TV (The Book)

by Alan Sepinwall

  Science fiction has a spotty commercial track record on TV, but The X-Files was able to build a big and broad fan base because it was sci-fi in cop show drag, attracting viewers who would never have watched a version told from the point of view of the aliens, or even of William B. Davis’s conspirator-in-chief, the Cigarette Smoking Man (who claimed the spotlight in one of the show’s most mordantly funny episodes, “Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man”; basically, “Evil Forrest Gump”). That audience cross-pollination was apparent in fans’ fascination with the unresolved sexual tension between Mulder and Scully. The X-Files wasn’t the first show to play that game, but it was the first with a collection of fans used to obsessing over everything about their favorite shows each week online. It popularized the concept of ’shipping (short for “relationshipping”), where some fans’ desire to see their favorite characters get together overwhelms their interest in any other aspect of the series. Carter played a longer game with this than many other creators would, not letting Scully and Mulder have their first proper kiss until season 7, and not turning them into an actual couple until season 8. Fans still aren’t entirely sure when the two officially became an item or whether their baby was produced the old-fashioned way. That Carter would leave the circumstances mysterious seems, in retrospect, like a bolder storytelling stroke than anything in his conspiracy episodes.

  The first five seasons were shot in Vancouver, lending the proceedings a gloom and geographical vagueness that fit the show as snugly as Mulder’s red Speedo. An unhappy Duchovny pushed for production to shift to Los Angeles, which moved Mulder and Scully’s adventures out of the shadows and into harsh sunlight. Foggy forests were replaced by deserts and highways, most successfully in season 6’s “Drive,” which introduced writer Vince Gilligan to actor Bryan Cranston (as a man with a deadly implant in his head who carjacks Mulder), paving the way for Cranston and Gilligan’s reunion (in similarly sun-bleached terrain) on Breaking Bad. The X-Files became more technically ambitious, which helped compensate for the increasingly convoluted storytelling. Season 5 staged a black-and-white homage to the 1930s Universal Frankenstein pictures titled “The Post-Modern Prometheus.” The sixth season featured the Carter-directed “Triangle,” an episode where each act was presented as a continuous take on board a German-occupied British ocean liner during World War II and in FBI headquarters in the present. Its aesthetic peak found the 1940s version of Scully and the latter-day version passing each other across the frame-line of a split-screen composition; both Scullys pause and shiver as if each has been passed through by a ghost.

  The X-Files was the first major show since the original Batman to release a theatrical film while the mother-ship series was actively on the air and producing new episodes. A more remarkable, related milestone: The tie-in movie, titled The X-Files: Fight the Future, was integrated into the series’ ongoing story line, amounting to a two-hour, big-budget episode that fans had to pay to see. It hit theaters the summer after the conclusion of season 5 and set up events in season 6.

  In addition to branching into film, Carter built out his personal brand with the bleak, exceptionally violent Millennium (1996–1999), starring craggy-faced character actor Lance Henriksen (Aliens, Near Dark) as a criminal profiler who works for the shadowy Millennium group; the dystopian action series Harsh Realm (1999–2000), set mainly inside of a virtual-reality combat simulator used to train US soldiers; and the one-season The Lone Gunmen spin-off (2001). The latter is remembered mainly for its pilot, which found its titular trio foiling a scheme to crash a remote-piloted commercial jetliner into the World Trade Center; it aired March 4, 2001, six months and seven days before the attacks of 9/11. The X-Files, Millennium, and The Lone Gunmen were all part of a shared universe; when Millennium was canceled, its story lines were concluded in an X-Files episode.

  If Carter had a coherent plan for the mythology at the start, The X-Files’ popularity—and, therefore, the need to elongate the mysteries, save certain big reveals for the movie, et cetera—began to turn what had once been the biggest narrative hook into a stone around the series’ neck. Even then, there was still the Mulder-Scully partnership to keep things interesting, but Duchovny stepped back his involvement with the show, appearing in only half of season 8’s episodes, and only twice in the final season, and replacement characters John Doggett (Robert Patrick) and Monica Reyes (Annabeth Gish) didn’t hold the same appeal. That the series ended with so many questions unanswered felt appropriate, even if it wasn’t reassuring. A second film, The X-Files: I Want to Believe, was released in 2008, four years after the end of the series; while a box-office disappointment, it proved that there was still a loyal fan base for Scully and Mulder’s adventures, and helped jump-start talk of a third feature, which morphed into a six-episode miniseries that aired on Fox in 2016.

