Inessentials

1. Community

Is it the funniest show on TV? Most weeks, yes. (But it gets some serious competition from #3 at times.) But it’s also a rich, warm, smart, sophisticated, superbly acted, sharply written show. That’s why it’s number one. Unlike Modern Family, which throws some sentimental goop onto the ends of its shows in the least compelling manner possible, Community has built a cast of characters who genuine like each other and who we can care about, so when it goes for sentimental it succeeds beautifully. It seems the greatest divide among the passionate fans of the show is just which episode is the greatest, which says a lot about how many truly excellent episodes of television it has already given us. Funny, smart, sexy – will you marry me, Community? (I’ve previously written about Community here.)

2. Terriers

Oh, Terriers, how we loved you so. You brought us so much humor, so much intrigue, so much Donal Logue. You will go down as one of the all time great one season wonders. You reminded us that great characters can be funny and tragic, and that the best stories are sometimes the least conclusive. We praised you in life, let us praise you in death. And for those of you have yet to experience the charms of Terriers, let me tell you that it even with some unresolved stories, it is well worth your time to watch all 13 episodes.

3. Parks and Recreation

I’m pretty sure I could sit and watch Leslie Knope recount Friends episodes for hours on end. Sadly, we only got about 90 seconds of that in “Telethon,” one of the many hilarious episodes from the show’s second season. Happily, P&R has created one of the strongest ensembles on television, who take their already solid scripts and find ways to ground them in the absurdities of every day life. (I’ve previously written about Parks and Recreation here.)

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Some not-too-specific spoilers for Chuck and Burn Notice‘s third seasons

There’s an old adage in music that sophomore albums are usually terrible. Many bands manage one great break-through album before their sophomore release reveals a band not worth the investment. If the sophomore album holds steady or improves on the debut, then you have a band that is really worth throwing yourself into for the long haul.

I think something important also happens on television shows in their second year, but it’s often the opposite from the music case. Many shows have trouble finding just that right balance of tone in their first year. Occasionally they recover, but too late to save the show, like Dollhouse. Sometimes they recover and they have the good fortune to be on NBC (!), where very modest ratings can bring back buzz-building shows like Parks and Recreation, which is having a wonderful second season. But a good show is one that can manage by its second season to strike consistently in its tonal sweet spot, and hit that groove through enough episodes to make for really enjoyable viewing.

A great example of this is Chuck, which somewhere around episode five or six of its second year turned from modest and enjoyable spy comedy to unbelievably hilarious spy show, workplace comedy, and heart-twisting drama. In that second season, it was about as perfect as a lightweight TV show can be.

Burn Notice was always designed to be more episodic, and there are plenty of great moments in the first season. But the immensely irritating brother was largely removed in the second season, and the mother was made less histrionic and more sympathetic in the second season, which eliminated the two most unwatchable elements of the first season. The story became more complex without being too dense, the actors revealed themselves to be very comfortable in their roles, and the writing for each character became more specific. It was a pretty great season.

Then in the third seasons of both Chuck and Burn Notice, the producers made a change, and that change was largely the same in both cases. To push the edges of what each show did well, they attempted to take the central character (Chuck Bartowski and Michael Weston) and isolate them from their closest allies (Sarah & Casey for Chuck, Sam & Fiona for Michael Weston). In doing so, they took each character to a slightly darker place that challenged the viewer’s understanding and relationship to each lead. (This is more true for Chuck than Michael Weston, but it applies to both.) Can Chuck became a “real spy” and still be the person that Sarah (and the viewer) loves? Can Michael work for Gilroy and still be the good guy that does bad things for helpless people, which keeps Sam and Fiona (and the viewer) as allies?

It makes for more challenging viewing to see the central character in the show you love become less sympathetic. But when it works, it works. Buffy the Vampire Slayer worked well through seven seasons by pushing its title character further and further away from her friends (and only occasionally closer again) and making her more and more irritating. But the writers (often, not always) did such a fine job of telling their story that the viewer was rewarded with seven good-to-great seasons, even when those seasons (starting with two) push the lead character to a dark place that distances her from her friends.

But it doesn’t always work, which is what is worrying a lot of fans of Chuck. Where is the normal guy we loved? Where is the relationship with Sarah going? Who are these new characters pushing our two lovers away? Why is Chuck acting like such an ass? Has the show, in the unfortunate parlance of our time, jumped the shark?

