TV (The Book)

by Alan Sepinwall

  But it’s still hard to revisit this series without seeing its hipster facetiousness as a roundabout kind of sincerity. The joke was ultimately on people who saw the show only as a joke: Batman’s concern for Gotham was as sincere as the worrywart goodness of Christopher Reeve’s Superman in the post-Watergate ’70s, and there are moments when Batman/Bruce’s easygoing patriarchal warmth toward Robin/Dick Grayson seems a harbinger of the Reagan ’80s, which saw some of the same boomers who found the ’Man so absurd or menacing in the ’60s acquiring $100 sneakers, stock portfolios, and Republican Party memberships. (Other times Batman seems like a toasted hippie fantasy of law enforcement; though he tends to lecture rather than talk, he’s nicer than Joe Friday, and he often sticks up for the kids.)

  Historical resonances aside, the ’60s Batman is still a breath of fresh air if you grew up on the default, post–Frank Miller “Dark Knight” incarnation of Batman, who wore “armor” rather than a costume and snarled rather than spoke. Think about that for more than five seconds and then ask which image of a superhero is sillier.

  —MZS

  King of the Hill (Fox, 1997–2010) Total score: 75

  Mike Judge created Beavis and Butt-Head, and Greg Daniels wrote for The Simpsons at its peak. Both shows were once accused of heralding the end of Western civilization as we knew it, and though civilization has done just fine, it’s not too surprising that when the two men teamed up to create a show, it would be one about a man convinced everything was better in the good old days.

  But what made King of the Hill so special was that it chose Hank Hill’s side of the argument most of the time. Yes, he was uptight, had trouble expressing his emotions, and worried far too much about son Bobby’s (Pamela Segall Adlon) love of prop comedy. “That boy ain’t right,” Hank always said with both amazement and concern. But the series shared his dismay about things like the rise of big-box stores and the resulting loss of pride in craftsmanship and customer service. Hank could be a clown, but he knew how to take care of his lawn and his propane grill, dangit, and King of the Hill made it clear that it also admired those traits and many more.

  Judge and Daniels are such great, gifted writers that they could have made a very funny show where Hank was a target of mockery (much like Tom Anderson, his Beavis and Butt-Head doppelgänger), but it’s hard to imagine it lasting nearly as long, nor being as emotionally rich, as what we got from a version where Hank was the sane man in an increasingly insane world, in a series that wound up feeling not like a mash-up of The Simpsons and Beavis, but the best elements of The Simpsons and The Andy Griffith Show.

  —AS

  Veronica Mars (UPN, 2004–2006; CW, 2006–2007) Total score: 75

  One show can’t justify an entire network’s existence, but Veronica Mars came close.

  UPN spent eleven years locked in a pointless battle with the WB to see who could be TV’s fifth-place broadcaster, shuffling through multiple identities—We’re the Star Trek network! We’re the Homeboys in Outer Space network! We’re UPS for UPN, here to pander to middle America!—before both merged into the CW, whose combined DNA far more closely resembles the WB’s than it does UPN’s.

  But UPN also gave us the unexpected delight that was Veronica Mars, Rob Thomas’s high school noir about a former popular girl who, in the wake of a tragedy, reinvents herself as a teenage private eye apprenticing under her disgraced ex-cop father, Keith (Enrico Colantoni). A ridiculous idea on paper, it came to vivid life through the crackling dialogue of Thomas, Diane Ruggiero, and others, and through the tart, tough, vulnerable title performance by Kristen Bell.

  Season-long mystery arcs have proved historically tricky for almost every TV show, with the resolution being either something the audience had long since predicted or something so out of left field that it felt like a cheat. But the first-season Veronica Mars arc—involving the murder of Veronica’s best friend, Veronica’s unexpected romance with bad boy Logan (Jason Dohring), and the reopening of many old wounds in a beach town that’s home to only the superrich and their blue-collar servants—is a master class in how to do it right.

  The next couple of seasons were uneven in their attempt to catch lightning in a bottle again, but for one year, Veronica Mars was so great it made UPN jokes feel like old news, and filled the show’s fans with such love that, years later, they dipped into their own pockets to fund a Kickstarter campaign for a reunion movie.