  Carter’s attempts to build a multilayered franchise across two media never quite gelled, but he showed that such a thing could be done, and the executives at Marvel and DC Comics took notice, intertwining theatrical films and TV series that were part of a shared universe, every part embellishing and hyping every other. The comic book universes’ triumphs are mainly financial and logistical rather than artistic, though; Carter’s characters have more wit and soul, and feel like true adults rather than action figures trapped in an eternal twilight between adolescence and adulthood. The six-episode 2016 series was hit-and-miss, awkward in many ways and overly dependent on Easter eggs and fan service (to the point of repeating catchphrases). But it inspired affection anyway, mainly for how it acknowledged the burden of the show’s long-running popularity on Carter, his fellow writers and filmmakers, and on the core trio of Duchovny, Anderson, and Mitch Pileggi (as FBI assistant director Walter Skinner), who were wiser, sadder, and visibly older than during the last go-round, but still game to whip their flashlights out and wade into the gloom in search of the truth.

  —MZS & AS

  Curb Your Enthusiasm (HBO, 2000–2011) Total score: 96

  Imagine George Costanza from Seinfeld, but with a little bit of fame, a lot of money, a beautiful (if often irritated) wife, and almost zero accountability. That’s the starting point for Curb Your Enthusiasm, an inventively plotted, scathingly funny, joyously foulmouthed comedy series created by Seinfeld cocreator (and Costanza inspiration) Larry David.

  David played himself opposite a floating repertory company of regular costars, recurring cast members, and cameo players. Some played versions of themselves: Richard Lewis, Ted Danson, Wanda Sykes, all four Seinfeld alums at different times. Others played fictionalized characters: Cheryl Hines as Larry’s frustrated wife, Cheryl; Jeff Garlin as his business manager; Susie Essman as Garlin’s spectacularly profane wife; and, in later seasons, Bob Einstein as Larry’s frenemy Marty Funkhouser and J. B. Smoove as Larry’s gregarious sidekick Leon Black, who had even less of an internal censor than Larry.

  As on Seinfeld, each episode would feature a mixture of plots that tended to converge at the end, usually in a way that righted the cosmic scales by severely punishing or humiliating Larry for having been a horrendous asshole for the preceding twenty-five minutes. As on Seinfeld, characters were defined by their pathologies, misconceptions, tics, prejudices, grudges, and so on; they were often defined by one or two traits (Larry’s arrogant certainty of his own rightness, for instance, or Richard Lewis’s insecurity and manic behavior, which fueled his comedy offscreen as well), and the show rarely asked us to sympathize with any one character (even the long-suffering Cheryl could be annoyingly passive-aggressive at times).

  Social anthropology was the main order of business. Like Seinfeld, but with a more desperate, at times furious edge, the series did a brilliant job of identifying phenomena we vaguely recognized but had never put a name to before—for instance, “pig parking,” the practice of parking in a way that takes up more than one space and screws things up for people who park after you. The tightly interwoven subplots emboldened Larry to flout, subvert, reinvent, or game every social nicety
, rule, and law. The show wasn’t shy about pointing out the ways in which Larry’s social prominence, wealth, and white skin emboldened him to condescend to people who didn’t have one or more of those traits in common with him. His rudeness and cruelty led to shenanigans, still more shenanigans, and sometimes to wholesale destruction, occasionally capped with a fleeting moment of enlightenment or a freeze-frame of Larry being hoisted on his own petard. David’s skill at manipulating audience sympathies came through as strongly here as it did in the later, darker years of Seinfeld.

  The first half of any given episode might style Larry as half id-beast, half anti-political-correctness crusader. His ire was often so hilarious (never more so than when he was teeing off on some puny annoyance, such as the pretentiousness of the Starbucks menu) that viewers’ rational objections disappeared for a while until they had to emerge again because Larry’s horrendous behavior made them feel vaguely ashamed for identifying with him. You rooted for him to tear through Los Angeles like a balding, stooped-over tornado (in one episode, Larry is outraged that he can’t drive in a high-occupancy vehicle lane with just one passenger, so he picks up a prostitute), but then he’d go too far, then way too far, and right when Larry threatened to become entirely monstrous, he’d receive his comeuppance (the punch line of the HOV-lane gag finds Larry getting photographed by a traffic camera in a compromising position with his passenger, who wasn’t even doing anything compromising with him). There was an O. Henry–like ironic purity to how things turned out. After years of race-baiting by Larry, the now-divorced antihero dates a black woman whose last name is actually Black. In season 5, Larry, who had previously used his Jewish identity as an excuse to duck obligations and act on impulse (he once ate the baby Jesus out of a nativity cookie plate, then claimed he’d mistaken it for a monkey), learned that his birth parents were devout Christians from Bisbee, Arizona, and (before finding out that this was all a mistake and his parents were his parents) threw himself into learning to hunt, sing hymns, and chug cheap beer.

