TV (The Book)

by Alan Sepinwall

  —AS

  Maverick (ABC, 1957–1965)

  James Garner’s smart-mouthing, fast-dealing Wild West gambler Bret Maverick was the closest thing TV had to a pure antihero in its black-and-white days. But even he tended to do the right thing when the occasion called for it. This was the show that made Garner one of TV’s best and most enduring stars—and led him to team up with Maverick creator Roy Huggins years later for The Rockford Files—even if he ultimately appeared in about half the episodes for the first few seasons, alternating with Jack Kelly as Bret’s brother, Bart, when the workload got too tough, and then being replaced by Roger Moore and then Robert Colbert when he quit in a contract dispute. Bret may have been “the second-slowest gun in the West,” according to Bart (who admitted to being the first-slowest), but TV in the ’50s and ’60s didn’t lack for cowboys who were quick on the draw. None of them had the pure charm of wily Bret Maverick, though.

  —AS

  Mission: Impossible (NBC, 1966–1973)

  Your mission, should you choose to accept it: to seek out episodes of the original Mission: Impossible, the lean, clever, irresistibly ritualized spy drama-caper adventure that aired each week on NBC for seven seasons; to appreciate the imagination and tenacity of the Impossible Missions Force, a team led by Jim Phelps (Peter Graves) and filled out by intrepid men and women who engaged in international espionage part-time, using skills honed in their civilian jobs; to admire the absurdity of hiring fashion model Cinnamon Carter (Barbara Bain), scientific genius and Collier Electronics founder Bernard “Barney” Collier (Greg Morris), iron-spined weight lifter William “Willy” Armitage (Peter Lupus), actor and escape artist and master of disguise Rollin Hand (Martin Landau) and his replacement, the Great Paris (Star Trek’s Leonard Nimoy), to do dangerous jobs more often assigned to flesh-and-blood superheroes like 007 and Napoleon Solo; to dig the ’60s fashions, cars, and architecture showcased in the series’ international adventures, most of which were faked on sets in and around Los Angeles and populated by actors whose accents were less than United Nations–credible; to think about how much more democratic this ensemble series feels in comparison to the Tom Cruise film spin-offs, which are spectacular and fun, but downplay teamwork in favor of steely-eyed, lone hero endurance; to try and fail not to bob your head in time to Lalo Schifrin’s still-groovy opening credits music, which played out over almost subliminally brief flash-forward images of the episode you were about to watch; and to turn your rational mind off long enough to believe that no task is truly impossible if you hire good people and trust them to do their thing. This entry will self-destruct in five seconds.

  —MZS

  Murphy Brown (CBS, 1988–1998)

  In the ’80s and early ’90s, The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Maude begat a whole bunch of tough, complicated CBS sitcom heroines, particularly Dixie Carter as the eloquent shatterer of bullshit Julia Sugarbaker on Designing Women and five-time Emmy winner Candice Bergen as Murphy Brown: flinty, Motown-singing, recovering-alcoholic star of a prime-time network newsmagazine. An overreliance on name-dropping and topical references have given Murphy Brown the shelf-life of a Stone Phillips bobble-head, but Murphy herself remains one of TV’s great characters, and an important point on the continuum of fictional single women working in TV, even if she’d have little patience for Mary Richards’s sentimentality or Liz Lemon’s… everything. At its peak, the series was such a big deal that Vice President Dan Quayle objected to a story line about Murphy becoming a single mother, treating her as a real-life role model rather than a fictional one. Bergen, and the writing by Diane English and company, were so vivid that you can understand his confusion.

  —AS

  The Odd Couple (ABC, 1970–1975)

  In the fifty-plus years since the first Broadway performance of Neil Simon’s play about two divorced men sharing a New York apartment, The Odd Couple has been adapted into a feature film (with a decades-later sequel), three different TV sitcoms, and countless theatrical remakes. In some versions, the characters have changed races and even genders.

  But of the many versions across stage and screen, the definitive one was the first made for television, adapted by Garry Marshall and Jerry Belson, and starring Tony Randall as clean-freak photographer Felix Unger and Jack Klugman as slovenly sportswriter Oscar Madison. It owes some of that to the ubiquity of its syndicated repeats—for about twenty years, it was all but impossible to channel surf in the late afternoon or early evening without stumbling across the episode where the guys competed on Password—but mainly to the sheer force of will of Randall as Felix.

