Louise Lasser’s Mary was a send-up not of the typical soap opera heroine (not even the most outwardly unremarkable “housewife” character was as life-sized as she) but of the hypothetical ideal viewer of daytime soaps: a female homemaker who was housebound for most of the day, caring for young children or running errands and cleaning house while waiting for the house to fill up with life again. The plotlines were as knowingly ludicrous as anything on General Hospital or One Life to Live; the first episode focused on Mary; her husband, Tom (Greg Mullavey); her mother, Martha Shumway (Dody Goodman); her best friend, Loretta Haggers (Mary Kay Place); and her neighbors as they reacted to a spectacular crime: the mass murder by Davey Jessup (Will Seltzer) of an entire family, including their goats and chickens. The series ran five days a week, like the thing it parodied, and aired 325 episodes that didn’t stint on soap opera–style melodrama and borderline Grand Guignol flourishes. Mary’s husband had an affair with a bisexual. Mary’s grandpa Raymond Larkin (Victor Kilian) turned out to be a flasher. An abusive husband played by Martin Mull (of the fake talk show Fernwood 2-Night, a show in this vein that perhaps inhabited the same fictional universe) was impaled by the star atop an aluminum Christmas tree. A child evangelist was electrocuted in a bathtub. There were political protests and extramarital affairs and even a hostage situation.
Running beneath the show’s outrageous surface was a depressing account of the deadening effects of suburbanized, advertising-saturated American consumerist life. One episode found Mary obsessing over her failure to scour the “Waxy Yellow Buildup” (the phrase that gave the episode its title) from her kitchen floor, then hearing sirens that might or might not be real—a predicament that wouldn’t have been out of place in a film by John Waters (Pink Flamingos) or Todd Haynes (Safe). The show’s core creatives weren’t baby boomers, but the overall sensibility was counterculture-friendly: knowing and mocking and sometimes sinister. Mary and many of the other characters were grown-ups who had been infantilized by modern life; her Pippi Longstocking pigtails and schoolgirlish dresses made this official. The show was in quiet rebellion against a venal and fatuous society that made pop culture intoxicants like soap operas (and TV commercials) seem as necessary as oxygen. The characters were constantly striving to get outside of their consciousness and their society and discover something authentic, but no matter what avenue they chose, they still seemed unreal to themselves, to others, and to the audience—as plasticized and packaged as characters in a soap opera. They could not simply exist and be happy. “The art of being, of knowingness, of knowing how to be,” the social worker Roberta Wolashek (Samantha Harper) intones in a mid-season episode, trying to sell Mary on a faddish 1970s New Age belief system called Survival Training Existence Therapy (STET). “I say ‘I am’ because I know how to be. Here, now, completely.” “That’s wonderful,” Mary says. “What does it mean?” “Mary, it means that when I’m here, that’s the only place I am. I’m complete, I’m whole, no pieces of me are anywhere else. I’m together.” Samantha urges her to do some STET exercises and Mary can’t handle it and begins freaking out; by the end of the episode she’s in full retreat from Samantha, who shouts at her, “There is only now!” “When I get there, I’ll call you,” Mary says, spooked and exhausted, “and we’ll work this whole thing out.”
Soap, a saga about the wealthy and troubled Tate and Campbell families, arrived on ABC a year later, mainstreamed Hartman’s innovations, and repackaged them for prime time, creating one of the first hit sitcoms that was simultaneously kidding and not kidding. Katherine Helmond and Robert Mandan played Jessica and Chester Tate, opposite Cathryn Damon and Richard Mulligan as Mary and Burt Campbell; they all had affairs, the earliest of which inadvertently led to the murder of Mary’s stepson Peter (future Spenser: For Hire star Robert Urich). The Campbells had mob ties and a tragic past and attracted death the way a magnet attracts iron filings. The huge supporting and recurring cast included Robert Guillaume as the Tates’ sardonic butler, Benson (later spun off into his own self-named prime-time sitcom), and Billy Crystal as prime time’s first openly gay character, Jodie Dallas, who impregnates a lawyer he meets at his aunt’s murder trial, gets embroiled in a custody battle after his wife flees to join the rodeo, and enters hypnotherapy to forget the past and ends up believing he’s an old Jewish man named Julius Kassendorf (which let Crystal do one of his favorite bits of shtick, impersonating his own grandfather). The series was nowhere near as unnerving as Mary Hartman; the humor was more broad and accessible, more obviously campy, with fewer moments that audiences weren’t sure how to take. Jessica’s daughter Corinne (Diana Canova) falls in love with a priest (Sal Viscuso), convinces him to leave the priesthood and marry her, then gives birth to his son, who is possessed by Satan. Burt comes to believe that he can become invisible by snapping his fingers, gets abducted by aliens and replaced with a double (also played by Mulligan), and is eventually elected the town’s sheriff.