Although I have some small worries, I do not think Chuck has ruined itself. It’s going through a fairly typical attempt (especially typical for a third season) to create drama by isolating the main character. And – this is important – the worries that we have about Chuck are amplified by standard television scheduling. Waiting week to week for each episode allows one to dwell on those worries about where the story is going and reduces the trust we have in showrunners to tell a compelling story. I’m sure many of the complaints about this season of Chuck would be dissipated if it could be watched in one weekend mega-viewing, without the unfortunate weeklong wait or monthlong Olympics hiatus. Let’s trust Josh Schwartz & Chris Fedak. We’ve already seen in the last month that Matt Nix can push Michael Weston to a similar place as Chuck and bring him back. Similarly, the third season of Mad Men left many cold in its front half, until viewers had a chance to see where Matt Weiner was taking us. (Surprise! He further isolated Don Draper from his family.) I don’t doubt (too much) that Schwartz & Fedak can do the same.

And even if they don’t, so what? Let them tell the story they need to tell, even if that means it loses some of its audience. I’m waiting to watch this last season of Lost for a while still, but I really hope they leave a lot of loose ends, things that leave the audience wondering. Great stories can do that. They can leave us disappointed, and they should, because sometimes life leaves us disappointed. (Of course, a show can be disappointing because it gets less good, but I’m talking about a story taking a character or story to a place we don’t want them to go.)

So I haven’t given up on Chuck, and those who have seen the screeners are saying tonight’s episode is pretty dang awesome. Cheers to third season isolation, and the hug-it-out moment we invariably get at the end.

Nearly spoiler-free discussion of The Wire, The Sopranos, and Lost

Critical consensus is that The Wire is the best television show of the decade, and probably the best show in the history of television. Perhaps despite being the best, though, the show is not particularly influential. Media scholar Jason Mittell recently wrote that The Wire, like Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, is immediately recognized by informed viewers/listeners as a great work of art, but also recognized as completely inimitable. You admire it, you are in awe of it, but you don’t attempt to do what it does. Perhaps partly, you are intimidated, but more importantly it seems like something that it would be impossible to try and copy. So not only do you not try to examine why it is successful and then copy it, you don’t even try to draw any lessons from what makes that show great. Its greatness is unique and its uniqueness is inimitable.

In comparison, I’d like to add that despite being vastly inferior to The Wire, The Sopranos may be the most influential television show since Friends. (Possible exception for Survivor.) And while I felt the show was consistently over-rated and I lost interest in the show after two seasons, I do think The Sopranos had a much bigger impact on television than The Wire. The variety of its influences is as notable as the intensity of its influence.

1. It convinced Hollywood actors that there were great roles for them in television. Dennis Leary, Glenn Close, and more came to TV in large part because they watched The Sopranos and found the stories so powerful and the acting so superb that they thought they could do better there than in Hollywood. The standard for dramatic acting was upped.
2. In what would become one of the most annoying trends on television in the 2000s, The Sopranos used therapy as a contrivance to give actors an opportunity to go mono a mono in scenes that seemed designed for an actors’ workshop. You could determine a show’s pretensions by how often its characters went to therapy (except for Monk, which used the trope for comic effect). By the time Gregory House, M.D., got around to it, he had to be fully committed to an asylum for there to be any plausibility in what was by 2009 a hackneyed plot device.
3. Want to get arty? Try a dream episode! We’ll have nearly silent scenes played out on a boardwalk, and everyone will want to get in on the game. Sure, Buffy also did it with “Restless,” but it was David Chase who codified the idea that inner turmoil over a tough decision should be visually represented in a dream episode or dream sequence. Protege Matthew Weiner would add a twist by making Don Draper’s dreams into daydreams and memories, but the basic model still holds.
4. Great television happens on cable. Drama found its home on cable, with each channel that wanted to make a name for itself finding a flagship drama that would define its ambitions (AMC’s Mad Men, SciFi/SyFy’s Battlestar Galactica, FX’s The Shield, Showtime’s Dexter). Each of these was an attempt to build a brand through HBO’s success with The Sopranos (and to a much lesser extent, Sex and The City and Six Feet Under).
5. Catholics get all the good stories. If you want religious characters on television, two rules apply: they’ve gotta be Christian, and they’ve gotta be nondescript or Catholic. Evangelical? Charismatic? Mennonite? And, God forbid, Jewish or Muslim or Buddhist? Good luck! The Sopranos reinforced the notion that guilt is what makes religion interesting, and Catholics hold the reigns on dramatic guilt. (The idea of Jewish guilt, with its siblings harping and nagging, get manifested in comedic roles, and we’re talking drama here.) Obviously, Big Love stands as an exception, but we all recognize how exceptional that sympathetic and unflinching portrayal of religion is. If you don’t want to play up the guilt, go the Reverend Lovejoy route and make the character nondescript and mainline, and then use that for a funny episode of how your sit-com family is conflicted over whether to take the kids to church.

