TV (The Book)

by Alan Sepinwall

  But the same could be said about the entire ensemble, whether it’s Aubrey Plaza matching Offerman minimalist beat for beat as Ron’s gloomy assistant, April Ludgate; Aziz Ansari’s irrepressible hustle as the swag-obsessed Tom Haverford; Rob Lowe as literally the most positive character in TV history as Chris Traeger; Adam Scott’s deadpan befuddlement as Leslie’s adoring love interest, Ben Wyatt; Jim O’Heir’s wounded dignity as schlemiel/schlemazel Garry Gergich; or the no-bullshit spirit of Retta as parks department veteran Donna Meagle. For that matter, the large recurring cast of Pawnee became so indelible that TV doesn’t necessarily need another clueless news anchor to follow Jay Jackson’s overly expository Perd Hapley (“The statement that this reporter has is a question”); and it’s hard to imagine anyone topping Ben Schwartz’s Jean-Ralphio in the area of hilariously oblivious bro-dom.

  Because the cast was so versatile, Parks could shift from slapstick to sincerity without missing a beat. It always rose to big occasions, whether Leslie was saving the town economy—with some help from beloved tiny horse Li’l Sebastian—by organizing a harvest festival, or throwing one of the show’s many strange, sweet, uproarious impromptu weddings. In an era when comedy was growing ever more cynical, the unabashed joyousness of Parks stood out as the tougher and more satisfying accomplishment.

  Ultimately, it was a far more consistent comedy than The Office had been, not that many people noticed. Its highest-rated episode was its very first, back when it was a very faint sketch of the series it would become. So it had to work comic and romantic miracles in relative anonymity, not unlike all the things Leslie was accomplishing as a mid-level bureaucrat in a small city whose residents didn’t appreciate or deserve her.

  In the series’ funniest episode (which belongs in the sitcom time capsule alongside Lucy at the chocolate factory, “Chuckles Bites the Dust,” et al.), “Flu Season,” a sick Leslie consumes an inadvisable amount of flu medicine to give an important presentation about the harvest festival. Incoherent and barely ambulatory only moments before, she somehow pulls her faculties together long enough to give the speech, then reverts to gibberish as soon as it’s over.

  Ben, awestruck by this woman he’s just beginning to fall for, tries to find the appropriate sports metaphor for what he just saw: “That was amazing. That was a flu-ridden Michael Jordan at the ’97 NBA Finals. That was Kirk Gibson hobbling up to the plate and hitting a homer off of Dennis Eckersley. That was…”

  He pauses, thinks about it some more, and realizes there’s only one framework that applies:

  “That was Leslie Knope.”

  —AS

  Roseanne (ABC, 1988–1997) Total score: 85

  Some of the greatest shows of all time were made by people who worked together with a smile, sat around the campfire, and sang “Kumbaya.” Others were born of chaos, and at times brilliantly reflected all the difficulties behind the scenes.

  Take Roseanne, where rancor and tension were the status quo practically from the first day to the last in a way that must have been deeply unpleasant for many of the people who worked there, but that resulted in a classic of the “kitchen sink” sitcom subgenre that started all the way back with The Honeymooners.

  There was strife backstage, as star Roseanne Barr (then Arnold) feuded with the show’s creator (Matt Williams, who was forced out midway through the first season because she resented him getting all the credit for adapting her stand-up act and life), with the show’s revolving door of writers (including future show creators Joss Whedon, Chuck Lorre, Amy Sherman-Palladino, and Danny Jacobson), with second husband, Tom Arnold (who became an executive producer and recurring cast member, then got bounced after their divorce), the network, the studio, and even the notes of our national anthem.

  But the end result of all that fighting was not only an enormous hit but a trailblazer (Roseanne’s leap from the comedy clubs to her own show made it possible for the likes of Jerry Seinfeld, Ray Romano, and Drew Carey to do the same over the next decade) and a versatile, wonderful family sitcom. Whatever fighting took place off-camera only fueled the sense that Roseanne Conner and her husband, Dan (John Goodman), were living life under siege, struggling in many weeks simply to keep the lights on and put food on the table, let alone figure out how to prepare their three kids for the harsh realities of adulthood.

