TV (The Book)

by Alan Sepinwall

  Hearst himself (TV veteran Gerald McRaney, giving—like so many of the show’s actors—the best performance of his career) arrives at the end of the second season and dominates the third. He is a revolting depiction of pure capitalism, uninterested in any issue beyond acquiring more gold (or, as he puts it, “the color”), and with the physical and political might to run roughshod over Swearengen, Bullock, and the rest of the camp. Though Al would gain the occasional victory—like Dan beating Hearst’s chief goon to death in the thoroughfare at the end of the most savage fight scene in TV history—Hearst’s ultimate victory would be absolute. At the same time, we also meet Jack Langrishe (Brian Cox), head of an acting troupe whose members aim to bring some culture to this remote community. Years later, Milch would say that the stories of Hearst and Langrishe were linked: “It’s seemed to me that when the bosses seem to be in charge, there’s always room for art as a compensatory dynamic. I think that what we do in our society, the best of us as storytellers, present an alternative to the story the bosses are telling.”

  At the time of its cancellation, Deadwood was the most expensive regular series on TV, costing $6 million per episode. This was partly due to the difficulty of creating a full-scale replica of an Old West town, with period clothes, horses, and carriages, in which many of the interiors and exteriors were fully functioning, stage-play-like sets, with catwalks covered in fixed lights that could instantly mimic the position of the sun at particular times of day. But Milch’s methods were a much bigger problem. Actors spoke of having just a few minutes to rehearse fiendishly complex dialogue that had been written or rewritten minutes earlier by Milch. There were stories of whole sequences, sometimes whole episodes, being junked and then recast or reshot because Milch wasn’t happy with them for whatever reason. During a set visit in early 2006, Milch admitted to one of the cowriters of this book that much of the third season had been completely reshot. These stories make one wonder if Deadwood wasn’t an example of a great artist going from “worth the trouble” to “not worth the trouble” in his patron’s eyes based on the perusal of a balance sheet.

  Between the expense (not helped by HBO having to share ownership of the series with Paramount) and the way Milch’s creative process made outside input impossible, there had always been tension between the show and HBO’s executives, and Milch suspected the end was coming faster than he wanted. The finale is a triumph of bloody-toothed capitalism: Bullock and Swearengen spend the season amassing an army to battle Hearst’s hired thugs, but after Hearst arranges the murder of Alma’s devoted prospector husband, Whitney Ellsworth (Jim Beaver), and Trixie botches an impromptu assassination attempt on Hearst, the camp loses its will to fight. Alma sells Hearst her claim, Bullock loses a rigged election to remain sheriff, and Al murders innocent young prostitute Jen as a sacrificial stand-in for Trixie, whose death Hearst has demanded. The camp is saved, and still on deck to be absorbed into the American experiment, but at a horrible cost. As Hearst smugly rides out of the camp, we end the show with Al on his knees in his office, scrubbing Jen’s blood from the floorboards. Junior henchman Johnny Burns (Sean Bridgers), who was sweet on Jen, awkwardly steps in and asks if she suffered. “I was as gentle as I was able, and that’s the last we’ll fuckin’ speak of it, Johnny,” Al replies, then returns to the bloodstain, muttering, “Wants me to tell him somethin’ pretty.”

  Was there more story to tell? Sure. Hearst’s victory proved less absolute in the long term, and there are a lot of other fascinating historical details to work in, including Sol’s political career, Bullock’s friendship with the young Teddy Roosevelt, and the 1879 fire that burned down the Gem and a large swath of the town, forcing Swearengen and others to rebuild bigger and fancier than ever. But it’s hard to imagine a final moment better representing the totality of Deadwood than Al Swearengen up to his arms in blood, covering up one of the violent truths of building a civilization with one last lie agreed upon by all involved.

  —AS & MZS

  All in the Family (CBS, 1971–1979) Total score: 106

  Boy, the way Glenn Miller played

  Songs that made “The Hit Parade”

  Guys like us, we had it made

  Those were the days!

  That’s the opening theme to All in the Family, which premiered January 12, 1971, and ran eight years, spawning multiple spin-offs (including the continuation series Archie Bunker’s Place) and making its executive producer, Norman Lear, into a TV powerhouse.

