TV (The Book)

by Alan Sepinwall

  Astonishingly, Lucy and Desi got everything they wanted from CBS, including the right to shoot their series on location on a Los Angeles soundstage before a live studio audience, their way. This turned out to be the couple’s masterstroke—a decision that revolutionized not just the visual and structural grammar of the sitcom but the business of TV itself. It helped make Lucy the number one show during four of its six seasons, and built Lucy and Desi’s company, Desilu Productions, into the medium’s first independently owned and operated mini-empire.

  Prior to Lucy, most TV sitcoms (most TV, period) were shot and broadcast live with grainy black-and-white video cameras, and it was understood that all that work would vanish into the ether unless the network pointed 16mm- or 35mm-film cameras at the monitors to produce a permanent record, known as a “kinescope.” (The first broadcast-standard videotape system wasn’t unveiled until 1956, five years after Lucy’s debut.) The kinescope method resulted in a record that was even more crude than what people saw on their then-tiny TV screens: a soupy, smeary image that captured phosphorescent-looking light trails when the camera or an actor moved too quickly. Ball and Arnaz eliminated these problems by inverting the usual production process. Rather than produce the series as a TV program and record a rough impression of it on celluloid, they shot Lucy as if it were a series of twenty-six-minute feature films, on 35mm black-and-white, then cut it on film and shipped finished prints to the network. The network then projected each new Lucy episode at New York headquarters and beamed it to the public, just as it would a feature film or cartoon short shot on celluloid.

  Besides eliminating a step and producing a more pleasing image, this method had a number of other benefits, all of which accrued to Desilu.

  First, the Ball-Arnaz production model let the show’s directors design musical numbers and comedy routines for the camera, as a feature filmmaker might, rather than treating them as stage-bound events that happened to have cameras pointed at them. If you look at old blueprints and photos of Desilu’s soundstages, you’ll see that a number of permanent sets were built so that the performers and crew could move about (and move their cameras about) with maximum freedom. The 35mm-film cameras blocked the sight lines of most visitors; when scenes took place at the Tropicana nightclub, the audience was anywhere from thirty to forty feet back from Ricky, and there was plenty of space between the four “front” tables so that cameras could be pushed between them to follow dancers or push in for a close-up of the bandleader or the kooky redhead who’d somehow managed to sneak in as a waitress or chorus girl.

  Second, the Desilu model captured every moment with three film cameras and then pieced together the best takes later to create a complete scene. This resulted in a more consistent comedic product than shooting things live and filming whatever happened to be captured on the monitor (including blown lines, botched camera moves, and moments where the studio director switched from camera A to camera B too late to catch an important moment). Directors could, and did, reposition the cameras between takes and get alternate angles on the same action, or reaction shots from peripheral characters. All of this cumulatively made I Love Lucy seem somehow bigger and more intense than other sitcoms of its time—more like a “little movie” than a televised play. When people use the phrase “multi-camera sitcom” to describe the format of a TV show, they are naming a type of production that I Love Lucy perfected.

  Third, the Desilu model let Ball and Arnaz control their show in ways that prior sitcom makers could not have imagined. They weren’t creating half-hour episodes that were then broadcast by the studio on the studio’s terms, and recorded as kinescopes if the studio felt like it at whatever quality they deemed suitable, then filed away on a shelf at network headquarters; they were creating properties, entries in an ongoing library. And they were doing it on their own terms: insisting upon a certain kind of film stock, a certain way of lighting, a certain way of moving the camera. Finally they were letting CBS broadcast the result, and keeping properly stored copies for themselves on 35mm film. Forward-thinking as Ball and Arnaz were, they had no way of knowing how important a good image would become. High-quality celluloid didn’t just produce a more attractive picture than anything coming through TV sets in 1951, it produced an image that would remain viable even as TVs got better over the course of many decades, while kinescopes of shows like The Honeymooners, The Ernie Kovacs Show, and Playhouse 90 started to look as if they’d been filmed through a fish tank. Any TV production company known for putting out great-looking shows should have a shrine to Lucy and Desi in their lobby and meditate in front of it each morning.

