TV (The Book)

by Alan Sepinwall

  [Squidward asks if anyone can play an instrument.]

  Patrick: Is mayonnaise an instrument?

  Squidward: No, Patrick, mayonnaise is not an instrument.

  [Patrick raises his fin.]

  Squidward: Horseradish is not an instrument, either.

  Bikini Bottom has its own fables and legends and myths and bedtime stories and detailed mythologies. In an episode that sends up campfire stories, Mr. Krabs decides he can make more money by staying open twenty-four hours, which traps the eager-to-please SpongeBob and the dour Squidward in the restaurant all night and causes Squidward to devise the bloodcurdling tale of the Hash-Slinging Slasher (“The Slash-Bringing Hasher?” SpongeBob asks), a onetime fry cook who accidentally sliced off his hand and replaced it with a spatula. In another episode, Patrick and SpongeBob decide to go camping (which entails pitching a tent between SpongeBob’s pineapple and Squidward’s house, which looks like a tiki idol and has the exact address 122 Conch Street) and warn him not to do anything that might summon the dreaded Sea Bear. The list of summoning behaviors includes playing the clarinet badly, waving your flashlight back and forth really fast, stomping the ground, eating cubed cheese (sliced is safe), wearing a sombrero in a goofy fashion, wearing clown shoes or a hoop skirt, running, limping, crawling, and screeching like a chimpanzee. Of course Squidward insists on doing all of those things (and it’s impressive how he can rush offscreen and reappear moments later with clown shoes, a hoop skirt, and a sombrero—but hey, Bugs Bunny could produce a mallet out of thin air and bonk Elmer Fudd on the head with it, so give the squid a break), and lo and behold, a Sea Bear appears and subjects Squidward to a Scorsese-level beatdown (off-camera, thankfully). SpongeBob and Patrick are safe because they’ve drawn a circle around themselves, but unfortunately this can’t insulate them from a follow-up attack by the Sea Bear’s dreaded enemy, the Sea Rhinoceros, who is drawn by the sound of a Sea Bear attack and can be repelled only by Anti–Sea Rhinoceros Undergarments.

  It all makes perfect non-sense. The more demented the visuals become, the more sublime SpongeBob is.

  The highlight of the aforementioned Hash-Slinging Slasher episode is SpongeBob’s fearful reaction to Squidward’s patched-together story: First he chews his nails, then he eats his arms over and over (they make a buzz-saw sound as they arc into his gullet), and finally he pops an endless series of disembodied SpongeBob arms into his maw from a popcorn bucket. In the Fry Cook Games, a fast-food version of the Olympics, Patrick and SpongeBob compete in a chocolate high dive and grapple in a wrestling ring atop a giant sandwich bun. “The inner machinations of my mind are an enigma,” intones Patrick in one of the many moments when he becomes lost in thought or insists on being recognized for his intellect, whereupon we see a thought balloon of a carton of milk tipping over. In another episode, filled with dreams of material success by Fancy Living magazine, SpongeBob and Patrick envision owning a house with a swimming pool inside of another swimming pool and decide that the best way to get rich is by selling chocolate door-to-door, but get bamboozled by a con-fish who sells them individual zippered bags for every chocolate bar and still more bags to hold the bags, and then takes what’s left of their money by pretending that he’s in constant pain because he has glass bones and paper skin and injures himself whenever he moves.

  And then there’s the Iron Butt.

  Look it up.