  HBO gave David more creative freedom than he’d ever had on NBC, starting with the ability to play himself rather than filling the role with Jason Alexander (whose Curb appearances displayed contempt for qualities associated with his alter ego—and thus the man on whom George was based). David was also able to use profanity and ethnic, racial, homophobic, and sexist slurs (a third-season episode revolves around an obituary typo that mistakenly refers to Cheryl’s beloved aunt as a “beloved cunt”), improvise most of the dialogue in any given scene (while sticking to strict plot outlines), and root many of the subplots in fine points of culture, politics, and religion. The latter was especially striking because David and his Seinfeld collaborators had to fudge particulars to avoid antagonizing censors and sponsors. Jerry, for instance, was a Jew who never explicitly identified as one until a late-series episode, whereas Curb did stories that treated specific and dire material irreverently (a Holocaust survivor and a former Survivor cast member wind up at the same dinner due to a misunderstanding) or trafficked in Jewish esoterica (such as the special section in some Hebrew cemeteries set aside for suicides and people with tattoos).

  Even more than the series that provided its structural template—not to mention many similar plotlines, like the main character befriending a figure from the 1986 World Series (again being generous, David provides Red Sox goat Bill Buckner the chance to redeem himself for letting the ball go through his legs)—Curb was a meticulously constructed comic contraption, not only within each episode but over the course of seasons, most of which ended on notes that would’ve constituted a pretty, pretty, prêt-tay good series finale had he decided to quit there (Larry dies but gets kicked out of heaven for being annoying; Larry triumphs in a Broadway production of The Producers, not knowing that Mel Brooks cast him hoping that he’d kill the show). The finality of each season’s end made sense when you understood David’s sweet deal with HBO, which put him under no obligation to ever make another season but gave him the freedom to do another the minute he had a good idea for one.

  David even managed to defend, interrogate, and stealth-remake the Seinfeld finale, building a whole season around TV Larry assembling the old show’s core cast for a reunion special. This ruse let David tie a more satisfying bow around his earlier hit without having to give viewers more than a taste of what Jerry, George, Elaine, and Kramer had been up to since we last saw them in jail. (The season also made clear that Jerry Seinfeld—or, at least, this version of him—was indistinguishable from Larry David aside from sporting a lush head of hair and a willingness to at least fake being interested in other people.)

  One of the subtexts of Curb was a craving to prove that Seinfeld was no fluke. The stories mock this obsession even as the scripts validate its usefulness as a wellspring of comic ambition. The show you’re watching is the show that “Larry David” could never create, and its mercurial energy comes from watching David dismantle and rebuild the perfect comic engine he created with Jerry Seinfeld back in the day—the better to reflect his own wilder, nastier vision of life, which at times feels like a Jerry Lewis movie with splashes of Federico Fellini’s magical-grotesque, circus-of-life sensibility. (The sound track repeatedly quotes passages from Fellini’s favorite score composer, Nino Rota.) Curb’s “Larry” is as rich, famous, and relatively untouchable as the genuine article, but he’s clearly bothered by the idea that his best work is behind him. All the money and perks he’s accumulated can’t quell his fear that his cultural footprint is fading, that his achievements mean nothing beyond this circle-jerking corner of Hollywood, and that he’s at risk of morphing, Cinderella-like, back into George Costanza. And so he lashes out at everyone and everything, with a mad-eyed force that would be devastating if the character had better aim and wiser taste in targets.

  If the show itself weren’t such a masterpiece of scabrous wit, it would come off as unseemly and pathetic: the ranting of a sore winner. Much of Curb’s nearly horrifying humor comes from the sight of Larry trying to bend the world to his will in the way that the ineffectual and cowardly George Costanza never could. Relief arrives when you step back and admire the show’s comic architecture and keen sense of when to pull back from the brink and when to dive headfirst into the abyss. While TV Larry fumes and schemes and makes an ass of himself, the real Larry David bends TV comedy into spikier shapes than NBC would ever allow.

