TV (The Book)

by Alan Sepinwall

  —AS & MZS

  Star Trek (NBC, 1966–1969) Total score: 81

  “To boldly go where no man has gone before.” That’s what Star Trek’s star, William Shatner, promised in the opening narration of Gene Roddenberry’s science-fiction series, and the show delivered. Even though it really had only one great season, the first, and its liberal-for-1966 situations and attitudes seem, on closer inspection, not too radical by modern standards, or even the standards of the 1980s, its innovations lay in its willingness to depart from TV norms of the time rather than in any particular attitude or position that its characters espoused. This was plenty radical on its own, though, and without the show’s determination to mix intergalactic derring-do with Twilight Zone–type morality plays about civilization and human nature, much of what we think of as adult mainstream science fiction either would not exist or might have come down the pike much later.

  Star Trek was set in the twenty-third century, during an era of intergalactic peace maintained by the Federation’s exploratory/military Starfleet with occasional Cold War–type incidents involving Klingons and Romulans. The series had a fairly hawkish attitude about the merits of interfering in other cultures—Starship Enterprise’s captain James T. Kirk (Shatner) always had intense discussions with his half-human, half-Vulcan first mate, Mr. Spock (Leonard Nimoy), and the ship’s doctor, Leonard “Bones” McCoy (DeForest Kelley), about the integrity of the Prime Directive, which mandates that Starfleet not intervene in cultures in ways that might change them. They always intervened anyway, phaser-blasting and in some cases personally karate-kicking the stuffing out of space Nazis or ghostly gunfighters or gladiators or one of the seemingly endless array of godlike creatures that were eventually revealed to be a child, a con artist, or both. The only notable instance of the Enterprise crew declining to intervene was in season 1’s Harlan Ellison–scripted time-travel episode “The City on the Edge of Forever,” which finds Kirk learning that a 1930s labor activist (Joan Collins) whom he’s fallen in love with is fated to die in a car accident, and accepting that he cannot save her because doing so would profoundly alter the future. It seems strangely fitting, given the show’s schizoid Cold War eagerness to intervene, that the impossibility of changing history is treated here as unambiguously tragic, only because of the loss of a single human who matters personally to Kirk. David Gerrold, who wrote the series’ most purely charming episode, “The Trouble with Tribbles,” said Roddenberry was enamored of President John F. Kennedy, whose mix of socially liberal and antiracist attitudes was leavened by his compulsive womanizing and his determination to show that he wasn’t scared by the Soviet threat. Indeed, there were times when Kirk seemed like the two-fisted, sci-fi action figure version of JFK, beaming down to planetary surfaces to negotiate treaties, beat the crap out of anyone who stepped to him, and bed women in foil bikinis.

  If Kirk was Roddenberry’s leading man, Mr. Spock was the series’ soul. Roddenberry wanted the Enterprise to have an alien crew member, and pushed against NBC executives wary of what one of them described as “the guy with the ears.” Even Roddenberry would later acknowledge that many of the character’s most famous traits—the formal posture and elocution, the Vulcan nerve pinch, the split-fingered “Live long and prosper” salute (modeled on the Jewish priestly blessing)—came more from Nimoy than from him or any other Trek writer. Without Spock, Star Trek might have become another half-forgotten space opera from that period, rather than the unofficial fan religion that it still is today. The character simultaneously offered an outsider’s and an insider’s perspective, coolly reacting to situations that made Mr. Chekov panic or Dr. McCoy sputter with rage, yet never feeling wholly a part of either the Enterprise crew or his own species, which ended an ancient legacy of war-making by suppressing emotion and replacing it with logic. There was still passion, and even distemper, in Spock’s people, though; viewers got a taste of it in the season 2 episode “Amok Time,” which revealed that every seven years, Vulcans suffer a blood fever that could kill them unless they undergo a “Pon Farr” ritual in which they either mate with someone empathically connected to them or take part in hand-to-hand combat. Spock’s conflicted status as a “half-breed”—a term used by the speciesist McCoy, who needled Spock every chance he got—was at the center of many episodes. Spock’s nonviolent characteristics—epitomized by his Socratic dialogues with other characters, his egoless, empathetic mind-melds with every manner of creature, and his “nerve pinch,” which could incapacitate foes without resorting to weapons—aligned him with countercultural forces that reshaped US life in the ’60s. Multiple episodes saw Spock stating an affinity for hippie-friendly societies or beliefs: “This Side of Paradise,” “Shore Leave,” “The Apple,” “The Naked Time,” “The Way to Eden,” among others. There were moments throughout the show’s run when Spock’s stoicism, isolation, and devotion to service evoked two of Shakespeare’s greatest outsider characters, Shylock and Othello.

