Unsurprisingly, the Kevin who seemed so sweet and adorably awkward in junior high became much more complicated, and at times unlikable, as he got old enough to drive, and his relationships with his parents and his closest friends grew strained, or worse. But that was a truth that stretched well past the ’60s and ’70s. And ABC executives—protective of what had been a relatively wholesome show for the whole family when it began—seemed more uncomfortable than any viewer as Kevin started edging into adult behavior. The show’s end was both abrupt and bittersweet, with the narration of Daniel Stern’s middle-aged Kevin having to fill us in on the many triumphs (Kevin becomes a writer, his mom an executive, etc.), tragedies (Kevin’s father, whose stutter-step relationship with his son would become the series’ heart, dies while Kevin is still in college), and everything in between (Kevin and Winnie remain friends, though their romantic destinies lie elsewhere) that we would never get to see.
In a closing monologue that speaks to both the era in which Kevin Arnold became a man and almost any coming-of-age story, the adult Kevin tells us, “Growing up happens in a heartbeat. One day you’re in diapers, next day you’re gone. But the memories of childhood stay with you for the long haul. I remember a place, a town, a house, like a lot of houses. A yard, like a lot of other yards. On a street like a lot of other streets. And the thing is, after all these years, I still look back… with wonder.”
—AS
BEST TEACHERS
1. Gabe Kotter, Welcome Back, Kotter
2. George Feeny, Boy Meets World
3. Valerie Frizzle, The Magic School Bus
4. Ken Reeves, The White Shadow
5. Mr. Bergstrom, The Simpsons
6. Charlie Moore, Head of the Class
7. Eric Taylor, Friday Night Lights
8. Marla Hendricks, Boston Public
9. Richard Katimski, My So-Called Life
10. Mr. Collins, The Wonder Years
Barney Miller (ABC, 1974–1982) Total score: 78
Ask a lawyer to name the most realistic legal TV drama, and they’ll likely roll their eyes and say, “None of them.” Chances are you’ll get a similar response asking doctors about hospital shows, reporters about newspaper shows (and/or season 5 of The Wire), or any other profession whose details have been bent and exaggerated for dramatic effect over the years on TV.
But ask a cop—particularly a cop above a certain age—and they may tell you that of the eight million stories in the naked city, the most accurate was told on a ’70s sitcom called Barney Miller.
The show debuted at a time when New York City had come to be viewed by the rest of the country as a hell on earth, with the Daily News’s infamous “FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD” headline, and gritty crime films like Dog Day Afternoon. Barney Miller didn’t sugarcoat or present a fantasy version of the city or its police department. The show’s NYPD was perpetually broke (Steve Landesberg’s spacey intellectual Arthur Dietrich transfers in only because his own precinct was closed due to budget cuts), while crime in the Greenwich Village neighborhood policed by Barney (Hal Linden) and his detectives was more abundant—and, in the case of vice, more public—than ever.
But if the series, created by Danny Arnold, didn’t try to clean up the harsh realities of life in the NYPD at the time, it also didn’t try to glam up the very mundane realities that came with it. Its cops didn’t look like action heroes, whether the ancient Phil Fish (Abe Vigoda, who would live forty-two years past the series’ debut, even though it was a running gag that Fish looked too old to still be breathing, let alone working as a cop), deadpan brewer of awful coffee Nick Yemana (Jack Soo), or even musclebound but sweet Vietnam vet Wojo (Max Gail). Even the relatively hip Ron Harris (Ron Glass) was only so cool: His goal in life was to parlay his time on the force into a career as a crime novelist.
And there, Harris struggled for source material, because Barney Miller’s cops spent most of their time doing paperwork and locking up low-level offenders. After splitting early episodes between Barney’s work and home lives, the series quickly turned the detectives’ squad room and Barney’s office into the only sets that we saw. If exciting things happened away from the precinct, we heard about them later, usually with a lament from the ones who had missed all the fun.
