TV (The Book)

by Alan Sepinwall

  —MZS

  The Bernie Mac Show (Fox, 2001–2006)

  Stand-up legend Bernie Mac starred as his comic alter ego, Bernie “Mac” McCullough, a comedian who takes in his drug-addict sister’s three kids and tries to raise them with help from his devoted wife, Wanda (Kellita Smith). The show’s lovingly directed, single-camera format evoked Malcolm in the Middle, but the tone, language, and worldview were unapologetically and innovatively black, in a way that channeled Tim Reid’s CBS art-object Frank’s Place, and prefigured the arrival of Black-ish and Empire a decade-plus later. (Black-ish star Anthony Anderson showed up near the end of the run as the children’s previously AWOL father, giving this sitcom and his own an accidental sense of artistic continuity.) Mac’s gruff demeanor and defiant, direct-address monologues marked him as a different kind of sitcom dad, working-class in his outlook and Jackie Gleason–esque in his tendency to go ballistic. The series was distinguished by its cultural details, knockabout humor, and corner-barbershop worldview (Mac caused a minor outcry in the pilot when he pledged to bust disobedient children’s heads “until the white meat shows”), and by its impressive array of guest stars, which included Don Rickles, Angela Bassett, Parker Posey, Stone Cold Steve Austin, Wesley Snipes, Charles Barkley, and, of all people, Hugh Hefner.

  —MZS

  The Bold Ones: The Senator (NBC, 1970–1971)

  Shown as part of an “umbrella” program of series that rotated in and out of the same lineup, The Senator started out as a TV movie (A Clear and Present Danger, not to be confused with the Jack Ryan adventure) and aired seven regular episodes; it stars Hal Holbrook as Senator Hays Stowe, who tries to implement idealism and work out political impasses within the system, which isn’t easy considering how inert and corrupt it can be. Most of the program is shot in a documentary style, letting complex arguments play out in real time, like a town meeting scene in a Frederick Wiseman documentary or an argument over protest strategy in a Ken Loach film. It has such immediacy that when you watch it, you feel as though you’re in the room with these characters, in the early ’70s, getting a sense of what life was actually like.

  —MZS

  A Charlie Brown Christmas and It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown! (CBS, 1965 and 1966)

  Based on Charles Schulz’s comic strip, directed by Bill Melendez, and scored by Vince Guaraldi, these two Peanuts specials represent the creative peak for the trio and rank among the finest single episodes of anything to air on American television. The first, a melancholy examination of the true meaning of Christmas, has been referenced in everything from the early films of Wes Anderson to South Park and Arrested Development; the latter was spoofed in a Simpsons’ “Treehouse of Horror” episode and is never far from the minds of children on Halloween who would really rather get candy in their goodie bag than a rock.

  —MZS

  Chuck season 2 (NBC, 2008–2009)

  Sometimes, TV shows peak in their first seasons, either because the idea has been rolling around in the creator’s head for years until it’s just right, because the concept is inherently limited, or because the show simply burns through too much story up front.

  Sometimes, though, shows are thrown together in relative haste, and need time to sort the wheat from the chaff, and don’t really come into their own until season 2. Case in point: Chuck, a goofy action comedy about Chuck Bartowski (Zachary Levi), a geek at a big-box store who unwittingly uploads an entire government intelligence database into his brain. Created by Chris Fedak and Josh Schwartz (whose The O.C. is a classic case of peaking in season 1 and not having enough plot left after), Chuck went through a lot of trial and error in its abbreviated first season as it tried to figure out the right balance between spy adventure and wacky store hijinks, and how to get the tone quite right so that one minute you’d take Chuck’s peril seriously, or his feelings for his gorgeous handler, Sarah Walker (Yvonne Strahovski), and then the next laugh at Chuck and best friend, Morgan Grimes (Josh Gomez), swapping nerd references at the store.

  When Chuck returned for year two, it was a more confident, more cohesive, and simply more fun show, having made small but crucial improvements up and down the board. Morgan was a lot more entertaining once he stopped being an obstacle to Chuck’s secret identity, for instance, and the spy missions (also involving Adam Baldwin as the sadistically proficient John Casey) became more satisfying once the show started stunt-casting the bad guys and assets, allowing the mere presence of a John Larroquette or Chevy Chase to fill in characterization there wasn’t time to otherwise craft on a show with lots of moving pieces. The action, the comedy, and the romance all began working in perfect harmony.