  Ditto any production company, network, or media conglomerate that refers to its “library of titles,” a notion that Desilu made real. When CBS balked at the high cost of shooting on 35mm film, Arnaz worked out what is now considered one of the most producer-favorable deals in the history of TV: Desilu would cover all costs associated with making the program their way, and in return they would retain rights to all film prints and negatives. This meant that when Lucy was sold into syndication, in the first so-called ancillary rights deal ever worked out by an independent TV producer, CBS did not receive a penny. The network made money from ads during its first broadcast and repeats. And that was it.

  Meanwhile, as Desi Arnaz acted as a combination Orson Welles and David O. Selznick of sitcom production, Lucille Ball kept busy on the creative side, looking for additional projects for Desilu to oversee. Her judgment was superb. Desilu was founded in 1951, sold to Paramount Television in 1967, and discontinued as a “brand” in 1975. During that time, it produced thirty-one series, including such long-running hits as The Untouchables; Star Trek; Mission: Impossible; I Spy; The Dick Van Dyke Show; The Lucy Show; My Favorite Martian; Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C.; Family Affair; Hogan’s Heroes; That Girl; and Mannix.

  Given all this behind-the-scenes technical and financial innovation, the show would be a shoo-in for the Pantheon even if it were artistically hit-and-miss. But it was never that. Lucy could be formidable even during its unsteady later years—which found Lucy and Ricky struggling to recapture that old spark after having a baby, Ricky Jr., in what was the highest-rated single episode of a TV show aired up to that point in time. And during its comic peak, roughly seasons 2 through 5, I Love Lucy was sidesplittingly funny in the manner of early sound comedies by Laurel and Hardy, the Marx Brothers, Abbott and Costello, W. C. Fields, and Mae West.

  Ball pushed for Arnaz to play Ricky as a last-ditch attempt to save a relationship that had nearly ended in divorce once before—and that would end permanently in 1960, shortly after the end of The Lucy-Desi Comedy Hour, a series of specials that continued I Love Lucy’s story and characters. If the Ricardo marriage didn’t reflect the problems Lucy and Desi were going through, it was nonetheless fraught with tension. Lucy Ricardo wanted the fame, the glamour, or at least the opportunity to express herself that Lucille Ball had, but her quest to escape the drudgeries of housewifedom inevitably ended in embarrassment for her, and exasperation for Ricky. Later seasons were set predominantly in Hollywood, and then in Europe—serialized comedy, sort of, decades before it was enshrined on shows like Soap and Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman—with Ricky’s career pressures wreaking havoc on the marriage. Most episodes hewed to the same farcical template, with Lucy failing at whatever scheme she’d tried to engineer and being chastised or punished by Ricky. Her fate would be purely humiliating if the love between them weren’t self-evident. Warmth notwithstanding, this aspect of the series has dated badly, to put it mildly—it was raising the hackles of feminists as early as the 1970s, when the series was still a big earner in syndication—and it will prove a deal-breaker for some. Ditto Lucy’s and Ethel’s gibes about men and Ricky’s and Fred’s grousing about women, which encapsulate the hidebound attitude toward gender roles that made life unbearable for women (and men) who couldn’t fit into 1950s America’s rigidly defined slots.

  But if so many of Lucy’s escapades ended in misery for her, they gave
joy to the audience by demonstrating Ball’s command of verbal and physical comedy. If Lucy Ricardo was often a clown or a victim, the actress who created her remained in control of both the character and the series built to showcase her dazzling gifts. You want verbal comedy? Ask Ball to play progressively drunk as Lucy tries to extol the virtues of 46-proof health tonic Vitameatavegamin while filming a commercial. You need comedy even more physical than the conveyer belt? Put Lucy in a vat of grapes for a knockdown brawl with an Italian vineyard worker. You want to know what the absence of vanity looks like? Slap a putty nose on her face to disguise her from William Holden (one of many guests playing themselves in the Hollywood season), then light the thing on fire. Want to make clear she’s as great a comic performer as Groucho Marx? Have her re-create the mirror scene from Duck Soup, opposite Harpo.

  Even more so than the candy factory, the mirror scene might be Ball’s greatest moment as a performer. It equals its inspiration in physical assurance, but it also serves as a comment on Ball’s influences and the traditions that her sitcom deepened and expanded. And it shows how, by moving to television, Ball achieved a dream that had eluded her in movies: to be acknowledged as the equal of the men who preceded her.

