Like so many touches on Mad Men, this one bespeaks an attention to detail (not merely clever but narratively meaningful) that is breathtaking in its totality of vision. That word, “vision,” has been cheapened by critical overuse, but when a show really, truly has it, we recognize it. Mad Men doesn’t just have vision, it’s about vision, and visions, and seeing, and seeing through. Don is at heart a copywriter, but even he recognizes the way imagery is beginning to overtake words as the currency of his business. As the series moves along, it becomes more and more visually adventurous, presenting stunning, haunting images like Don walking across a darkened soundstage where Megan is filming a commercial, the distance between husband and wife seeming geographically as well as emotionally insurmountable; Don staring down a distressingly empty elevator shaft in the Time-Life Building, literalizing the abyss over which every Mad Men character hovers, and into which Don’s colleague Lane Pryce (Jared Harris) will plunge a few episodes later; Betty descending the steps of the Savoy Hotel in slow motion, looking every bit the movie-star vision Don wants rather than the emotional reality he can’t find a way to honor and cherish; mirrored shots of Don grieving the suicides of Adam and Lane; Don, bored in a new job at McCann-Erickson, being mesmerized by the view of a jet plane flying behind the Empire State Building, its vapor trail stretched across the sky like a pen stroke. At the end of season 6, we even get a dark mirror of the Carousel pitch when Don becomes too candid about his childhood in a meeting with Hershey executives. It plays like the Carousel’s booze-soaked, pathetic kid brother—or, if you prefer, Dick Whitman to the Carousel’s Donald Draper, or Nixon to Kennedy.
The lie of closure has never been more completely articulated in any American series, nor has the myth of nonstop forward personal progress been so thoroughly (if compassionately) demolished. The characters move through history—and destiny, if indeed the word means anything here—not in a straight line but in a series of horseshoe movements or a zigzag pattern or spirals, and they can never be entirely sure if they make decisions or decisions make them. Their restless dissatisfaction feels true; they’re happy only when they’re working, and then only when they have maximum freedom and are demonstrating maximum creativity and control. In season 5’s “Commissions and Fees,” Don and Roger force a meeting with executives at Dow Chemical, who claim to be perfectly happy with their current ad agency. Don aggressively, if unsuccessfully, tries to shake that confidence, asking them, “What is happiness? It’s a moment before you need more happiness.” The show ends not with a bang or a whimper or a cut to black but with a cheerfully upbeat song promising a utopian convergence of humanity on a sunlit hilltop. Like every other campaign on the show, it’s just another advertisement, but like every great ad, there is a part of it that feels sincere in spite of itself. This closing moment, too, like every Mad Men character, is more than one contradictory thing at the same time and should be embraced but not held too closely. If you’ve made it through seven seasons of Mad Men, you know more or less what to make of it: It’s saying trust the feeling and let the buyer beware.
—MZS & AS
Seinfeld (NBC, 1989–1998) Total score: 110
“Well, what’s the show about?” Jerry asks his friend George.
“It’s about nothing,” George tells him.
“No story?”
“No, forget the story.”
“You gotta have a story,” Jerry insists.
“Who says you gotta have a story?” George counters. “Remember when we were waiting for, for that table in that Chinese restaurant that time? That could be a TV show.”
The actual origin of Seinfeld is far more complicated—and wildly improbable for any series, let alone one that would eventually become TV’s most popular—than that exchange in Seinfeld season 4 that gives birth to Jerry, the terrible show-within-the-show created by the fictional Jerry Seinfeld and the spineless George Costanza (Jason Alexander). But because Seinfeld was playing himself, because George was famously a stand-in for misanthropic Seinfeld cocreator Larry David, and because lines constantly blurred between Seinfeld and Jerry that season, the notion that Seinfeld was the “show about nothing” stuck.
And in many ways, it fit. Here was a series that could build entire episodes around a barely visible red dot on a white sweater, or whether a local yogurt shop’s product was actually nonfat, or even, as George noted, the wait to get a table at a Chinese restaurant. It was, like its characters, obsessed with what Jerry’s ex-turned-friend Elaine Benes (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) once referred to as “the excruciating minutiae of every. Single. Daily. Event.”