  It didn’t become great art, but it wasn’t trying to be. It was just pleasurable genre television being done exceptionally well, giving its fans such weekly joy that they became involved in one of the more famous Save Our Show campaigns ever, buying Subway sandwiches in droves to encourage the sponsor to get involved in keeping the show alive.

  Chuck actually stuck around for three more seasons, produced on a lower budget and living perpetually on the edge of cancellation, never again quite recapturing that perfect balance of season 2. But for that one year, Chuck was everything a young Chuck Bartowski might have fantasized a show about his life could one day look like.

  —AS

  The Comeback (HBO, 2005 and 2014)

  This dark sitcom from producer Michael Patrick King (Sex and the City) and producer-star Lisa Kudrow is about a washed-up TV comedy star who tries to revive her career by hiring a camera crew to shoot her latest gig on a sitcom. It’s cringe TV at its finest—a comic acid bath few viewers were brave enough (or masochistic enough) to dip into when it first aired in 2005, although during the intervening decade its reputation grew to the point where HBO brought King and Kudrow back for another go-round. Every week The Comeback forced viewers to ask what, exactly, they want from their protagonists: hard truth or audience-coddling fantasy. It divided viewers’ sympathies, encouraging them to root for Kudrow’s character, the ditsy, aging sitcom starlet Valerie Cherish, then having her scheme, overreach, and self-destruct so horribly that it was hard to look at the screen. The 2014 series was even more punishing because Valerie, already considered too old to be bankable in 2005, was a decade older but just as desperate and deluded. Like The Larry Sanders Show, the classic Canadian media satire More Tears, and Steve Coogan’s various Alan Partridge programs for English TV, The Comeback reminded us that comedy is often tragedy that’s happening to someone else, and that behind each joke, there’s a grievance.

  —MZS

  Cop Rock (ABC, 1990)

  Was Steven Bochco’s musical police drama Cop Rock the most ridiculous show ever to air on an American broadcast network or one of the boldest? The latter—which is not to say that everything in it worked, but that its full-throated belief in its vision was unique, and it deserves a reappraisal. Bochco somehow convinced ABC to green-light this chimera of a show after his critically acclaimed one-two punch of Hill Street Blues and L.A. Law, and he spent his creative capital by envisioning a musical melodrama about the intersection of law enforcement, the criminal courtroom, city hall, and the private lives of citizens with original songs by Randy Newman (who appeared with a band in the opening credits) and characters segueing from spoken dialogue to rock, blues, and rap songs and back again. The pilot featured gang members rapping about the racism and brutality of police while being rousted, and a jury returning a verdict by bursting into a gospel number titled “Guilty.”

  Main characters included Peter Onorati as Vincent LaRusso, a corrupt detective in the vein of Hill Street Blues’ Sal Benedetto, who eventually ends up in prison surrounded by criminals he’d hounded, abused, or framed; Ronny Cox as the harried police chief; and Blues costar Barbara Bosson (Bochco’s then-wife) as the mayor. Some of the actors were not really what you’d call singers, but others (notably Onorati) were terrific; the supporting cast included Vondie Curtis-Hall, Paul McCrane, and Anne Bobby, as w
ell as Kathleen Wilhoite as a manipulative addict who, in the pilot’s chilling final scene, sings a Newman-penned love song to her infant before selling it to black marketers for drug money.

  English playwright Dennis Potter had been working in this vein in England for years to great acclaim, in such miniseries as 1978’s Pennies from Heaven and 1986’s The Singing Detective (Bochco cited the latter as a primary influence), but American network TV was inhospitable to the very idea of Cop Rock, despite inroads made by such formally playful predecessors as Moonlighting and St. Elsewhere. The series ended up on nearly every TV critic’s year-end Worst list, and the ratings cratered a bit more each week, until ABC finally canceled it after its eleventh episode. Viewed in succession, though, its lone season holds together well, despite lumpy storytelling and some songs that feel like placeholders; the middle section has the lurid power of a telenovela and the shamelessness of an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical. Glee is Cop Rock’s hormonal daughter.