  And if Roseanne treated her writers in demeaning ways (at one point assigning them numbers so she wouldn’t have to be bothered to learn their names), they still produced work that was raw, honest, and at times shockingly funny, given the blunt financial and emotional realities of the Conner family members’ lives. The show dealt with touchy issues (teen sex, PMS, mental illness) with unapologetic candor, but also wit and grace.

  As Roseanne, Dan, and Roseanne’s sister, Jackie (Laurie Metcalf), bounced from job to job, there was an inviting sense of looseness to the way the different members of the family interacted. Sitcoms are often reluctant to let characters laugh at someone else’s punch line, but Roseanne and Dan were always cracking each other up, and there was a genuine sense of intimacy—along with all the aggravations that come with it—to their relationships with the kids, and the way sisters Darlene (Sara Gilbert) and Becky (Lecy Goranson and, later, Sarah Chalke) got along together, or didn’t.

  Roseanne ran one season too long, with a shark-jumping story arc where Roseanne won the lottery, Dan cheated on her, and everything that had been good and true about the series got turned upside down. But even that led to a fascinating final episode, which revealed that not only had the final season actually been part of a novel written by Roseanne Conner, but that much of the series we had seen previously wasn’t “real.” (Darlene and Becky had, for instance, married each other’s husbands from the show.)

  It felt like the show’s star trying to seize control of her story one last time, even if the end result wasn’t nearly as effective as the show had been in its tumultuous early years.

  —AS

  30 Rock (NBC, 2006–2013) Total score: 84

  In the fall of 2005, NBC made an extraordinary commitment to a new prime-time series set backstage at an SNL-like sketch comedy series, agreeing to pay a near-record licensing fee for a first-year show (along with an enormous financial penalty if the network hated the pilot and decided to give up), on top of a promise of complete executive noninterference. The show, everyone believed, would help pull the network out of its millennial doldrums, and win many awards in the process.

  The show? Aaron Sorkin’s Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, which instead turned out to be one of TV’s more high-profile creative disasters in recent memory, brought down by Sorkin’s struggle to write both convincing romantic relationships and convincing comedy sketches to illustrate the brilliance of his main characters. By the end of its one and only season, Sorkin more or less gave up on the faux-SNL idea and did a glorified West Wing arc about a medical crisis at home and a hostage crisis in Iraq.

  In hindsight, it’s remarkable that no one—not NBC’s development executives, nor the entertainment press who follow their process—seemed nearly as excited about the Peacock’s other new show that year set backstage at a fictional Saturday Night Live, even though it was created by and starred an actual SNL alum in Tina Fey. It was never a hit—accepting a critics award in 2008, Fey referred to the series as “the highest-rated cable show on broadcast TV”—but it did all the other things (including winning many Emmys) NBC was hoping for from Studio 60. Hell, it even had a more entertaining fake NBC executive named Jack, brought to terrifying deadpan life by Alec Baldwin.

  Though Fey had the sketch-writing background Sorkin lacked, she never bothered putting it to much use here. Show-within-a-show TGS with Tracy Jordan was only occasionally glimpsed, and all indications were that it was terrible. (Sketches mentioned or seen included “Pam, the Overly Confident Morbidly Obese Woman,” “Fart Doctor,” and “Gaybraham Lincoln.”) Instead of creating the pretense that we were watching fictional comic genius at work, 30 Rock gave us the gen
uine article, lovingly but relentlessly satirizing television, politics, corporate greed, and much more, with jokes all presented at a machine-gun pace as Fey’s Liz Lemon struggled to keep control of the lunatics around her.

  30 Rock would do nearly anything for a laugh: funny names (Tracy’s deranged internist was Dr. Leo Spaceman, pronounced “Spuh-CHEH-men”) and titles (Honky Grandma Be Trippin’ or Fresh-Ass: Based on the Novel “Tush” by Assfire), unexpected punch lines (“I finally understand the end of The Sixth Sense: Those names are the people who worked on the movie!”), subversive use of guest stars (everything from Carrie Fisher telling Liz, “You’re my only hope!” to a very game Jon Hamm appearing in blackface during a live episode), and once did a story revealing that chipper, ageless NBC page Kenneth (Jack McBrayer) saw all of his coworkers as Muppets.