  Lear’s sitcom revolved around a working-class Queens family: Archie Bunker (Carroll O’Connor); his “dingbat” wife, Edith (Jean Stapleton); his daughter, Gloria (Sally Struthers); and his liberal son-in-law, Mike “Meathead” Stivic (Rob Reiner). The plots contained some of the expected sitcom fodder: misunderstandings, silly deceptions, crises that turned out to be no big deal. But the heart of the show was topical humor. The Bunkers and their friends and neighbors debated war, religion, drugs, gun control, sex, sexism, gay rights, race relations, immigration, taxation, the environmental movement, and everything else under the sun. The series wasn’t just a situation comedy, it was an ongoing national conversation rooted in multifaceted characters.

  “If your spics and your spades want their rightful share of the American dream, let ’em get out there and hustle for it like I done,” Archie groused to Mike, who was agitating about civil rights yet again. “So now you’re going to tell me the black man has just as much chance as the white man to get a job?” Mike demands. “More,” Archie says. “He has more. I didn’t have no million people marchin’ and protestin’ to get me my job.” “No,” Edith interrupts. “His uncle got it for him.”

  “Racial balance is important in everything,” Mike declares in another episode. “Take education: Why do you think it’s so tough for a black student to become a doctor?” Archie: “Because nobody wants to see a black guy coming at them with a knife.”

  It’s hard to imagine the shock audiences felt the first time they saw this series on commercial TV, in prime time. Prior to the late ’60s and early ’70s, pop culture either made an ostentatiously big show of grappling with hot-button topics (usually in Oscar-baiting message films or dour live TV dramas) or plugged its ears and whistled a happy tune. There was a deep schism between how people talked in private (and what they talked about) and what you saw on TV and on movie screens and heard on the radio. When Norman Lear got approval from CBS to create an American version of the popular British sitcom Till Death Do Us Part—which had the same concept as All in the Family but was less elegantly directed and tonally adventurous—the boundaries that once separated socially aware popular art from mainstream entertainment became more porous. In the aftermath of the ’60s, pop culture started to let the world in, and not in dribs and drabs. The floodgates opened. All in the Family’s 1971 debut helped knock them down. Three seasons of Lear’s surprise hit helped prepare audiences for Mel Brooks’s 1974 smash Blazing Saddles, a racial burlesque on horseback that you could imagine Archie’s African American neighbor George Jefferson (Sherman Hemsley)—a pioneering small businessman whose language was nearly as racist as Archie’s—recommending to everyone he knew.

  Some of the show’s nonwhite supporting characters were Sidney Poitier–style credit-to-his-race types to whom Archie could have no rational objection (George’s son, Lionel, for example, was a handsome, unflappable cipher), but a surprisingly high percentage were as flawed and raucous as Archie. Their talk was sometimes smart, sometimes dumb, always blunt. It was scalding but necessary, like steam from a teakettle. The show’s core sensibility was basically liberal; that’s why Archie got stuck with all the malapropisms. But it would be wrong to claim that Archie was just a rhetorical punching bag, or that Mike was intended as a righteous truth-telling character. O’Connor was such an appealing performer—never more so than when Archie dropped the bluster and spoke from the heart—that the character became an emblem of working-class grit and Depression-era resilience. (In one of President Richard Nixon’s
secret White House tapes, Nixon and his staff decry the show’s ribbing of Archie and affectionately label him a “hard hat.”) And it wasn’t lost on the writers—or the audience—that Mike and Gloria sponged off Edith and Archie even as they lectured them on the right way to live. Archie ridiculed Mike’s mooching in almost every episode; it was the knockout punch he threw after Mike zinged him with college-boy jabs.

