Parker and Stone’s success is all the more remarkable when you consider that they started with no showbiz connections to speak of. Back in 1992 they were students at the University of Colorado who’d produced a goofy short film titled The Spirit of Christmas, which climaxed with a kung fu fight between Jesus and Santa. Within five years—thanks to help from Fox executive Brian Graden, who gave them $2,000 to turn the short into a “video Christmas card” that he could send to friends and birthed the very first viral video sensation—they’d landed a Comedy Central series, South Park. Not only have the duo lasted, they’ve continued to plausibly maintain outsider status (despite being entrenched at a cable channel owned by Viacom) by being more provocative than even their most jaded viewers expect. (They’ve been repeatedly censored or preempted by their own venue, most famously in 2011, when they flouted Muslim taboo by depicting the prophet Muhammad.) Some episodes have been sharper and more coherent than others; Parker and Stone practice a type of humor that is by nature hit-and-miss, and their accelerated production schedule, which allows them to riff on current events, guarantees that the show’s writing is at times as rough-edged as its crude animation. But if you comb through the series’ online archive, you might be shocked by how few total duds there are, and by how well much of their rapid-response humor holds up. And some of South Park’s most gleefully outrageous situations and images (Mecha-Streisand; the token black character named Token; Mr. Hankey the Christmas Poo; Chef’s “Salty Balls” song; class pet gerbil Lemmiwinks going on a Tolkienesque odyssey when inserted up the rear end of Mr. Slave; Tom Cruise trapped in a closet; Jesus urging mortals to cut out the middleman and communicate with God directly, only to be killed again) have detached from their cultural context, becoming as timeless as “Who’s on first?”
Stuff that seemed vital at the time still does, and stuff that felt like mere adolescent provocation—such as the season 1 episode with the Ethiopian, and the season 2 episode with the “Joozians”—has nuggets of warmth or vitality that mitigate the shock factor. And just when you start to get burned out, an A+ episode—such as season 10’s “Hell on Earth 2006,” wherein Satan decides to rent out the W Hotel in downtown South Park and throw himself a Sweet 16 party—reminds you of what the series is capable of. The Satan scenes in that installment (a continuation of the hell sequences in their 1999 animated feature South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut) are a skewering of reality show participants’ narcissism and their audience’s rubbernecking smugness, so sharp they might have been enough to sustain a half-hour episode by themselves. But Parker and Stone always go much further than you expect, to overwhelm viewers with irreverence, bad taste, and excess. Here they add a subplot with the boys summoning the spirit of murdered rapper Biggie Smalls by repeating his name into a mirror (à la Candyman), and another subplot that finds mass murderers Ted Bundy, Jeffrey Dahmer, and John Wayne Gacy being dispatched from the underworld to pick up a giant cake shaped like a Ferrari and deliver it to Satan’s bash. The “Three Murderers” become the supernatural version of the Three Stooges, squabbling among themselves, getting into wacky hijinks, and beating, stabbing, and disemboweling themselves and innocent bystanders. These bits explore the connection between comedy and cruelty incisively, but without becoming dry or self-regarding. This level of conceptual sophistication, improbably wedded to humor so low that mitochondria might sneer at it, is as rare a sight as Eric Cartman eating salad. It can only exist because Parker and Stone have as much respect for how things are supposed to be done as their big-boned avatar, who once proclaimed, “I don’t make the rules, Kyle; I simply think them up and write them down.”
—MZS
BEST MUSTACHES
(With apologies to the mostly nonfictional Alex Trebek, Gene Shalit, Geraldo Rivera, et al.)
1.Thomas Magnum, Magnum, P.I.
2.Andy Sipowicz, NYPD Blue
3.Ron Swanson, Parks and Recreation
4.Gomez Addams, The Addams Family
5.Gus Witherspoon, Our House
6.Isaac Washington, The Love Boat
7.Doc Cochran, Deadwood (not all the Deadwood mustaches were real, but that glorious horseshoe was)
8.Bob Belcher, Bob’s Burgers
9.Captain Kangaroo, Captain Kangaroo
10.Ned Flanders, The Simpsons
11.Jim Dangle, Reno 911!
