TV (The Book)

by Alan Sepinwall

  The series debuted only a few months after the invasion of Iraq, and though silliness was the first order of business—when Barry is temporarily unavailable, the family retains Bob Loblaw (say that three times fast), played by Winkler’s former Happy Days costar Scott Baio, who notes he can do anything Barry can do, “Plus, I skew younger”—Arrested Development was also a vicious satire of the head-in-the-sand thinking that got America into that mess overseas. George goes to jail in the first episode for embezzling from the family business, and is later accused of building houses for Saddam Hussein. He becomes a fugitive for a while and is later found by George Michael in a scene choreographed to resemble the footage of Saddam being examined after he was discovered in his spider hole.

  More than any comedy before it (and almost every one after), the series demanded complete viewer attention and loyalty for most of its jokes to work properly. Fold a piece of laundry, and you might miss the blue handprints—a reminder that Lindsay’s transparently closeted husband Tobias Fünke (David Cross) was constantly covering himself in blue body paint in the hopes of becoming an understudy for the Blue Man Group—dotting the wall of the model home where most of the Bluths were living. Miss a week, and you might not understand that George’s business rival Stan Sitwell (Ed Begley Jr.) suffers from alopecia, and thus has to wear a series of absurd wigs and false eyebrows.

  This was more work than most viewers were willing to do, and thus Arrested struggled in the ratings for all of its three seasons. But the rewards for those who wanted to pay attention were enormous, like interlocking running jokes about Michael’s contempt for George Michael’s boring girlfriend Ann Veal (Mae Whitman), whose existence he kept forgetting (“Her?”), and George Michael’s own uncomfortable feelings for first cousin Maeby (Alia Shawkat).

  Sometimes, Hurwitz and company got too clever for their own good, like a story arc in the third season where guest star Charlize Theron played Michael’s new girlfriend, who was revealed near the end to have the mental age of a preschooler; it’s the rare sitcom plot that plays much better the second time you watch it (and thus know what to look for) than the first. And when Netflix revived the series years later for a disappointing sequel season, tweaks to the formula—most episodes featured only one or two main characters, due to the difficulty of coordinating the actors’ busy schedules, and episodes could run anywhere from seven to sixteen minutes longer than they did in the Fox days—revealed how fragile the comic alchemy had been in the first place. (Coauthor’s note: Matt vehemently disagrees with every complaint Alan has about the Netflix season, and also thinks he smells like a loose seal.)

  But the cast was so devoted to bringing their ridiculous alter egos to life, and the writers so prepared to go anywhere for a joke, no matter how dumb and/or filthy (Tobias, noting that he’s worked as both an analyst and a therapist, decides to combine the two job titles, not realizing that his new business cards read “analrapist”), that you can understand why the show’s creators, stars, and fans keep returning to it. Like Michael with his relatives, it’s just too hard to walk away, no matter how much sense it makes at this point.

  —AS

  The Larry Sanders Show (HBO, 1992–1998) Total score: 100

  If one were to make a list of the most influential TV series that almost nobody watched, HBO’s The Larry Sanders Show would be at the top. During its run, it never got the industry accolades fans felt it deserved, and although it routinely ended up on critics’ year-end Top 10 lists, it got a meager handful of Emmy nominations and just three awards. It also rarely drew more than a couple of million viewers per episode, puny by broadcast standards. But history has rendered a glowing verdict. Created by actor-writer Garry Shandling and Dennis Klein, The Larry Sanders Show changed the look and feel of TV comedy. Its influence was felt almost immediately, and its impact continues to resonate. Although it wasn’t the first half-hour series to strip-mine the comedy of embarrassment, assume a laid-back, naturalistic style, or do without a score or a laugh track (except in the talk show sequences), the program’s combination of these elements was so distinctive that they amounted to a new template—one that subsequent programs borrowed and customized, from actor-writer-producer Ken Finkleman’s seriocomic Canadian series The Newsroom through the British and American versions of The Office and NBC’s 30 Rock.

