The good news: It ends for all of us, even if Freaks and Geeks itself ended much too soon, and long before anyone at the network understood what an absurd collection of talent they had on hand.
—AS
My So-Called Life (ABC, 1994–1995) Total score: 94
It’s wonderful and awful being a teenager. It’s old news to the world, but it’s all new to you. You have to go through all this crap—hormones, sexual anxiety, psychological separation from one’s parents, fear for one’s future—knowing full well you’re not the first person to go through it, but maybe sometimes wishing you were, so that you could just deal with it on its own terms, in your own way, without adults diminishing the gravity of your emotions by reminding you that you’re not a special snowflake, that everybody goes through this, and that someday it’ll be over and you’ll be nostalgic for your lost innocence, blah blah blah, just shut up, Mom and Dad, gah! (Door slam.)
My So-Called Life got all this. It got it better, in fact, than any network series about teens since James at 15, which aired almost twenty years earlier on the same network, ABC, and caught flak for dealing with many of the same issues (including adolescent drinking and premarital sex) that were woven so matter-of-factly into Life’s story lines.
“What’s amazing is when you can feel your life going somewhere… Like, your life just figured out how to get good,” said the show’s heroine, Angela Chase (Claire Danes). “Like, that second.” That’s just one piece of the show’s intermittent narration, in which Angela obsesses on her middle-class teenage problems. But rather than let Angela’s musings sit there unexamined, writer-producers Winnie Holzman, Marshall Herskovitz, and Ed Zwick put a knowing yet compassionate frame around them. Her roiling emotions (and those of her friends, and her parents, and their friends) were respected and understood, even as the show signaled to older viewers that it knew full well that Angela’s problems weren’t really at the center of the universe, and that the notion that they were was but one small part of the condition of being a teenager, which can be treated and even managed through experience and maturity but never quite goes into remission. This life has been a test, Angela thinks to herself. If this had been an actual life, you would have received instructions on where to go and what to do.
This unusually supple and complex point of view—let’s call it what it was: a voice—anchored the show’s pilot and manifested itself in the eighteen episodes that followed. The result, though sadly truncated, stands as one of the great one-season wonders in TV history, and one of the finest depictions of American adolescence since Holden Caulfield donned his hunting cap with earflaps and took a train to New York City.
The characterizations of Angela’s mother, Patty (Bess Armstrong); father, Graham (Tom Irwin); and little sister, Danielle (Lisa Wilhoit), had as much warmth and intelligence as the heroine’s, and Angela’s classmates (and her relationships with them) were so rich that they could have supported series of their own. Angela’s relationships with her onetime best friend, Sharon Cherski (Devon Odesssa), and her new best pal, Rayanne Graff (A. J. Langer), were great explorations of the notion that friendships have life spans that can end suddenly for all sorts of reasons. (The episode where Angela declines to participate in a traditional mother-daughter fashion show demonstrates that the same is true of stages in a parent-child relationship.) Rayanne and Angela’s bond was also a reminder of why “good” girls are so often drawn to troubled ones: They’re frustrated by their own respectability and need to feel at once dangerous-by-proxy (Rayanne was a burgeoning alcoholic with bad sexual judgment and often encouraged Angela to push limits) and more “mature” than someone else their age. Angela is often put in the position of worrying about a teenager who’s gone off-radar, just as her own mother and father worry about her—proof that Angela herself has good parents who had already passed down their values. And we didn’t have to take the show’s word for that because it was very conscientious about showing Graham and Patty engaged in the nitty-gritty of parenting. They talked and sometimes fought about how to raise their daughters, how to balance child-rearing against the need to tend their own romantic/sexual spark, and whether or not to sit in judgment of other parents (such as Rayanne’s mother, who sometimes acted more like her big sister or roommate). “Nobody wants to hear they may have made a mistake with their kids,” Graham says. “Nobody wants to be accused of not being a decent parent.”
