TV (The Book)
Page 35
Ball and his writers moved through five seasons with some difficulty, often resorting to seemingly arbitrary and sometimes violent or perverse plot twists to goose the audience’s flagging interest (the most notorious of these is a season 4 episode that spends most of an hour on David getting kidnapped by a crackhead). But in retrospect these flourishes seem consistent with the show’s central conceit, established not just in Nate Sr.’s sudden death but in the regular prologues showing how the mortuary’s subjects died: Life can turn on you at any moment, for no reason. The opening expirations were sometimes darkly comical, sometimes horrendous or weird, sometimes sadly mundane. Many times you assumed the cameo character you’d been following would get offed, only to be shocked when the victim turned out to be someone tangentially connected to them. Six Feet paid off this recurring bit in its brilliant finale, the last few minutes of which jump into the future to show how and when all of the show’s major characters will die. Six Feet’s opening credits, which are filled with resonant images of doom and decay, merge here in the mind with those how-they-died prologues, and as we see all of the characters growing old and gray, sickening and shrinking, and finally succumbing to the inevitable, the sprightly chimes of Newman’s theme resonate on a poetic level. The bells toll for everyone.
—MZS
BEST CARS
(American shows only, so no Mach 5 from Speed Racer)
1. KITT, Knight Rider
2. General Lee, The Dukes of Hazzard
3. Robin Masters’s Ferrari, Magnum, P.I.
4. Batmobile, Batman
5. Mystery Machine, Scooby-Doo
6. B. A. Baracus’s van, The A-Team
7. Gran Torino, Starsky & Hutch
8. Bluth Company stair car, Arrested Development
9. Black Beauty, Green Hornet
10. Crockett’s Ferrari Spyder and Tubbs’s Cadillac convertible, Miami Vice
11. El Camino, My Name Is Earl
12. Pontiac Firebird, The Rockford Files
13. Fred’s foot-powered car, The Flintstones
14. The Munster Koach, The Munsters
15. Jed’s roadster, The Beverly Hillbillies
BEST SPIES
1. Sydney Bristow, Alias
2. Jack Bauer, 24
3. (tie) Philip and Elizabeth Jennings, The Americans
4. Napoleon Solo, The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
5. Sarah Walker, Chuck
6. Michael Westen, Burn Notice
7. Angus MacGyver, MacGyver
8. Agent 99, Get Smart
9. Lana Kane, Archer
10. Rollin Hand, Mission: Impossible
11. Artemus Gordon, The Wild Wild West
12. Kale Ingram, Rubicon
13. Alexander Scott, I Spy
14. Saul “the Bear” Berenson, Homeland
Sports Night (ABC, 1998–2000) Total score: 74
Television, meet Aaron Sorkin.
The medium didn’t know what to make of the playwright and screenwriter (A Few Good Men, Malice) when he first made the move to TV. And Sorkin was clearly still finding his way in the early days of Sports Night, a dramedy set backstage at a cable sports network. The jokes—what there were of them—tended to lean too much on repeated dialogue (to the constant befuddlement of ABC executives, who forced a laugh track on the show for much of its first season), and the romantic comedy beats already showed signs of the uncomfortable gender politics that would bloom into enormous problems on later Sorkin shows-about-shows Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip and The Newsroom.
Some Sorkin fans might argue that the most important thing about Sports Night was the way it prepped Sorkin and director Thomas Schlamme for their Emmy-winning collaboration the following season on The West Wing, but that would sell this show very short. Even with those early bumps, Sports Night had Sorkin’s crackling dialogue and those gorgeous speeches. (The on-air apology Josh Charles’s Dan Rydell delivers to his late brother in the show’s second episode remains one of the best bits of oratory Sorkin—or anyone else, for that matter—has written for the small screen.) It had a cast of actors (also including Peter Krause, Felicity Huffman, Robert Guillaume, Joshua Malina, and Sabrina Lloyd) who seemed born to deliver Sorkin’s words, plus Schlamme’s gliding camerawork, a Capraesque sense of optimism and fun, and, in time, a superb balance between comedy and pathos.