  Larry’s warning to viewers before cutting to a commercial, “No flipping,” could double as praise for Shandling’s series. Once those white-on-black credits appeared, backed by the offscreen sound of sidekick Hank Kingsley (Jeffrey Tambor) warming up the crowd, the viewer was in a comic universe that was immaculately detailed and hermetically sealed: a snow globe full of bile. From its pitiless portrait of showbiz narcissism to its on-a-dime switching between videotape and film (establishing an art/life boundary that the characters willfully breached) to its then-innovative use of the Steadicam to transform long dialogue scenes into kinetic “walk and talks” (a technique pushed to the breaking point on Sports Night, ER, The West Wing, and other programs), The Larry Sanders Show infused sitcom conventions with cinematic flair and refused to sugarcoat its corrosive wit. (It also made the greatest use of the final-kicker freeze-frame since Police Squad!)

  The title character—brilliantly underplayed by Shandling—is a vain, pampered jackass whose insecurity and self-regard destroy his relationships with women and lead him to off-load rejection and failure onto his employees. He’s late night’s Narcissus, holding court during afternoon tapings and then going home to watch himself. (He sometimes invites his dates to join him; what a turn-on.) Larry throws himself into the show because he can’t function outside of it. “You’re like one of those goddamn creatures out of Greek mythology,” Artie (Rip Torn) tells him. “Half-man, half-desk.” At the end of season 2, Larry quits the program in a fit of pique and moves to a remote cabin in rural Montana, where he watches old tapes of himself over and over. (To get back on the air in season 3, Larry lies to the network’s new owner, telling him that he’s addicted to prescription painkillers; by the end of that season, Larry’s addiction is genuine—and the metaphor is impossible to miss.) His sign-off prior to this short-lived retirement is, “You may now flip,” and he delivers it dry-eyed, perhaps subconsciously realizing (as we do) that he doesn’t mean it. Larry says something similar near the end of the show’s multiple-Emmy-winning 1998 finale, “Flip”—a stunning reimagining of Johnny Carson’s farewell that replaces Bette Midler’s farewell torch song to Johnny with Jim Carrey belting out the Dreamgirls anthem “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going.” But this time there’s no backing out; that’s why Larry’s tears are real. Separate a man from his desk—or a junkie from his drug—and you get waterworks.

  Larry’s second banana, Hank Kingsley, is one of the most venal and pathetic characters in TV history. A former cruise ship entertainer elevated to minor stardom by Sanders, he’s sadly lacking in the charisma necessary to take the spotlight and plagued by fears of irrelevance and worthlessness. He works out his insecurities by throwing drama-queen tantrums and casually insulting those lower on the production’s totem pole. Larry’s producer, Artie, is a showbiz veteran of near-mythological awesomeness—a four-times-divorced Korean War veteran who seems to have made a friend, enemy, or lover of everyone in Hollywood (he once dated Kim Novak). He has a knack for delivering kiss-off lines with a raised eyebrow and a grin, so that the person on the receiving end doesn’t quite know how to respond. (“Don’t take this as a threat,” Artie tells an interfering female executive from the network, “but I killed a man like you in Korea. Hand-to-hand.” He smiles as he says it.) But beneath his assured facade, Artie is as damaged as Larry or Hank. In the season 4 episode “Arthur After Hours,” Artie gets soused with the show’s Russian janitor late at night on a deserted soundstage and belts “I Wanna Be Around,” a song about rejection that’s plainly directed at his boss and a long-running show that doesn’t appreciate his devotion.

  The tertiary characters are no less troubled. The s
how’s first head writer, Jerry (Jeremy Piven), is a lazy, horny, substance-abusing screwup who eventually gets axed for incompetence. (When Jerry tries to save himself with a self-pitying three-hankie monologue, Artie cups a hand to his ear and crows, “Do you hear that, my boy? I believe that’s the sound of the needle breaking on the Bullshit-O-Meter!”) Jerry’s replacement, Phil (Wallace Langham), is a wheedling suck-up who undermines his colleagues at every turn. The program’s hip, cynical talent booker, Paula (Janeane Garofalo), tries and often fails to focus her energy on a job, and a medium, that she secretly feels is beneath her. The series’ closest equivalent to functioning people are Larry’s loyal, tough right-hand woman, Beverly (Penny Johnson Jerald), and Hank’s two assistants, the kindhearted Darlene (Linda Doucett) and the quick-witted, openly gay Brian (Scott Thompson). But their willingness to subject themselves to discomfort, even abuse, makes you wonder what demons they’re wrestling with. (Brian’s list of unpleasant tasks assigned by Hank includes “digging through Great Dane poop looking for a ring.”)