I could go on and on about how The Sopranos either created or reinforced various ideas about television drama in its storytelling and in its prominence, but let’s get back to The Wire. What is The Wire‘s legacy?

Its legacy is not the complex, long-developing storylines. Attempts at that style of storytelling wore their Lost comparisons openly, or were soapy WB/UPN/CW teeny-bopper shows. No episode of The Wire (including the pilot) makes sense by itself, any more than a chapter of a novel could stand on its own. Lost built its mythology as it went and used mysterious clues to keep the viewer guessing, but The Wire presumes that you would understand each character had a backstory in the way that a newspaper article about the Great Recession assumes you lived through the financial crisis of 2008. It simply picks up mid-way through a story and lets the viewer fill in the rest. It does it without the wink to the viewer that Lost is always giving (there’s a polar bear on a tropical island, but we’re not telling you why!). It is played with a completely straight face, with a seriousness appropriate to a newspaper story.

Its legacy is not the quality of the acting, which was uniformly superb. The acting on The Wire is not showy the way it is on The Sopranos or even Mad Men. Who would you give an Emmy to in any given year? Obviously The Wire had some of the most memorable characters in the history of television, but even when the actors were doing their best work, there was no guarantee that they would get an Emmy-ready episode written for them. Just as each character is beaten down by the system, each performance is subsumed to the story of the city of an American city. (Maybe Baltimore should have won an Emmy?) And while other television shows openly stole actors from the stable developed by the superb East Coast casting, no one is giving Michael K. Williams roles like James Gandolfini is offered.

If there is any legacy for The Wire, it will be the way it elevated the possibility of television as an art form. People who don’t care about TV can find that they care about The Wire, just as someone with no art background can find the joy in a Christo and Jeanne-Claude. You tell your friends about The Wire the way that Mittell tells his friends about Astral Weeks. Referring to a remarkable run of films in the ’50s and ’60s, Mike D’Angelo recently wrote that Jean-Luc Godard was a game-changer who didn’t change the game at all. And that may be exactly what happened with The Wire. It was so great, so special, so revered, that no one really knows how to do more than name-check it.

There’s been a spoiler-disclaimer backlash happening among television critics. You can read a nicely condensed argument at Monkey See. The even-shorter version of the argument: In TV journalism, “spoilers” applies only to reveals about unaired television episodes. If you time-delay on your DVR or if you are just now finishing season one of Mad Men, it is your responsibility to avoid discussions of what happens later. Journalists and critics can help by not spoiling things in the title of a post or article, but use your common sense: don’t read ahead. And if an article references an old occurrence from a different show, that’s not spoiling.

I am very sympathetic to nearly all of these points. But it’s not the policy I’m following here. Whenever possible, I’ll alert a reader to the television shows and films being discussed by placing a big, bold statement at the beginning of that piece. Even if it means, as it did in the last post, that I’m discussing only the first 30 minutes of the film Wendy and Lucy. Why would I be so hypersensitive? Because I am going to reveal information about a film that I want people to see and discuss, and by informing them of how much of the film I am discussing, they can decide for themselves whether to read on based on how much of the film I will be discussing. It’s just one of the many services I helpfully provide.

By informing the reader of which films or shows I will be discussing, and how mild or strong I consider the spoiler to be, the reader can make a more informed choice about whether to read on. That’s not always possible. If I do an end-of-the-decade discussion like the AV Club’s Best TV Series of the Decade or, more significantly, Best TV Episodes of the Decade, it will be impossible to avoid all spoilers. (Heck, it’s a list spoiler if you see the picture at the top of the latter article and know that shows on the latter list aren’t on the former list. Oh, well.) I’ll try in that case to keep them mild (e.g., talking about “romantic developments” instead of “getting married”), but remember that you proceed at your own risk, even as I try to help avoid big spoilers.