Then there was Brian Krakow (Devon Gummersall), the prototypical “nice guy” nerd pining after Angela; and Angela’s crush object Jordan Catalano (Jared Leto), who perfectly captured the discombobulated entitlement of the long-haired dreamboat stoner (“I like the way he leans,” Angela said); and, of course, Rickie Vasquez (Wilson Cruz), the stealthy conscience of the show. Rickie was a revolutionary character, as real and affecting as Angela and Rayanne but more surprising and original. At that time, it was rare to see Hispanic or openly gay characters on TV, period, much less on a teen show, and he was both. The show was unstinting in its willingness to look at what it meant to be Rickie, a double outsider who had to deal with all of the same pressures as the heterosexual white kids, plus identity issues that, in 1994, the white suburban educational mainstream was only beginning to understand and care about.
The series impressed at the level of sheer craft as well: Everybody who makes a TV series claims at some point that they’re making a series of little films, and usually they’re kidding themselves, but in this case it felt true. The novella-like scripts by Holzman and writing staff, complete with Salingeresque unreliable narration (the opening of the New Year’s–themed episode, “Resolutions,” offered snippets of narration by seven characters); the moments of connection between characters you wouldn’t have expected to have any (such as Brian pulling a Cyrano de Bergerac and writing Angela a love letter on behalf of the nearly illiterate Jordan); the sometimes dreamlike visuals, with white-gold sunlight blasting through schoolroom windows, reddish brown shadows that seemed fogged-up as in a hormone-addled daydream, and scene transitions featuring vertical “wipe” transitions created by walls and doorframes; W. G. “Snuffy” Walden’s sprightly score, which had a “life goes on” feel even when Angela was so depressed she wanted to die; the astute deployment of pop tunes (including Brian circling Angela on his bike to R.E.M.’s “Everybody Hurts” in the pilot, and Angela dancing away her infatuation with Jordan to the Violent Femmes’ “Blister in the Sun”): These touches and others might have seemed too on-the-nose were the series not so disarmingly sincere. They were the products of discernment and empathy, and they have ensured that the show retains its power to illuminate and move even as the fashions, music, and cultural references (Rayanne wants CDs for her birthday!) became “period.” My So-Called Life reproduces the commingling of wonder, anxiety, and bitterness that defines adolescence, so faithfully that teens not born when Angela first appeared on ABC can watch it and say, “Yes, thank God, finally, someone got it right.” Grown-ups, to their amazement, can say the same.
—MZS
Oz (HBO, 1997–2003) Total score: 93
Among the many ways characters died on Oz:
Burned to death
Throat slit with long, sharpened fingernails
Internal organs ruptured after being fed meals laced with ground-up glass
Executed by lethal injection
Buried alive when an escape tunnel collapsed
Electrocuted in a bathtub
Injected with an HIV-infected needle, then smothered to death in the infirmary
Executed by a firing squad
Fatally allergic reaction to eggs hidden in food
Shot with a staple gun
Executed by electric chair
Face melted off with hot steam
Buried alive behind a wall, then rescued after suffering horrific burns, then buried alive behind another wall
So, yeah, Tom Fontana and company got creative with the way they doled out death among the inmates of Oswald State Penitentiary, the
men who guarded them, and at times the loved ones who got mixed up in their blood feuds. Seeing how the show was going to bump off yet another character could be thrilling and revolting at the same time. Cumulatively, it was a lot for the viewer to endure, and is likely one of many reasons that Oz—HBO’s very first original drama series, and thus the great-granddaddy of this new golden age of television we have before us—hasn’t had the afterlife of immediate descendants like The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, and The Wire.
But the sheer amount of thought, and daring, that went into figuring out the most macabre way to kill off characters on Oz was emblematic of the amount of creativity that went into every single element of the show itself. Week after week, season after season, Oz functioned very much like one of its outlaw protagonists (most likely Dean Winters as perpetual schemer Ryan O’Reily), awe-inspiring in everything it kept getting away with.
It featured acts of unspeakable violence, along with the men (and, occasionally, women) who committed them. But it also dealt with matters of sexuality, aging, health care, and organized religion with a candor (particularly among its many male couplings) made possible by HBO’s near-complete lack of content restrictions.
Sometimes, great breakthroughs in TV storytelling happen because someone relatively new to the medium doesn’t know or care about all the unofficial narrative rules. (Fontana’s protégé David Simon, who went from newspapers to Homicide to creating a run of unconventional HBO dramas like The Wire, qualifies.) Often, though, the best rule-breakers are the ones who have spent so long working inside the system that they know exactly how to tear it apart from within.