  It wasn’t hard for sci-fi fans to see their own sense of otherness reflected in Spock. Their love inspired not only the initial letter-writing campaigns to NBC to keep the show on the air after the first and second seasons, but Star Trek conventions, essays, and fan fiction (some of it depicting Spock as the one true love of Kirk’s life) in the years after its cancellation. In a way, though, Spock’s popularity served as a political deflector shield, focusing so much media attention on a metaphor-rich character that the show’s more direct engagement with social change could fly under the radar at warp factor 5. Star Trek’s milestones include TV’s first interracial kiss, between Kirk and Nichelle Nichols’s Bantu communications officer Uhura (in season 3’s “Plato’s Stepchildren”—under duress by alien captors, but still!), and an ethnically and internationally diverse bridge crew that included George Takei’s Japanese Sulu, Walter Koenig’s Russian Pavel Chekov, and James Doohan’s bluff Scotsman Scotty, who regularly told Kirk, “The engines canna take much more!” but then proved otherwise. “Leave any bigotry in your quarters,” Kirk tells a Vulcan-hater in season 1’s “Balance of Terror.” “There’s no room for it on the bridge. Do I make myself clear?” After season 2, when Nichols considered leaving the show because Uhura wasn’t being given enough to do, the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. talked her out of it.

  After Star Trek entered syndication in the 1970s, it became such a success that NBC bankrolled an animated Saturday morning spin-off. A 1979 feature film followed, motivated in large part by the success of 1977’s Star Wars. The show’s direct descendants include three discrete film series; five prime-time TV spin-offs (The Next Generation, Voyager, Deep Space Nine, Enterprise, and a new program, produced by longtime Trek movie producer Alex Kurtzman and Hannibal’s Bryan Fuller, that was announced as this book was going to press); novelizations; board games; video games; and comics. But it also influenced everything from The X-Files and both versions of Battlestar Galactica to Firefly, Andromeda, and the Alien franchise, as well as any film or TV series that tries to combine action with ideas. “One man cannot summon the future,” an alternate-universe version of Spock tells Kirk in season 2’s “Mirror, Mirror.” “But one man can change the present,” Kirk counters. By changing TV’s present, Star Trek altered its future.

  —MZS & AS

  Firefly (Fox, 2002–2003) Total score: 80

  There is inspiration, there is hubris, and there is whatever divine madness gripped Joss Whedon when he decided to create Firefly. After years of running Buffy and Angel over at the WB, he finally had his shot at the network big leagues, and chose to make a mash-up of Western and science-fiction tropes, combining one genre that TV had left for dead in the early ’70s with another that had a wildly mixed commercial-TV track record. This wasn’t putting your chocolate in my peanut butter; this was putting your goulash in my chicken à la king and expecting the world at large to want to eat it.

  It was, of course, doomed from the start. Even if Fox executives hadn’t sabotaged the show by shelving the two-hour pilot�
�which not only introduced the large cast of characters but explained the show’s elaborate universe, where a human exodus to a new solar system had created a stratified class system with elements of both the Wild West and the Reconstruction-era South—it was never going to be a big commercial hit. Still, it struck such a chord with its small but fiercely loyal audience that Whedon was able to leverage their passion into a sequel feature film, Serenity, released three years after Firefly’s cancellation.