MOST IMPORTANT HAIRSTYLES
1.The Rachel, Friends
2.Jill’s feathered shag, Charlie’s Angels
3.Felicity’s curls, Felicity (the only show in TV history where a ratings decline was blamed on the leading lady cutting her hair)
4.(tie) Julie’s flat-ironed hair and Linc’s afro, The Mod Squad
5.Doug Ross’s Caesar cut, ER
6.Jesse’s mullet, Full House
7.Denise’s braids, The Cosby Show
8.Angela’s cinnamon hair, My So-Called Life
9.Julia’s bouffant, Julia
10.Thelma’s natural, Good Times
11.Kojak’s bald dome, Kojak
12.Claire Underwood’s pixie undercut, House of Cards
The West Wing (NBC, 1999–2006) Total score: 89
History tends to take a global view of presidential administrations, when in fact most of them tend to be broken down into smaller and more complicated eras, and the same is true of the seven seasons of The West Wing, which chronicled the majority of Josiah Bartlet’s two fictional terms as president of the United States (or, in an acronym the show helped popularize, POTUS). The first two seasons were shiny and full of possibility, in many ways the apex of what traditional network TV drama could achieve; then, as so often happens in politics, the new bosses got a bit too full of themselves, cratered due to infighting and scandals, flirted with irrelevancy, then mounted an unexpected comeback. What a long, strange trip it was.
The West Wing started out in 1999 as an unabashed celebration of center-left political values, which had dimmed in the aftermath of President Bill Clinton’s impeachment by House Republicans for lying about an affair with an intern. Writer Aaron Sorkin and director Thomas Schlamme, who had gotten used to each other’s rhythms on ABC’s Sports Night (located elsewhere in the Pantheon), hit the ground running with a Capraesque political fantasy stocked with passionate, charismatic policy wonks. The top-notch cast was headed by Martin Sheen as Bartlet, whom you could view as Bill Clinton without the scandals or Jimmy Carter without the political naïveté or perhaps a delibidinized John F. Kennedy who was socially liberal but a hawk on defense. John Spencer played Bartlet’s wise chief of staff, Leo McGarry, a recovering alcoholic; Bradley Whitford, Richard Schiff, Allison Janney, and Rob Lowe played inner-circle members of the senior staff, flitting around Bartlet and Leo like screwball gnats, spitballing proposals and correcting one another’s grammar and citing factoids about military history, constitutional law, astronomy, US currency, the postal service, even Gilbert and Sullivan operettas (one of Sorkin’s passions). They bantered at top speed while gliding Steadicams tracked their progress through the White House, their bodies moving in and out of bustling frames like fish in an overstocked tank. The whole production had the gloss of a prestige studio blockbuster like the Sorkin-scripted 1996 drama The American President, which costarred Sheen as that POTUS’s chief of staff.
Conventional wisdom said that viewers had little interest in watching fictional politics, much less on a program with an explicit ideological bent. Sorkin and Schlamme proved them wrong, hatching engaging stories out of wonky topics like the census and arguments in favor of discontinuing the penny, and drawing a large audience (particularly in the early seasons) to a show that was unabashedly liberal, even though Sorkin threw in token sympathetic Republicans like junior legal adviser Ainsley Hayes (Emily Procter). People came because the characters and actors were smart, passionate, and essentially lovable, even when they succumbed to arrogance or made mortifying tactical blunders. In three consecutive seasons, the show got Emmy-winning performances out of Schiff, Whitford, and Spencer in each yea
r’s Christmas episode; Janney won four Emmys for playing by far the most nuanced and capable female character of Sorkin’s TV career (even if C. J. was often kidded for her height—her Secret Service code name was “Flamingo”—and used as a viewer proxy to whom the other characters could mansplain complex issues). Sheen’s series-long shutout remains a historic Emmy black mark.
There’s not a lot of subtext to Sorkin’s writing (it’s one of the reasons he made a bumpy transition into cable drama with The Newsroom, a show whose dialogue served up prechewed food for thought). And the sheer speed and density of the banter could be overwhelming: Scripts routinely came in at nearly twice the standard length, and rather than cut them, Sorkin and Schlamme ordered the actors to talk as fast as they could. But The West Wing text was so deft, confident, and sometimes genuinely lyrical that even viewers who made fun of Sorkin’s tics adored the show. The banter was sparkling. The rhetoric soared.