  Klugman made a fine Oscar, but there were excellent Oscars before and after him (including a few Olives in the gender-flipped play). Randall and his writers, on the other hand, made this Felix stand apart from any other take. He was a force of nature: dainty, uptight, and allergic, but so assertive in his convictions about cleanliness and culture that he could bend the entire world (including his spiritual opposite, Oscar) to his will whenever necessary. (In that way, The Big Bang Theory is something of an unofficial remake, with Sheldon as a Felix with Asperger’s.) He could be annoying, he could be insufferable, and yet you understood exactly why Oscar hadn’t tossed him out an apartment window years ago.

  On paper, Felix should’ve been so easy to hate, but Randall made him weirdly admirable. In perhaps the show’s most famous moment (inspired by a teacher Belson had in typewriter repair class), Felix acts as his and Oscar’s defense attorney when they’re wrongly charged with ticket scalping, and gets the prosecution’s key witness to admit she just assumed they were scalpers. Knowing he has the case won, Felix requests the use of a blackboard to loudly and boldly explain that “when you assume, you make an ‘ass’ out of ‘u’ and ‘me’!” It’s a smug, preening moment, but one that leaves even the judge smiling.

  —AS

  Phineas and Ferb (Disney, 2007–2015)

  In television, formula often seems to come from a lack of imagination. It’s simply easier to do the same thing every week when your audience doesn’t mind. Phineas and Ferb, though, managed at the same time to be wildly imaginative and slavishly formulaic, using its repetitive structure not as a crutch but as a sturdy framework on which it could hang all kinds of fantastic new ideas.

  The formula, as created by Dan Povenmire and Jeff “Swampy” Marsh: On each day of summer vacation, stepbrothers Phineas and Ferb dream up and execute an impossible task—building the world’s largest roller coaster, traveling through time, or otherwise bending the laws of physics—all while their older sister, Candace, tries in vain to bust them for their antics in front of their mom, only to have their latest incredible invention disappear as the result of each episode’s B story, where Perry the Platypus (the kids’ pet, but really a spy for a government agency that employs cute animals in fedoras) foils evil scientist Heinz Doofenshmirtz’s latest attempt to conquer the Tri-State Area.

  These things happen in every episode with such predictability that the characters’ awareness of that formula—and any deviations from it—quickly became one of the show’s most fertile sources of humor. While the basic structure stayed the same (even in episodes set in feudal Japan or caveman times), that familiarity made it easier to focus on the audacity of what the kids were doing in every episode, or on the ever more absurdly tragic backstory of Doofenshmirtz, whose sole friend during his lonely childhood in the backward European country of Drusselstein was a helium balloon.

  Pretty much everything the kids do defies the rules of nature—up to and including the fact that their summer vacation is 104 days long—yet they, and the series, always made it look easy.

  —AS

  Quantum Leap (NBC, 1989–1993)

  By the late ’80s, the original form of the anthology drama—new people and stories every episode—had gone more or less the way of the dodo, because audiences wanted continuing characters they could invest in, while networks wanted those familiar characters to make each show easier to promote from week
to week. With Quantum Leap, Donald P. Bellisario (who earlier created Magnum P.I. and would later give CBS the NCIS franchise) borrowed the stealth anthology format of The Fugitive and Route 66, but with a science-fiction twist: Each week, polymath scientist Sam Becket (Scott Bakula) would travel to some period in the past, temporarily occupying the body of a person who needed his help improving his or her future. The audience would see Sam—always scrambling to figure out who he was and what he came here to do and muttering a nervous “Oh, boy” upon realizing the nature of his latest identity—while the people he met would see him as a blind concert pianist, a gorgeous Mad Men–era secretary, a young man with Down syndrome, or even a NASA chimpanzee.

  It was an ingenious idea that invited all kinds of crossover viewing: sci-fi fans interested in the nature of Sam’s time travel device and the brief glimpses of future tech via his best friend, Al Calavicci (Dean Stockwell), who appeared in the past as a hologram only Sam could see; history fans who enjoyed the re-creations of the ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s the show offered; drama fans who appreciated the little short stories the show told each week about the life Sam had dropped into; and people who simply grew attached to Sam and Al and wanted to see Sam fix events in their own lives, and maybe make it home somehow.