Both Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman and Soap were part of a wave of post–World War II humor that built audiences’ awareness of showbiz clichés into the DNA of the stories it told; Showtime’s It’s Garry Shandling’s Show, the most Brechtian sitcom of the ’80s, took the tradition further, even as aspects of it felt as though the sitcom had come full circle. It was a cable-saucy Jack Benny Program for the Reagan era, cocreated, written, and fronted by a performer whose mortified cringes, pregnant pauses, and narcissistic lies were Bennyesque. Shandling played, well, Garry Shandling, a stand-up comic who’s starring in a sitcom and is hyperaware of what that means. The opening theme by Bill Lynch consists solely of assertions of what the song is doing at any given moment:
This is the theme to Garry’s show,
The theme to Garry’s show.
Garry called me up and asked if I would write his theme song.
I’m almost halfway finished,
How do you like it so far,
How do you like the theme to Garry’s show?
Nearly every aspect of the series was drawn from Shandling’s life, including the character’s hometown (Sherman Oaks, California), the design of his condo, and the life milestones of friends who stopped by as guest stars. Garry addressed the audience directly, like a stand-up comic hired to warm up a studio audience, and revised the show’s plots when they didn’t reflect favorably on him or seemed like they might not turn out the way he wanted. Recurring characters were often described by Garry in terms that you might encounter in a production casting notice or a TV critic’s review (Molly Cheek’s Nancy Bancroft was described in dialogue as his “attractive but nonthreatening platonic neighbor”). When former Saturday Night Live cast member Gilda Radner appeared as herself, Shandling asked her why she hadn’t been acting much lately, and she replied, “Oh, I had cancer, what did you have?” She died of cancer seven months later. Shandling elaborated on all these conceits—actually inverted them, in a way—on the aforementioned The Larry Sanders Show, which feigned “realism” but also included distancing devices.
Today the Benny/Hartman/Soap/Shandling tradition has been carried on by such a dazzling array of programs—everything from Twin Peaks and The Simpsons and 30 Rock to Futurama and Louie and BoJack Horseman and Rick and Morty—that it has ceased to be noteworthy. The sophistication, even jadedness, of modern audiences, who start watching (or “consuming”) TV from an early age and absorb all the genres and variants that the medium can devise, practically demands self-awareness—a frame around the frame that borders the TV set (or computer screen, or mobile device) on which stories or “stories” play out. The most radical thing a television series can do today is be unaware of itself as entertainment, as story, as product: to simply be, or pretend to simply be, and ask us to embrace the illusion and intellectually and emotionally commit—as one should commit to life, whatever channel that’s on.
—MZS
The Andy Griffith Show (CBS, 1960–1968) Total score: 87
The Andy Griffith Show came into existence because CBS wanted to
make a buck off people they thought of as country bumpkins. When TV sets became sought-after consumer items in the early ’50s, big-city and suburban residents were the earliest adopters; it wasn’t until the late ’50s and early ’60s that rural Americans started to buy them in droves, and once they did, networks rushed to give them entertainment they thought they’d like: Drawling small-town sitcoms like Green Acres, The Beverly Hillbillies, and Petticoat Junction were all a part of this cynical marketplace maneuver. Their characters spoke with exaggerated drawls and fished and hee-hawed and smacked their knees and played banjo and smoked corncob pipes and skinny-dipped in swimming holes. Their universe seemed more 1930s than 1960s. Even the characters in the comic strip L’il Abner might find them stereotypical.
