TV (The Book)

by Alan Sepinwall

  Right out of the gate, one of the show’s most distinctive traits was its acknowledgment of what it’s like to live paycheck to paycheck without a safety net. The family barely scrapes by after Lois gets temporarily fired from the drugstore (“Lois vs. Evil”). In “Malcolm Babysits,” the family lives in a trailer while their house is fumigated; meanwhile, Malcolm fantasizes about an easier life while babysitting for a family with money. There are story lines that see Lois tearing the house apart to find a misplaced paycheck (“Stock Car Races”) and suddenly using too much makeup after getting a negative customer review at work (“Lois’ Makeover”). But a far greater percentage of story lines are gloriously madcap, bordering on surreal, especially in later seasons. Lois ends up making like Henry Fonda in Twelve Angry Men while serving as a juror in a trial (“Jury Duty”), while her husband tries to solve the murder that he mistakenly thinks his wife is helping adjudicate. At various points, Francis becomes the roommate of a mad bomber in a woodland cabin, works as a rat catcher, and partners with a German-accented rancher (Kenneth Mars). In season 3’s “Monkey,” Lois’s boss Craig’s new helper monkey terrorizes the house while Reese thwarts a prowler, goes mad with power, and plots to control the neighborhood.

  Where sitcoms about kids can struggle creatively as their young actors age, Malcolm never really had that trouble—and not just because Dewey’s serene, knowing response to the house’s chaos only became creepier and funnier the older Erik Per Sullivan got. The focus began shifting toward Lois and Hal almost immediately, and the strengths of the show’s adult stars—Kaczmarek’s comic force of will, Cranston’s eagerness to poke fun at himself (even if it meant disco-dancing in roller skates to “Funkytown”)—were immune to the passage of time.

  Cranston gave a performance without vanity, as a man fighting a perpetually losing battle against his tendency to panic. Foreshadowing his acclaimed work on Breaking Bad, Cranston appeared frequently in saggy white jockey shorts and similarly ludicrous outfits. In season 4’s “Malcolm Holds His Tongue,” Hal takes up speed-walking, eventually appearing in a red body stocking covered in fire drawings, plus a yellow helmet that makes him resemble H. R. Giger’s xenomorph from Alien. Besides the underwear, Hal and Walter White share a knack for having their plans go awry. But where Walt tends to improvise violently, Hal sobs or shrieks. In another piece of Breaking Bad foreshadowing that’s still uniquely Malcolm, season 3’s “Health Scare,” Hal becomes convinced he has cancer and worries he’ll die before his children can grow up. At night, he slips into the boys’ room—not realizing that Malcolm and Reese have snuck out to a party—and delivers a quiet, heartfelt speech (“You kids are the best thing I’ve ever done. You’ll never know how much I love you. Maybe you’re not supposed to.”) to what he thinks are his three sleeping boys, only to scream in horror when a kiss he gives to Reese’s balloon stand-in makes his “son” pop and deflate.

  Malcolm’s dark streak complicates what might otherwise have been an exhausting weekly display of high-octane shtick. Tender, serious scenes often flip over into comedy, but the reverse happens, too—and when it does, the effect can be unexpectedly piercing. “Look at that sky, Malcolm,” Hal tells his son, sitting in the yard in a scene from “Malcolm Babysits.” “Just think. Somewhere out there, in all those stars and planets, there might be at this very moment a space dad who just got kicked out of his space trailer, who’s looking down on us. Or would it be up at us? Or maybe sideways?” “Trust me, Dad,” Malcolm replies, “they’re all looking down on us.”

  —MZS & AS

  BEST PILOTS

  1.Twin Peaks

  2.Cheers

  3.Police Squad!

  4.Lost

  5.The Sopranos

  6.The Shield

  7.The Wonder Years

  8.My So-Called Life

  9.Miami Vice

  10.Hill Street Blues

  11.The Larry Sanders Show

  12.Kolchak: The Night Stalker

  13.The West Wing

  14.Arrested Development

  15.Wonderland

  16.Friday Night Lights

  17.ER

  18.Breaking Bad

  19.Alias

  20.The Walking Dead

  21.Mad Men

  22.The O.C.