  Anyone rooting for the last thing came away disappointed—the series ended with a title card reading “Dr. Sam Becket never returned home”—but the nimble series satisfied the rest of its constituency throughout. None of it would have worked without an actor as versatile and game as Bakula—a beefy guy who could sing and dance and do light comedy and intense melodrama and who gave himself fully to this crazy idea and his ever-changing role. He may not have fully transformed into a woman or an African American chauffeur or (as part of a sketchy late-period grab for ratings that saw him interacting with famous historical figures) Lee Harvey Oswald, but as each episode moved on, you would see the lines begin to blur between Sam and the part he was playing. Bakula’s passion, and his chemistry with Stockwell, elevated even the most run-of-the-mill relationship drama story, and when the personal stakes were higher—particularly during a two-parter where Sam was given a chance to rewrite his own timeline, including the death of his brother in Vietnam—Quantum Leap went from a fun genre mash-up to an incredibly powerful drama.

  The Vietnam episode featured the kind of story that couldn’t have been told as well in a conventional anthology, because all of its impact came from the audience knowing and caring about Sam. We had watched him for years helping other people improve their lives, and just once, we wanted to see him get a win of his own.

  —AS

  Recess (ABC and UPN, 1997–2001)

  Easily one of the smartest, most prankishly playful adult cartoons ever passed off as children’s entertainment, this comedy from Paul Germain and Joe Ansolabehere was set mainly in and around a fourth-grade playground before, after, and during, ahem, recess. Although it had the setting of an afterschool special, the show’s mentality was more attuned to 1960s social allegories in the vein of Catch-22 and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, with nods to Kafka and the Marx Brothers. The resident Randle Patrick “Mac” McMurphy, T. J. Detweiler, leads a bomber crew of types that include hot-tempered tomboy Ashley Spinelli, military brat Gus Griswald, tenderhearted hulk Mikey Blumberg, brainiac Gretchen Grundler, and jock Vince LaSalle. When they aren’t battling the shortsighted and arbitrary edicts of school administrators, teachers, and parents, the kids have to contend with the whims of King Bob, the self-appointed despot of the playground, who exerts his will through a never-ending series of schemes, tests, and epic tasks, including building a great pyramid and declaring himself pharaoh.

  Like Community, which might have learned something from its tone and structure, Recess is a highly ritualized bit of entertainment that strikes the same notes over and over again, but always in infinite variation, and with a surprising eye for psychological grace notes, especially when characters you thought of as brusque and one-dimensional reveal their dreams and fears to one another.

  —MZS

  The Rifleman (CBS, 1958–1963)

  In the 1950s and early ’60s, Westerns were all over the airwaves, but very few of them held up as well as the smartest Western films being made during that period, because the ritualistic quality of the weekly stories seemed more repetitious than comforting. A curious exception is The Rifleman, a series about a widowed rancher named Lucas McCain (Chuck Connors), who struggles to raise his young son, Mark (Johnny Crawford), while helping the local sheriff, Micah Torrance (Paul Fix), stand tall against rustlers, stagecoach and bank robbers, duelists, and uncategorizable antiheroes (the most vivid of which was a tormented gunman, played by Sammy Davis Jr., sworn to avenge his lynched father).

  Originally titled The Sharpshooter, The Rifleman was created by Arnold Laven, who brought The Big Valley to CBS and directed a number of theatrical Westerns, including Geronimo, and developed for television by Sam Peckinpah, who would go on to revolutionize the depiction of violence on film in The Wild Bunch. (He also created The Westerner, which receives its own citation in this section.) The gorgeous black-and-white imagery, contained stories (Lucas rarely left the county), stirring music (by Herschel Burke Gilbert), expected but always startling bursts of violence, and heart-to-heart father-son talks gave each episode the ritualistic quality of a parable or a heroic poem. The core theme was always the difficulty of being a moral person in an immoral world.