  The Larry Sanders Show also presents what other industries would call “inappropriate behavior” as the show business norm. Larry has little patience for any woman as strong or accomplished as he is. He dates and sometimes beds the female guests but rarely views their attention as anything but a referendum on his power. He has a one-night stand with Beverly following his divorce; briefly reunites with his first ex-wife, a journalist named Francine (Kathryn Harrold); and gets sued by a fan who claims Larry impregnated her (after denying that he knows her, Larry sheepishly admits that she gave him a hand job in the parking lot of a Denny’s). His colleagues are just as sexually dysfunctional. The place is a fetid pit of hormonal distress. During Hank’s own postdivorce crisis, he numbs his loneliness with booze and hookers, lamely flirts with female guests, and puts the moves on a horrified Darlene. Late in the show’s run, Brian gets fed up with the constant stream of homophobic jokes—mostly from Hank—and sues the program for sexual harassment. “Goddamn it, what has happened to courtesy and respect in this world?” bellows Hank, a prime suspect in their disappearance.

  Shandling and his team (including head writer Peter Tolan and regular director Todd Holland) regard Larry and company with wry detachment. But they also leaven the characters’ misbehavior, cruelty, and pain with wry banter, elaborate profanity, rude slapstick, and empathy that wells up subtly, naturally, often when you least expect it. In the season 3 episode “Hank’s Divorce,” for example, Hank is in such pain—and projects so much of his agony onto others—that he’s nearly unwatchable. Artie, who is to divorce what Clint Eastwood’s Heartbreak Ridge character was to war, visits Hank at the hotel where he’s holed up to marinate in despair, and witnesses a breakdown that’s too raw to be amusing. The moment pushes further into darkness when Artie produces a pistol and dares Hank to kill himself. It’s a gamble that no therapist would endorse, but in the straight-male-dominated culture of ’90s talk shows, it’s just what Hank needs—and the episode’s final scene reveals that Artie’s macho veneer was just that. He ambles into Larry’s office to tell the boss that Hank will be returning to work, then produces the pistol. Larry grins as if reuniting with a long-lost friend. “Is that the divorce gun?” He beams, then lights Artie’s cigar with it. Freeze-frame; roll credits.

  —MZS

  The Honeymooners (CBS, 1955–1956) Total score: 99

  The Honeymooners was written by, produced by, and starred Jackie Gleason. He even wrote and conducted the theme music; then he made extra certain that everyone knew he was in charge by adding an “Entire Production Supervised by” credit. He wanted to leave no doubt about who ran the show, even though, since the beginning of his career, there had never been any. Gleason, a late-period vaudeville and radio star who made the jump to TV in the ’40s, was one of TV’s earliest auteurs, an Orson Welles of the small screen. Even though his finest creation ran just thirty-nine episodes during its regular presentation (after appearing for four years as part of the DuMont network’s Cavalcade of Stars, episodes of which were added to syndication decades after the fact), it expressed his sense of life in every conceivable way: raucous, grotesque, sentimental, and ultimately life-affirming.

  The Honeymooners was one of the most influential of all series. Its influence can be felt not just in every three-camera sitcom built around a blustering, scheming doofus of a husband and his poised and improbably patient wife (see Everybody Loves Raymond and King of Queens, to name two obvious examples), but also on All in the Family and The Sopranos, which learned a lot from Gleason’s staging of domestic arguments in tight spaces and his willingness to drop the comic bluster for a moment, zoom in for a close-up, and observe a character’s face as it got lost in a reverie, or a realization of a grave but not irrevocable mistake.