In the series finale, a white-knight investor buys the network, insisting, “Anybody who can’t make money on Sports Night should get out of the moneymaking business.” Sports Night was unlikely to ever be a big hit (Sorkin has had much greater commercial success in movies than television), and it had its flaws from beginning to end, but each time Sorkin returned to the inside-TV well, it was hard not to wish he could just get the original band back together.
—AS
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (Syndicated, 1993–1999) Total score: 73
Deep Space Nine was often the unloved stepchild of the latter-day Trek empire. For most of its run, it overlapped with either Star Trek: The Next Generation or Star Trek: Voyager, both of which had familiar franchise trappings like starships and visits to strange new worlds, while DS9 took place on a space station in an unglamorous corner of the galaxy, and its main character, troubled widower Benjamin Sisko (Avery Brooks), didn’t even attain the traditional rank of captain until the end of season 3.
But that unusually fixed position in space had its advantages. At its absolute strongest, Next Generation is the best of the spin-offs, as you might expect from a show employing the wildly overqualified Patrick Stewart as its star. But DS9 was more consistently excellent, dug deeper with its characters, and took advantage of its also-ran position to break franchise rules against interpersonal conflict, serialization, and other fundamental elements of modern TV drama. It boldly stayed where no Star Trek show had stayed before, building an ever-richer world involving politics, religion, genocide, and the brutality of war.
It could have fun when it wanted to—say, dropping Sisko and friends into the middle of classic Trek’s “The Trouble with Tribbles”—but was rightly content with being the most serious, mature, and cohesive of all TV Treks.
—AS
Batman: The Animated Series (Fox, 1992–1995) Total score: 72
Animation is often thought of as a more natural fit for superhero movies and TV shows not simply because comic books physically resemble cartoons much more than they do live action but because animation has an unlimited special-effects budget, rendering the entire medium into something like Green Lantern’s power ring: If you can imagine it, you can make it real.
Outside of occasional appearances by superpowered villains like Clayface and Mr. Freeze, Batman: The Animated Series (sometimes known as The Adventures of Batman & Robin) didn’t often have to depict things that wouldn’t have looked convincing in the Batman films of the ’90s. Instead, the series—developed by Bruce Timm and Eric Radomski—used the power of animation in a counterintuitive way: to make Batman and his rogues’ gallery seem more real than they ever could in live action.
Even when Batman and his adventures are taken as seriously as they were in the Christopher Nolan films, there’s still an inherent ludicrousness to the image of a man fighting crime in a batlike costume. Batman: The Animated Series never had that problem, using stylized designs for Batman (Kevin Conroy), the Joker (Mark Hamill), and everyone else—including Joker’s lovestruck sidekick Harley Quinn (Arleen Sorkin), a creation of Timm and writer Paul Dini who proved so popular, the comic books had no choice but to incorporate her—but placing them in a film noir world where the many tragedies of Bruce Wayne and Gotham City never felt ironic or campy.
To many Batman purists, the show (along with spin-off film Batman: Mask of the Phantasm) is the best screen adaptation the character has ever had. But even if you prefer a different flavor of the Caped Crusader, these eighty-five episodes are hard to knock as a thrilling, emotionally resonant take on a Dark Knight unfettered by a need to make him seem plausible. In this format, Batm
an needed no justification or defense, and this creative team could just let him loose on the biggest monsters Gotham had to offer.
—AS
Boardwalk Empire (HBO, 2010–2014) Total score: 72
Created by Sopranos writer Terence Winter, starring Sopranos alum Steve Buscemi, and set in the Garden State—albeit seventy-nine years before our first meeting with Tony—the Prohibition gangster drama was inevitably compared to its Jersey predecessor. The more apt HBO analogue, though, is The Wire, which favored a similar novelistic structure that tied together all the stories by season’s end to make the whole feel greater than the sum of its parts.
Those impressive parts included stunning direction (by Martin Scorsese, Tim Van Patten, and others) and an incredible collection of supporting players: Michael Shannon as a fallen Treasury agent, Michael Pitt and Jack Huston as WWI vets damaged in very different ways, Kelly Macdonald as a deceptively canny widow, Stephen Graham as a volcanic but sympathetic Al Capone, Michael Stuhlbarg as the calculating Arnold Rothstein, Jeffrey Wright as a hypnotic Harlem crime lord, and so many more.
