The Dick Van Dyke Show ended its run just when broadcast TV switched over to color. It kept smoothly ticking along for five glorious seasons, and has dated better than many sitcoms of its era, not just because Rob and Laura were ahead of their time, but because excellence never gets old.
—MZS
Friday Night Lights (NBC, 2006–2008; DirecTV/NBC, 2008–2011) Total score: 92
There’s a great episode of Lost called “The Constant,” named after the idea that a time traveler needs some kind of emotional anchor that exists in multiple eras, or else becomes completely unmoored when traveling to one where the constant doesn’t exist. We see the notion of the constant in action when Desmond in the past gets the phone number of his lost love Penny so that Desmond in the present can call her up and stay alive.
Friday Night Lights obviously didn’t involve time travel (though it did cross the network/satellite barrier midway through its run when DirecTV and NBC came to a content-sharing arrangement to keep it alive). But it very much had its own constant in the marriage of Coach and Mrs. Coach, aka Eric and Tami Taylor, played by Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton. When all else was going awry for the high schoolers of Dillon, Texas—whether they were players on the local football team or not—they could turn to the Taylors for some semblance of order and stability. And when anything else was going wrong on Friday Night Lights creatively, the show could always find itself by looking back to the marriage at its heart.
Peter Berg, who developed the series after writing and directing the FNL movie (itself adapted from the nonfiction best seller by H. G. Bissinger), has a deliberately chaotic narrative and visual style, favoring naturalistic performances, jump cuts, and handheld camerawork, complete with wild sports-documentary-style zooms. The style, which the show maintained long after Berg had gone back to his film career, was messy but entirely by design, and in a way that brought out the spontaneous, natural best from its actors, most of them young unknowns under their first real spotlight. The show’s visual language both embodied and intensified its substance. More so than any network series since My So-Called Life (where FNL showrunner Jason Katims broke into television), Friday Night Lights insisted that teenagers were as multifaceted, self-contradictory, and deep as adults, and that there was no easy explanation for why they did or didn’t do things.
Sometimes, though, the messiness of Friday Night Lights could be unintentional. The football action, while always well-shot, tended to be crafted in a way that undercut attempts to paint Eric Taylor as a master offensive tactician. (At a minimum, he was horrible at clock management.) The age of the kids fluctuated wildly depending on the needs of the plot (Scott Porter’s Jason Street and Taylor Kitsch’s Tim Riggins are initially written as best friends since their preschool days, but in time it turns out that Riggins was a sophomore when Street was a senior), as did the status and history of East Dillon High (where Eric moved after being fired from football powerhouse Dillon High at the end of the third season). And in the second season, pretty much every storytelling choice Katims and company made was wrong, none worse than the decision to take two kids from what had been an incredibly grounded show and involve them in a murder plot.
But despite that, all FNL needed to do was give us one scene of Coach and Mrs. Coach together—Chandler’s brow furrowed, Britton’s eyes wide—to make everything feel normal and right again.
Across five seasons, FNL was about many things: football and the absurd pressure-cooker atmosphere in which Texas high school players and coaches resided; race, class, and the way so many of the disadvantaged in the area looked to football as a way to be seen or to get out; teen sexuality; religion (it’s one of the most sincerely spiritual TV shows ever made); drug and alcohol abuse; and so much more. Through quarterback/cosmic punching bag Matt Saracen (Zach Gilford) alone, the show dealt with issues as disparate as eldercare and the war in Iraq.
(That it managed to place so many of these topics within the context of Texas high school football was both blessing and curse. The stakes of everything felt higher for those who watched, but the subject matter proved alienating to a mass audience in the same way it has for most TV sports dramas: Sports fans didn’t want to try what they perceived to be a soap opera, and drama fans didn’t want to try a show about football.)
The show handled all those subjects with remarkable nuance and sensitivity, especially given some of the demands and restrictions of being a broadcast network family drama. But the subject on which FNL was without peer wasn’t football, but marriage. The union of Coach and Mrs. Coach was, simply put, the best, richest, most complex and satisfying portrait of a marriage TV has ever seen. In the process, it shamed every single TV writer who has ever argued that happy couples are boring.