  —MZS

  Crime Story season 1 (NBC, 1986–1987)

  One of the lesser known but more fondly remembered Michael Mann productions is Crime Story. Although it was packaged and sold as a period cousin of Miami Vice, the shows had little in common besides cops-and-robbers scripts, a fondness for reflective surfaces, and a deft sense of how to use pop music to enhance the mood. Where Vice was an internalized, at times abstract series set in a kind of dream space, Crime Story was more concrete—an epic cat-and-mouse chase pitting Major Crimes Unit detective Mike Torello (Dennis Farina) and his crew against an up-and-coming mobster named Ray Luca (Anthony Denison), who wanted to conquer the world of organized crime overnight and was talented and ruthless enough to pull it off. Set in early 1960s Chicago and Las Vegas and shot on location in both cities, the series was cocreated by screenwriter Gustave Reininger and Chuck Adamson, a former Chicago police detective turned producer who was a close friend of Mann’s.

  Set on the brink of mass revolt against the status quo, Crime Story showed the American city’s tribal mentality fading, and the melting-pot ideal being replaced by Jesse Jackson’s patchwork-quilt metaphor. The principal cast included actors who had originally been policemen or crooks and had worked with Mann on his 1981 feature Thief, in which the director perversely cast cops as criminals and criminals as cops. (Farina, who had a bit part as a gangster’s henchman in Thief, was a former Chicago police detective before he turned to acting, while John Santucci, who played Luca’s dumb but loyal right-hand man, Pauli Taglia, was an infamous jewel thief who had been arrested by Adamson.) Torello’s Major Crimes Unit included the cigar-chomping, shotgun-toting Walter Clemmons (Paul Butler), a black detective whose pioneering presence went largely unremarked by perps because they didn’t want to get their heads busted. The criminals’ ranks included Italians, Irish, blacks, and Jews (played by Jon Polito, Andrew Dice Clay, David Caruso, Ted Levine, and Michael Madsen, among others) who set aside ethnic hatred in the name of filthy lucre.

  The Sopranos, Lost, Deadwood, The Wire, The Shield, Mad Men, and Breaking Bad walked a wide-open road that Crime Story had done much to pave. The series was a densely plotted serialized drama: Imagine The Godfather: Part II flattened into a comic strip. Each episode began with a recap of the plot up to then, but after a few episodes, there was so much to summarize that the recaps themselves became confusing; this, coupled with the show’s brutal violence and period ambience, probably sealed its fate. Although Crime Story did okay in its original time slot, Fridays after Miami Vice, NBC moved the show to Tuesdays to counterprogram ABC’s Moonlighting, which had a similarly retro flavor but more comedy and sex appeal. With its ratings in free fall, Crime Story got a surprise second-season order from the network. But that wasn’t the end of its troubles. It had reached a natural endpoint in a literally explosive season 1 finale, which wrapped up every loose end; it took a mighty display of pretzel logic to continue the tale. Add in the crippling effect of the 1987–1988 writers’ strike, and the result was a sophomore season so inferior to the first that even some die-hard fans would rather pretend it never happened.

  —MZS

  Dallas (CBS, 1978–1991; TNT, 2012–2014)

  “Like my daddy always said: If you can’t get in the front door, just go around to the back.” That’s one cold pearl of wisdom from J. R. Ewing (Larry Hagman), the drawling Richard III of nighttime soaps, the rapacious engine that powered through every episode of Dallas, making deals and bedding women and pitting fellow members of the Ewing clan against one another to control their family estate, Southfork, and their family-owned petroleum empire.

  The Ewings were like a lusty cartoon version of the Texas oil clan in the novel and movie Giant; the bad guy even had the same initials as James Dean’s antihero Jett Rink, and was one step up on the capitalist evolutionary ladder; he was less interested in drawing crude oil out of the ground than in processing and shipping it all over the world, and building Ewing Oil into a megacorporation to rival Exxon or Mobil. Well—that and getting laid with every big-haired vixen in North Texas. His moral counterweight, Bobby Ewing (Patrick Duffy), was as decent and compassionate as J.R. was ruthless, though he had his moments of weakness. The supporting cast included Barbara Bel Geddes as the family matriarch, Miss Ellie (replaced for one season by It’s a Wonderful Life star Donna Reed when Bel Geddes briefly “retired” from acting); Jim Davis as Miss Ellie’s rock-solid husband, Jock Ewing, the company’s founder; Victoria Principal as Bobby’s wife, Pamela, daughter of the rival Barnes family; Linda Gray as J.R.’s tormented alcoholic wife, Sue Ellen; Charlene Tilton as Lucy Ewing, J.R. and Bobby’s scheming, sensual teenage niece; and Steve Kanaly as ranch hand Ray Krebbs, Jock’s bastard son.

