The snow globe scene delivered that point more coldly than Fontana may have intended. But in reminding us that this was a world that existed only in our collective imaginations, he also underlined the many ways that the rules of an imagined world aren’t so strict as in a physical one—an understanding that St. Elsewhere frequently took advantage of to brilliant effect.
Introduced a couple of seasons after Hill Street Blues, St. Elsewhere initially seemed like an attempt to replicate that show’s controlled chaos within the context of another classic TV profession. In Flanders, Lloyd, and Daniels, the show had a marvelous trio of wise old character actors to provide mentorship to promising young actors like Morse, Denzel Washington, and Mark Harmon. Stories tackled what were at the time cutting-edge issues in the world of medicine: Dr. Craig experimented with organ transplants and artificial hearts, while head nurse Helen Rosenthal (Christina Pickles) got a mastectomy, and Harmon’s charming plastic surgeon Bobby Caldwell became one of the first notable TV characters to contract AIDS.
But the series was most special whenever it tested the boundaries of its constructed reality.
St. Eligius staffers and patients sometimes confuse people with characters those actors had played on other TV shows, and in one strange outing, the three senior doctors stop by Cheers to drink and banter with Cliff, Norm, and Carla. The classic “Time Heals” two-parter covers fifty years in the hospital’s history, with each jump in time signified by a shift in the filming style to resemble movies of that era. In a later episode, Wayne Fiscus gets shot by a patient’s angry wife and spends the rest of the hour bouncing between purgatory (presented as a depressing vacation spot populated by NFL referees and other people who didn’t do enough with their lives), heaven (a beautiful garden party), and hell (a desolate lake where serial rapist Dr. Peter White, played by Terence Knox, is condemned to spend all eternity trying to catch fish that aren’t there), before having a conversation with God, who turns out to look and sound exactly like Wayne Fiscus. (“I created you in my own image, didn’t I?” he tells a puzzled Wayne.)
The show could be pretty spectacular even when it kept things relatively grounded. An early story arc finds Dr. Craig hoping to perform a heart transplant, at once advancing modern surgery and saving the life of a sweet patient. In a cruel twist of fate, the donor is Jack Morrison’s young wife, and the episode ends with him slipping into the patient’s ICU room to listen to his wife’s heart keep beating inside another woman’s chest. Even Fiscus’s trip to the afterlife is contrasted with the desperate struggle to save him in surgery, with an anxious Dr. Craig performing his first major operation since a potentially career-ending hand injury.
Even before the snow globe revelation, the finale offered up a cracked-mirror view of TV history, with homages to The Fugitive (a one-armed man flees the attentions of a Dr. Kimble), M*A*S*H (morgue patient #4077 is Henry Blake, who died in a helicopter crash), The Mary Tyler Moore Show (a group hug similar to the last one at the WJM newsroom), and more. On some level, St. Elsewhere had always been aware it was a TV hospital show; the finale just removed any doubt.
During Fiscus’s trip through the afterlife, God tells Fiscus that He doesn’t manipulate every aspect of life on earth: “I just create possibilities.” And if the writers of a TV show are the deities of their fictional universes, while they don’t always have a master plan, they exercise far tighter control than the Almighty describes to Wayne.
As Fontana recalls, he and the other top St. Elsewhere writers jokingly discussed putting the St. Eligius snow globe next to ones representing the settings of other shows from the MTM production company, including The Mary Tyler Moore Show and The White Shadow, but decided that “would be overkill, even for us!” As it turned out, enough characters from past shows had already wandered through St. Eligius, just as they and some of the doctors would link up to characters on so many future series (Alfre Woodard reprised her role as OB/GYN Roxanne Turner on Homicide, which thus joined St. Elsewhere to every other show where Richard Belzer has played John Munch), that a website called “The Tommy Westphall Universe” currently lists more than four hundred shows—including The X-Files, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Seinfeld, and even The Wire—that occupy the same fictional continuity as St. Elsewhere, and thus also must exist inside Tommy’s imagination.
And ours, too, thankfully.