Now, the two weren’t happy every minute of every episode. He was incredibly stubborn, she could be staggeringly naive, and they often had conflicting philosophies about work and family. But that’s a relationship. Disagreements and compromises and plenty of eye-rolling come with even the healthiest of marriages, and that is exactly what the Taylors had. They fought, they busted each other’s chops, and they could annoy the hell out of each other, but there was also never any doubt that they were together for the long haul. (When Eric loses the Dillon High job, Tami promises him, “You know what? No matter what happens, no matter where you go, no matter what you do, I’m always going to be behind you. Always and always and always.”)
Nearly all of the kids on the show were being raised by single parents—some just raising themselves—which made the admirable nature of the Taylor marriage so important for everyone. Saracen’s mother had run out, his father was deployed overseas (season 4’s “The Son,” where Matt deals with the complicated feelings of learning his father was killed in an IED explosion, is among the most powerful hours of television ever made), and his grandmother was sliding deeper into senility, so when he had problems (and he, like everyone else on FNL, had many), he and the show could turn to Coach and Mrs. Coach for guidance and reassurance that things would eventually be okay.
A lot went wrong in that second season. It wasn’t just the murder plot. Almost everything that happened that year was happily ignored in later seasons. Among the many misguided creative decisions (albeit one introduced the season before) was having Eric accept a college position hundreds of miles away from Dillon, even as Tami and the kids stayed in town. There was never a suggestion that the job would break up the Taylors, but it’s also no coincidence that the show’s universally least-liked period occurred while Coach and Mrs. Coach were living separately and arguing much more than usual on the rare occasions when they were together. They were the constant for the team, the town, and the show.
Texas forever? Sure. But more important, Taylors forever.
—AS
NYPD Blue (ABC, 1993–2005) Total score: 91
Reckless, drunken, bigoted cop Andy Sipowicz asks assistant district attorney Sylvia Costas if she’s accusing him of planting evidence in a case where he very obviously did.
“I’d say ‘Res ipsa loquitur’ if I thought you knew what it meant,” she tells him, using the Latin phrase for “The thing speaks for itself.”
Not a Latin speaker, Sipowicz prefers to respond in his own distinctive language, grabbing his crotch and telling her, “Hey, ipsa this, you pissy little bitch!”
And here was NYPD Blue, the breathtaking, groundbreaking balance of lowbrow and high, of profanity and poetry, of bare asses and bared hearts.
The series’ two sides roughly represented the interests of its creators: Former Hill Street Blues collaborators Steven Bochco and David Milch. Bochco, fearing that network television was losing grounds to the R-rated content readily available on cable, wanted to push the outer edge of the envelope of what broadcast censors would allow in terms of language and nudity. (The series was in development for an extra year as Bochco and ABC boss Robert Iger figured out exactly where the limits were; reportedly, the two men made crude drawings of naked men and women
to identify what could and couldn’t be shown, and at what angle.) Milch, frustrated with what he felt were Hill Street’s compromises in form and content, saw Bochco’s crusade as license to be far franker about the harsh realities of modern police work, whether the horrible nature of the crimes being investigated or the extralegal methods its cops would use to secure confessions.
The end result represented the alchemy of the two partners at their Lennon-and-McCartney best: Bochco’s commercial instincts and strong command of narrative making Milch’s challenging dialogue and raw emotionality more palatable, and Milch in turn giving soul to the relationships so that the frequent sex scenes felt profound rather than naked grabs for attention.