  23.WKRP in Cincinnati

  24.Night Gallery

  25.Modern Family

  BEST SERIES FINALES

  1.The Shield

  2.The Fugitive

  3.The Sopranos

  4.Six Feet Under

  5.Cheers

  6.M*A*S*H

  7.St. Elsewhere

  8.Angel

  9.Newhart

  10.The Mary Tyler Moore Show

  51–75

  Groundbreakers and Workhorses

  Miami Vice (NBC, 1984–1990) Total score: 84

  Legend has it that Miami Vice was born when Brandon Tartikoff, NBC’s entertainment president in the early ’80s, scribbled “MTV cops” on a cocktail napkin and asked Hill Street Blues producer Anthony Yerkovich to turn it into a show. The phrase reads like a glib marketing label, and at the time it probably was. But Yerkovich and executive producer Michael Mann (a student of both documentary cinema and advertising who worked on Starsky & Hutch, Vega$, and other edgy prime-time cop shows) took it further.

  Owing more to 1960s European art cinema than to any TV dramas being made at the time, Miami Vice superimposed ripped-from-the-headlines details about drug smuggling, arms dealing, and covert war onto a pastel-noir dreamscape. It gave American TV its first visionary existential drama: a cop show starring a team of salt-and-pepper badasses, James “Sonny” Crockett (Don Johnson) and Ricardo Tubbs (Philip Michael Thomas), lit by sunshine and neon, wreathed in cigarette smoke, and scored to chart-topping hits. Like all series, it was a team effort, enlisting such resourceful filmmakers as Thomas Carter, Rob Cohen, and Abel Ferrara as well as actor-directors Paul Michael Glaser and David Soul—stars of Starsky & Hutch—and Vice cast members Don Johnson and Edward James Olmos. But the guiding aesthetics belonged to Yerkovich, who oversaw the scriptwriting, and Mann, whose sensibility as both dramatist and visual stylist gave Vice its creative foundation. Taking most of its cues from Mann’s midnight-slick 1981 thriller Thief, Vice was the most aggressively cinematic drama made up until that time—a visually musical show where style, mood, and imagery were more important than plot; a place where actors and filmmakers could play around like musicians, noodling and jamming.

  The series’ frank fascination with street life marked it as the rare network show not suitable for kids (which of course made it catnip for many young viewers). It was one of the most frankly sexual series in commercial TV history, notable not just for the frequency of Crockett’s and Tubbs’s hookups but for the varying degrees of intensity they invested in them. On Miami Vice, as in life, sex could be currency, recreation, or a real means of connection depending on the circumstances. But it was always, by network standards, hot—sometimes too hot for television. Johnson’s first directorial outing, season 3’s “By Hooker by Crook,” juxtaposed the murder of a prostitute with a tryst between Johnson and his real-life ex-wife, Melanie Griffith, that included multiple positions, plus cunnilingus. NBC yanked the episode from repeats after viewers called affiliates to ask why the network was airing pornography.

  Mann and Yerkovich consulted experts on both sides of the law, to accurately depict street slang, SWAT team tactics, legal statutes, and the fine points of drug distribution. But in the end, the show was more daydream than news report. Miami Vice flaunted its movie-ness every chance it got. The visuals referenced everything from Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt and Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï to Brian De Palma’s Scarface and every Sam Peckinpah gunfight ever filmed. A wide shot in the pilot shows Crockett in a phone booth beneath a neon sign that appears to be floating in space, an astonishing image that is but the prelude to a long night drive toward a dockside shoot-out, all scored to Phil Collins’s “In the Air Tonight.” A leisur
ely crane shot in season 1’s “Milk Run” frames cops and their prisoners in a motel room window, then pans to reveal a nightclub on the corner—a real locale lit with such ludicrously rich colors that you wouldn’t be surprised if Nathan Detroit crashed through the front doors belting, “Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat.”