—AS
Community (NBC, 2009–2014; Yahoo!, 2015) Total score: 83
The essay begins like this, with an acknowledgment that you are reading an essay; it contains five phrases, separated by commas and one semicolon, and ends with a colon:
Dan Harmon’s sitcom Community is set on a community college campus populated by adult learners whose adultness and ability to learn are never sure things. The core set of characters—a “study group” that often has to force itself to study—consists of a wiseass, womanizing, disbarred lawyer named Jeff Winger (Joel McHale); his on-again, off-again squeeze Britta Perry (Gillian Jacobs), a high school dropout and self-styled activist; the anal-retentive but supermotivated Annie Edison (Alison Brie), who has a crush on Jeff; crabby racist millionaire Pierce Hawthorne (Chevy Chase); Christian single mother Shirley Bennett (Yvette Nicole Brown), who keeps getting pulled into the group’s asinine schemes and destructive misadventures no matter how stridently she questions them; former star athlete Troy Barnes (Donald Glover), whose macho facade soon melts to reveal a geeky side; and Troy’s best friend, Abed Nadir (Danny Pudi), a half-Polish, half-Palestinian film student whose pop culture–saturated ramblings, imaginative leaps, and symptoms of spectrum disorder mark him as Harmon’s go-to stand-in and mouthpiece.
“Are you staying for the party?” Jeff asks Abed (dressed at the time as Batman for a Halloween party) in season 1’s “Introduction to Statistics.” “If I stay,” he replies, “there can be no party. I must be out there in the night, staying vigilant. Wherever a party needs to be saved, I’m there. Wherever there are masks, or if there’s tomfoolery in joy, I’m there. But sometimes I’m not, because I’m out there in the night staying vigilant, watching, lurking, running, jumping, hurdling, sleeping. No, I can’t sleep. You sleep. I’m awake. I don’t sleep. I don’t blink. Am I a bird? No. I’m a bat. I am Batman. Or am I? Yes, I am Batman.”
The title of each Community episode hints at the story’s main concerns in language that suggests the title of a course that the characters (and we) are about to take (e.g., “Remedial Chaos Theory,” “Herstory of Dance,” “Intermediate Documentary Filmmaking”). But the show is about college the same way that Gilligan’s Island is about surviving on an island and Waiting for Godot is about a couple of friends waiting for a third to show up; which is to say it is that, and it isn’t, and is and isn’t, and it’s a lot of other things besides. It is the most meta-textual live-action half-hour comedy of all time. More so than any network show besides The Simpsons, it is television, and almost anything that might appear on television. It is typical sitcom tomfoolery, built on misperceptions, wacky schemes, shenanigans, overheard and misunderstood remarks, petty ego battles, pranks, love affairs and breakups and reconciliations and dates gone horribly wrong. It is satire and parody. It can be an action film (the classic paintball episode “Modern Warfare”) or a Western or a paranoid thriller or a musical. It spoofs documentarian Ken Burns, mockumentary sitcoms, daytime and nighttime soaps and timeline-twisting science fiction, and cartoons, and puppetoons. It deals with hallucinations, fantasies, parables, and parallel timelines (one of which, as Abed explains with awe and fear, is “the darkest timeline”).
The stories are sometimes just stories, but more often they are stories about storytelling, or stories about stories about storytelling. It is a snake that seems to be swallowing its own tail but often turns out to be swallowing the tail of a snake that swallowed the tail of yet another snake. Even its parenthetical asides have asides. Some dialogue is straightforward, but much more is italicized, as if the characters are aware of being characters (and indeed, much of the
time they are). “Abed, it makes the group uncomfortable when you talk about us like we’re characters in a show you’re watching,” warns Jeff in season 1’s “Football, Feminism and You.” “Well, that’s sort of my gimmick,” Abed replies. “But we did lean on it pretty hard last week. I can lay low for an episode.”