  At the core of all this situational and verbal absurdity lies very, very silly and very, very stupid humor, of a type that parents know is sure to delight a child who has been verbal for only two or three years and therefore hasn’t yet been conditioned by authority figures to demand that stories be consistent or scenarios “believable.” (“That smell… A kind of smelly smell… The smelly smell that smells smelly,” says Mr. Krabs, a mini-monologue equally likely to slay a five-year-old or Salman Rushdie.) The same indestructible faith in the transformative power of imagination that can turn a refrigerator box into a spaceship or a bath towel into a Superman cape powers the imaginations of the show’s creative team. The apotheosis of SpongeBob’s methodical madness could be “Frankendoodle,” a segment in the spirit of Chuck Jones’s classic Duck Amuck, wherein SpongeBob and Patrick acquire a magic pencil accidentally dropped from a rowboat by an artistically inclined pirate and draw a black-and-white golemesque doppelgänger of SpongeBob who takes possession of the pencil and embarks on a campaign of eraser-driven terror, rubbing out portions of the animated landscape and—in a moment that distills the show’s aesthetic to a single gesture—SpongeBob’s crack. Always hold on to your magic pencil, kids, and remember that mayonnaise is not an instrument.

  That last “moral” would not be out of place on The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show (sometimes known as Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends or The Bullwinkle Show), a groundbreaking cartoon series whose excellence resonated far beyond its Saturday morning time slot. Created by Jay Ward, Alex Anderson, and Bill Scott as a means to sell sugary cereal to children (to this day, the characters remain wholly owned properties of General Mills), the show was the most radical thing to appear on children’s TV until that point: arguably much more of an “adult” cartoon series than the prime-time hits The Flintstones and The Jetsons (both of which essentially ripped off The Honeymooners but added prehistoric anachronisms and Eisenhower-vintage sci-fi jokes, respectively), Rocky and Bullwinkle owed more to the unself-conscious deconstructions of The Jack Benny Program and the quasi-experimental formalism of Ernie Kovacs than to anything that was genuinely aimed at tots. Little kids laughed at the goofy-looking animals and humans with their silly voices and accents and perhaps at the broader slapstick bits, but the excited archness of the storytelling and the plethora of puns, double entendres, and fourth wall–breaking asides were aimed at parents and adult caregivers, as well as college students who’d been up all Friday night and wanted a splash of absurdism with the hair of the dog that bit them.

  Each episode was a grab bag of recurring bits, most self-contained (the sardonic spoofs “Fractured Fairy Tales” and “Aesop and Son”), others serialized in the manner of theatrical cliff-hangers, albeit without a trace of suspense about how things would resolve. The wanderings of Bullwinkle J. Moose (Bill Scott) and Rocket “Rocky” J. Squirrel (June Foray), previously the favorite sons of Frostbite Falls, Minnesota, were interspersed with other ongoing shows-within-shows. In “The Adventures of Dudley Do-Right,” Scott stars as the voice of a square and square-jawed Canadian Mountie battling a literally mustache-twirling villain named Snidely Whiplash (Hans Conried). In “Peabody’s Improbable History,” a genius dog (Scott) and his adopted human son, Sherman (Foray), travel through time and get involved with Napoleon, Pancho Villa, and the like. “The World of Commander McBragg” chronicles the exaggerated exploits of an elderly veteran of every war of the preceding century. Some of the wordplay is skull-smackingly obvious (Bullwinkle and Rocky’s alma mater is Wossamotta U). The rest is so brainy that it takes a moment to register the nature of the joke (when Mr. Peabody and Sherman try to capture a dreaded bandit known as Zero, who brands things à la Zorro, there’s a pan across a wall of “Wanted” posters that includes a sketch of an outlaw named Joaquin Behindu). The dumber the joke, the bigger the belly laugh, generally—and the responsibility for earning it often lies with Bullwinkle, who misperceives situations that a toddler would grasp. (When the moose and squirrel’s nemeses, Russian spies Boris Badenov and Natasha Fatale, fail to kill them by dropping a safe from a window, Bullwinkle stares at the crater in the sidewalk, then yells, “Hey, up there! Ya dropped yer safe!”)