Fontana had a list of things he had always wanted to do, but had never been allowed to, during his time on network shows like St. Elsewhere and Homicide. With Oz, he got to do them all.
Wait, so I can’t kill off my main character in the first episode? Watch me. Oh, on an ensemble drama you’re supposed to go back and forth between your stories across the whole hour, rather than telling them one at a time? Who said that was the only way to do it? You can’t mix gritty violence with magical realism? Why the hell not?
Along the way, he made Oz into a show that could be enjoyed simply as a never-ending revenge thriller—particularly in the sick central love triangle between well-heeled lawyer Tobias Beecher (Lee Tergesen), white supremacist leader Vern Schillinger (J. K. Simmons), and omnisexual predator Chris Keller (Christopher Meloni)—but also as a profound meditation on so many aspects of American life, not least of which was our penal system and the conflicting agendas of retribution versus rehabilitation.
It was even more experimental than the shows that followed it on HBO and elsewhere, and more uneven as a result. If The Sopranos was a heavyweight Broadway drama, Oz was an avant-garde theater production in the West Village. Some of its experiments worked, like bringing back a series of dead characters from past seasons to join recently deceased narrator Augustus Hill (Harold Perrineau) to link together the stories of the final season. Some didn’t, like a bizarre story line where inmates were offered a drug that would unnaturally age them in exchange for a reduced sentence. But it kept trying, kept striving to do more, to be different, and to be memorable.
—AS
MOST IMPORTANT ARTICLES
OF CLOTHING
1.Fonzie’s leather jacket, Happy Days
2. The red shirt, Star Trek (What other item of clothing describes the plot function of an entire group of characters?)
3. Maxwell Smart’s shoe phone, Get Smart
4. Pastel suits with T-shirt and no socks, Miami Vice
5. Carrie’s entire shoe collection, Sex and the City
6. Raylan’s hat, Justified
7. Wonder Woman’s costume, Wonder Woman
8.The embroidered L on Laverne’s blouses, Laverne & Shirley
9.Gilligan’s hat, Gilligan’s Island
10.Magnum’s Hawaiian shirts, Magnum, P.I.
11.Captain Stubing’s white socks, The Love Boat
12. Xena’s leather bustier, Xena: Warrior Princess
13. B. A. Baracus’s gold chains, The A-Team
The Dick Van Dyke Show (CBS, 1961–1966) Total score: 92
When you hear the words The Dick Van Dyke Show, imagine the gears of a Swiss watch ticking. Created by and eventually costarring Your Show of Shows writer Carl Reiner, and based partly on his own experiences working for that variety series’ star, Sid Caesar, this sitcom is a lovingly crafted object that has only one purpose, to entertain, which it executes flawlessly.
There are slight variations from season to season and episode to episode, of course. In the opening credits, sometimes the hero, Rob Petrie (Van Dyke), a comedy writer for The Alan Brady Show, trips over an ottoman after his wife, Laura (Mary Tyler Moore), opens the door for him, and other times he hops over it and laughs defiantly. Sometimes the show focuses on Rob, a slim, stylish, witty, dashingly goofy fellow who’s about as nice as a person can be and not be dull; other times it focuses on Laura, a slim, stylish, witty, glamorously goofy knockout (“Raaah-h-h-h-h-h-b!!” she quavers when the pressure gets to be too much). Still other episodes shift focus to Rob’s Manhattan TV writing job, where he and his fellow comedy writers and banter buddies, Buddy Sorrell (Morey Amsterdam) and Sally Rogers (Rose Marie), work up sketches for Alan and submit them to their humor-impaired, chrome-domed supervisor, Richard Deacon’s Mel Cooley. (Mel: “I have a feeling someone’s pulling my leg.” Buddy: “Maybe your garter belt’s too tight.”) For the first few seasons, Alan Brady is talked about but never fully seen—just slivers of his face or the back of his head, with Reiner providing the voice; later, Reiner played the role on-camera and became a series regular, frequently making sport of the character’s vanity. (In a precursor of the Seinfeld arc where George and Jerry pitch a Seinfeld-like show to NBC, Alan options Rob’s memoir about working on the show and says he plans to play Rob, but that Rob “doesn’t need to shave his head—I’ll wear a toupee.” Like Reiner in real life, Alan is as bald as Mel.)