Some of the most sublime moments contemplate the ridiculousness of being human, or thinking of ourselves as substantially removed from an animal state. “Conversation was invented by humans to conceal reality,” Jeff says in season 2’s “Critical Film Studies,” a meditation on art, friendship, being, nothingness, Pulp Fiction, Cougar Town, and My Dinner with Andre. “We use it to sweet-talk our way around natural selection. You know who has real conversations? Ants. They talk by vomiting chemicals into each other’s mouths.” And yet even when it’s mocking the very idea of civilization and human dignity, it cares about its characters. The Jehovah’s Witness Troy’s religiously sensitive birthday cake inscription reads, “Hello during a random dessert, the month and day of which coincide numerically from your expulsion from a uterus,” but he’s still touched by it. The school’s pansexual dean, Craig Pelton (Jim Rash), is often used as a sight gag, parading in front of the study group in an array of ridiculous (and usually feminine) costumes, but he will occasionally pause to acknowledge that he’s being too defined by that gimmick, and is far more complex, and lonely.
Even when a scene or sequence or episode isn’t quite working, you can appreciate the complexity, the ambition, the fervor of each situation, image, and joke, as well as the baked-in (maybe just baked) tension between the show and the “show.” Harmon and his writing staff seem engaged in some mysterious ongoing contest to see how many pop culture footnotes they can hang on a conversation and still have you care about the story as a story and the characters as people, or “people.” It is certainly the only series in network TV history equally inspired by Gilligan’s Island, Our Town, Taxi, and the holodeck on Star Trek: The Next Generation. Not only did it seem too smart and ostentatiously self-aware for network TV, but few cable series could match its ingenuity. So of course it struggled merely to exist, clinging to NBC’s schedule by its fingernails for five seasons—the fourth produced without Harmon’s involvement, and dismissed as “the gas leak season” the moment he returned—then landing a sixth courtesy of Yahoo!, which wanted to go the Amazon or Netflix route but couldn’t get the hang of it and nearly allowed Harmon’s creation to play out in a pop culture void.
Ah, well: The world is filled with millions of Abeds; they have memorized every syllable spoken on Community, and they will recite it to you at the drop of a hat, whether you want to hear it or not, because its incantatory strangeness speaks to them, quote marks and parentheses and semicolons and all, period, the end.
—MZS
The Golden Girls (NBC, 1985–1992) Total score: 83
Friends (NBC, 1994–2004) Total score: 77
The Golden Girls concluded two years before Friends premiered (though the gap shrinks to only a year if you count the short-lived Golden Palace spin-off), and it’s a good thing, because the former show would have never gotten on the air in a universe that already included the latter.
Before Friends, one of the unwritten rules of television was that young, pretty people couldn’t be at the center of a sitcom. Not only was it hard to find attractive actors who could also deliver a joke, but the business’s conventional wisdom suggested the audience wouldn’t relate enough to them or their struggles to find them funny. Dramas were for the young and blemish-free; comedies for faces that had some character, and preferably some age lines as well. There might be one or two token young and/or hot people (say, Woody on Cheers), but that was it. If you study publicity stills of sitcom casts from even a couple of years before Friends debuted, it looks like the earlier shows were dipping into not just a different casting pool but a different gene pool.
Then, somehow, everyone doing casting on Friends caught lightning in six bottles in a row, with a sextet of actors—Jennifer Aniston, Courteney Cox, Lisa Kudrow, Matt LeBlanc, Matthew Perry, and David Schwimmer—who were young, good-looking, likable, and, most important, could deliver the quippy dialogue of cocreators Marta Kauffman and David Crane with their own amusing inflections.
At first, NBC didn’t realize what it had with Friends, scheduling it on Thursday nights, but in the less plum time slot after Mad About You (which it would forever displace the next fall), while Madman of the People (starring Dabney Coleman and a much more traditional-looking sitcom ensemble) was on after Seinfeld. That changed in a hurry, as Friends became a phenomenon, and fundamentally altered the very DNA of sitcom casts.
This was around the time that the broadcast networks began truly obsessing over shows that could attract young adult viewers, and Friends suggested an obvious way to get that audience: Give them shows with characters who were around their age. Imitation is the sincerest form of television, and few shows have ever been as imitated—almost always badly—as Friends. Suddenly, every other new sitcom out there featured a cast of would-be models, were often produced by second- and third-tier Friends writers (and, on occasions like CBS’s short-lived Can’t Hurry Love with Nancy McKeon, featured actors who were runners-up to be in the Friends cast), and usually struggled to come anywhere close to the alchemical level of talent, wit, heart, and silliness of Friends. The industry had watched Friends hit on 17 a bunch of times in a row and get blackjack every time, and foolishly assumed the strategy would keep working for everyone else.