  Their weekly melodramas made Dallas the highest rated and most influential of the nighttime soaps that were all the rage in the 1970s and ’80s, thanks in large part to the success of this series. It inspired one official spin-off, Knots Landing (CBS, 1979–1993), and two ABC imitators: Dynasty (1981–1989), basically Dallas Goes to Denver; and its own proprietary spin-off, The Colbys (1985–1987), which followed members of the Dynasty clan to Los Angeles. Viewed through the lens of today’s more jaded viewers, the show seems exuberant but artless—a brightly lit, indifferently directed, and obvious potboiler. But those qualities were always the key to its success; you were never in doubt as to who any of these people were, and the only mystery was what treachery J.R. would pull off next. He dominated every scene, even ones he wasn’t in, because, like a Shakespearean villain, he was the only character who seemed aware that he was in a play.

  The show perfected the art of the audience-torturing cliff-hanger when, at the end of its third season, J.R. got shot by an unseen assailant (later revealed to be Mary Crosby’s Kristin Shepard, Sue Ellen’s sister); fans and the media went wild speculating on how the story would resolve, and the producers spent the rest of the show’s run trying to top themselves, leading to escalating series of absurdities, including an assassination attempt on Bobby, Bobby’s death in a car wreck, and Bobby’s mysterious return in a shower scene, which revealed that the preceding season had been a dream.

  Dallas returned to TV in 2012 via cable channel TNT, with Hagman reprising his role, and seeming all the more malevolent having survived so long; with his Heat-Miser eyebrows and avowed preference for money over sex, he seemed as agelessly malevolent as The Simpsons’ Mr. Burns, who got shot in a cliff-hanger that itself spoofed Dallas. Hagman finally died in 2013 of the cancer he’d battled for twenty years; both Dallas and the tradition of the middlebrow network prime-time soap died with him, although traces of its DNA can be found in everything from The Sopranos and Boardwalk Empire to Revenge and Scandal—and, of course, Empire and Nashville.

  —MZS

  Dexter season 4 (Showtime, 2009)

  Showtime has this unfortunate ongoing habit of airing shows with limited premises that run forever because they’re too popular not to. Homeland is a recent victim of this phenomenon (see page 326), but never was it more o
bvious than with Dexter, a drama about a serial killer trained by his late cop father to channel his psychopathic instincts in a socially useful way, by killing only other killers. Early on, the show had a great lead performance by Michael C. Hall, a sharp visual sense, and a cheeky sense of humor. It just stayed on the air much too long, until the creative team first developed Stockholm syndrome with the eponymous character and began treating him as a hero, then ran out of ideas entirely and ended the series with Dexter randomly becoming a lumberjack. (And not the fun, cross-dressing, Monty Python kind.)

  There’s a version of the series that could have gone down as a classic, where it ran only three years. Leave the first season intact so the audience can get to know Dexter, his methods, and the people around him. Then keep season 2’s arc where the police get wise to Dexter’s activities, if not his secret identity as one of their own forensic analysts, but don’t wimp out at the end by having Dexter’s crazy girlfriend murder an innocent police officer, rather than letting him do it. Then skip over the misconceived third season with Jimmy Smits as a DA trying to apprentice under Dexter, and go straight to the show’s best year, featuring the cat-and-mouse game between Dexter and Arthur Mitchell (John Lithgow), aka the infamous Trinity Killer.

  Structurally, the Trinity season was a rehash of the first, but Lithgow was mesmerizing as a kindly old man who was so cruel underneath. And the climax, where Dexter kills Arthur, then comes home to find that Arthur had already murdered Dexter’s wife, Rita (Julie Benz), and left their baby son, Harrison, crying in a pool of her blood—repeating the cycle of violence that began when young Dexter found himself covered in his own dead mother’s blood—was such a perfect ending not only to that season, but to Dexter as a whole, that continuing the series felt redundant.