  The program switched from broad comedy to kitchen-sink drama and back so subtly that the shift rarely felt forced, even in the harrowing season 4 episode in which Edith narrowly escaped being raped, or in the quietly devastating pilot for Archie Bunker’s Place, when we gradually realize that Edith has died by watching Archie putter around the house without her. Throughout, the blocking owed more to live televised theater than to I Love Lucy–style three-camera sitcoms. When characters turned introspective, the camera crept in slowly from a medium shot to a tight close-up, creating a protected space where delicate monologues could flower. The finest example might be the 1978 episode “Two’s a Crowd,” in which Archie and Mike accidentally get locked in the storeroom of Archie’s bar and pass the time by boozing and talking. Archie casually states that his father taught him everything he knows, and when Mike gently suggests that Archie’s father was wrong to pass on his bigotry to his son, episode director Paul Bogart zooms in on O’Connor, watching Archie’s face soften. Wading into memories, he turns into a boy who lives in terror and awe of his old man. “Your father?” Archie says, to Mike and to himself. “The breadwinner of the house, there? The man who goes out and busts his butt to put a roof over your head and clothes on your back? You call your father wrong?”

  The success of Lear’s show inspired good spin-offs (The Jeffersons, Maude), bad spin-offs (Gloria, Archie Bunker’s Place), and one half-great, half-terrible spin-off of a spin-off (Good Times, starring Esther Rolle as Florida Evans, Maude’s former housekeeper). None equaled their inspiration in comic force. For a long time after its run ended, broadcast TV was inhospitable to shows like All in the Family. This was partly due to TV’s splintering from a handful of channels into hundreds. But an equal or larger part of the blame can be laid at the feet of broadcast network executives and their marketers, who figured out (sometime in the ’80s) that they could make more ad money by junking the “Big Tent” model and appealing to white college graduates with loads of disposable income—a description that rules out anyone who looks or sounds like a character from All in the Family (even Mike or Gloria). In the ’80s and ’90s, networks gentrified prime time, banishing demographically déclassé minority characters to “netlets” like UPN and the WB, and all but banning straightforwardly political topics while retaining harsh language and cutting remarks (a trend that reached its apotheosis on Fox’s casually ugly Married… with Children). Except for certain corners of cable, you didn’t hear people talking about race, class, religion, or politics, unless their talk was treated as the centerpiece of a special episode (like the episode of NYPD Blue where Sipowicz uses the n-word) or treated as jocular and sarcastic and “just kidding” (like the banter on Glee and Community, which enclosed inflammatory terms inside facetious air quotes).

  Thankfully, recent series like Black-ish, Fresh Off the Boat, Master of None, The Carmichael Show, and Modern Family have picked up Lear’s torch—perhaps a delayed reaction to a two-term presidency by a chief executive of color as well as social advances like the battle for marriage equality and a growing awareness that straight white people weren’t going to be the dominant demographic group for much longer, and pop culture would have no choice but to acknowledge it. These are the days.

  —MZS

  11–50

  No-Doubt-About-It Classics

  M*A*S*H (CBS, 1972–1983) Total score: 105

  Nearly 106 million people watched “Goodbye, Farewell and Amen,” the series finale of M*A*S*H. At the time, that was the biggest audience ever for a TV broadcast in America, shattering the previous record of 78 million for The Fugitive finale, and holding on to the title for nearly thirty years until the Super Bowl started averaging a bigger audience beginning in 2010. And if you treat sports as a separate thing, then M*A*S*H not only still has the record for an episode of television but will always have the record. More people than ever are watching TV, but their eyeballs are split among so many different shows, at so many different times, that there’s just no way a modern series will generate the same kind of mass audience that was available in 1983, when there were essentially only three channels to choose from (four if PBS counts).

  But why does M*A*S*H, of all shows, have the record? It’s one of the greatest shows of all time, sure, and it aired during the height of the Big Three network era, but a lot of other classics did as well; All in the Family’s run largely overlapped with M*A*S*H’s, and was often the more popular and acclaimed show, but its finale (before it transitioned into Archie Bunker’s Place) averaged a little over a third of the audience that came for “Goodbye, Farewell and Amen.”