As a result, it’s hard to imagine the NBC of the mid-to late ’90s, or most of its rivals (save maybe CBS, which aired The Golden Palace and was still building sitcoms around veteran performers like Bill Cosby, Bob Newhart, and Judd Hirsch), seriously considering a show about a quartet of senior citizens sharing a house in Miami as they try to find meaning in their final decades. It wouldn’t matter that it featured, in Bea Arthur and Betty White, two of the most gifted and indelible sitcom actresses of all time; a pair of outstanding foils in Rue McClanahan and Estelle Getty; and dazzling joke writing from creator Susan Harris and others (including a bunch of future series creators like Desperate Housewives’ Marc Cherry, Modern Family’s Christopher Lloyd, and Arrested Development’s Mitchell Hurwitz). Friends had made sitcoms into something cool, which they had never really been before, and a show about women in their sixties (or in the case of Getty’s Sophia Petrillo, eighties) would have seemed the exact opposite of cool in that moment.
But The Golden Girls was made in a time before the expectation that viewers would or should watch shows about people their own age, which is why there was a generation of kids who grew up watching the show and can still recall all of Rose Nylund’s weird stories about her childhood in St. Olaf just as easily as they’d eventually grow into Friends viewers who understood that Joey’s favorite food was sandwiches and would quote Ross screaming “PIVOT!” whenever asked to move a piece of furniture.
Because once you get past the superficiality of the age and appearance of the two casts, Golden Girls and Friends are fundamentally the same show: a group of people, brought together by a mix of circumstance and the odd familial relationship, moving through a distinct time in adulthood with minimal responsibility and many questions about what the future holds, tossing around razor-sharp punch lines and occasionally pausing to hug. It’s not hard to imagine Rose and Phoebe getting along, or Blanche trying to put the moves on Joey (and, given his openness to sleeping with older women, him agreeing), or Dorothy and Chandler trying to figure out who has a higher degree of withering disdain for the world around them.
Friends didn’t render sitcoms about older people extinct. The explosion of original content across cable and streaming in time created a demand for every niche, including comedy geared to a more mature audience, whether TV Land’s Hot in Cleveland (essentially a next-gen, slightly more glammed-up Golden Girls, but with Betty White now in the Estelle Getty slot) or Netflix’s Grace and Frankie. Nor has the failure
of nearly all the ’90s Friends clones scared the business away from trying to make shows about hot young singles, occasionally finding ones like How I Met Your Mother that can be pretty great in their own right.
For a long time, the sitcom trade discriminated against younger performers. More recently, the scales tipped the other way. The moral of the story (and these were two shows that, if they didn’t always moralize, were at least deeply comfortable with sentiment) is that the goal shouldn’t be to find only comedies featuring characters in a specific age bracket, but to find comedies featuring the funniest actors you can possibly get, regardless of demographic.
—AS
Police Squad! (ABC, 1982) Total score: 83
You know the old comedy axiom about a movie having a laugh a minute? The Zucker brothers—aka the filmmaking team of Jim Abrahams and actual brothers David and Jerry Zucker—scoff at that. In films like The Kentucky Fried Movie, Airplane!, and Top Secret!, no joke is too crude, too silly, or too old to be deployed. If they aren’t getting laughs every ten to fifteen seconds, surely something has gone awry.
And stop calling me Shirley.
Police Squad! was team ZAZ’s only foray into television, and ended so abruptly that you can’t blame them for never making another show. ABC aired four episodes and postponed the other two for months, and the creators would later claim the head of the network said he was canceling the series because “the viewer had to watch it to appreciate it.”
This sounds insane, yet it also summed up the downside to the show’s frantic, anything-for-a-yuk ethos on TV in 1982. In a darkened theater, audiences were conditioned to pay attention to every last detail so that they could appreciate all the visual gags and throwaway details that filled a movie like Airplane! But sitcom audiences were used to being passive, if not outright distracted, and so it was easy to miss so many of the details, like the way that each episode’s announced title was different from its displayed title, or the amount of inappropriate background action taking place while the actors stood awkwardly still at the end of each episode in a spoof of TV freeze-frames.
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