At the center of all these great performances and all this attention to narrative and visual detail was Buscemi as fixer Nucky Thompson, whose careful, inscrutable style didn’t always serve the show well in elevating him above the more colorful gangsters. It’s not a coincidence that the best Boardwalk season, the fourth, temporarily makes Michael Kenneth Williams’s fiery Chalky White into Nucky’s narrative equal.
Which is another thing it has more in common with The Wire than The Sopranos. Anyone at any time could be The Wire lead; put Tony on the sidelines for long and The Sopranos doesn’t work. Boardwalk was at its best when Nucky was just one character among many. Pitt’s Jimmy Darmody once warned Nucky that he couldn’t be “half a gangster” anymore, but Boardwalk surrounded him with so many full-on gangsters that it got by just fine.
—AS
NewsRadio (NBC, 1995–1999) Total score: 72
Emboldened by the success of Friends, and convinced that Ross and Rachel’s slow-burning relationship was at the heart of that success, NBC tried turning itself into the romantic comedy network in the mid-to late ’90s. No coupling was too implausible to become fodder for sappy promos, and no obstacle was too stupid to put in the path of true love so that it wouldn’t arrive until at least the February sweeps period of season 3.
NewsRadio, however, very clearly missed that memo, and as a result wound up the great, unloved child of the Must-See TV era.
In only the show’s second episode, with virtually no buildup, station manager Dave Nelson (Dave Foley) has sex with reporter Lisa Miller (Maura Tierney). NewsRadio creator Paul Simms did this over the objections of his bosses at NBC, robbing the show of a marketing hook, but giving it something more creatively useful: a rich and abundant source of humor as those two continually broke up, reunited, and were constantly mocked by their coworkers for it.
It was one of many elements of this weird but hilarious show that NBC execs didn’t appreciate; perhaps not coincidentally, NewsRadio was one of the few sitcoms of the era to never once air on Thursdays after Friends or Seinfeld. NBC put a lot of sitcoms on Thursday in the ’90s, many of them utter garbage like Veronica’s Closet and Union Square, but this gem—with Foley as the best kind of exasperated straight man, Phil Hartman finally finding a normal(ish) role to fit his vast comic gifts as the pompous news anchor Bill McNeal, and Stephen Root having a ball as the station’s eccentric owner, Jimmy James, among other pleasures—kept being assigned to obscure nights and times. (If NBC could invent a day of the week no one would ever hear of, they’d have scheduled NewsRadio there.) While nobody was looking, NewsRadio did amazing work, including a scene—from season 4’s “Super Karate Monkey Death Car,” where Jimmy reads aloud from a memoir that’s been translated from English to Japanese, and then back to English as gibberish (“But Jimmy has fancy plans, and pants to match!”)—that’s as worthy of a sitcom time capsule as Lucy at the chocolate factory or Reverend Jim taking his driving test.
—AS
Picket Fences (CBS, 1992–1996) Total score: 72
Picket Fences creator David E. Kelley had bigger commercial successes: He ran L.A. Law during its mid-’80s peak, and his law-office romantic comedy Ally McBeal struck such a chord—for good and for ill—that the title character appeared on the cover of Time alongside Susan B. Anthony, Betty Friedan, and Gloria Steinem, with the headline “IS FEMINISM DEAD?”
But Picket Fences was Kelley’s signature work. It combined the former lawyer’s love of courtroom theatrics with his love of soliloquies about the way we live now, balanced with the kind of kinky, quirky touches that would eventually swallow later shows like Ally and Boston Legal whole.
Set in a small Wisconsin town where strange and dramatic events took place with improbable regularity, Picket Fences was a volatile blend of comedy, family drama, cop drama, political drama, and legal drama. It presented utterly ridiculous characters like hammy lawyer Douglas Wambaugh (played by Yiddish theater vet Fyvush Finkel) alongside serious ones like cop Jimmy Brock (Tom Skerritt) and his doctor wife, Jill (Kathy Baker), and successfully demanded that you view them all as equals, and it found a way to wrap up almost every story with a powerful oratory from Judge Henry Bone (Ray Walston from My Favorite Martian, of all people).