It was, then, the workplace comedy as hangout show, with the plots mainly excuses to let this diverse collection of brilliant comic voices bounce off one another, whether Fish struggling to conceal his contempt for the much younger Dietrich; Harris or Barney trying to educate the well-meaning but impulsive Wojo; or everyone failing to get Yemana to change his affect even slightly (other than in the episode where he unwittingly eats a pile of hash brownies, the series’ best contribution to the sitcom canon).
It wasn’t fancy, but in the banter, the boredom, and the bureaucracy, real cops could finally see something resembling their own work, and viewers groomed on more exotic police stories could appreciate the sharpness of the writing and performances.
—AS
Frank’s Place (CBS, 1987–1988) Total score: 78
One of the great ancillary benefits of WKRP in Cincinnati was this one-and-done series from its creator, Hugh Wilson, and one of its stars, Tim Reid, aka Venus Flytrap. No viewer knew quite what to make of this half-hour scripted program about an African American professor at Brown University who ends up running his late father’s restaurant and bar in New Orleans, Chez Louisiane. Frank Parrish travels to the Big Easy in the opening episode intending to sell the place; then Miss Marie (Frances E. Williams) puts a voodoo curse on him fating him to stay, and he does. Of course we immediately wonder if this isn’t just a secret wish being fulfilled, and the show continues to keep us guessing.
Nearly thirty years after its brief run, Frank’s Place now seems apocryphal. The sound track’s expertly chosen mix of blues, jazz, rock, and prewar standards made it too expensive to relicense for DVD and online streaming platforms; today it can be seen only at the Paley Centers in New York and Los Angeles and in fragments on YouTube, often by way of blurry VHS uploads that reduce the show’s feature film–quality lighting, composition, and camera movement to mush. The show’s unavailability might be the greatest tragedy in this book’s Pantheon. Frank’s Place was so advanced in every way that network television still hasn’t caught up with it. Shot on film and devoid of a laugh track, every episode is preternaturally unafraid to be not-funny; to just let characters be, and think; to savor the pauses and silent looks that pass between them; and to observe the differences between cultures, races, religions, and genders with curiosity and tenderness. It is equally comfortable with situations that aren’t so much amusing as awkward, sexy, even mournful (as in the episode where Frank is pressured by a local gangster to assume responsibility for his father’s gambling debts). Imagine an African American Cheers by way of A Confederacy of Dunces, then mix in astute commentary on New Orleans culture (including a spirited discussion of the difference between Cajun and Creole), and you’ve got a one-of-a-kind experience—so unique, in fact, that Frank’s Place languished in the ratings even though pretty much every TV critic with a byline begged viewers to check it out.
—MZS
Justified (FX, 2010–2015) Total score: 78
Throughout its six seasons, Justified made an art of being underestimated, weaving intricate stories and creating vivid characters within a context that strove to entertain above all else. The rope-a-dope strategy was embedded in the series’ identity before it even hit FX’s airwaves. One of the finest adaptations of Elmore Leonard’s writing is rooted in a work so minor that even a lot of fans hadn’t heard of it: a short story titled “Fire in the Hole,” set in Harlan County, Kentucky, about a lawman and a criminal whose animosity is complicated by the fact that they once dug coal together.
As overseen by screenwriter and producer Graham Yost (Speed), the first half of Justified’s first season was clever and affable and occasionally (expectedly) violent, but not necessarily the sort of thing you’d want to go up on a ri
dge and crow about. While the ensemble acting and cultural details were unusual for American TV (which is prejudiced toward big cities and suburbs), and the whole thing was anchored to strong lead performances by former Deadwood star Timothy Olyphant (as Stetson-wearing US marshal Raylan Givens) and The Shield’s Walton Goggins (as Raylan’s grinning, loquacious nemesis Boyd Crowder), on the whole it felt like a throwback to the 1970s and ’80s way of making episodic crime dramas, where cocky or eccentric heroes (McCloud, Columbo, Jessica Fletcher, or whomever) solved a mystery or neutralized a threat to the community and then the narrative needle reset to zero.