  The awkward dance between art and commerce, represented by Liz and Jack, was the series’ most frequent topic, but 30 Rock was also razor-sharp when it came to gender and race relations. Because Tracy (played by fellow SNLer Tracy Morgan) was simultaneously unstable and far smarter than he looked (in one episode, he took great advantage of Liz’s assumption that he was illiterate), the show had license to go to ridiculous places, like a therapy scene where Jack broadly impersonates Tracy’s father, mother, and Latina upstairs neighbor. (Faking Mr. Jordan’s death, he moans, “Dey got me! Da honkies shot me!”)

  In the first episode, Kenneth confesses, “I just love television so much.” This would be 30 Rock’s ethos as well, even if that love came with no illusions about the many ridiculous aspects of the medium and the people who work in it.

  NBC was on the brink of extinction for most of the series’ run, which helped keep the show on the air for seven seasons. (The best thing about NBC being such a train wreck for a decade was that it allowed for healthy runs of fun but commercially marginal shows like this one, Friday Night Lights, Parks and Recreation, and Chuck when they’d have been canceled in a year or two on a network with actual expectations of success.) The fictionalized Peacock run by Jack and others was doing no better, cycling through bad ideas like MILF Island and Bitch Hunter, and while the show had great fun at the expense of the network suits, it had equal skepticism about the creative types, whether the hackiness of TGS’s writers or the way stars Tracy and Jenna (Jane Krakowski) were revealed to be erratic, emotionally needy sociopaths.

  Yet, despite all that, the deep affection Fey and company felt for the business they had chosen was palpable through all seven seasons. It did so in gimmicks like the live episodes or the ones presented as a Bravo reality show about Tracy’s wife, but also in the series’ canny deployment of guest stars in ways that paid homage to TV history (Alan Alda, as the sensitive, liberal biological father Jack wished he never knew he had, once popped up to complain about someone on a comedy show crying about a chicken and a baby), and its frequent acknowledgment that television was the only place that weirdos like Liz (and, by extension, Fey herself) could belong and feel fulfilled.

  30 Rock at its best was a live-action cartoon, but one with a pair of recognizable, if exaggerated, humans at the center of it in Liz and Jack. The show ran into creative trouble from time to time when it didn’t keep at least a couple of toes planted in reality, even as Tracy and Jenna were getting into cross-racial drag to win an argument or Dr. Spaceman was describing what it’s like to date Squeaky Fromme (“She is… difficult”).

  The 30 Rock finale, of course, included the TGS finale, where Tracy summed up the whole experience for both series neatly: “That’s our show. Not a lot of people watched it, but the joke’s on you, because we got paid anyway.”

  —AS

  The Bob Newhart Show (CBS, 1972–1978) Total score: 84

  The show that made Mary Tyler Moore’s production company into a TV powerhouse wasn’t the star’s beloved, self-titled sitcom but its time-slot follow-up, which starred stand-up comic and frequent guest actor Bob Newhart as Dr. Robert Hartley, a psychiatrist in Chicago. It made a TV superstar of Newhart and his onscreen spouse, Suzanne Pleshette (who played his loving but tart-tongued wife, Emily), and proved beyond a doubt that Moore and her fellow MTM executives had a knack for building shows around very particular comic talents in ways that made them as accessible as possible without tamping down their specialness.

  The style and tone of the show came out of Newhart’s stand-up career, which jump-started in 1960 when the onetime accountant released a solo album, The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart, featuring a series of one-way conversations between Newhart and people you never actually heard. Essentially, it was a series of comic duets where the straight man did all the work, and it was such a smash that Newhart recorded several follow-ups, deploying his expressive deadpan and mastery of the pregnant pause to suggest the subdued madness of the reasonable man living in an unreasonable world. The Bob Newhart Show cleverly expanded on this idea, deducing that psychiatry and therapy were basically one-way conversations, and pairing Bob with an endlessly amusing and fascinating array of patients, including Lillian Bakerman (Florida Friebus), a laid-back eccentric grandma and compulsive knitter; Jack Riley’s cranky neurotic, Elliot Carlin; and John Fiedler’s meek-seeming former Marine Emil Peterson. When Bob wasn’t seeing patients, he was dealing with office and interoffice intrigue, featuring his secretary, Carol Kester (Marcia Wallace), the dentist Jerry Robinson (Peter Bonerz), and assorted other doctors on the floor. Bob’s home life was generally a refuge from all the subdued chaos of work, though he and Emily did have to deal with their inept and thickheaded neighbor, airline navigator Howard Borden (Bill Daily).