  Perhaps the quintessential Curb moment comes at the end of season 3, when the opening of a restaurant Larry, Danson, and others have invested in threatens to go awry due to a profane outburst by the head chef, who’s afflicted with Tourette’s. Larry, who often means well but is usually too lazy, selfish, and/or clumsy to make his intentions into reality, tries to help out the chef and normalize his behavior by shouting curses, and soon Jeff, Cheryl, and everyone else in the restaurant has joined in, until the place is a cacophony of four-letter words, all in the service of a good deed performed by a delighted Larry David, who has reshaped his environment into something more reflecting of who he is inside.

  —MZS & AS

  SpongeBob SquarePants (Nickelodeon, 1999–present) Total score: 96

  The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show (ABC, 1959–1961; NBC, 1961–1964) Total score: 78

  Who lives in a pineapple under the sea? Why, one of the stars of the most brilliantly imagined and sustained display of surreal humor in pop culture, that’s who. SpongeBob SquarePants: bug-eyed, buck-toothed exponent of the phylum Porifera, and the most indestructibly innocent ninny since Candide—an ebullient, yammering, shrieking dolt, playing nautical melodies on his slide-whistle nose; disassembling and reassembling and exploding and imploding from shock and joy; singing songs about the best day ever and the best time to wear a striped sweater (“All the time!”); frolicking through the best of all possible undersea worlds with his dear friends Patrick the starfish and Sandra “Sandy” Cheeks the squirrel; doting on his pet snail Gary; inadvertently tormenting his anal-retentive cephalopod neighbor Squidward and his penny-pi
nching boss, Mr. Krabs; improving and destroying and rebuilding and improving and destroying his underwater hometown, Bikini Bottom; and bringing joy to children and Dadaesque humor to adults both straight and stoned.

  SpongeBob: Patrick, you’re a genius!

  Patrick: Yeah, I get called that a lot.

  SpongeBob: What? A genius?

  Patrick: No. Patrick.

  Created by animator and biologist Stephen Hillenburg, SpongeBob SquarePants is in every way a classic work of family entertainment, hitting the same conceptual sweet spot as the Marxes, Laurel and Hardy, Looney Tunes, The Simpsons, and The Muppet Show: silly creatures and voices and wild slapstick for little kids, outrageous puns and non sequiturs for slightly older kids, pop culture parody and thinly veiled social commentary for grown-ups, and brazen inventiveness for all. The universe that contains Bikini Bottom maintains rigorous internal consistency by doing whatever the heck the writers and animators feel like doing; as in Duck Soup, or certain defiantly patched-together films from W. C. Fields, the show favors situations over stories and comic effects over messages, and given the choice between doing something expected yet clever and something that seems to have been released from the reincarnated id of Marcel Duchamp or Salvador Dalí, it goes with option B.

  Squidward: Could you not stand so close? You’re making me claustrophobic!

  Patrick: What does “claustrophobic” mean?

  SpongeBob: It means he’s afraid of Santa Claus.

  Patrick: Ho ho ho!

  SpongeBob: Stop it, Patrick! You’re scaring him!

  The show is set mostly underwater, but not so you’d notice—when characters get excited or scared or unduly exert themselves, you might or might not see bubble trails, depending on whether the artists feel like drawing them, perhaps—and for the most part, “under the sea” amounts to a Yellow Submarine–styled fantasy of life above the waterline. There are houses and office buildings, fast-food restaurants and schools, highways and railways, cars and trucks and bikes, swimming pools and beaches (!), and boats (!!). Sometimes it rains (!!!) or snows (!!!!). There are moments when humans or mammals somehow find their way down to the ocean floor; when they do, they’re usually played by human actors in ridiculous outfits or very cheap animal costumes. (A gorilla in a diving helmet that terrorizes our heroes seems to have been inspired by the titular beast from Robot Monster.) The passage of time is indicated by the monotonous mutterings of a French-accented narrator modeled on Gallic explorer Jacques Cousteau: “Three hours later.” “Four days later.” “So much later that the old narrator got tired of waiting and they had to hire a new one.” The hero is a good-natured, wandering peanut-brain, a perforated Gomer Pyle. “Well it’s no secret that the best thing about a secret is secretly telling someone your secret, thereby secretly adding another secret to their secret collection of secrets,” he peals. “Secretly!” His laugh could curl your hair, even if your hair is already curly, and his fearful shriek could strip the barnacles from the deck of Mr. Krabs’s pirate ship, the Krusty Krab, which supposedly was reformatted into the Krusty Krab restaurant, but which might actually have once been a retirement home called the Rusty Krab, according to the Krusty Krab Training Video, which may or may not be a reliable source of information.