  —AS

  Cagney & Lacey (CBS, 1981–1988) Total score: 74

  It took a long time for TV to build a cop show around partners who were both women; the template was usually two or more men, a man and a woman (Hunter), or a glamorous loner (Police Woman). Cagney & Lacey got the memo, then threw it out. Despite widespread indifference from male viewers and weak ratings, this character-driven procedural survived for six seasons, injecting estrogen into a genre that had been tediously macho.

  Created by feminist activist Barbara Avedon and TV executive Barbara Corday, the show started out as a riff on the mismatched-partners template, pairing two spirited, quirky female “types,” the married mother Mary Beth Lacey (Tyne Daly) and the single, career-oriented Christine Cagney (Sharon Gless). The working title was Newman and Redford (as in Paul and Robert, stars of the classic buddy films Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting); the network changed it for fear of getting sued, but as Cagney and Lacey worked their fictional Manhattan neighborhood of Midtown South, they became a more harmonious and mutually supportive duo than Newman and Redford had ever played, their jocular banter enriched by knowledge of how hard it was to be women doing what was thought to be men’s work.

  It was equally hard for a female-focused drama to survive in a male-dominated medium. Cagney & Lacey was originally a TV-movie, with M*A*S*H star Loretta Swit as Cagney. It was canceled after its initial, low-rated six-episode run in 1981 (featuring Meg Foster as Cagney), and returned for a regular series run in 1982–1983 (with Gless as Cagney). But it wasn’t out of the woods yet. Cagney was deemed too déclassé, so her backstory was revised to make her the daughter of an upper-middle-class professional woman who had married a working-class cop. Even then, CBS pushed the producers to make Cagney “softer” and more stereotypically girlish—which was also the reason behind the switch from Foster to Gless—so that casual viewers wouldn’t assume she was a lesbian.

  The writers addressed the network’s demands without damaging the partners’ dramatic integrity, charting their workplace battles (and Cagney’s many relationships) with sharp humor, and building memorable stories around workplace misogny, sexual harassment, the callous treatment of rape survivors by police, and reproductive rights. The latter was the focus of 1985’s “The Clinic,” which finds the partners investigating an abortion clinic bombing that claimed the life of a homeless man; Lacey reveals that she once terminated a pregnancy in Puerto Rico rather than seek illegal and possibly dangerous treatment in the United States, while Cagney expresses ambivalence due to her Catholic upbringing but ultimately supports a woman’s right “to make up her mind about her own body.” Antiabortion activists lobbied CBS to spike the episode and pressured affiliates not to show it, but it aired as scheduled, becoming the first installment of a regular series since CBS’s Maude to put pro-choice sentiments in the mouths of central characters.

  —MZS

  EZ Streets (CBS, 1996–1997) Total score: 74

  Wiseguy (CBS, 1987–1990) Total score: 74

  In the era of The Sopranos, The Wire, and Breaking Bad, CBS was the network of CSI, Without a Trace, and NCIS. Yet, despite its reputation for comfort-food crime procedurals, CBS was home to two incredible, intensely serialized cable-type dramas years before there even were dramas on cable.

  The first of those, Wiseguy, came from perhaps the last producer you’d expect to be involved in something like it. Stephen J. Cannell wasn’t a hack, but nor did he carry himself like an artist. He was a master craftsman, who could assemble works both exceedingly simple (The A-Team) and those aspiring
to something more adult (The Rockford Files). Cannell always made sure the product was put together with care, in a way that felt comforting but fresh, and where everything would be neatly wrapped up by the hour’s end.

  But just because a man prefers to keep things simple doesn’t mean he can’t do complex, as Cannell and his A-Team partner Frank Lupo would demonstrate with Wiseguy, a show that proved they could make filet mignon just as easily as hamburger.

  Better than any cop show before it, Wiseguy understood that the greatest asset of TV for storytelling purposes was time. The show’s hero, federal agent Vinnie Terranova (Ken Wahl), was unremarkable, which made him ideally suited to infiltrate criminal organizations. Other cop shows had sent their heroes undercover, and/or given them recurring outlaw foes, but none had been willing to park themselves in one story line for a long stretch and let their hero and audience alike really get to know the bad guys.