Then something happened, probably somewhere toward the middle of season 1—maybe between “Blowback,” the episode with Deadwood regular W. Earl Brown as an escaped inmate taking hostages in the US marshal’s office until Raylan defused him by ordering him some spicy fried chicken; and “Hatless,” which saw Raylan lose his hat in a stupid bar fight and spend the rest of the episode trying to prevent his ex-wife’s doofus husband from getting killed over a real-estate debt. Both episodes forced Raylan to try to resolve situations without violence, not for pacifist reasons (Raylan has an Old Testament mind-set and a simple code—“You make me pull, I put you down”—hence the series’ title) but for practical ones: He was starting to figure out that his hot temper and itchy trigger finger were ruining his chances for happiness.
And at that point the show began seriously looking at why that was; the investigation led the writers into Raylan’s past, and Harlan County’s past, including the family feuds that had been going on since the nineteenth century. We realized that the macho cowboy code of doing what a man’s gotta do was baked into the marrow of this coal mining community, and the former Confederate States, and perhaps America itself, and that at some point every character would have to reckon with it.
Justified kept teasing this notion out, examining new facets, discovering new ways into it, through Raylan and Boyd, but also through their significant others: Raylan’s ex-wife, Winona Hawkins (Natalie Zea), and Boyd’s main squeeze, Ava Crowder (Joelle Carter), who was Boyd’s brother’s wife until she shot him for abusing her, and briefly Raylan’s gal, too. Yost and his core group of writers and directors were fascinated by what sociologists have taken to calling “toxic masculinity”—the psychic as well as physical damage the macho code inflicts; but also the allure of it, as depicted on series like Justified, which, like most of Clint Eastwood’s films, managed the neat trick of making audiences groove on smart-ass quips and pissing contests and bursts of savagery even as the dialogue and more mournful, quiet moments suggested that it wasn’t good for people, or society, to be enamored of such behavior. So when Raylan threatens local mob fixer Wynn Duffy (Jere Burns) by dropping a bullet on his supine chest and promising, “Next one’s comin’ faster,” it’s presented as an ultracool moment, but within a few episodes, the stunt helps Duffy’s boss, the sociopath carpetbagger Robert Quarles (Neal McDonough), temporarily frame Raylan for murder. Raylan once explains to a criminal, “You run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole; you run into assholes all day, you’re the asshole.” In the moment, that applies to the criminal, but when you look back on all the trouble Raylan gets into over the course of the series, and the number of people on both sides of the law whom he manages to annoy, it’s hard not to admit that he’s the asshole.
Throughout, Justified remained at least three-quarters a comedy, often of a bantering sort, but it still made space for moments of suffering (and transcendence) as well as filmmaking touches, which confirmed that the show’s directors were never content merely to photograph actors talking. There was evident thought put into the relationships between characters and their environments. Sometimes those environments seemed to reflect their interior states (lots of shots of an about-to-explode Raylan partly shrouded in shadow or etched by the pulse of red police lights) or comment upon the show’s dual allegiance to film noir (the show is more comfortable with silhouettes than most) and the Western (when Boyd confronts a group of Harlan power brokers in season 4, he’s framed from behind like a gunfighter about to draw, even though he has no guns on his hips).
Some of the series’ seasons were, to put it mildly, better than others, and for some reason they were the even-numbered ones. (The peak was season 2, with Margo Martindale as backwoods crime lord Mags Bennett, whose offer of moonshine should never be accepted.) The only superfluous season was the fifth, where a show that was usually so impeccable in its casting for some reason thought quintessential New York guy Michael Rapaport would make a convincing Florida swamp rat; but at least it set the stage for the magnificent final season, which focused tightly on the central trio of Ava, Boyd, and Raylan, characters bonded by love and wary respect as well as rivalry and resentment.
The key question for the three of them—indeed, for most of the major characters—is whether they can let go of old pains, grudges, and fantasies long enough to make a peaceful future for themselves. Turns out it’s harder than even the wisest among them imagined. Raylan tries to unload the family home that’s represented nothing but misery, fear, and loss to him, where he had to grow up eyeing the future burial plots not only for his parents but for himself. At one point, an undertaker tells him, “What you are moving is not your mother’s remains, but the idea of her remains.” The more you turn that sentence over in your mind, the more it seems like the key to Raylan’s stop-and-start progress toward controlling his pride and temper and becoming something other than the adult version of an angry, abused, helpless child, a hateful criminal’s son. Everything’s a ritual, everything’s a symbol, is the point: Once you accept that, you don’t feel as beholden to the idea of being “true” to your family, your home, your town, or your county, and you can make tough decisions that are ultimately good for your development.