Yet saying Seinfeld was about nothing gets the point almost entirely backward. In its fascination with zooming in on life’s most insignificant details, it actually wound up offering a broad view of life at the end of the twentieth century: the show about nothing that was really about everything.
Okay, maybe not everything. The show’s world was very much New York—and a very white, affluent subsection of that. (On the rare occasions minority characters appeared, they tended to be even more caricatured than the show’s other bit players, and even Michael Richards’s glorified hobo, Cosmo Kramer, never had to worry about money.) But even viewed through that lens, the series continually managed to identify, classify, and find humor in everyday phenomena we all recognized yet had never given name to.
Think of how many Seinfeld social constructs set such deep root in our larger cultural lexicon that they felt like they had always been there and are known even to people who’ve never seen an episode: the bad manners of double-dipping a chip or regifting a present, or the male mortification of shrinkage after swimming in a cold pool, or the various unconventional manners of speaking (low-talkers, close-talkers, shushers), to name just a few.
But Seinfeld was so much more than its catchphrases and sociological dissections. It was a relentless joke machine with a black comic heart that ran against every decades-old tradition about sitcom sentimentality. Seinfeld and David’s mantra for the show was “No hugging, no learning,” and it featured a quartet of characters who were never in danger of doing either.
George was a desperate, pathetic ball of misery with a superhuman gift for deception, once explaining, “It’s not a lie if you believe it.” Kramer was a magical fool, forever stumbling upon money, women, trouble, and the entrance to Jerry’s apartment, moving and speaking like a pilot who was still figuring out the controls of this particular vessel. Elaine and Jerry tended to look down their noses at the other two, but they were every bit as shallow and self-destructive, just wrapped up in more socially acceptable packages. But put her on the dance floor or ask him to lie (or anything else that stretched out Jerry Seinfeld’s charmingly limited range as an actor), and they became part of the freak show.
Neither creator was exactly an outsider to the medium, but nor had they been entirely comfortable in it before. David wrote for Saturday Night Live for a season when Louis-Dreyfus was a cast member, though his ideas were so unconventional that only one of his sketches ever made it to air. Seinfeld had a recurring role on Benson but was fired after only a handful of episodes and went back to focusing on his stand-up career. NBC executives didn’t know what to make of their pilot for an observational sitcom where Seinfeld played a fictionalized version of himself—NBC president Brandon Tartikoff feared it was “too Jewish”—and the show was nearly killed in development before the network’s head of late-night programming, Rick Ludwin, stepped in and offered to fund a four-episode first season out of his own budget. The show had a rollout that suggested a complete lack of confidence from the network: The pilot episode aired on its own in the summer of 1989, the four Ludwin-backed episodes the following summer, then a half-season in the spring of 1991, before the first full season finally found its way onto the schedule that fall.
That long stretch in obscurity gave David, Seinfeld, and company the freedom to fine-tune their ideas: for Alexander to stop doing a Woody Allen impression and start doing a Larry David one,
for the writers to figure out the show was best served by throwing the four leads in different directions before having their stories converge at the end of an episode, and to realize that something as low-concept as “The Chinese Restaurant” actually represented the show at its most creative.
By the time the rest of NBC began to realize Seinfeld’s value, and to groom it into the successor to Cheers, it had grown into its full, incredible potential. Its four regulars were surrounded by a cavalcade of ever-more-bizarre foils, some wholly fictional and some only semifictional: contemptuous mailman Newman (Wayne Knight), who served as both Kramer’s sidekick and Jerry’s nemesis; George’s intolerable parents Frank (Jerry Stiller) and Estelle (Estelle Harris); long-winded globe-trotter J. Peterman (John O’Hurley); Yev “Soup Nazi” Kassem (Larry Thomas), who ruled his soup stand with an iron fist; and even irrational Yankees owner George Steinbrenner (a Doonesbury-style abstraction voiced by Larry David), who employed George for a few seasons. The show could attempt almost anything in terms of subject matter, mocking the JFK assassination (or, at least, Oliver Stone’s JFK) with an expectoral assault involving Kramer, Newman, Keith Hernandez, and a “second spitter,” or having Jerry and his latest girlfriend get caught making out while watching Schindler’s List. It mixed comic anthropology with slapstick, vaudeville routines with sexual farce. An episode like season 6’s “The Fusilli Jerry” could on one level use Jerry’s special bedroom technique as a metaphor for his stand-up act—and the story of a man who appropriates the move as a commentary on comics who steal others’ jokes—while also going lowbrow with a subplot where Kramer reaps the benefits of accidentally getting vanity license plates that read “ASSMAN.”