  It wasn’t hard to understand why Vinnie’s enduring conflict of the series was guilt over betraying the trust of each of the villains. The writers and the guest actors brought each of these bad guys to such vivid life that it was like we were all being seduced by them. For some of the guests, like Jerry Lewis or Glenn Frey, Wiseguy was a chance to reinvent an image, or to prove dramatic chops after becoming famous for other reasons. For others, this was simply the role—and opportunity—of a lifetime.

  Wiseguy’s first two villains were its best. We were introduced to Vinnie’s world as he bonded with Atlantic City mob boss Sonny Steelgrave, played by journeyman actor Ray Sharkey. Sonny would die of self-inflicted electrocution, but Sharkey played the entire run as if he had been shot through with a few thousand volts right before the director called “Action!” After a career on the margins, Sharkey tore into the part for everything it was worth.

  After that came Mel Profitt: a silky, incestuous, drug-addicted crime lord who had a knack for keeping all his darkest secrets well-hidden from the world (shooting up in his feet, for instance, because “the toes knows”), but not from Vinnie. The man playing him in such mesmerizing fashion? A young, unknown Kevin Spacey.

  Later seasons kept shortening the arcs, and the last one did away with Vinnie altogether. But it’s not hard to imagine the great showrunners of the twenty-first century looking at the Steelgrave and Profitt stories and asking themselves, “What if?”

  Then there was EZ Streets, which starred Ken Olin as Cameron Quinn, a detective in an unnamed Rust Belt city; Joe Pantoliano as his gangster target, Jimmy Murtha (five years before Joey Pants popped up on The Sopranos, and with an even better performance than the one that won him the Emmy there); and Jason Gedrick as Danny Rooney, the parolee caught in the middle of their game. The series, created by Paul Haggis, featured storytelling so unabashedly dense and serialized that you not only had to watch every episode to have a prayer of understanding it, if you looked away from the screen at the wrong moment, you could become hopelessly lost. (I swear, one of the season’s most important plot points was conveyed by a split-second nod delivered by a minor character to someone offscreen.) CBS’s audience unsurprisingly ran screaming from it, and the show was effectively canceled after only two episodes had aired.

  While the series was in limbo, Haggis took it to HBO, which was starting to get into the drama business, and claims he was told they’d love to buy it, but only after they held a meeting on another show—which turned out to be The Sopranos.

  A few years too early, and half a dial away from being a phenomenon, EZ Streets instead had to settle for being something so rich and engrossing that it made its handful of viewers ravenous for other things like it. They would soon get it, in great abundance, far from CBS.

  —AS

  BEST DADS

  1. Charles Ingalls, Little House on the Prairie

  2. Andy Taylor, The Andy Griffith Show

  3. Mike Brady, The Brady Bunch

  4. Cliff Huxtable, The Cosby Show

  5. Eric Taylor, Friday Night Lights

  6. Bob Belcher, Bob’s Burgers

  7. Lucas McCain, The Rifleman

  8. Howard Cunningham, Happy Days

  9. Rocky Rockford, The Rockford Files

  10. Jim Anderson, Father Knows Best

  BEST MOMS

  1. June Cleaver, Leave It to Beaver

  2. Clair Huxtable, The Cosby Show

  3. Tami Taylor, Friday Night Lights

  4. Cookie Lyon, Empire

  5. Marion Cunningham, Happy Days

  6. Molly Goldberg, The Goldbergs (1949)

  7. Marta Hanson, I Remember Mama

  8. Elyse Keaton, Family Ties

  9. Florida Evans, Good Times

  10. Patty Chase, My So-Called Life

  11. Jean Weir, Freaks and Geeks

  Gilmore Girls (WB/CW, 2000–2007) Total score: 74

  So many elements of the life of Lorelai Gilmore (Lauren Graham) are sheer fantasy: that she and teen daughter Rory (Alexis Bledel) could eat obscene amounts of unhealthy food at all times yet remain supermodel-thin, that the sleepy Connecticut town of Stars Hollow would have come together to help Lorelai raise Rory after she gave birth at sixteen, and that both Gilmore girls would always have the perfect pop culture bon mot ready to comment on the occasion, and delivered as warp-speed banter.

