TV (The Book)

by Alan Sepinwall

  It’s a finale that builds on every single thing that happened over the previous eighty-eight episodes, that shows that Ryan and his team were paying attention to all of Vic’s and Shane’s past sins, and that reveals all that came before not as another aggressive celebration of a swaggering male antihero but an intricate, inescapable tragedy involving a man who thought he was a different kind of cop, when really he was just a different kind of crook.

  —AS

  TV’S MOST MEMORABLE DEATHS

  Henry Blake, M*A*S*H: Sent home from war, shot down over Sea of Japan.

  Joyce Summers, Buffy the Vampire Slayer: A natural death in a supernatural world.

  Ned Stark, Game of Thrones: Beheaded as an example to his supporters.

  Rosalind Shays, L.A. Law: She really thought there would be an elevator.

  Gus Fring, Breaking Bad: Lost half his face, but not his sense of style.

  Chuckles the Clown,The Mary Tyler Moore Show: While wearing a peanut costume, shelled to death by elephant.

  Susan Ross, Seinfeld: Died from licking toxic envelope glue from off-brand envelopes her fiancé picked out.

  Rocket Romano, ER: Eventually, the helicopter’s gonna get you.

  Mags Bennett, Justified: It was already in the glass, not in the jar.

  Shane Vendrell, The Shield: Killed entire family to ensure their innocence.

  Ralphie Cifaretto, The Sopranos: Lost his head.

  Lori Grimes, The Walking Dead: Gave birth to one child, stabbed in head by other.

  Kenny McCormick, South Park: Impaled on flagpole, eviscerated and decapitated by football players, cooked in microwave oven, crushed by Mir space station, pierced by Iraqi sword, tied to tetherball pole and asphyxiated, gored by bull, expired from chicken pox, drowned by goldfish, squashed by derailed mining cart full of underpants, struck by lightning, pulled into giant fan by magnet, mauled by bear while impersonating deer, frozen in carbonite by CIA as gift to Sally Struthers, voids self to death after playing “The Brown Note” in concert, dies of boredom riding a boat going five mph, stabbed through heart by member of Cthulhu cult, perishes of autoerotic asphyxiation after choking self with belt while dressed as Batman, jumps from headquarters of Sony Japan while dressed as “Princess Kenny,” head bitten off by Iguana Entertainment logo, and others.

  Flock of turkeys, WKRP in Cincinnati: As God was his witness, Mr. Carlson thought they could fly.

  Charlie Pace, Lost: Drowned, but not before warning Desmond it was “NOT PENNY’S BOAT.”

  Wild Bill Hickok, Deadwood: Inadvertently created the dead man’s hand.

  Omar Little, The Wire: Died an old gunfighter’s death, but in West Baltimore.

  Bobby Simone, NYPD Blue: Literally died of a broken heart.

  Lane Pryce, Mad Mad Men: Jaguar engineering proved unreliable, but a necktie did not.

  Nate Fisher Sr., Six Feet Under: Died Died as he lived; gone but not forgotten.

  The Twilight Zone (CBS, 1959–1964 and 1985–1989; UPN, 2002–2003) Total score: 101

  Imagine, if you will, an innovative writer and producer who feared two things almost equally: death and irrelevance. Death claimed him in 1975. Irrelevance: never.

  The writer-producer is Rod Serling. He was best known to the public as the dapper, grimly ironic host of his great half-hour anthology series The Twilight Zone (1959–1964). But he was more than a TV personality. Throughout his brief heyday—which lasted from the live TV era of the 1950s through the late ’60s—he fought hard, often losing the battle to put meaningful drama on television. He was one of its earliest and greatest auteurs, an artist of integrity and vision.

  Raised in Binghamton, New York, and scarred by his experience as an infantryman in World War II, Serling was a walking paradox: a Jew who converted to Unitarianism; a bookish intellectual drawn to the most popular medium yet devised; an alienated, profoundly lonely man who became one of the most recognizable and widely imitated celebrities of the twentieth century.