  Lucas was hot-tempered, macho, and prideful, and the opening credits (which showed him rapid-firing sixteen shots from a Winchester carbine) promised gunplay that the show nearly always delivered. But despite this, Lucas usually advocated diplomacy and de-escalation. He killed mainly to save himself, his loved ones, or the integrity of the town’s institutions, as represented by the beleaguered Micah. The deeper narrative of the series was about a man continuing to learn and grow and improve his character, even as an adult saddled with grave responsibilities.

  —MZS

  Robbery Homicide Division (CBS, 2002–2003)

  Michael Mann’s first TV series since Crime Story felt like a continuation of themes and images from his 1995 masterpiece Heat, but shot in the loose, documentary-inflected style that would increasingly become his trademark. It ran just thirteen episodes and was of no particular interest dramatically. Heat supporting player Tom Sizemore played a philosophically inclined motormouth of a detective, prowling the streets of Los Angeles, investigating gang activity, mass murders, robberies, and the like. RHD merits a citation here mainly because its technical innovations provided a glimpse of television’s future.

  At that point, most dramatic series were still shot on 35mm film, which required large crews, lots of lights, and a fair amount of preparation, especially when shooting took place in real locations, as was usually the case on RHD. Mann’s most recent theatrical film, Ali, had used high-definition video to create some of its more impressionistic moments; this show used it throughout, and the smaller crews and lighter equipment gave the whole production a degree of spontaneity previously unheard of on broadcast network dramas as logistically complex as this one. Every subsequent Mann film would be shot digitally, in a manner that made no attempt to pass off video as celluloid; he was straightforward in telling interviewers that he did the show mainly to test out new equipment that he thought would revolutionize motion pictures, including his own. Large swaths of dialogue were improvised or rewritten on the fly, new scenes were invented en route from one location to another, and some of the locations were impulse decisions as well. Mann often served as his own camera operator, traveling in cars with Sizemore and other actors like a news cameraman. Mann made it a point of pride to shoot using available light whenever possible. Other series were experimenting with high-def video around this time, including Sidney Lumet’s A&E city drama 100 Centre Street, but they all took pains to disguise how they were made. RHD did not. It decided it would rather be comfortable in its own (digital) skin, an aesthetic decision that h
ad an enormous impact. Within fifteen years, only a handful of TV dramas would be shot on film. The show’s lone season now seems like a crucible in which TV’s new digital reality was forged.

  —MZS

  Rubicon (AMC, 2010)

  A one-and-done spy drama, set in a civilian think tank whose employees provide advice to US intelligence, Rubicon had a story arc that never made much sense. But the think tank’s low-tech atmosphere was so richly evocative of paranoid ’70s conspiracy thrillers, and the performances—by James Badge Dale as a hero perhaps too brilliant for his own good, by Arliss Howard as an ex-CIA operative without Dale’s moral qualms, by Michael Cristofer as the think tank’s hypnotic boss, and more—were so exciting that the plot was almost beside the point. Before the phrase “Peak TV” was coined, Rubicon was both an early example of the phenomenon (created as part of AMC’s initial push into original programming) and one of its first victims (because it was hard to convince people to sample a wonky show with some clear flaws when more complete and commercial alternatives were abundant elsewhere on cable).

  —AS

  Samurai Jack (Cartoon Network, 2001–2004); and Star Wars: Clone Wars (Cartoon Network, 2003–2005)

  Even the most cinematic TV series rarely approach what film buffs might call Pure Cinema. Genndy Tartakovsky achieved it every week with Samurai Jack and Clone Wars. These two half-hour Cartoon Network series used two-dimensional, cell-style animation and a bare minimum of dialogue, and often kept anything resembling plot to a minimum as well. But their low-tech action spectacles were so intricately designed, boldly staged, and gracefully executed that they made the most expensive contemporaneous Michael Bay blockbusters feel puny. Anybody who had been introduced to the Russian-born filmmaker through his animation direction on Dexter’s Laboratory already knew that Tartakovsky went above and beyond when it came to staging action, but nothing in that show could have prepared them for his follow-ups, which took action cinema back to its roots in late-period silent cinema—the era that, along with anime, seems to have most strongly inspired his aesthetic sensibility, even though the music and sound effects on both shows were magnificently mixed, alternating eerie silence with all-hell-breaks-loose noise.