  M*A*S*H had a few built-in advantages. First, it ended at a time when grand TV series finales were still the exception rather than the norm. For most of the medium’s history to that point, TV shows didn’t so much end as stop. Last episodes told stories very much like the ones from the week before: Gilligan and the Skipper would have to wait for a reunion movie or three to get rescued from the island because in the last regular episode, Gilligan was dressing up as a woman to trick the native king of a nearby island out of throwing Ginger, Mary Ann, or Mrs. Howell into a nearby volcano. (You can look it up.) Television narratives were designed to be open-ended, and many executives believed the syndication value would be hurt if the story ever concluded and Wednesday’s rerun of the definitive ending was followed by Thursday’s repeat of the pilot episode. But if the business didn’t like final chapters, the audience did: One of the reasons that the Fugitive audience was so huge was because the finale avoided tradition and (spoiler) let Richard Kimble catch the one-armed man and clear his name.

  Second, M*A*S*H was Important with a capital I in a way that even All in the Family or The Mary Tyler Moore Show (another ’70s sitcom with an atypically final finale) could not be. It debuted in 1972, two years after the release of the beloved, Oscar-winning film (both of them based on the novel by Richard Hooker). Like the movie, it was technically set in the time of the Korean War but was really telling stories about Vietnam, and at a time when all but the most blinkered of hawks had accepted that we had lost that conflict. It provided not only laughter as a tonic for the horrors on the network news but at times an incredibly thoughtful examination of what it was like over there, all with the comforting filter of the Korea references. And though it kept running for seven years after the last US chopper left Saigon (and outlasted America’s involvement in Korea by almost nine years), the later seasons coincided with a time when the country was finally ready to more directly confront the subject on film, through the likes of Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, and Coming Home.

  Beyond its value as a coded, cathartic narrative about an ongoing national trauma, M*A*S*H was a great TV show almost all the way around, and it shared a quality with many other beloved series: It was not ultimately about any individual character but a place (the 4077th Mobile Army Surgical Hospital unit), which in turn represented a particular institution (the United States military) and a certain way of dealing with the world (bureaucracy, God forbid). This might have been the real secret of its popular success: Even though most of us aren’t in a life-and-death business, we’ve all chafed under rules that seemed nonsensical or self-defeating, or tried to do good work without proper funding or moral support, or resolved to grin and bear it while an incompetent or cruel superior made our lives difficult.

  The style and structure did a lot to make an experience that was thankfully foreign to most viewers feel welcoming. The consistent storytelling ensured that no matter where you joined the narrative, you could find your footing within a couple of scenes. Every episode included one or more
familiar story beats: the arrival of choppers bearing fresh wounded; gory surgeries leavened by snide or silly jokes; corpse disposal; pranks and group activities (such as dances or parties or Alan Alda’s Hawkeye trying to see how many people he could cram into a Volkswagen); griping about bad food; the reading and writing of letters. This all drove home the grinding repetitive nature of life in the camp and anchored all the silliness in the blood and muck of reality and showed how the former made the latter more bearable, at least some of the time. Care of the wounded was shown to be an assembly-line process that was meant to heal the sick, or at least make their deaths as painless as possible, but was hampered by a lack of funding and proper equipment (the doctors and nurses were constantly having to improvise with materials that weren’t designed for medicine) as well as by the indifference of the military brass or their paper-pushing underlings and acts of sabotage by someone that a major character had offended. Colonel Blake (McLean Stevenson) and especially Colonel Potter (Harry Morgan) were constantly angling to get rest and recreation (R&R) for their men and women, or horse-trade for much-needed supplies (the Holy Grail was always a jeep), and there were times when Hawkeye or B.J. (Mike Farrell) or some other character would fudge paperwork or pull a switcheroo that would make life bearable for someone else, if only for a while.

  The series’ original producers, Larry Gelbart and Gene Reynolds, resisted CBS’s orders to add a laugh track. They wanted the show to have real stakes, so that the jokes would feel like welcome relief from the horrors beyond the camp. As a compromise, they were allowed to mute the laughter during surgical scenes. Even in the first season, M*A*S*H wasn’t shy about going for the tears with an episode like “Sometimes You Hear the Bullet,” where a childhood friend of Hawkeye’s dies in the 4077th operating room; afterward, Colonel Blake tries to snap Hawkeye out of his grief by reminding him of the first two rules of war he learned: “Rule Number One is young men die and Rule Number Two is, doctors can’t change Rule Number One.”