  —MZS & AS

  Deadwood (HBO, 2004–2006) Total score: 107

  Whenever arguments are held about the best TV dramas of all time, and particularly of this modern golden age, Deadwood—like Deadwood’s craven mayor, E. B. Farnum (William Sanderson), whenever there’s important scheming to do—gets left out. It’s not that people can’t recognize the brilliant performances, particularly by Ian McShane as the show’s cutthroat antihero, bartending crime lord Al Swearengen, or the poetry of the dialogue by the show’s creator, David Milch. It’s that Deadwood ran only three seasons when Milch had been very publicly angling for at least four, and that HBO’s promise of two sequel movies was never fulfilled. How can a show that finished so abruptly, and in such a messy fashion, possibly compete with a Sopranos or a Wire, whose creators got to end their creations on their own terms?

  Easy. Because messiness and an aversion to closure were parts of the deal with Deadwood from the start—and because the real-world furor over the cancellation obscures the fact that the actual ending Milch wrote under tough circumstances was as appropriate and true to the spirit of the thing as anything he might have devised if he’d had a couple of more years to think about it.

  Not that Milch—a devout believer in the notion that when men plan, God laughs—was ever much for long-range preparation. The series is not only TV’s great unfinished masterpiece, but its greatest improvised masterpiece, with many of those incredible lines of dialogue—“What a type you must consort with, that you not fear beating for such an insult”—dreamed up only days, or even hours, before the actors spoke them before HBO’s cameras.

  Deadwood tried to retell the story of the founding of civilization (American and otherwise) by reimagining Deadwood, a Dakota gold-mining camp that went from a chaotic hellhole in an unincorporated territory to an incorporated town within an incorporated US state in the space of a few post–Civil War years. The show was, in no particular order, a Western, a gangster picture, a political drama, a lewd farce, and a comedy of manners; an operatic potboiler chock-full of sex, violence, and profanity; a sustained long-form narrative that interweaves parallel plots tighter than a hangman’s rope; a satire on American hypocrisy and greed; a portrait of needy, ambitious people who see through other people’s illusions but cleave tight to their own; a revisionist look at frontier life; a case study of a civilization struggling to create itself; and a weekly showcase for characters and dialogue so rich in complexity and contradiction that they deserve to be called Shakespearean.

  Milch was uniquely suited to this quixotic task. A Yale-educated recovering drug addict and onetime pupil of Robert Penn Warren, he had written and produced for Hill Street Blues and NYPD Blue, so he understood the project from a literary and philosophical as well as populist standpoint, and even when he was writing theatrically complex, ostentatiously profane monologues for his characters, he always kept his finger on the show’s humanist pulse. Like Robert Altman’s town-based Western McCabe & Mrs. Miller, which Milch cited as a primary influence, Deadwood took a sardonic yet compassionate God’s-eye view of its setting, observing powerful and helpless individuals as they tried (and often failed) to better themselves.

  There are no pure heroes in Deadwood, but two characters dominate: Swearengen and newly appointed sheriff Seth Bullock (Timothy Olyphant). On first glance, Swearengen resembles a nineteenth-century mob boss—a mustachioed godfather in a stinky suit, making a fortune dealing dope, liquor, gambling, and sex in his saloon, the Gem. Bullock is a terse, tightly wound man of action in the Gary Cooper–Clint Eastwood mode. (His ramrod posture and machinelike stride suggest he really does have steel in his spine.) Yet both men are more complex, at times confounding, than this summary suggests.

  Swearengen is a vicious sociopath who lectures employees on the right way to clean up a bloodstain and delivers ornately profane monologues while being serviced by prostitutes. But he has a weird tender streak. He claims to employ a handicapped cleaning woman, Jewel (Geri Jewell), to give penniless johns a hooker they can afford, but that seems to be a macho lie. Al dominates and abuses another of his prostitutes, Trixie (Paula Malcomson), but seems incomplete and dissatisfied after Trixie takes up with Bullock’s business partner, the Jewish frontiersman Sol Star (John Hawkes). In the first-season finale, when the Reverend H. W. Smith (Ray McKinnon) lies dying in dementia from a brain tumor, Al—recalling the similar struggle his late brother went through—strangles him to end his suffering, tenderly whispering, “You can go now, brother,” as he holds a rag over the man’s mouth and nose.