  It was an underdog show full of underdog heroes. Roguish ship captain Mal Reynolds (Nathan Fillion, as charming and funny as he is on Castle, but in a role that allowed him to show off a much greater range) and his second-in-command, Zoë (Gina Torres), had both been on the losing end of a civil war, and now had to make a living as smugglers on the outer planetary rim. Traveling with them on their beat-up little smuggling ship was a wagon train’s worth of Western archetypes given a shiny new gloss: the whore with the heart of gold (Morena Baccarin’s Inara), the preacher with a dark past (Ron Glass’s Book), the brute who’s good with a gun but not always reliable (Adam Baldwin’s Jayne), the sweet tomboy (Jewel Staite’s Kaylee), the wisecracking sidekick (Alan Tudyk’s Wash), and the fugitives (Sean Maher and Summer Glau as Simon and River). They had sharp dialogue, moments of great heroism and greater comedy, and adventures in a fully realized world made up of equal parts Stagecoach, The Professionals, and Blade Runner.

  At fourteen episodes, Firefly is the shortest-lived of the five shows Whedon has created (or, in the case of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., cocreated). It’s also the one that came into focus most quickly—where Buffy needed most of a season, and Angel needed parts of several, to figure out what they were, Firefly was thrilling and clever and entirely itself from the jump—which made it even more maddening that viewers didn’t get to see the beginning until the very end.

  But what did Whedon expect? Like his hero, he had thrown his heart and soul into a noble cause that was guaranteed to fail—even if it failed most gloriously.

  —AS

  Law & Order (NBC, 1990–2010) Total score: 80

  We often talk about formula in television as if it’s a cardinal sin, or a relic of a dumbed-down era best forgotten. But formula doesn’t automatically equal laziness or lowest common denominator programming. There can be enormous pleasure in reliability (who wouldn’t want the gang at Cheers to yell “NORM!” when Mr. Peterson came in?), and it can be a greater storytelling challenge to find subtle and clever variations on a formula the audience knows so well they can set their watches to it.

  Few shows in TV history have been as formulaic from episode to episode as the original Law & Order, but that was always a feature, not a bug.

  Over twenty seasons, viewers became so conditioned to the rhythms of each hour that they became fodder for stand-up comedians, like John Mulaney’s routine about how the victim’s coworkers are always so unmoved by the murder of a colleague that they insist on going about work as usual while the cops interview them. But the show understood which recurring elements were comforting and necessary—say, the gallows humor of Jerry Orbach’s character, Detective Lennie Briscoe, taking us into the opening credits every week for twelve seasons—and which could be turned upside down to keep the audience guessing.

  Some weeks, for instance, the cops would land on the killer almost immediately, and the drama of the courtroom half was in whether the district attorneys could get a conviction; in others, the lawyers would either figure out that the cops didn’t get the right man, or decide that another party was more at fault than whoever technically pulled the trigger. Sometimes, the prosecutors won, and sometimes they lost, but senior DA Adam Schiff (Steven Hill) always (at least for the first ten seasons) had a world-weary bon mot to toss out before the final credits rolled.

  For that matter, the show’s oft-promoted habit of crafting stories that were “ripped from the headlines” worked not because viewers could recognize a plot’s tabloid inspiration but because the episode would almost immediately pivot away from the true story to tell a twisty parallel-reality version of it. So an early episode from the first season might be a riff on the Bernie Goetz vigilante case, but here the shooter would be a woman (a young Cynthia Nixon, the first of many future stars to wander through an L&O courtroom) turning subway avenger as a coping mechanism after an earlier rape.

  And even the show’s revolving-door cast was arranged to simultaneously reassure and confound the audience. There were six regular positions—a senior detective, his partner, and their boss, plus a lead prosecutor, his assistant, and the head of the DA’s office—and the casting of each role often fell into a narrow type, yet the characters themselves varied wildly in personality (and, on occasion, quality). All of the assistant district attorneys after Richard Brooks’s Paul Robinette were played by willowy supermodel types, but you could switch from Carey Lowell’s reserved former defense attorney Jamie Ross in one season to Angie Harmon’s cutthroat staunch conservative Abbie Carmichael in the next.