  This Miami was ultimately no more “real” than the title locale of Casablanca, a film that Vice, in its glamorously grubby way, invoked—a global way station; a port city where people came to make a fortune and remake their identities; and where the CIA, the FBI, the Medellín Cartel, the IRA, and the Japanese yakuza wrought havoc with individual lives. The weekly body count made real-world, mid-’80s Beirut or El Salvador seem like Club Med. Crockett, Tubbs, and their fellow officers rarely went a week without shooting several people and having several more killed on their watch—often innocents too naive to realize their dreams were unattainable. The show’s depiction of violence mixed artistry with hucksterism; even at its cruelest and coldest, it felt like an ad for itself. The bloodshed was grotesque yet gorgeous. It meant everything and nothing. And by the following week, it was usually forgotten.

  The advertising part of Mann’s sensibility is encoded in the show’s brooding slickness. It treats clothes, cars, boats, buildings, and bodies as objects worth contemplating apart from their narrative function. Mann—who is said to have reshot a whole scene in his 1999 film The Insider because he didn’t like the color of an actor’s tie—pushed hard for an innovative feel. Rather than using traditionally orchestrated music, he insisted that much of the show be scored with Jan Hammer’s pulsing synth work, and with then-current, often expensive-to-license pop, rock, and soul. He micromanaged the color palette, issuing a now-legendary edict: “No earth tones.” And he urged each episode’s writers and directors to let compositions, cuts, and music bear the weight of the tale’s emotions. The series’ visceral inclinations are powerfully illustrated in a sequence from episode 5 of season 1, “Calderone’s Return: Part 2”—a dialogue-free, four-minute montage scored to Russ Ballard’s “Voices,” showing Crockett and Tubbs headed to the Bahamas on a mission of revenge, their grudges illustrated only in flashback snippets of outrages perpetrated in earlier episodes.

  The front-and-center fashion parade was too much at times—Crockett’s sockless topsiders, linen jackets, pastel T-shirts, and stubble soon became shorthand for “clichéd ’80s dude”—and the glib banter, often thin scripts, and contrived musical guest stars—and cutesy touches such as having Crockett live on a boat with a pet alligator named Elvis early in season 1—took some of the gritty edge off. By season 3, when the series largely abandoned pastels and blew up Crockett’s Ferrari (only to replace it with a Lamborghini), Vice already seemed to have exhausted its cultural cachet, but it could still stage knockout episodes like “Out Where the Buses Don’t Run,” guest-starring the brilliant character actor Bruce McGill as an ex–vice officer obsessed with bringing down the drug lord who drove him mad.

  Mann’s comfort with racially diverse casts, evident from his TV movie The Jericho Mile onward, served as coolness insurance throughout, and has dated better than any of the show’s style choices. The underused Tubbs never got as many meaty story lines (or as expensive a car) as Crockett; the blogger Lance Mannion once likened him to Tonto. But he was still a rare African American lead who displayed cutting wit, righteous anger, and moral intelligence—a tough, sensual black man moving through a multicultural universe in which ethnic and language barriers fell before the lure of sex and money. The show’s artistic love-children are everywhere.

  —MZS

  The Office (NBC, 2005–2013) Total score: 84

  Which is the greater achievement: the twelve perfect episodes (plus a Christmas special) of the UK Office starring Ricky Gervais, or the decidedly imperfect, wildly uneven, but often brilliant two hundred-odd episodes of its American remake starring Steve Carell?

  If you’re being a purist, you go with the UK. Not only did Gervais and Stephen Merchant create the world and characters—particularly socially inept, painfully unfunny paper company branch manager David Brent—that would be faithfully adapted in America by Greg Daniels, but they were able to get on and off the stage before anyone got sick of the show.

  On the other hand, you can not only find twelve episodes of the American show that match the UK version in laughs (if anything, the Mindy Kaling–scripted “The Injury,” where Carell’s Michael Scott accidentally cooks his foot on a George Foreman grill, is funnier than any single Brit installment) and exquisite discomfort, but dozens upon dozens more that are in the ballpark.

  Of course, you have to wade through some dire episodes to get to all the gems, even if you’re willing to pretend that most of the two post-Carell seasons didn’t happen.