  If Swearengen is an evil man with good in him, Bullock is his opposite—a straitlaced, married businessman who intervenes in other people’s troubles yet seems incapable of controlling his own volcanic rage. These flaws combine to devastating effect in the first-season finale, when Bullock’s lover, widow Alma Garret (Molly Parker), receives an unexpected visit from her ne’er-do-well father. When Alma’s dad tries to blackmail her by threatening to spread rumors that she killed her husband and took over his gold claim, Bullock goes berserk and beats the man to a pulp in the middle of a crowded casino, then asks a visiting Army colonel to protect the man against various enemies, Bullock included. “We all have bloody thoughts,” the colonel tells Bullock, a half-statement that completes itself in the mind.

  Bullock and Swearengen’s psychological-poetic connection forms the core of Deadwood. They’re surrounded by characters every bit as tangled, from Swearengen’s murderous right hand, Dan Dority (W. Earl Brown), who clings to Al the way a toddler clings to Daddy, to Swearengen’s chief competitor, saloon maven Cyrus Tolliver (Powers Boothe), who treats his onetime employee, prostitute-turned-madam Joanie Stubbs (Kim Dickens), like an ex-wife, a surrogate daughter, and a business rival all at once. The show’s complexities are embodied in Milch’s dialogue, which weds profanity to poetry, encloses thoughts inside thoughts, and back-loads its sentences in the manner of pre-twentieth-century verse, unpacking its components in order of importance and withholding the most potent image or idea until the end. Tending a wounded Sol Star, Trixie says, “I pray to God your shoulder pains like some sharp-toothed creature’s inside you and at it and gnawing.” Swearengen chides smart-mouthed henchman Silas Adams (Titus Welliver), “Over time, your quickness with a cocky rejoinder must have gotten you many punches in the face,” and heals a dispute with Dan by promising, “Whatever looks ahead of grievous abominations and disorder, you and me walk into it together like always.”

  All Milch’s characters are this rich and slippery. With her doe-eyed “respectability,” flirting skill, and secret drug habit, Garret is part sturdy frontier widow, part femme fatale. Farnum, Swearengen’s emissary and foil, is a scheming little weasel, but he’s got an agile mind, a poetic tongue, and grand ambitions. Doc
Cochran (Brad Dourif) is a one-man board of health and an angry hermit drowning his Civil War nightmares in whiskey. Trixie’s gutter mouth and matter-of-fact carnality contrast with her devotion to Sol, Swearengen, and an orphaned girl, while the romanticized toughness of Calamity Jane (Robin Weigert)—who in another era had been played in a movie by Doris Day—was revealed to be a defense mechanism of a profoundly damaged woman.

  Deadwood pairs the characters’ private struggles with larger events. In the fourth episode of the first season, famous gunslinger and dying alcoholic Wild Bill Hickok (Keith Carradine) is shot dead by Jack McCall (Garret Dillahunt). McCall’s flight, capture, and subsequent trial are public events, the outcomes of which affect every citizen. Milch presented the shooting not just as a random act of murder but as a celebrity assassination and a signpost marking the end of the Old West as both fact and legend. The first-season finale mirrored Bullock’s accepting his destiny as sheriff with a cavalry garrison’s arrival in town—complementary images of order confronting chaos.

  The second season deals with the arrival of Francis Wolcott, chief geologist for mining mogul George Hearst. (He was played by Dillahunt, with Milch not caring if viewers recognized him as Jack McCall sporting a beard and a more cultured accent.) On the one hand, Wolcott represents the encroachment of both capitalism and civilization—that a man as powerful as Hearst sees value in the camp only makes the place more appealing to the political swells in the territory’s capital, Yankton. On the other hand, Wolcott is a serial killer of women, and the techniques he and his lackeys use to gain a monopoly on the camp’s gold claims suggest that the optimism so many of Deadwood’s citizens arrived with should be severely tempered.