  Gleason played Ralph Kramden, a bus driver who fantasized about escaping his Brooklyn tenement and living the life of a swell. His wife, Alice, played by Audrey Meadows, is a sardonic mate who casts a side-eye on his idiocy, weathers his explosions of distress and anger, and punctures his bluster by needling him about his temper, his long record of idiotic schemes, and his weight. (Ralph: “We got any lard laying around here?” Alice: “Yeah, about three hundred pounds.” Ralph: “Oh, you’re gonna get yours!”) Nearly every week, Ralph gets the bright idea to take a shortcut to fortune and draws his best pal, the sewer worker Ed Norton (Art Carney), into his scheme, which always ends in disaster, capped by Ralph begging Alice for forgiveness and Ed doing the same with his own wife, Trixie (Joyce Randolph), who’s more chipper than Alice but equally unwilling to suffer a fool gladly.

  Much of The Honeymooners is shtick-based, setting up comic situations and letting them play out at length, the better to showcase Meadows’s laser-beam focus, Randolph’s ebullient timing, Gleason’s improbable grace and mercurial energy, and the physicality of Carney, a porkpie-hatted string bean with the posture of a shrimp. (When Ralph tries to teach his friend to play golf—a ridiculous notion in itself—he tells him to begin by addressing the ball, and Norton salutes it and exclaims, “Helloooooo, ball!”) The show has become, as they say, problematic, thanks to Ralph’s oft-repeated promise to send Alice “to the moon… bang, zoom!” But viewers knew he would never raise a hand to her—not just because he was a kind soul deep-down, but because Alice would knock him right out. (“I’ll go fix my lipstick,” she tells him. “I won’t be gone long, Killer. I call you ‘Killer’ ’cause you slay me.”)

  Beneath this veneer of tomfoolery was a melancholy strain. The settings were unapologetically urban and dire—the sorts of places where you might expect to see a private detective rooting through trash or a lout in a tank top yelling up at his wife in a window. Economic distress and depression over the impossibility of leaving one’s social class drove Ralph’s schemes. He always felt like a failure for not being rich enough to support Alice in the manner to which he believed she should become accustomed, even though he was a hardworking stiff who was doing the best he could. Ralph was a product of his conditioning, even though it’s doubtful that Gleason or his costars would describe the character’s predicament in those terms.

  “No wife of mine is gonna work,” he tells Alice. “I got my pride. You know, no Kramden woman has ever supported her husband. The Kramden men are the workers in the family.” “Wait a minute, Ralph,” she says. “What about your father? For a long time there he didn’t work at all.” “But neither did my mother. At least he kept his pride, Alice. He went on relief.”

  Few contemporaneous series even spoke about such things—not in the postwar United States, where everyone was supposedly happy and prosperous—and fewer wove them into every story line. While other popular sitcoms set in 1950s America, like Leave It to Beaver and Father Knows Best, reassured viewers that patriarchal wisdom was always comforting and that the relative opulence of suburban life was “normal,” The Honeymooners showed a life of struggle by those left behind in the cities to drive buses and work in sewers, and to live vert
ical rather than horizontal lives. Ralph and Alice may live near the top of their tenement apartment building, but socioeconomically they’re closer to the bottom of what their leaders and their media told them was each American’s birthright.

  The show’s low-tech visuals enhance its sneaky power. The Honeymooners in all of its incarnations was videotaped before a studio audience, like a theater production. The only records of the earliest episodes come from black-and-white film cameras pointed at monitors. The alchemy of video-into-film, known as kinescope, crushes blacks and blows out white spaces and creates what could be ectoplasm trails behind characters as they move across the screen. The Honeymooners is a dream of itself without having aspired to be any such thing. The aesthetic is haunting: We are aware that we’re seeing a memory of a time and place long gone and that was fading away even as it appeared on TV screens.

  —MZS

  Louie (FX, 2010–2015) Total score: 99

  What makes Louie, focused on the surreal misadventures of a divorced New York comedian, so remarkable? It isn’t the content, which is alternately funny, sweet, and mortifying. Nor is it the form, which was close to revolutionary. Sometimes Louis C.K., a stand-up comic and skilled filmmaker who played the title character, would spend his allotted twenty-two minutes telling one story. Other times he’d deliver the TV equivalent of a couple of short stories, or (as in the divisive fourth season) serve up what amounted to feature-length films in twenty-two-minute chunks (two of which cast other actors as younger versions of Louie). Within any given sequence, C.K. might stick with the show’s dominant mode—melancholy sitcom, no laugh track—or shift into a dream sequence, a bit of stand-up, a flashback, even a sort-of documentary.