  The eye-popping yet crude animation added to the sense of wonder. The gap between the sophistication of the writing and the sight of characters practically sliding across the screen, their feet moving out of sync with the ground beneath their feet while background elements, including blank-faced and often immobile “extras,” reappeared ad nauseam (as they would on South Park generations later), multiplied the aura of benevolent madness. Even the interstitia
l materials, which existed to segue in and out of ad blocks, displayed a level of imagination and beauty that was unnecessary given their function, yet marvelous for that very reason: Rocky helping Bullwinkle try and fail to pull off the “rabbit in a hat trick” (he kept producing ravenous lions, tigers, bears, and the like); “Bullwinkle’s Corner,” featuring illustrated renditions of poems read aloud by the moose; a repeated sequence showing the silhouetted Rocky and Bullwinkle flying down past a jagged mountain peak during a thunderstorm, getting buried in the earth, and then erupting into the sunlight amid a crop of flowers.

  Like its direct spiritual descendant, SpongeBob, this show found the sublime in the ridiculous and vice versa. It’s easy to dismiss comedies as being innately inferior to dramas because their main purpose is to make people laugh and brighten their moods, and because dramas tend to be sticklers about structure, whereas in comedy it’s all about the moment, the pun, the punch line, the sight gag. That mandate can make noncomic minds think there’s no art to winning a laugh—that you just keep saying and doing and drawing things until someone guffaws. That’s true, insofar as it goes. But there the best slapstick comedy can achieve an expressive richness that rivals that of the most meticulous entertainment that calls itself drama. Image and sound, dialogue and composition, color and texture come together in shows like SpongeBob Squarepants and The Rocky and Bullwinkle Show to create a hallucination of life, a snapshot of chaos and joy.

  —MZS

  Twin Peaks (ABC, 1990–1991) Total score: 96

  Five minutes and fifty-nine seconds. That’s how long it takes for the pilot episode of Twin Peaks to unwrap the plastic sheeting on the corpse of Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee) and reveal her masklike face. Her hair is plastered back against her scalp and there are gritty flecks of soil on her forehead and cheeks.

  Who killed Laura Palmer? That was the question in the minds of the thirty-four million people who watched the premiere of David Lynch and Mark Frost’s indescribably original drama, and as the series unfolded over the next two seasons (one and a half, really; the first contained just eight episodes), they grew increasingly frustrated by Lynch and Frost’s refusal to solve it, as well as by the playfully sadistic way the show prolonged the suspense until it began to dissipate. Some viewers started to get annoyed as early as the end of the third episode, when FBI special agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) had a dream about a plush red room containing a Laura Palmer look-alike and a dancing dwarf whose cryptic dialogue (“Where we’re from, the birds sing a pretty song, and there is always music in the air”) was recorded backward and then played forward; Cooper woke up and called to tell his partner, local sheriff Harry S. Truman (Michael Ontkean), that he’d figured out who killed Laura Palmer, then added, “And yes, it can wait till morning,” but when the morning arrived at the start of the next episode, he said he’d forgotten that part of the dream and that they’d have to recapture it through an intuitive process involving meditation, target shooting, and word association.

  Lynch, Frost, and their fellow writers and filmmakers—a formidable bunch that included the brilliant cinematographer Caleb Deschanel (The Black Stallion), River’s Edge director Tim Hunter, and future Hall of Fame series TV director Lesli Linka Glatter (Homeland, Mad Men)—continued to test the audience’s patience ever more brazenly. The season 1 finale showed Cooper getting shot in his hotel room by an unseen assailant, then season 2 opened with a protracted comic bit of business between the wounded Cooper and a shuffling elderly bellhop. When the murderer was finally revealed to be Laura Palmer’s own father, Leland (Ray Wise), under control of a savage woodland demon known as BOB (Frank Silva, a set dresser on the pilot who was cast after Lynch saw his face reflected in a mirror), he committed another killing (of Laura’s look-alike cousin Maddy Ferguson, also played by Lee), and the show spent an entire episode following him as he drove around town with Maddy’s corpse in the trunk of his car.

  After that, the ratings plunged, and in the spring of 1991, ABC pulled the plug; by that point the series had moved on to other, less compelling plotlines, delving into the paranormal aspects of the show’s mythology (including a puzzle box, a possible UFO, and the Black Lodge, where evil doppelgängers of all the main characters dwelled) and tying up loose ends. A good case could be made for the idea that Twin Peaks should have been a self-contained miniseries rather than an ongoing series. (Years later, Frost acknowledged that he and Lynch never expected the show to succeed, and that they’d therefore have to resolve those story lines.)