  Newhart paid tribute to his stand-up roots by doing phone sessions where you couldn’t hear the person on the other end of the line, and the first couple of seasons’ worth of episodes began with Bob picking up a receiver and saying hello, as if to remind viewers of the star’s previous claim to fame. But very soon, The Bob Newhart Show settled into a comfortable groove as a low-stakes ensemble comedy par excellence, filled with lovable eccentrics who would’ve been at home in a Preston Sturges movie. Beneath it all was a soulfulness that might have caught viewers by surprise if they’d somehow missed the funky-jazzy opening theme by series cocreator Lorenzo Music and his wife, Henrietta, which captured the hustle and bustle of upper-middle-class suburban life but also the oasis provided by a loving, stable relationship.

  —MZS

  Malcolm in the Middle (Fox, 2000–2006) Total score: 84

  Anyone who grew up in a house with too many people and not enough money will testify to the truth of Malcolm in the Middle, Linwood Boomer’s stylish, relentlessly amusing sitcom. The family (whose last name, Wilkerson, is mentioned only twice in the show’s seven seasons) lives in a California suburb in a small bungalow with cluttered rooms and a brown front lawn. Malcolm (Frankie Muniz), a brilliant child whose inclusion in his school’s gifted program makes him a pariah, is the show’s main character and narrator, often addressing the viewer in asides reminiscent of Albert Finney as Tom Jones or Matthew Broderick as Ferris Bueller. He fights for scraps of attention against his younger brother, Dewey (Erik Per Sullivan), and his older brother Reese (Justin Berfield). Malcolm’s eldest brother, Francis (Christopher Masterson), spends much of the series in his own self-contained show-within-a-show (first at a military academy, then becoming an emancipated minor, getting married, and wandering around Alaska the western states), but he still manages to create drama for his relatives. Malcolm’s mother, Lois (Jane Kaczmarek), is hot-tempered and a control freak. She’s burned out from having to raise four boys while toiling at a spirit-crushing job at the Lucky Aide drugstore. Malcolm’s father, Hal (Bryan Cranston), comes from money, but because his family rejected Lois, he rarely speaks of them; he’s goofy and kindhearted but often chafes at his wife for insisting that he and the boys act mature every once in awhile. Their marriage is a contest of wills, with Lois representing a stifling, rules-oriented life and Hal an improvisational joie de vivre that could easily lead to chaos.

&
nbsp; Boomer’s sitcom was old-fashioned in concept but innovative in execution, always marrying form to content and pushing the boundaries of both. It was shot on 35mm film, sans studio audience or laugh track, and employed the cartoonish angles and dynamic camera moves of an early Coen brothers picture. Early on, while airing after The Simpsons, Malcolm was a big hit; its success helped break down the networks’ prejudice against single-camera sitcoms. Within a few years, Malcolm’s template would be used in 30 Rock, The Office, Modern Family, and other popular comedies. Its structure was just as restlessly inventive. The season 2 opener, “Bowling,” crosscut between parallel timelines, one where Lois took the boys out bowling, the other where Hal did it.

  But the show never got too full of itself, because its plots were always driven by shenanigans and highlighted the feral wildness of the family. They would be unbearable if they lived next door to you, but they won your sympathy because the characters were lively and the actors committed. The episodes often revolved around one or more characters stealing or lying or breaking house rules or state laws or flat-out destroying something, then trying unsuccessfully to keep their relatives or local authorities from finding out, or else making a promise or threat and having to carry it out, in the process realizing its folly. Even their victories tended to be Pyrrhic: When Hal’s scandal-ridden employer tries to make him a scapegoat for their worst sins, Malcolm bails him out by noting that all the misdeeds took place on Fridays, and provides incontrovertible proof that Hal had been skipping work on Fridays for years. (Lois, rather than act relieved that her husband avoided a lengthy jail sentence, yells at Hal for lying to her all that time while he was playing hooky.)