Though David would later take pleasure in the lack of content restrictions as the creator and star of HBO’s very Seinfeld-esque Curb Your Enthusiasm, Seinfeld itself frequently demonstrated the power generated by being forced to work within limitations. The series’ most famous episode, season 4’s “The Contest,” has the gang of four wagering on who can go the longest without masturbating. However, because it was 1992 and NBC wasn’t yet relaxing its broadcast standards in an attempt to compete with cable, the word “masturbate” was never used. Instead, the phrase used to describe their abstention—to the raucous response of a studio audience that (a) couldn’t believe a sitcom was doing an episode about this, and (b) was impressed by how cleverly the show got the idea across—was “master of your domain.” The series pushed the outer edge of the envelope without ever ripping it outright, allowing Elaine (who hoarded her preferred method of birth control after it was discontinued) to judge sexual partners on who was “sponge-worthy,” or asking Jerry to guess his girlfriend’s name only with the knowledge that it rhymed with a part of the female anatomy (“Mulva?”).
If there were limits on what David, Seinfeld, and the show’s other writers could allow their four leads to say, there were precious few on what they could allow the quartet to do. Their crimes, sometimes on purpose (Jerry mugs an old woman to steal her loaf of marble rye bread), sometimes by accident (Jerry ruins a man’s business and later gets him deported), were so frequent, so tasteless, and so horrifying that David devoted the bulk of the divisive series finale to putting the four of them on trial just so we could be reminded of what swine they always were.
David, who stepped back from showrunner duty for most of the series’ final two seasons, perhaps felt that the audience needed one last reminder that they’d spent close to a decade in the company of despicable human beings. As a result, the finale played more like a lecture—and, by that point, a redundant one. In David’s final episode as hands-on producer, he not only killed off George’s long-suffering fiancée Susan Ross (Heidi Swedberg) by having her die of a toxic overdose from the glue on the cheap wedding invitations that George insisted on buying, but also had George (who had been so desperate to get out of the wedding that he tried asking Susan for a prenup in hopes she’d be too offended to marry him; instead, she laughed in his face, knowing she was rich) react to the news more with relief than anything else. Meanwhile, Jerry, Elaine, and Kramer shrugged off Susan’s death as a curious development, less worthy of comment than the time Kramer accidentally hit a golf ball into a whale’s blowhole.
What David didn’t seem to fully grasp until he’d moved on to Curb was that the audience already knew, on some level, that they were watching the adventures of four awful people but had decided that their awfulness was outweighed by how well-drawn they were, how sharp their dialogue was, and how cleverly their stories came together, and said, after each despicable act, much like Jerry and George’s reflexive apology each time they denied being a gay couple, “Not that there’s anything wrong with that!” The phrase might as well have been the mantra of all four friends no matter the people they deceived, mistreated, or stepped on.
The playwright’s adage “Drama is about people changing; comedy is about how people never change” was demonstrated more vividly on Seinfeld than on any other network sitcom. To the bitter end, nobody hugged and nobody really learned anything. The finale ends with the core quartet behind bars, bantering and repeating dialogue from the very first episode. Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer were locked inside a cage of their own narcissism from the start, but because it never occurred to them to think there was anything wrong with that, they carried themselves like the freest people on earth. The final shot is of Jerry in a prison jumpsuit doing stand-up for his fellow inmates. He’s the center of attention. Life is good.
