Inessentials

Mild spoilers for How I Met Your Mother 5.15, “Rabbit or Duck” (February 8) and The Bible, Genesis 1:1

On Sunday, a football game was televised on CBS. More Americans watched it live than have watched any other television show in history. CBS ran a clever spot for How I Met Your Mother that just showed the show’s break-out character, sex-obsessed Barney Stinson, holding up a poster with his telephone number on it. (A friend I was with called immediately and got to a voicemailbox message by Neil Patrick Harris, in character.) This fed nicely into the next day’s show, in which Barney receives call after call from women interested in him because they saw him on TV.

Barney, sadly, runs into a problem. No matter how attractive the woman sitting across from him is, each time the phone rings he thinks that the next girl might be a little bit hotter. So he abandons whichever woman he is with to pursue the next one. And this slowly drives him crazy.

The show does a nice job of pointing out the problem faced by having too many choices. There’s a vast literature in psychology on this point, which has been summarized in an easy-to-understand book by Barry Schwartz called The Paradox of Choice. The basic point is that more choices can lead to less happiness.

But there is a different problem suggested by Barney’s particular struggle, and it is a problem that many philosophers and theologians have suggested might be one faced by God. God’s problem is this.

God decides to create a world, because that’s what a good God does. But being God, not just any world will do. God must choose the best possible world to create; anything less would be un-godlike. But there is no best possible world. There are infinitely many possible worlds that God could choose to create, and if we lined them all up from worst to best, the line would go on forever. So for each world that God could create, there would always be a better one. If this is the case, then it seems like God would not create any world.

So that leaves you with three choices. (1) There is no God, and this is just another reason why. (2) There is a best possible world, which we know because God created one (spoiler: it’s this one), so it is not true that for each possible world, there is a better one that God could have created. (4) God does not have to create the best possible world, just one that is good enough. This problem has been noticed for hundreds of years, so each of these has been defended by someone.

Barney’s situation is disanalogous to God’s in a lot of ways. For one, Barney doesn’t know if the next girl is hotter than the last, but God presumably knows if there is a better world. For another, God’s motivation seems a lot, well, healthier, than Barney’s.

But they both reveal the same problem. When presented with many choices, a reasonable maxim for acting (sleep with the hottest woman, create the best possible world) can lead one to not acting, which is worse than any (or many) of the alternatives. If one could be a satisficer (pick one that is just good enough) instead of a maximizer (pick the best one), one might be able to lead a much happier life.

The situation-comedy is about as old as television itself. It suffered an agonizing near-death experience in the early 2000s with the rise of the news magazine and the explosion of reality television. Mid-decade critical favorites Arrested Development and 30 Rock have never been commercial hits, and The Office and How I Met Your Mother (the other two highly respected sit-coms of the last few years) haven’t fared all that much better in the ratings.

So what a pleasant surprise 2009 has turned out to be. This year’s critical favorites are Modern Family and Community, and both seem to be getting enough viewers to keep them around for a while. Last spring were the pleasant surprises of Parks and Recreation and Better Off Ted. Reaching back to early 2009, we have Party Down on the Starz! network, which was fairly successful comedically and commercially. Some people found love for Nurse Jackie. Amazingly, even the pilot of Cougar Town wasn’t as terrible as its title suggests.

Why is 2009 the year of the sit-com? I really don’t know, but I think there are a few things that have contributed to all of these successes.

1. The ensemble

Each of these shows (I’m excepting Nurse Jackie, which I haven’t seen) chooses to provide, from the outset, at least five or six characters who we can immediately recognize, but get strengthened quickly in the run. Better Off Ted has the fewest at five regular characters, and even the “Lenny and Carl from The Simpsons, only they’re scientists!” pencil sketches become adorably personal through the superior acting of Jonathan Slavin and Malcolm Barrett. The smart writers at Community have paired off different characters each week in what has become the most colorful merry-g0-round on NBC’s killer Thursday nights. Parks and Rec took a while to find its sea legs, but this fall it has turned out some of the best 22-minute runs of any show this year by writing to the diverse strengths of its cast. Being able to immediately present an entire family in all its disfunction, as Modern Family does from episode one, or work mates, as Party Down did consistently, from the earliest stages is a pretty remarkable feat, but it has been done repeatedly in 2009.



2. Single-camera directing

For all its innovation in story telling, How I Met Your Mother is a very traditional sit-com in its friends-as -family format and three-camera direction. A three-camera show, like Friends, Cheers, or The Cosby Show takes a stage, filmed from only one side, with two additional camera for close-ups. You never see how McLaren’s looks from the doorway, or the Cosby house from the stairwell. A single-camera show, on the other hand, follows its characters through a full 360-degree, three-dimensional world. Each of the new shows uses this format. Some have an even more particular mockumentary style, clearly inspired by the two iterations of The Office. Parks and Recreation even takes some of The Office‘s regular writers and their knowledge of the format. Single-camera directing in general, and the mockumentary format in particular (with its talking head cut-aways), are hallmarks of this year’s crop. This contributes to presenting a more fully realized world, and adds to the feeling that these characters are grounded in real life, even if when a show like Better Off Ted goes for the extreme wackiness of 30 Rock.



3. Balance of one-liners, sight gags, character humor

Each of these shows is willing to write toward humor that works because the characters work and willing to leave that aside when there’s a really great throwaway gag to be had. This combination of characters that we can track through multiple seasons and gags that have walked right out of a sketch comedy show makes for some great comedy. Some critics fault 30 Rock and The Office for these rapid changes in tone, but I find that makes them more endearing. And that makes for another part of their legacy. Community best exhibits the throwaway gag mixed in with character humor, but each of these sit-coms has it.

4. Corporate satire

The final legacy of 30 Rock and The Office on the current crop of sit-coms is the satirizing of corporate culture. Party Down chronicles the attempts of disenchanted workers to make their work less dull. Better Off Ted, particularly in its fake Veridian Dynamics commercials and the hilarious “Racial Sensitivity” episode, shows top-down corporate stupidity better than any show ever, including 30 Rock‘s continual body blows to NBC/GE/Universal/Sheinhardt Wig(/Comcast?). Parks and Recreation adds local governance to the workplace formula. Modern Family isn’t interested so far in the working world; it takes on the social institution that is the family, but rather than focus on the familiar foibles of family life (a la Everybody Loves Raymond or King of Queens), it treats the family as an unlikely bonding of mutually incompatible personalities – the same philosophy that underlies workplace sit-coms.

It’s heartening to see so many great sit-coms on television right now. For all the serialized glory of Mad Men and challenging nonsense of Lost, that television still has room for making people laugh without a Jaywalking segment is cause for celebrating.