Andy Griffith was several cuts above the competition. Its fictional small town, Mayberry, felt like a real place, although it was considerably whiter than a lot of small towns in North Carolina, where it supposedly was set. Its story lines were believable, sometimes believably uneventful. And the filmmaking was thoughtful and expressive, tracking the characters’ movements through intricately detailed interiors, making time and space for quiet conversations and wordless moments of interaction and sometimes musical numbers.
More important was the show’s aura of quiet dignity. These characters weren’t dumb rednecks, they weren’t cartoons, they weren’t clichés. They were people. They weren’t funny merely because they didn’t live in the city. They were as full of life as Mark Twain characters, and as rooted in the real. Andy Taylor, a widower raising his young son, Opie (future Happy Days star and Oscar-winning director Ron Howard), was a good and complicated man, nice to his friends and dedicated to his job and always good for a quick-witted joke or a philosophical aside. He spent a lot of his time gossiping (while admonishing those who gossiped), eating Aunt Bee’s cooking, and going out with schoolteacher Helen Crump (Aneta Corsaut) or spirited single gal Ellie Walker (Elinor Donahue). (You could tell they both wanted to marry Andy, but he didn’t seem terribly interested in making that move; he didn’t want to upset the apple cart, you know.)
The townspeople, and the ensemble of actors who portrayed them, were a constant source of delight. They were support for Andy, Opie, and Aunt Bee (Frances Bavier), but they had a life force; you could imagine them brewing moonshine in the woods or making pie in their kitchens when the camera wasn’t looking. Town barber Floyd Lawson (Howard McNear) was a one-name CNN of bad information. Otis Campbell (Hal Smith), the town drunk, checked into the jail on Saturday night and checked out Sunday morning; he was such a regular that sometimes Andy would barely look up as he helped himself to the key to the cell. Gomer Pyle (Jim Nabors) and his cousin Goober (George Lindsey) were smiling goofballs who might have been played as one-joke comic relief on a lesser show, but the writing embellished them so lovingly and the actors imbued them with such decency that you wanted them to succeed at whatever harebrained scheme they were smitten with that week. More so than any sitcom of the ’60s, The Andy Griffith Show blurred the line between the domestic and the workplace sitcoms. Andy was the nexus point between the two, treating everyone in town and everyone who drifted through town (including a lazy hobo played by Buddy Ebsen and assorted con artists and reprobates) as human beings worthy of being heard and understood, if not necessarily indulged. A longing for connection animates every scene on the show, even ones that seem frivolous or corny. Sometimes the filmmaking draws out this theme in faintly Expressionist ways, as in season 1’s “Christmas Story,” when the camera pivots away from Yuletide revelers and slowly pushes in on the window of a doorway where a Scrooge-like character, Ben Weaver (Will Wright), looks on others’ happiness with paralyzed longing.
Andy’s shrimpy string bean of a deputy, Barney Fife (Don Knotts), was the series’ breakout supporting character, a sidekick with the sputtering self-importance, insecurity, and disarming romantic streak of a Preston Sturges dreamer-hick. His comic impetuousness was the earliest critique of masculinity on network TV. Andy knew full well how incompetent Barney was but was respectful of his fragile ego; he let Barney carry a gun but insisted on issuing him a single bullet, which he had to keep in his shirt pocket, effectively creating a “waiting period” that gave Barney just enough time to realize that it was better not to draw. Knotts incarnated the character so vividly that he became a comic legend in his own right. He left the show in 1965, hoping to become a movie star (he succeeded, kind of, in kid-friendly films like The Reluctant Astronaut and The Incredible Mr. Limpet); Jack Burns stepped in, playing Deputy Warren Ferguson.
The Andy Griffith Show spawned two spin-offs, the Jim Nabors vehicle Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C., and Mayberry R.F.D., a reboot of The Andy Griffith Show that tried to continue the story of Mayberry without Griffith, who’d left by that point. Both series evoked some of the gentleness and decency of their predecessor, but neither had the same magic, because they didn’t have Andy Griffith. The show wasn’t named for Griffith just because he was the star. It seemed to take its artistic cues from his affable brand of cool. Griffith’s performance hinted at a persistent sadness in Andy that could be managed only through service to his town, his friends, his family, and, most of all, his son.