Consider Bartlet’s introduction, late in the pilot, where he’s been oft-discussed but unseen, until he barges into the middle of a meeting where Whitford’s Josh and Schiff’s Toby are having a shouting match with Christian fundamentalists, one of whom admits to being confused about what’s actually said in the First Commandment. “I am the Lord your God; thou shalt worship no other God before me,” intones Jed Bartlet as he barges into the room, before flashing a delighted grin and saying, “Boy, those were the days, huh?” The complicated relationship between the president and his deity would lead, in the season 2 finale, to the show’s grandest moment: Bartlet, furious and grief-stricken over his secretary Mrs. Landingham’s death in a random traffic accident, commandeers National Cathedral, curses out God in both English (calling Him a “feckless thug” and a “son of a bitch”) and Latin, then stubs out a cigarette on the marble floor.
That episode, “Two Cathedrals,” was the series’ peak. The second half of Sorkin’s tenure on the show (he was muscled out after four seasons over escalating issues with budget and scheduling, owing in part to his insistence on writing all but one out of close to ninety episodes) felt like a presidency moving past giddy optimism and into the grotty reality of governance: the internal squabbles, the overreaching, the solutions that only worsened the problems. In an earlier episode, for example, Sorkin had wanted an excuse to write a scene where President Bartlet is watching a daytime soap; the only way he could justify it to himself was to give the POTUS a case of secret, relapsing, remitting multiple sclerosis—only later recognizing that a president who kept a serious illness from the public would get into big trouble over it. Season 3 bogged down in congressional hearings over the cover-up, while also introducing the show’s ultimate conservative straw man in Robert Ritchie (played by James Brolin), Bartlet’s dim-witted, George W. Bush caricature of an opponent for reelection. The transparent lameness of Ritchie was emblematic of a cockiness that crept into the show in Sorkin’s later years, which also included season 3’s “Isaac and Ishmael,” a hastily conceived, preachy, awkward attempt to use the fictional Bartlet administration to talk about the recent horrific events of 9/11. (In general, the show foundered whenever Sorkin tried to create overlap between what Bartlet’s gang was doing in West Wing land and what Bush’s administration was up to in reality.)
On his way out the door, Sorkin dug a deep hole for his replacement—longtime ER showrunner John Wells, who had been a largely hands-off producer for The West Wing’s early seasons—by having Bartlet temporarily resign the presidency when his daughter was kidnapped, leaving Glenallen Walken (John Goodman), the Republican Speaker of the House, to take over. Once Wells figured out a way to unring that bell, he overcompensated for the show’s reputation as a liberal fantasy by miring the Bartlet administration in gridlock from a Republican-controlled Congress, then ratcheting up tension between the senior staff to a degree that felt contrived. Without Sorkin’s voice or the original spirit of optimism, it seemed pointless for the show to continue.
But late in the fifth season, Wells hit on a new kind of fantasy: a bipartisan one, where people with wildly different ideologies could come together and disagree in ways that only increased their respect for one another. It started with an episode called “The Supremes,” where Josh, realizing the only Supreme Court justice Congress will approve is a milquetoast moderate, hatches a scheme to replace two justices at once with a revered liberal and a brilliant conservative who take genuine pleasure in debating each other. The following season, the series pivoted away from the lame-duck days of the Bartlet administration and onto the race to succeed him, eventually spotlighting two bold candidates played by familiar actors: Jimmy Smits as Matt Santos, a hawkish congressman with a military background and devout Catholic (read: pro-life) beliefs; and Alan Alda as Arnold Vinick, a pro-choice, agnostic senior senator. The twist was that Santos was the Democrat, Vinick the Republican. Even though neither man (particularly the fiscally conservative but socially moderate Vinick) would have a prayer of getting his party’s nomination in the real world, both characters were so vividly drawn and their new prominence so fundamentally altering to the balance of the show that the final years felt like a well-crafted West Wing spin-off embedded within the original framework.