The show’s heroes mirrored the passions of the two creators: Sipowicz (played by Milch’s Hill Street muse Dennis Franz) the Milchian noble savage, struggling to rein in his many flaws and vices; John Kelly (David Caruso, a great actor before his ego turned him into a sunglasses-wielding self-parody on CSI: Miami), a sensitive and self-righteous firebrand in the vein of Frank Furillo from Hill Street or Michael Kuzak from Bochco’s L.A. Law. Bochco took a step back after the complex initial thirteen-episode arc, where Kelly fell for beat cop Janice Licalsi (Amy Brenneman) before discovering she was working for the mob; the storytelling not only became more episodic as a result, but otherwise more focused on Milch’s interests. Caruso was difficult to work with (Milch would blame his first-season heart attack on having to work with his rising star), and Franz a legendary nice guy; between the leads’ respective temperaments, the audience’s growing love for Sipowicz (who would, in time, fall for and marry the pissy little bitch herself, played by Sharon Lawrence), and Milch’s creative instincts, the focus shifted more and more to to the fat, crude sidekick than to the more conventional hero, and Caruso left early in the second season. (He was succeeded, with varying degrees of success, by Jimmy Smits as soulful widower Bobby Simone, Ricky Schroder as anxious Danny Sorenson, and Mark-Paul Gosselaar as confident rookie detective John Clark. Kelly was the most complex character of the four, but Smits’s chemistry with Franz made Andy and Bobby the strongest pairing.)
The show was an unabashed love letter to law enforcement—“This is a good job for people like us,” Andy tells son Andy Jr. (Michael DeLuise) as the younger Sipowicz studies to become a cop himself (before becoming the first of many Sipowicz loved ones to die over the series’ run). “We don’t have a lot of education, but we can read and write, and we’re honest. Don’t ever embarrass this job”—but also acknowledged the moral complexities of it. At times, it could play like an elaborate defense of police brutality, as Andy was as apt to use his fists as his wits to secure confessions. (“I’m gonna have such a migraine tonight because I didn’t beat you,” he laments to one perp.) But it also featured crooked cops and lazy ones, and constantly reminded its audience of how detectives like Sipowicz and Simone were exposed to the very worst that humanity had to offer. (In season 1’s “NYPD Lou,” Andy patiently elicits, and endures, the confession of a child molester who murdered his latest victim, then steps out of the interview room and shatters a door with his fists.)
The show didn’t shy away from the ugliness of Andy’s language, nor his attitudes about minorities. At one point, his African American commanding officer Arthur Fancy (James McDaniel) teaches him a lesson by taking him for dinner to a rib joint with a predominantly black clientele; noting Andy’s clear discomfort, Fancy asks, “Now what if they had badges and guns?” In a later episode, Andy runs into trouble for using the n-word in front of a black activist, and even though he’s throwing the man’s words back at him, his behavior throughout the story suggests the activist is wise to distrust this cop.
In time, Sipowicz’s rough edges would be sanded off. He married two beautiful women, had an adorable new son, became a mentor to the younger detectives in the squad as well as, in the series finale, their new commanding officer. At one point, he even encountered God himself (depicted as a surly trucker), albeit in the midst of a dream about reuniting with the late Andy Jr. at a crowded diner.
But the Sipowicz whom the audience fell for was the wounded animal, doing and saying things that had never previously been allowed on network television. (Andy to an irritating TV reporter: “All’s we know so far, Norman, is we heard some reporter called a low-life asshole turd pimp with the brains of a flea and the balls of a moth. But we haven’t nailed down yet who was being referred to.”) Viewers loved Andy not because they wanted to see him have sex (though he did once show his ass while getting into the shower), nor even really because he had a way with four- and five-letter words, but because there was a depth and sadness to him that had rarely been glimpsed in TV characters before, and because we trusted him to be our guide into this cruel and crude world.
Broadcast dramas grew more formulaic post-Blue as cable became the place to experiment with form and content. And the Janet Jackson / Justin Timberlake wardrobe malfunction during the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show instantly rolled back most of the progress Blue had made in expanding the boundaries of what you could say and show in network prime time.
But Sipowicz and the show around him had proved that there was an audience hungry for not only more adult content but more difficult characters. Bochco and Milch had inadvertently blazed a trail that would be followed, mainly on cable, by characters with more than a touch of Sipowicz in them, such as Tony Soprano, Vic Mackey, Walter White, and (also from the mind of Milch) Al Swearengen.