Kelley’s among the most gifted wordsmiths TV has ever employed, and his skill at crafting monologues has helped earn his actors (including Baker, Skerritt, Finkel, and Walston here) more than three dozen Emmys across multiple series. His shows tend to combine so many incompatible elements, though, that they rarely stay in balance for long. Over its four-season run, Picket Fences not only covered more of what fascinated Kelley than the other series did before or after, but somehow held itself together for longer than the others could.
—AS
Scrubs (NBC, 2001–2008; ABC, 2009–2010) Total score: 72
In the late ’80s, TV gave birth to a new hybrid form called the dramedy. The name suggested an even blend between drama and comedy, but more often than not these shows have been dramas that simply run for a half hour, or hour-long shows that are a shade lighter in tone than Breaking Bad.
Scrubs, though, was equally comfortable on either side of that blurred line. Following the residencies of young doctors J. D. Dorian (Zach Braff), Elliot Reid (Sarah Chalke), and Christopher Turk (Donald Faison), it laughed in the face of death—or, at least, had J.D. lose a game of Connect Four with the Grim Reaper—cried at the complexities of life, and was frequently overtaken by J.D.’s hyperactive imagination, which could transform the doctor/surgeon rivalry into a musical number out of West Side Story, or merge Elliot and Turk into his ideal roommate. (The show grew more creatively uneven in its later years as the line blurred between the real world and J.D.’s imagination—even if some of the oddball “real” sequences, like Turk expertly performing the choreography from Bell Biv Devoe’s “Poison” video, were delightful—before reining itself in for the final season with the original cast.)
Patients died often at Sacred Heart Hospital, and those deaths were treated with the utmost seriousness. Yet Scrubs was able to quickly pivot from tragedy to absurdity and back again, allowing J.D. to embarrass himself in front of sarcastic Dr. Perry Cox (John C. McGinley) in one moment, then help counsel his mentor through the aftermath of a fatal mistake in the next.
It was silly, it was stupid, it was lovely, and it was often great.
—AS
WKRP in Cincinnati (CBS, 1978–1982) Total score: 72
Hugh Wilson’s series about a struggling Cincinnati, Ohio, radio station came from Mary Tyler Moore’s production company MTM, which also produced such intelligent, assured, fundamentally kindhearted programs as The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Bob Newhart Show, Hill Street Blues, and St. Elsewhere. The main character was station manager Andy Travis (Gary Sandy), who kept trying to find new ways to boost WKRP’s weak ratings, including switching its format in the pilot from easy listening to r
ock and roll and R & B. Station owner Arthur Carlson (Gordon Jump), an amiable but befuddled and easily cowed man, kowtowed to his dragon-lady mama, Mrs. Carlson (Sylvia Sidney in the pilot, Carol Bruce later), the not-so-secret power behind his throne, and avoided conflict by hiding in his office with his golf putter. The supporting cast included the loudmouthed, unctuous, white-shoed advertising director Herb Tarlek (Frank Bonner), whose suits seemed patterned after Scottish kilts; late-night soul show DJ Venus Flytrap (future Frank’s Place star Tim Reid), the station’s lone African American and a consummate ladies’ man; burned-out ex-hippie Dr. Johnny Fever (Howard Hesseman); Mr. Carlson’s secretary, Jennifer Marlowe (Loni Anderson), who was every inch the stereotypical buxom blonde but performed intellectual jujitsu against men who condescended to her; the station’s news director Les Nessman (Richard Sanders), a bespectacled twit in a bow tie who was awful at his job but carried on as if he were the second coming of Edward R. Murrow; and Bailey Quarters (Jan Smithers), a Jill-of-all-trades who would put her journalism-school-trained mind to work in Les’s job if management would only see her talent.
The dominant mode of the show was relaxed, personality-based buffoonery, along the lines of The Bob Newhart Show or Barney Miller, but with a hip sound track. In one great episode, Andy hires a consultant to study the station and recommend changes, and everyone acts as outrageously as possible to reinforce stereotypes and foul up his data; Venus even pretends to threaten Johnny with a switchblade. In another classic, the station’s Thanksgiving Day promotional turkey drop becomes a massacre, with Les narrating the carnage à la the Hindenburg disaster (“Oh, the humanity!”) and Mr. Carlson concluding, “As God is my witness, I thought turkeys could fly.”