  He broke through to national success with Patterns, a ninety-minute teleplay about a young corporate climber who learns he was hired as the final element in a cold-blooded corporate plot. The public, the critics, and the industry embraced Serling when he wrote prosaic “little” dramas for live theater, such as Patterns and his more successful follow-up, Requiem for a Heavyweight. But he wanted to write more pointedly about politics and social issues—much to his employers’ chagrin. In 1958, he and director John Frankenheimer tried to produce a live drama about the fate of Emmett Till, a cocky black Chicago teen who went to visit relatives in small-town Mississippi and got lynched for whistling at a white woman. Network executives and censors “chopped it up like a roomful of butchers at work on a steer,” Serling later said. When the play finally aired, the cocky black teen had become a Mexican folk musician, and the story had been transplanted to the American Southwest circa 1870. Throughout the late ’50s, Serling got in trouble with network bosses and advertisers for writing plays drawn from modern events (including the civil rights movement, the Cold War, and the threat of nuclear annihilation) and recent history (including World War II and the Holocaust). He angered them further by giving newspaper interviews that painted network TV as being hostile to drama that dared challenge, provoke, or enrage viewers.

  Luckily for Serling (and for viewers), the next stop was The Twilight Zone. The irony was exquisite. CBS, the same network that routinely neutered Serling’s social dramas, let him write, host, and oversee a weekly anthology series that featured such unrespectable elements as time travel, robots, monsters, space creatures, and cameos by the Grim Reaper and Satan. The format disguised social commentary so pointed that if the series had been conceived in a more straightforward way, Serling’s scripts never would have seen the light of day. Season 5’s “I Am the Night—Color Me Black,” in which the sky turns black over a small town on the morning of a man’s execution, is one of many Zone episodes to grapple with the moral implications of capital punishment, mob violence, and the generalized desire for retribution. At the end, when the sky turns black over Vietnam, the Berlin Wall, a political prison in Budapest, a rough neighborhood in Chicago, and several cities in the segregated US South, Serling tells us that the blackness represents “a sickness known as hate. Not a virus, not a microbe, not a germ… Highly contagious. Deadly in its effects. Don’t look for it in the Twilight Zone. Look for it in the mirror. Look for it before the light goes out altogether.”

  The best Zone episodes are simultaneously of their time and timeless. Consider (if you will) “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” about a small town destroying itself during a blackout over fear of an unspecified invasion. The episode was Serling’s condemnation of McCarthy-era paranoia over Communism, which encouraged Americans to inform on one another for the greater good of the society. Substitute “terrorism” or “drug dealing” or “pedophilia” for “Communism,” and you have a drama as fresh as this morning’s headlines. “Eye of the Beholder,” about an “ugly” woman undergoing an operation to make her look “normal,” is often described as a parable about moral and aesthetic relativism. (The “ugly” woman turns out to be beautiful by our standards, but everyone else in her society—the “beautiful” people—are hideous pig creatures.) But pay close attention during the climax, which shows the young woman rushing down a corridor. The TV on the hospital wall shows a Big Brother–type pig creature in a military uniform, hollering about how there is “a single virtue, a single morality!” The episode is a dark fairy tale about how society and its leaders pressure individuals to conform—a tendency that, unchecked by law, leads to dictatorship. The apocalyptic ending of “Time Enough at Last”—which ends with bibliomaniac Henry Bemis (Burgess Meredith) left alone in the rubble of a freshly nuked city with a trove of books, only to break his glasses—is one of the show’s many effective riffs on the end of “The Monkey’s Paw” episode from The Alfred Hitchcock Hour; but the sight of a great city in ruins is also redolent of 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, a
nd other modern catastrophes. Serling narrates, “Henry Bemis, now just a part of a smashed landscape, just a piece of the rubble, just a fragment of what man has deeded to himself.” An episode about an astronaut-in-training who hallucinates he’s alone in a small town while being hounded by unseen forces now plays like a prophecy of our modern age of total surveillance. “Somebody’s looking at me!” the astronaut screams. “Please help me!”