Andy was a dinosaur who notoriously hated change—after new partner Simone introduces himself by genially asking how he’s doing, Sipowicz charges into Fancy’s office and announces, “It’s not gonna work out”—but he did as much to transform the way people on TV spoke and acted as any character in the history of the medium. If you told him that, he’d probably grumble and go looking for some skell to intimidate.
—AS
Frasier (NBC, 1993–2004) Total score: 90
Between Cheers, Frasier, and a guest spot on Wings, Kelsey Grammer played Frasier Crane for twenty years, tying the record for the most seasons playing the same character in prime time with James Arness as Marshal Dillon on Gunsmoke. Of course, Arness did it in an era where TV shows made more episodes per season, and on a show that did hour-long episodes for most of its run, so his record for number of minutes onscreen in the same role is likely safe for all time.
Still, it was an amazing run for Grammer, who was supposed to play the role for only a handful of episodes in Cheers season 3 before the creators recognized that their newest obstacle to Sam and Diane’s couplehood added a great flavor to the bar in his own right. Other supporting characters were perhaps more popular, and thus easier choices for a spin-off, but it was Frasier’s very outsiderness as an erudite man brought low by his association with the bar that made him the perfect choice for Frasier creators David Angell, Peter Casey, and David Lee to remove from that setting and start over elsewhere.
The Frasier who returned to his Seattle home was in some ways more like Sam Malone in his confidence and success with women, while young Grammer look-alike David Hyde Pierce was cast as Frasier’s brother, Niles, who occupied much of the same comic space that Grammer had on Cheers. But a Frasier who was no longer a regular at a sports bar was also fussier and more apt to put his high-culture fixations on display without fear of being mocked by Norm and Carla. (Though the earthier trio of father Martin, radio producer Roz, and physical therapist Daphne—played, respectively, by John Mahoney, Peri Gilpin, and Jane Leeves—still did plenty of that.)
The series followed Frasier’s lead: clearly descended from Cheers, but with different stylistic touchstones. Where Cheers had been a Howard Hawks romantic comedy, Frasier leaned more on Noël Coward and the world of slamming-door farce. Many of its best episodes involve characters having to support outrageous lies—in “The Two Mrs. Cranes,” Niles and Daphne pose as a married couple, Frasier as married to Niles’s chilly wife, Maris, and Martin as an astronaut—or conceal embarr
assing secrets. It was unapologetically highbrow in its references—in “Look Before You Leap,” Frasier backs out of singing an aria from Verdi’s Rigoletto on a PBS pledge drive, and instead bombs when he forgets the words to “Buttons and Bows” from The Paleface (stumped, he improvises lyrics like, “Let’s all go to a taco show!”)—yet was as comfortable with slapstick as wordplay.
Holding it all together was Grammer: a preening peacock one moment, a desperate buffoon the next, and a sensitive son and brother the moment after that. He and his costars had a knack for wringing every drop of humor out of every line. At one point, Frasier finds himself in a feud with some morning-zoo types, and Martin is tickled, asking, “How often do you get to hear your son on the radio?” Frasier replies, with thunderous indignation, “I’M ON THE RADIO EVERY DAY!” A good line on the page, it’s a great one out of the mouth of the star.
When Cheers ended, it was Seinfeld, not Frasier, that moved into its old time slot. But it was Frasier that won five straight comedy-series Emmys—one more than Cheers got in its entire run. I’ll take the parent show, but Frasier is the rare spin-off of a classic that’s immortal in its own right.
—AS
Homicide: Life on the Street (NBC, 1993–1999) Total score: 90
“What you will be privileged to witness,” Frank Pembleton explains to his new partner, “will not be an interrogation, but an act of salesmanship—as silver-tongued and thieving as ever moved used cars, Florida swampland, or Bibles. But what I am selling is a long prison term to a client who has no genuine use for the product.”
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