  Start with the word-for-word remake of the UK pilot episode, where lines that sounded harmless and cheeky from Gervais seemed menacing from Carell. Within a few episodes (and with the guidance of having seen Carell achieve a perfect balance of awkward but sympathetic in The 40-Year-Old Virgin), Daniels adjusted, changing Michael’s base motivation—he wanted a family, where David had craved an audience—to something more benign, even if the end result was just as off-putting to his coworkers.

  Even with those tweaks, though, Michael’s personality could shift wildly: a petulant fourth grader in a man’s suit one week, someone with moderate to severe Asperger’s the next, and simply an awkward but reasonably clever guy the one after that. Everyone in the audience (and perhaps on The Office writing staff) had their own favorite flavor of Michael—and of his beet-loving henchman Dwight Schrute (Rainn Wilson)—and no one was guaranteed their preferred version of him, or the show, each time out.

  But Carell was versatile enough to make all the Michaels seem more or less like the same person, and to be believable as both the idiot who had to buy himself a World’s Best Boss mug and the savant whose sales genius kept his branch afloat in a struggling company in a dying industry. He could, within the space of one episode, be convincingly astute enough to win over the coworkers at his moonlighting job by breaking down the problem with the later Die Hard films, and naive enough to believe that all he needed to do to declare bankruptcy was to literally walk into the Dunder Mifflin bullpen and yell, “I declare… BANKRUPTCY!” He could horrify the entire staff by assuming the best way to apologize for outing closeted accountant Oscar Martinez (Oscar Nuñez) would be to kiss him full on the mouth in the conference room, but also rope them in for pet projects like producing a local TV ad (with the problematic tagline “Limitless paper in a paperless world”) or starring in his zero-budget action movie Threat Level Midnight.

  Michael’s and Dwight’s idiocy—which reached its apex in the heart attack–inducing fire drill that began the show’s post–Super Bowl episode “Stress Relief”—also provided a comic anchor as the show went in a more serious and romantic direction with the slow-burning love story of Jim Halpert (John Krasinski) and Pam Beesly (Jenna Fischer). That romance was one example of Daniels’s turning the greater number of episodes to fill to his advantage, as he got far more mileage out of it (traveling each step of it inch by agonizing inch) than the original could with Tim and Dawn. Similarly, the show had to expand the roles of background characters like cranky Stanley Hudson (Leslie David Baker), cold Angela Martin (Angela Kinsey), sweet Phyllis Lapin (Phyllis Smith), drunk Meredith Palmer (Kate Flannery), and chili lover Kevin Malone (Brian Baumgartner), making the workplace a richer and more complete world.

  Sometimes less is more, and the UK version gets all the credit in the world for originality and consistency. But if sent to a desert island and told I could bring twelve episodes of only one Office, I’d be inclined to grab the incredibly rewatchable cream of the American crop.

  —AS

  St. Elsewhere (NBC, 1982–1988) Total score: 84

  To understand St. Elsewhere, you have to begin at the ending:

  Dr. Donald Westphall stands in the office of his late friend Dr. D
aniel Auschlander, grieving the recent loss and listening to one of Auschlander’s opera records to find a connection between the world where Daniel used to be and the one he’s in now. Westphall’s autistic son Tommy stares out the window at the falling snow outside St. Eligius Hospital…

  And suddenly the familiar St. Eligius exterior doesn’t look quite right, and now we’re in a shabby apartment where Tommy is holding a snow globe, and Auschlander is somehow alive, well, and father to Westphall, who is not a hospital’s chief of medicine but a construction worker. St. Eligius isn’t a real place, but the building inside the snow globe, whose doctors, nurses, and patients exist only inside the imagination of a boy who can’t interact with the world around him, and who places the globe atop the family TV set in the series’ final shot to make sure we get the message.

  Many St. Elsewhere fans felt the twist, dreamed up by writer Tom Fontana, was mocking their love for the show by equating it with this autistic child’s fantasy. But Fontana had a point: Westphall (Ed Flanders), Auschlander (Norman Lloyd), Mark Craig (William Daniels), Jack Morrison (David Morse), Wayne Fiscus (Howie Mandel), and the rest of the St. Eligius staff were no more real to the show’s viewers than they were to Tommy Westphall (Chad Allen), even if we invested dozens of hours and a whole lot of our emotional lives in them.