  Some motifs recurred so regularly that they became in-show clichés. Characters kept selling their souls to the devil, belatedly realizing that they were dead, and figuring out, long after the audience, that the place they were stranded in was heaven, hell, or purgatory. “This is what is meant by ‘paying the fiddler,’” Serling tells us at the end of season 1’s “Judgment Night,” about a German U-boat commander condemned to endlessly relive his own sinking of a Scottish civilian ship. “This is the comeuppance awaiting every man when the ledger of his life is opened and examined, the tally made, and then the reward or the penalty paid.” Twilight Zone characters heard voices and saw things and wondered if they were crazy and ultimately found out that they weren’t, too late to defend their sanity. (The most striking of the latter was “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” starring William Shatner as an airplane passenger who thinks he sees a gremlin tearing apart the engine.) As the series wore on, a repetitiveness set in, epitomized by Serling’s narration, which could sound slapped-together. “There are many bromides applicable here,” Serling explains at the end of season 5’s “The Brain Center at Whipple’s,” about a man who creates laborsaving machines that render most human labor unnecessary. “‘Too much of a good thing,’ ‘tiger by the tail,’ ‘as you sow, so shall you reap.’” You could almost hear him sighing as he read it.

  But even at its least inspired, there were always flashes of poetry and tenderness in The Twilight Zone; moments of eeriness, menace, and joy; fragments of narration by Serling that turned such a lovely phrase you almost didn’t care if the episode was working or not, or that felt like glimpses of a creator’s mind ruminating en route to a breakdown. “A man can think a lot of thoughts and walk a lot of pavements between afternoon and night,” he says in season 1’s “Walking Distance,” about a man so consumed by nostalgia for his childhood and adolescence that he can’t enjoy the present.

  Sadly, Serling spent his final years thinking of himself as a second-rater and a sellout. It’s true that the medium accustomed him to a lifestyle that he didn’t dare give up; by the late ’60s, he was hosting a series over which he had no creative control (Night Gallery) and appearing as a pitchman in ads (a Zone-worthy fate for a man who despised commercialism). He had joined a certain system (network TV), done what he could to change it from within, and failed—or so he thought. Later in life, Serling disparaged his best writing. “My stuff has been momentarily adequate,” he told an interviewer.

  Try permanently influential.

  The Twilight Zone inspired two official TV remakes (CBS, 1985–1989, narrated by Cliff Robertson; UPN, 2002–2003, hosted by Forest Whitaker) and a 1983 feature film produced by Steven Spielberg, with segments by Spielberg, John Landis, Joe Dante, and George Miller and narration by none other than Burgess Meredith, who appeared in four episodes of the original Zone. (The film’s playful artistry was overshadowed by the preventable deaths of Vic Morrow and two child actors, Myca Dinh Le and Renee Shin-Yi Chen, in a helicopter accident.) The show’s post-Serling TV incarnations had their merits. The finest was the ’80s version, which debuted in a one-hour time slot. Although its production values were dwarfed by those of NBC’s competing anthology Amazing Stories (a Spielberg project), it admirably reimagined Serling’s format, and lured heavy-hitting pop artists to write or direct episodes ranging in length from twelve to thirty-eight minutes. Highlights included Harlan Ellison’s “Shatterday,” starring Bruce Willis as a man tormented by a mirror version of himself; “Opening Day,” a John Milius–directed, neo-noir-styled nightmare about a man working up the nerve to murder his girlfriend’s husband during a hunting trip; and the unrelenting “Nightcrawlers,” directed by William Friedkin, in which a Vietnam veteran exposed to an Agent Orange–type chemical is pursued by the zombie-ghosts of soldiers he betrayed.

  Aside from the official reboots and Serling’s own 1969–1973 ABC horror series, Night Gallery (which gave a young Spielberg his first professional directorial credit, in an episode starring Joan Crawford as a blind woman), Zone inspired countless homages and rip-offs. The short list includes Thriller (ABC, 1960–1962, hosted by Boris Karloff); The Outer Limits (ABC, 1963–1965); Darkroom (ABC, 1981–1982, hosted by James Coburn); George Romero’s Tales from the Darkside (syndicated, 1984–1988, inspired by 1982’s Creepshow, Romero’s Zone-styled anthology film with Stephen King); The Ray Bradbury Theater (HBO and USA, 1985–1992); Tales from the Crypt (HBO, 1989–1996); Dead Man’s Gun (Showtime, 1997–1999, hosted by Kris Kristofferson); England’s Black Mirror (2011–); Deadtime Stories (Nickelodeon, 2012–); and From Dusk till Dawn: The Series (El Rey, 2014–). Its influence could also be felt in such allegorically minded science-fiction and horror programs as Star Trek (NBC, 1966–1969); Fantasy Island (ABC, 1977–1984 and 1988–1989); the rebooted Battlestar Galactica (Syfy, 2003–2009); and Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk’s American Horror Story (FX, 2010–) and Scream Queens (Fox, 2015–). The Rod Serling homage tree branches off via the cult favorite Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1974–1975), a monster-of-the-week series starring Darren McGavin that drew on The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, and Night Gallery, and that looked forward to the morality-play genre tales of The X-Files (Fox, 1993–2008); Buffy the Vampire Slayer (WB and UPN, 1997–2003); and Supernatural (CW, 2005–).