There were several episodes with Laura worrying that Rob had grown tired of her and taking drastic steps to spice things up, beginning with season 1’s “My Blonde-Haired Brunette,” where she botches a dye job and turns her head into a yin-yang symbol. There were plenty of jealousy plotlines, starting with season 2’s “The Two Faces of Rob,” where Rob pretends to be somebody else while flirting with Laura on the phone to gather material for a sketch and becomes jealous of himself. And of course the series did its own variations on primordial sitcom plots, such as the unexpected spiral into paranoia: The best of these is season 3’s “That’s My Boy??” where Rob becomes convinced that he brought the wrong baby home from the hospital and that his son, Ritchie (Larry Mathews), is not his son; runner-up is season 2’s “The Secret Life of Buddy and Sally,” where Rob becomes convinced that the duo is having an affair. (Of course they aren’t; Buddy adores his wife, Pickles, even though he gripes about her constantly. “Did you ever see my wife in the morning? I keep yelling at her, ‘Take off that ridiculous cask of brandy!’”)
Despite its very-showbiz commitment to keep doing stuff that worked, the show was quietly groundbreaking. At a time when most sitcom couples either stuck to the I Love Lucy / The Honeymooners model (pairing a scheming, impulsive buffoon with somebody more obviously adult) or made both parties likable but quite dull (Leave It to Beaver, Father Knows Best), The Dick Van Dyke Show showcased a mutually respectful, fully functioning marriage between good-looking, witty adults who managed to be sexy as hell even though CBS made them sleep in separate beds. Many TV historians have argued that the popularity of John and Jackie Kennedy rubbed off on Rob (who was supposed to be played by Reiner until CBS made him cast a WASP) and Laura; they looked as if they could be the first couple’s goofy cousins. They were also the earliest TV prototype of what would later be known as the Yuppie, though less whiny than versions that would show up on thirtysomething and Mad About You. Without making a big deal of it, or maybe even meaning to, th
e show legitimized the spread of a certain kind of college-educated urban liberalism, just by beaming into suburban and rural homes each week. (Sally: “Ooh, suburbs! Yeah, I’d like to look out my window and see a little green.” Buddy: “Why don’t you get an apartment in front of a stoplight?”)
The Dick Van Dyke Show was also one of the first to be set mainly inside the TV industry itself (more so than Lucy, which was more interested in shenanigans than process). Every week it took the audience deep inside the factory. We got to see Rob, Sally, and Buddy work through a concept for a sketch or musical number (Buddy: “Hey, play The Minute Waltz.” Sally: “I only know half of it.” Buddy: “Play it twice.”), brainstorming and writing and revising until they hit on something they felt sure would work, then starting all over when Alan rejected the result.
Besides the postmodern pretzel logic of having Dick Van Dyke play Carl Reiner working for a Sid Caesar character played by Reiner (and then pitching him the very show they were on!), the series gave us generous glimpses of the sketches and numbers themselves. This let the cast show off their sketch comedy and musical chops, which were dazzling. Rob and Sally and Buddy often broke into song while working on material for Alan, and Rob and Laura danced so well together that the writers kept contriving reasons for them to do it again; one of the most memorable numbers found Van Dyke and Moore hoofing it while dressed as Santa and Mrs. Claus. The rubber band–flexible Van Dyke did dandy impressions of Red Skelton, Emmett Kelly, and Charlie Chaplin, among other comedy legends. The show’s writing staff (headed by Reiner) routinely went the extra conceptual mile. They livened up standard sitcom plots with odd framing devices (season 2’s “The Night the Roof Fell In,” which recounts a fight from Laura’s and Rob’s points of view, starts with a conversation between two goldfish); aspects of satire and parody (season 2’s Twilight Zone parody, “It May Look Like a Walnut,” is filled with surreal imagery, including Laura bodysurfing a wave of walnuts); even quasi-mystery plotlines (the crown jewel is season 5’s “The Great Petrie Fortune,” which weaves together a haunting photograph and the song “Me and My Shadow”).
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