Inessentials

The Price Is Right is perhaps the only place on television where you can consistently find expressions of pure joy. There’s certainly a good deal of happiness in a show like Extreme Makeover: Home Edition, but it requires a journey through a family’s greatest sorrows. It’s also easier for scripted dramas to explore dark places, moments of tragedy and even triumph. But pure joy? Almost never.

Game shows can fill a lot of needs in our lives, but The Price Is Right has the singular ability to demonstrate the communal nature of joy. Having your name called (“Come on down! You’re the next contestant on The Price Is Right!”) leads to eager jumping, flailing, and hugging/climbing over each person in your row as you make your way down. The audience participates in a way uncommon in game shows, shouting suggestions and cheering on friends and strangers alike. Unlike the recent rash of Japenese-inspired game shows that feed off of humiliating others, The Price Is Right remains a place in which people join together in celebrating minor accomplishments. The games shows inspired by the popularity of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? also encourage isolating the individual. And it’s no surprise that Regis Philbin would be the only one who looks as if he is enjoying himself on Millionaire. Compare that to Bob Barker and Drew Carey, who are the least expressive hosts imaginable, rarely showing more emotion than cracking a smile, and smartly so, since any effusiveness on their parts would take the show (even further) over the top. Barker or Carey can stand while they are hugged, kissed, and nearly knocked over by excited contestants celebrating their victory or their opportunity.

The community of The Price Is Right is not just constituted by the studio audience. Viewers are drawn in by the host looking directly into camera and the showcase models exhibiting the prizes for us. Sit in a doctor’s waiting room or the holding tank at a automotive repair shop, and you’ll find that the show most likely to draw everyone’s faces toward the television is The Price Is Right. The joy is both intensely personal, as we watch a person jump up and down, screaming, and also communal as people cheer on their peer. It’s a rather wonderful thing to watch on TV.

If I am right that The Price Is Right is the rare show that allows housewives, frat boys, and retired grandparents to join together in expressions of shared joy, it is also problematic for encouraging these expressions through material consumption. The Price Is Right has been doing product placement since long before Spiderman reached across the room for a Dr. Pepper or Big Mike took a bite out of a Subway sandwich on Chuck. And the expressions of joy that I came here to praise are expressions of joy at the opportunity to win stuff. Hardly a person in the country won’t recognize “… a new car!” called out in your best Rod Roddy impersonation. The greatest expressions of joy on television are for getting a car, a boat, or a trip to the Eiffel tower, and we encourage this by watching a show whose purpose is to reward people for knowing the cost of common (and increasingly uncommon) consumer products. The two shows most like The Price Is Right are Let’s Make a Deal, which shares some of the community feeling, but in a detached, silly way, and Supermarket Sweep, a low-budget alternative that tries to capture some of the energy of The Price Is Right and its rewarding of pure consumerism. But neither has managed to stay on television as long (Deal is back with Wayne Brady after a long absence from television) nor be as successful in their runs.

The Price Is Right‘s success, I think, has to do with its unique ability to showcase and encourage shared joy. Like other shows, it can test our knowledge of trivia and allow us to compare ourselves to the show’s contestants. But unlike reality competition shows such as Top Chef or Jeopardy!, where we can see expertise exhibited but in an arena designed to pit players against one another and promote tensions, on The Price Is Right everyone is encouraged to cheerlead each other. You may not get to compete for a prize, but you are primed to cheer on those who are.

How rare is that? Almost as rare as joy itself.

Big spoilers for “Chuck vs. the Honeymooners” (3.14) (Monday, April 27, 2010) and general spoilers for season 6 of The Office

Last night’s Chuck (which is the first of six episodes added after the initial run of 13 episodes in season 3) brought a lot of satisfaction to those who had been waiting, and waiting, and waiting for Chuck and Sarah to get together. Finally, an end to all that UST (Unresolved Sexual Tension, to use Mo Ryan’s acronym). Most critics have focused on the myth that a show takes a nose-dive in quality after the leads finally get together (the Moonlighting myth). “Look at Jim and Pam on The Office,” these critics say. “There are still interesting stories to tell about being in a relationship, not just about leading up to a relationship.” And these critics are right (except that The Office example is ill-timed, since the best part of season six has been the budding romance of Andy-Erin and not the established relationship of Jim-Pam). There is no part in dragging out a relationship of two characters who seem like they should be together simply to avoid dealing with the new problem of writing them as a couple.