  It’s too bad Serling couldn’t have lived to see the modern version of TV, which filled hundreds of channels with dozens of shows, all of which learned from Serling that it was possible to make magic in a system that seemed designed to extinguish it, and create stories so clever that the powers that be didn’t know they had messages as well. “Someplace between apathy and anarchy is the stance of the thinking human being,” Serling said. The name of that someplace: The Twilight Zone.

  —MZS

  Arrested Development (Fox, 2003–2006; Netflix, 2013) Total score: 100

  At least half the members of Arrested Development’s Bluth family have their own personal chicken dance, which they deploy when they think another family member—usually sensible middle son Michael (Jason Bateman) or freakish youngest son Buster (Tony Hale)—is acting cowardly. Yet none of these impressions remotely resemble how a chicken might move or sound: Eldest son GOB (Will Arnett) claps aggressively while doing the Running Man, sister Lindsay (Portia de Rossi) waggles her fingers atop her forehead while doing a spastic hoedown, mother Lucille (Jessica Walter) flutters her arms like an entirely different kind of bird and recites baby talk, and father George (Jeffrey Tambor) simply stretches out his arms and utters a singsong “Coo-coo-ka-chah!” (Michael’s son George Michael, played by Michael Cera, apparently also has his own chicken dance, but the Netflix season of Arrested Development cruelly taunted fans with the possibility only to interrupt George Michael before he had a chance to do it.)

  Michael, at one point presented with the spectacle of three Bluth chicken dances at the same time, mutters, “Has anyone in this family ever seen a chicken?” This accomplishes nothing. His relatives, as usual, not only are ignoring the one relatively sane adult in the family, but they would be incapable of processing the idea that they’re doing anything incorrectly. (At one point, even the cowardly Buster has had enough of GOB’s taunts and screams at him, “Chickens don’t clap!” GOB pays him no mind.)

  As the show’s wonderfully deadpan narrator (and, along with Brian Grazer, its executive producer guardian angel) Ron Howard puts it simply at the top of each episode: It’s Arrested Development, which more or less turns into Michael Bluth’s version of Chinatown. He should forget all these defiant ignoramuses, grab George Michael, and move far, far away, but
he can’t—because, as this great, underwatched comedy slowly reveals over time, he’s just as vain and stubborn and foolish as the rest of them, and takes far too much satisfaction from being there to point out their many mistakes.

  Created by Mitchell Hurwitz, Arrested Development was an incredible Rube Goldberg contraption of a sitcom, elaborately setting up most of its jokes in a way that seemed like far too much effort, until the punch lines started rolling at the audience with devastating speed.

  Take Buster’s unhealthy relationship with Lucille, who still infantilizes him in his thirties and takes him annually to a creepy dinner dance event known as Motherboy. Over time, he rebels against her the only way he can: by starting a relationship with her next-door neighbor and oldest frenemy, who is conveniently also named Lucille. (“Lucille 2” is played by Liza Minnelli, just one member of an army of odd guest stars used to their fullest and most unexpected comic potential: Henry Winkler as perverted Bluth family attorney Barry Zuckerkorn, who in one episode literally jumped over a shark; Julia Louis-Dreyfus as a lawyer pretending to be blind; Carl Weathers as a cheapskate version of himself; and Amy Poehler as GOB’s drunken soldier bride, whose name he never learns, and thus is known only as “Wife of GOB.”) Later, Lucille Bluth has Buster enlist in the Army after being ambushed by a Michael Moore impersonator, only for Buster to be spared from combat because his hand is bitten off by a loose seal, the warnings of which he ignores because he assumes he’s being told about his mother.