  The basic cops-and-lawyers Law & Order formula didn’t come out of creative inspiration but financial desperation. It was the late ’80s, and hour-long dramas had stopped selling into syndication, which is where the real money was in TV at the time. So producer Dick Wolf came up with a way to make a show that would air as an hour on the network but could be split into half-hour episodes down the line. As it turned out, A&E and later TNT were perfectly happy shelling out a fortune to air the episodes as they were, at all hours of the day and night, but it took a while to get to that point.

  The young Fox network ordered thirteen episodes sight unseen, then backed out the next day, telling Wolf that it wasn’t a Fox show. (This was surely correct.) CBS made a pilot (with most of the season 1 cast, but a different DA, which always makes it jarring when it turns up in reruns) but didn’t order it to series. And though it was never in danger for most of its NBC run—the only time it came close to cancellation before the end was after season 3, when Wolf was told he had to add some women to the cast to keep it on the air—it didn’t become a bona fide phenomenon, which would in time launch several spin-offs (the most successful of which, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, is still on the air, and could run longer than the mother ship when all is said and done), until the network aired a handful of episodes in the ER time slot on Thursdays. (Not coincidentally, that higher-profile season earned the show its only best-drama Emmy.)

  But if making enormous sums of money was the inspiration for—and end result of—Law & Order, the show was a classic reminder of how commerce and creativity can go hand in hand just as easily as formula and surprise.

  —AS

  ALL THE LAW & ORDER CAST COMBINATIONS RANKED, FROM EASY BEST TO ABSOLUTE WORST:

  Season 5: Briscoe/Logan/Van Buren/McCoy/Kincaid/Schiff

  Note: The ’27 Yankees of L&O casts, featuring not only Hall of Famers at every position but the very best example of each respective role in the franchise’s history.

  Season 10: Briscoe/Green/Van Buren/McCoy/Carmichael/Schiff

  Note: Schiff’s last year, and the first for the very satisfying partnership between Briscoe and Green.

  Season 4: Briscoe/Logan/Van Buren/Stone/Kincaid/Schiff

  Note: Almost identical to the perfect season 5 cast, and Ben Stone was no slouch in that lead prosecutor position.

  Seasons 18 (midway through)–20: Lupo/Bernard/Van Buren/Cutter/Rubirosa/McCoy

  Note: The series’ final cast was one where the whole was greater than the sum of its parts: no weak links, great chemistry among the whole group, and the fun dynamic of Jack McCoy having to boss around a younger version of himself.

  Season 3 (episode 9 on): Briscoe/Logan/Cragen/Stone/Robinette/Schiff

  Note: Some deeper overall casts came later (both Cragen and Robinette were much more interesting when they returned to the franchise down the road), but any group with the Briscoe/Logan partnership is going to score very highly.

  Season 6: Briscoe/Curtis/Van Buren/McCoy/Kincaid/Sch
iff

  Note: Curtis was a significant step-down from Logan, but the rest of the lineup could carry him.

  Season 9: Briscoe/Curtis/Van Buren/McCoy/Carmichael/Schiff

  Note: Abbie Carmichael’s first season, and the other year where the talent around him allows me to overlook the sleepy presence of Curtis.

  Season 18 (through episode 14): Green/Lupo/Van Buren/Cutter/Rubirosa/McCoy

  Note: A badly needed stabilizer after a lot of years with one or two utter head-scratchers in the cast at all times.

  Season 11: Briscoe/Green/Van Buren/McCoy/Carmichael/Lewin

  Note: The first season without an original cast member, and the first of two puzzling instances of a great actor—in this case, two-time Oscar winner Dianne Wiest as new DA Nora Lewin—joining the show late and utterly failing to fit in.

  Seasons 7–8: Briscoe/Curtis/Van Buren/McCoy/Ross/Schiff

  Note: The first time the show made it through two full seasons without any cast changes (though semiofficial seventh regular Elizabeth Olivet was replaced for a while by Emil Skoda as the resident shrink).

  Season 1: Greevey/Logan/Cragen/Stone/Robinette/Schiff

  Note: The show was still finding its way, but the original group had Stone and Logan, and George Dzundza’s Max Greevey was a good early foil for Logan.