Andy and Erin, from The Office (photo from fanpop.com)

Unfortunately, though, critics have been forced to deal with a rift among the devoted viewers of Chuck. Some fans’ major interest in the show is in seeing Chuck and Sarah get together. Known as ‘shippers among critics (as in “relationshippers”), these fans primarily care about casting aside any obstacles to Chuck and Sarah and getting them together as quickly and as happily as possible. Critics are then in the position of needing to distance themselves from these fans while also reaffirming that there is no point in keeping the leads apart for arbitrary reasons or because of the Moonlighting myth. I’ve written before about how this season of Chuck is an example of how shows (often in their third season) push the lead character away from their allies/friends to add new levels of drama. This was partly accomplished by the introduction of Agent Shaw (Brandon Routh) and Hannah (Kristin Kreuk) as romantic possibilities for Sarah and Chuck, respectively.

What I want to focus on is Sarah. But to do that, alas, I must write about Chuck. A lot has been written about Chuck, which is appropriate on a show that bears his name. But Sarah’s story is in many ways the more interesting one. To an underappreciated extent, Chuck is a show by, for, and about fanboys. It’s the now-classic tale of geek-gets-girl. From Sam Raimi’s Spiderman to Josh Schwartz’s The O.C. to beer commercials, the last ten years have seen a new popular narrative established in which the Geek (brown, tousled hair, glasses, shirt untucked, comic book obsession) wins the Girl (blonde, svelte, a little tomboy-ish). This is derivative of some of the college nerd comedies of the 1980s, but one important twist is that the Girl must recognize that what makes the Geek geeky is also what makes him lovable. Also, the Geek may have a Rival, but this is more often the cause of undermining the Geek’s self-confidence than forcing the Rival out of the Girl’s gaze. Because deep down, this narrative says, the Girl really does like the Geek better, and they would be perfect together if only the Geek could gather the courage to be with the Girl.

One of the dangers with this narrative is that it reinforces the focus on the man (the Geek, in this case) even as it redefines manliness. If the story of the Geek getting the Girl is about the Geek overcoming his lack of confidence, then the story will have to follow him getting that confidence. It’s still all about the guy.

We’ve seen that problem pushed to the forefront in this season of Chuck. Sarah was shoved aside this season while the Geeek (Chuck) tried to earn her love (by becoming a spy) while fending off the Rival (Agent Shaw, who, like all Rivals, represents what the Geek is not but thinks that he must be to deserve the Girl). This left the viewer with one episode in which the Girl makes her move, followed by twelve episodes in which she sits idly by watching the Geek become unrecognizable. Since in the Geek Gets Girl narrative, it is the Geek’s geekiness that makes him suitable to the Girl, when he loses that geekiness he becomes too much like the Rival. And then the Girl may as well be with the Rival. Watching this unfold, however, it reinforces an underlying problem with the Geek Gets Girl narrative: the Girl is completely passive. She simply reacts. This is less noticeable in films (such as Spiderman) where one small goal (e.g., breaking into acting) is enough to distract away from the Girl’s passivity. But over the course of 50 episodes of a television show, it is difficult to find a way to make the Girl an agent with a life and decisions that are her own. This season of Chuck‘s greatest failing has not been avoiding a Chuck-Sarah romance, or introducing Agent Shaw, or putting the Intersect in Chuck’s head, it has been giving Sarah nothing to do. This is a problem embedded in the Geek Gets Girl narrative, but it came to the forefront this season.

Remember when we got backstory on how Sarah became a spy (2.10)? Remember when Sarah shot a Fulcrum agent to protect Chuck’s identity (2.11)? These provided ways to make Sarah a person, someone who makes decisions with consequences and has a story of her own, within the loose confines of the Geek Gets Girl narrative. This season Sarah has been reduced to a prop, whose job is to watch with Sad Eyes while the Geek tries to become like a Rival. She is a passive spectator, rather than a worthy partner to the eponymous hero.

What I liked about last night’s episode of Chuck was not that Chuck and Sarah finally got together, but that Chuck and Sarah were treated as equals. Both were trying to be good partners to each other, considering the other’s desires as at least as important as their own. That Sarah is once again Chuck’s equal is nicely captured in the smartly choreographed fight scene from the episode.

There is still a fundamental inequality to the show that I don’t think it will ever overcome. As we saw in the pre-credits sequence of “Chuck vs. The Honeymooners,” Sarah is in an expensive, barely-there neglige while Chuck is in a plain t-shirt and lounge pants. Sarah, no matter how realized the character becomes, will always exist also as eye candy in a way that Chuck does not. (Captain Awesome, who was yet again shirtless, is supposed to roughly even things out I suspect, but it doesn’t approach the level to which Scrubs took the equity, requiring that every episode of a woman in underwear also have a man in underwear).

Sarah may begin to be treated, finally, as an equal to Chuck, but she will still be the Girl.