  But if you go back and watch that pilot again—or other Lynch films, notably his 1986 thriller Blue Velvet—you can see that Laura’s murder was merely the clothesline along which the show’s writers and directors could string a story that was more perverse, frightening, sensual, and self-aware than most, but that still owed much to the daytime and nighttime soaps that it mocked in its show-within-a-show, Invitation to Love.

  Like most Lynch, Twin Peaks was at once a deconstruction and parody of the genres it invoked (the police procedural, the horror movie, the gothic-inflected small-town potboiler) and a satisfying example of same. The show could be silly in one moment (Lynch gave himself a recurring role as Cooper’s hearing-impaired supervisor, who would shout things like “COOPER, YOU REMIND ME TODAY OF A SMALL MEXICAN CHIHUAHUA!”) and shockingly violent in the next. The casual portrayal of teen sex with multiple partners, cocaine use, incest, rape, corpse mutilation, and other cable-ready material was shocking by 1990 broadcast TV standards (though no big deal in the post–Law & Order: Special Victims Unit era); Lynch and Frost’s goofy humor etched the darker elements in even sharper relief. Cooper was both a sincere, square-jawed hero and a Lynchian weirdo, a smile plastered across his face as he extolled the virtues of the local food and drink (“Damn good coffee! And hot!”) and dictated his thoughts into a tape recorder for transcription by an unseen assistant (“Diane, I’m holding in my hand a box of chocolate bunnies”). Half the town’s population seems borrowed from a swoony ’50s melodrama, the other half from a mental hospital. Nadine Hurley (Wendy Robie), wife of gas station owner Big Ed (Everett McGill), is obsessed with inventing silent drape runners, then falls into a coma, only to wake up acting like her teenage self. Leland Palmer’s overwhelming grief was contrasted with the hammy scheming of his business partners Ben Horne (Richard Beymer) and Ben’s brother Jerry (David Patrick Kelly). (The two acting styles cross paths when Leland seemingly overcomes his pain and bursts into Ben’s office singing “Mairzy Doats,” inspiring the brothers to start break-dancing; it’s possibly the pinnacle of Western television.) Truman wouldn’t seem out of place as a sheriff in a John Ford Western, even as he takes the community’s eccentricity at face value; when Cooper wonders about the woman (Catherine Coulson) who carries a small log around town, Truman deadpans, “We call her the Log Lady.”

  None of these elements—not to mention the slow and mournful score by Angelo Badalamenti and the fusion of hard-boiled crime fiction and talk of demons and parallel dimensions—had any business working in concert; but in the show’s first half, with the Laura Palmer investigation as a unifying element, it did. Lynch and Frost constantly went for big moments, knowing that the feelings they evoked would make complaints about consistency seem petty: teen siren Audrey Horne (Sherilyn Fenn) dancing provocatively around the jukebox or tying a cherry stem into a knot with her tongue; Sarah Palmer (Grace Zabriskie) screaming at the sight of BOB lurking behind Laura’s bedpost; or sensitive, dim-witted Deputy Andy Brennan (Harry Goaz) crying at the sight of corpses.

  It’s not only the strangest show to ever air on US network television, but the strangest one to (briefly) become a hit. The larger audience lost interest when they figured out that solving Laura’s murder wasn’t high on Lynch and Frost’s to-do list. But the show’s commitment to its passions and eccentricities left a mark, becoming a clear influence on more mainstream-oriented series like The X-Files, The Sopranos, and Lost, and inspiring such a devoted cult that Showtime belatedly c
ommissioned a follow-up miniseries, with Lynch set to direct every episode. Originally the resurrection was scheduled for 2016, a quarter-century after the finale, which saw the spirit of Laura Palmer promising Agent Cooper, “I’ll see you in twenty-five years.”