—AS & MZS
I Love Lucy (CBS, 1951–1957) Total score: 109
Think of I Love Lucy, and you likely think of Lucy and Ethel in the candy factory, with good reason: Not only is it one of the great slapstick set pieces—a vaudeville riff on Charlie Chaplin’s factory mishaps in Modern Times that’s still hilarious after sixty-plus years—it’s also emblematic of everything that made Lucy the most enduring sitcom of TV’s first few decades and an innovatively produced series.
The routine starts innocuously enough—but then every Lucy routine does. Lucy Ricardo (Lucille Ball) and her best friend, Ethel Mertz (Vivian Vance), are in the midst of their rocky first day of working in a candy factory. Their supervisor parks them in front of a conveyer belt in the wrapping station and warns them, “If one piece of candy gets past you and into the packing room unwrapped, you’re fired!” We know things will go wrong—public embarrassment, after all, is Lucy’s specialty—but things start out rather smoothly, with candy coming across the belt slowly enough that Lucy can boast, “Oh, this is easy.”
Then the belt moves a little faster, and they begin to notice that unwrapped candies are making it past them. “I think we’re fighting a losing game,” says Lucy, normally a blind optimist who takes much longer to admit she’s failed. Then the belt speeds up even more, and they start shoveling excess candy into their hats, their blouses, even their mouths, just to keep them from going into the packing room unwrapped.
The supervisor wanders in, mistakenly assumes they’re doing a great job, and screams for the machinist to “speed it up a little!” And at that point, the defeat turns into a candy massacre, with the women not even bothering to wrap candy anymore, but simply hiding it anywhere and everywhere on their persons that a TV sitcom could comfortably depict in 1952.
Lucy versus the conveyer belt is a dazzling bit of comic construction, building and building until things can’t seem to get any more ridiculous, at which point they do. It was a viral video before such a term existed, appearing in every retrospective of Lucy, TV’s first golden age, the evolution of the sitcom, and of course documentaries about Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, married costars whose success with Lucy made them the most powerful couple both on and in television. It’s so well-known that it has effectively obliterated the rest of the episode, “Job Switching,” which finds Lucy and Ethel leaving the house to work while their husbands, Ricky (Desi Arnaz) and Fred (William Frawley), stay home to do the cooking and cleaning.
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�s the thing: Go back and watch the entire episode, and you’ll realize just what a mother lode of comic wealth Lucy was, week in and week out. “Job Switching” features several other dazzling comic sketches, including one of Ricky and Fred fighting a losing battle of their own in the kitchen after foolishly trying to cook four pounds of rice at once, Lucy struggling to match the technique of a veteran candy dipper, and Ricky getting into a wrestling match with the ironing board. Any one of those scenes would have been enough for the I Love Lucy creative team to justifiably call it a day, dump some exposition into the rest of the episode, and move on to next week’s big idea. Instead, they kept layering big joke onto big joke, sending them in nearly as fast as the conveyer belt kept taunting Lucy and Ethel with its fathomless candy supply.
But that was I Love Lucy, a show nobody quite believed in, starring an actress Hollywood had never quite figured out how to use and the husband CBS wasn’t crazy about hiring as part of a package deal, and using a format that was both expensive and untried. The show kept pushing and pushing and finding new ways to exploit the previously untapped comic potential of its leading lady until it not only had become an enormous hit but had invented a new stylistic language for TV comedy. It’s not only one of TV’s very best sitcoms ever, but its most influential.
Lucille Ball was already forty when I Love Lucy debuted, having spent years in the movies never quite achieving stardom, nor having established a niche, and not making enough of an impression in dramatic roles. And as a physical type, she was in an impossible position, not hubba-hubba enough to play bombshells or femme fatales or innocuous enough to play bland hearth-keeper types (the easy-pop eyes and braying laugh made that tough even when she was younger), but she was paradoxically considered too pretty to play goofballs and freaks. She finally got a great role in that last category courtesy of My Favorite Husband, a popular radio comedy that CBS wanted to turn into a TV series. Ball wanted her real-life husband, a bandleader, to play her onscreen spouse. CBS worried that the audience wouldn’t accept a curvy redhead marrying a Cuban man, and Arnaz wanted to produce the show out of Los Angeles, which, in an era when most TV was produced in New York, made Lucy a time-zone nightmare.
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