Opie and Andy’s relationship is the most important one on the series. The father is always teaching moral lessons to his son—often ones that reflect on his life experiences and his desire to make his town a peaceful, sensible, decent place to live, so that his son can believe that the world is a good place despite having lost his mother before he had a chance to know her. The series’ aesthetic and dramatic high point is the first episode of season 4, “Opie the Birdman,” in which Opie kills a mother bird in his front yard with a slingshot, then runs away in shame and tries to hide the deed from his father. When Andy stands in Opie’s room and lectures him on the irrevocable impact of his actions, the episode literally darkens. The father seems to loom over the son like a specter whose outrage is held in check by grief. Without hitting the point too hard, the episode makes it clear that Opie’s killing of the bird has awakened the trauma of a primal loss. He names the motherless birds Winkin’, Blinkin’, and Nod, and resolves to raise them himself, then realizes he’s not up to the task and releases them into the wild. He tells his father that the cage seems empty now. “Yes, son, it sure does,” Andy says. “But don’t the trees seem nice and full?”
—MZS
The Cosby Show (NBC, 1984–1992) Total score: 87
My son looks at me hopefully and asks, “Dad, when are we going to watch another Cosby Show?”
My daughter grimaces and tells him we won’t be watching it anymore. Unlike him, she’s old enough to understand why our marathon viewing of The Cosby Show has come to an end, even if, thankfully, she’s not yet old enough to fully comprehend the sheer horror of the acts in question.
And I shake my head and wish I’d never introduced them to the show in the first place.
If you want to avoid the work of an artist whose personal activities and views you find questionable, that’s your prerogative, and everyone draws that line in a different place. You might view Mel Gibson as an anti-Semite, racist, and misogynist and still have to stop channel surfing whenever you land on the torture scene from Lethal Weapon; or you might hold your nose about the various scandals and accusations in Woody Allen’s past when you watch his latest film; or shrug off memories of Alec Baldwin’s last six public tantrums because you really want to see the 30 Rock where Jack role-plays as Tracy’s dad. Saints are rare in any profession, let alone the entertainment industry, and chances are you adore the work of someone whose presence you wouldn’t tolerate if you spent an hour getting to know them as a person.
With Bill Cosby, though, there’s no easy way to separate the art from the artist. The preponderance of testimony against him is horrifying, painting him as a serial predator of women on a level that can’t be rationalized away. And Cosby and Cliff Huxtable are as intertwined as any actor and character in TV history—including the ones like
Ozzie Nelson and Jerry Seinfeld, who, like Cosby, more or less played themselves.
Cosby and his alter ego had different names, professions, and levels of income and fame, but in all ways that mattered to the audience, Cosby was Cliff and vice versa. They had the same number of kids with the same gender breakdown. Theo in particular behaved exactly like how Cosby had described his son, Ennis, in his comedy act, and in many episodes, The Cosby Show simply felt like a dramatization of the Bill Cosby: Himself stand-up concert. They had the same cultural interests, the same attitudes about parenting, and the same desire to lecture others about both. This was a sitcom-as-lifestyle-manual, and the only difference at times between the show and some of Cosby’s own jeremiads against the state of black America was that the show had a lot of great jokes surrounding the harangues.
Because Bill and Cliff were one and the same, and because the show was so clearly bent on educating as well as entertaining, there’s no way to watch a second of it now without flinching at thoughts of what Cosby allegedly did to all those women, and at the unmitigated hypocrisy of the whole enterprise.
My kids and I had started watching episodes on Hulu a few months before the Hannibal Buress stand-up routine that finally turned the public against the Cos. I was looking to get them watching higher-quality sitcoms than what they were watching on Disney and Nick, and there was even a part of me feeling smug that the experience might wind up like the tagline to another Cosby series, where they’d enjoy some music and fun, and if they weren’t careful, they might learn something before it was done.
I shouldn’t have been smug. I’d heard the rumors, had been at press conferences where BuzzFeed’s Kate Aurthur had pressed NBC executives about their plans to do a new series with Cosby given the long string of accusations against him, even as they dismissed her questions as needless pot-stirring. Buress emboldened many other alleged victims to come forward—but with a sour reminder that, even in 2016, women’s voices needed male amplification to be heard.
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