—MZS & AS
76–100
Outlier Classics
thirtysomething (ABC, 1987–1991) Total score: 78
The gentrification of prime time didn’t begin with thirtysomething, Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz’s drama about the lives of white, upper-middle-class, once-radical baby boomers in Philadelphia; but this mostly low-key, tenderhearted drama does feel like a milestone in retrospect, in that it proved that this milieu could be fertile ground for intelligent popular art.
thirtysomething was the first critically acclaimed drama built around the life choices, moral struggles, and self-doubts of characters who could have been classmates of the core cast of Return of the Secaucus Seven or The Big Chill. The main characters were advertising agency partners Michael Steadman (Ken Olin) and Elliot Weston (Timothy Busfield), their wives, Hope Steadman (Mel Harris) and Nancy Weston (Patricia Wettig), Michael’s single photographer cousin, Melissa (Melanie Mayron), Hope’s best friend, Ellyn Warren (Polly Draper), Michael’s bestie, Gary Shepherd (Peter Horton), and Gary’s eventual wife, Susannah Hart (Patricia Kalember).
The show mined much of its drama from the sorts of predicaments that successful people in the entertainment industry dealt with all the time: remodeling a house; dealing with the demands of their children, coworkers, and clients; preparing to face their parents’ decline and death (Eddie Albert was brilliant in a supporting role as Elliot’s dad, Charlie, who got divorced and moved to California). The situations were so mundane, compared to what the characters on legal and cop and hospital dramas went through, that when thirtysomething introduced a more overtly grim or traumatic arc, such as Nancy’s struggle with ovarian cancer or the wave of despair unleashed on the group by Gary’s freakish death in a car wreck, it hit audiences with hammer-blow force.
As was the case with Zwick and Herskovitz’s other ABC dramas, My So-Called Life, Relativity, and Once and Again, there were complaints that the story lines occurred deep inside the collective navel of the Yuppie; therefore, there was no reason for anyone of a less-fortunate class to care what happened. The show overcame such objections by portraying the characters’ world with anthropological exa
ctness, conceiving every episode and scene in cinematic rather than purely theatrical terms, and creating conditions that allowed great lead and supporting performances (including David Clennon’s scene-stealing work as Michael and Elliot’s smug, opportunistic boss, Miles Drentell, so memorable that the producers brought him back for Once and Again) to flower.
—MZS
Columbo (NBC, 1971–1978; ABC, 1989–2003) Total score: 77
Right now, we’re in the midst of a boom in TV detective geniuses that somehow requires two different contemporary Sherlock Holmes series, and that was recently home to Gil Grissom on CSI, Adrian Monk on Monk, Robert Goren on Law & Order: Criminal Intent, and Patrick Jane on The Mentalist, among many other crime-fighting savants who need little help to figure out whodunit, and usually are happy to let everyone know how brilliant they are.
It’s funny, then, to look back to Lieutenant Columbo (no first name given, though if you squinted at his badge, it read “Frank”), who initially presented as the slovenly, inarticulate, blue-collar antithesis of all those Holmesian heroes, yet who time and again proved to be the smartest TV sleuth of them all.
Columbo was introduced in “Enough Rope,” a 1960 episode of the anthology series The Chevy Mystery Show, written by Richard Levinson and William Link. It pitted Columbo (then played by Bert Freed) against a psychologist who has seemingly committed the perfect crime in killing his wife so he can be with his lover. The killer thinks little of the detective assigned to the case, but as the title suggests, Columbo’s modus operandi is already in place: Play dumb, keep asking questions, and eventually give the bad guy enough rope to hang himself with his own statements.
TV (The Book) Page 32