And even when the show’s power began to ebb in season 3, after 9/11 violently shut the book on the Clinton era that had defined those magnificent early scripts, The West Wing never lost faith in language’s power to stir the mind and heart. “Words when spoken out loud for the sake of performance are music,” Bartlet says in the Sorkin-penned “War Crimes.” “They have rhythm and pitch and timbre and volume. These are the properties of music, and music has the ability to find us and move us and lift us up in ways that literal meaning can’t.”
—AS & MZS
Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman (Syndication, 1976–1977) Total score: 88
It’s Garry Shandling’s Show (Showtime, 1986–1990) Total score: 78
The Jack Benny Program (CBS and NBC, 1950–1965) Total score: 78
Soap (ABC, 1977–1981) Total score: 70
Television has long had a reputation as an oblivious medium, comfortably middlebrow and not prone to introspection. This is mainly the product of a smugness encouraged by devotees of media that had more time to develop: theater, literature, and most recently cinema, which was considered a mostly escapist or vulgar art in the United States until young French critics patiently explained to Americans, in the middle of the twentieth century, that Westerns, musicals, gangster films, and the like could be art, too, even when they weren’t based on a Tony Award–winning play or a Pulitzer Prize–winning novel or some other pedigreed source. The truth is, TV began contemplating its own properties immediately. It aired shows that put a great deal of thought into what made TV different from radio or movies, and integrated those observations into their stories and situations. For some reason, this was more starkly apparent in comedies than in dramas. Where half-hour and hour-long dramatic series tended to embrace the so-called invisible storytelling of the Hollywood feature, sitcoms were much more anarchic in their aesthetic, inviting audiences to enjoy their awareness of the show being put on before their eyes.
By no means is this entry suggesting that The Jack Benny Program; Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman; Soap; and It’s Garry Shandling’s Show are the only programs to attempt the sorts of effects described here; self-awareness, self-criticism, fourth wall–breaking asides and other distinguishing features can be found in many other series that are discussed in this book (including Moonlighting and Seinfeld) and many more that are not. The four programs, which qualify as Pantheon shows on their own, have been grouped here for purposes of illustration. If you think about what they did and represented, you recognize an artistic through-line that carries a certain self-aware brand of TV comedy from 1950 (the medium’s bronze age, probably) through the 1990s. The culmination of this tendency, for now, anyway, is Community (NBC and Yahoo!, 2009–2015), a work of such richness and ambition that it has been dealt with in a separate entry elsewhere in the Pantheon;
but there are many more.
Jack Benny went there first. His CBS and NBC TV series The Jack Benny Program, descended from his 1932–1955 radio show, was continuously and delightfully aware of itself as a show. Benny played “himself”—the only version of Benny that anyone ever saw—as a vain, neurotic skinflint who inflicted his rotten violin playing on everyone in earshot; insisted that he was thirty-nine no matter how old he got; griped about women and how little money he made; bantered with his chauffeur, Rochester Van Jones (Eddie Anderson); and alternated situation comedy–type story lines with fourth wall–breaking asides, monologues, and musical numbers. Some actors played characters, others were simply performers appearing under their own names, and still others (Benny first and foremost) blurred such distinctions. At the end of each broadcast, Benny summed up what the audience had just seen and what, if anything, they should take away from it. The italicized artificiality of The Jack Benny Program’s format bound the various types of performances together, and became a shared joke between Benny and his audience.
The syndicated daytime series Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman ran just one season, but it built on Benny’s innovations and served as a bridge between TV’s early developmental years and its somewhat more sophisticated middle period. Created by writers Gail Parent and Ann Marcus and producers Jerry Adelman and Daniel Gregory Browne, and set in the town of Fernwood, it was yet another pet project by sitcom innovator Norman Lear (All in the Family, Maude). Lear executive-produced two episodes only to see them rejected by all three broadcast networks as too intellectual and off-putting. Sold to a syndicator, the show became the first high-profile example of a TV series that spoofed the soap opera and needled the audiences that craved soaps while simultaneously providing many of the genre’s satisfactions. (Even the title was self-conscious: a goof on the idea that soap opera characters always said things twice.)
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