  But as created by Amy Sherman-Palladino, the fantasy of Gilmore Girls was an intoxicating one. Stars Hollow was at times a parody of a caricature of small-town Americana, but who wouldn’t want to live there? And perhaps no human other than Sherman-Palladino herself is able to speak that quickly and cleverly at every second, but Graham, Kelly Bishop (as Emily, Lorelai’s disapproving aristocrat of a mother), and the rest of the cast delivered those lines with such panache that who would have preferred they speak more naturally?

  And the show smartly laced the fantasy with some harsh realities, like the decades-old hurt between Emily and Lorelai over Lorelai’s decision to raise a daughter on her own, or Lorelai’s self-destructive romantic life, or the conflict between the two leads as Rory grew from perfect little daughter into a young woman making many of the same mistakes her mother once did.

  Sherman-Palladino left before its final season, but is working on a Gilmore miniseries for Netflix that will revisit the family years later, and will presumably reveal the mysterious four final words she’d always promised to end the series on. Whatever they wind up being, I’m sure they’ll be somehow funny and sweet, feature an obscure reference, and be delivered very quickly.

  —AS

  Six Feet Under (HBO, 2001–2005) Total score: 74

  The first thing we see on Alan Ball’s creation is a series of images redolent of death and decay: a raven flying through an azure sky; a tilt-down to a lone tree rooted in a meadow, followed by a pair of tightly clasped hands rushing into the foreground and then letting go; another pair of hands, probably a mortician’s, being washed in water; a pair of bare feet on a slab, marked with a toe tag; a pivoting point of view of clouds from a supine person’s viewpoint; a single gurney wheel tracking across a slick floor. Thomas Newman’s credits music chimes and chimes. The bell tolls. The bell tolls again. It never stops.

  The first character we meet is the patriarch of the mortuary-owning Fisher family, Nathaniel Sr. (Richard Jenkins), a mortuary owner who becomes his own customer when a bus crash claims his life in the pilot’s opening moments. Other Fishers soon enter the picture: the grieving widow, Ruth (Frances Conroy), who’s not quite as loyal to her husband as her family might think; a hard-living, cynical older brother named Nate (Peter Krause of Sports Night), who’s fallen for a stranger named Brenda Chenowith (Rachel Griffiths), who shared an anonymous tryst with him in an airport; a levelheaded middle brother, David (Michael C. Hall), who seems a logical candidate to take over the family business but is tied up in knots over his inability to admit that he’s gay; and a troubled kid sister, Claire (Lauren Ambrose), who anesthetizes the pain of her empty life with drugs.

  It sounds like an awfully depressing bunch, yet Six Fe
et manages to maintain a relatively upbeat tone. Much of this stems from the sheer energy of the performers. Ball, writer of American Beauty and future adapter of HBO’s True Blood, mapped out the series and wrote much of it, pulling off some nice bits of playwriting craftsmanship. When it’s not saddling its players with too-expositional dialogue (“My whole life I’ve been a tourist,” Nate admits—a comment rendered unnecessary by his evident comfort with airports), Six Feet cleverly suggests parallels between the family mortuary business, which labors to make the dead look almost alive, and American society, which spiritually embalms its citizens with materialism, unrealistic life expectations, and meaningless pop culture dreck.

  The series also indirectly honors the craft of acting, which raises abstract characters from death on the page and allows them to live onscreen. Jenkins appears repeatedly throughout the series, conversing with his wife and sons like a Shakepearean specter; the living characters are often seen talking with the dead. The deceased are portrayed not as literal apparitions but as shards of the living character’s self-image, influences that haunt every major decision they make until death claims them, too. Vivid supporting characters drift in and out over the seasons, including Brenda’s bipolar brother Billy (Jeremy Sisto); geologist George Sibley (James Cromwell), who becomes Ruth’s second husband; Freddy Rodriguez as Nate and David’s mortician and business partner, Federico Diaz; and Mathew St. Patrick as Keith Charles, David’s tough but kindhearted life mate, a policeman who resents David’s inability to be open about his sexuality, and who later becomes traumatized by the unceasing violence of his job.