Inessentials

On Wednesday, Psych returns for its fifth season on USA, a network that has solidified a place as the most-watched cable network by developing original content branded around a helpfully loose “Characters welcome” theme. (See a good discussion of its branding and the role of genre at In Media Res.) Critical reaction to this show is some mixture of ignoring it and reviling it. And frankly, I’m not sure I disagree with a lot of the criticisms of the show: the writing is too on-the-nose, the acting is too mugging, the humor is too broad, the mysteries are too predictable, the lead character is too irritating (to other characters and to us), and… well, you get the idea. Even the score gets trashed.

Despite all of these (and in some of these cases, because of them), I dearly love Psych. There’s probably no show I enjoy watching more than Psych, none that makes me laugh more, and none that gets watched as quickly after the DVR records it. And it really comes down to one simple thing: Psych is funny.

Funny makes up for a multitude of sins. I’ll watch and rewatch a funny show far more quickly and more regularly than an otherwise superior drama. So when Psych‘s fourth season gets released tomorrow, it will soon make it into the DVD player for a second viewing, and probably a third viewing within a year.

There are some things to be said in favor of Psych. The supporting cast is stronger than Monk, a show that is viewed more positively by critics and Emmy voters. They’re about equal on the quirk-o-meter, for whatever that is worth, and both can attract some solid guest stars. But for me, the show works for one main reason: Dulé Hill.

Critics (and, I suspect, many fans) claim that the show lives or dies by the James Roday’s performance at the center of the show. Shawn Spencer is the fake psychic, after all, and he gets the most lines and the most story arcs. I can’t disagree that the show rests a lots on his shoulders. But what makes Roday’s mugging and irritation to others watchable is Hill’s Burton “Gus” Guster.

Gus fits into a particular subgenre of the bromance that I think of as the Male Black Best Friend. There are Lenny and Carl on The Simpsons, Phil and Lemm on Better Off Ted, Shawn and Gus on Psych, and (the fullest realization of this subgenre) J.D. and Turk on Scrubs. In each case, there is a pair of male best friends, one Caucasian and one African-American, who view each other as equals and are viewed by outsiders as inseparable. (The second half of Community‘s first season saw them pairing Abed with Troy, interestingly putting a twist on the formula by putting a character of Palestinian-Polish descent in the role of the white friend.)

With Phil and Lemm, the idea was that these are codependent coworkers who need each other to be successful. Lenny and Carl began as background figures, drinking buddies to Homer, but The Simpsons has generated a lot of humor out of their pairing. Scrubs pushed the bromance aspect farther than any show or film has yet done, but what interests me the most about it was that it gave Turk more stories and a greater depth of characterization than any other Male Black Best Friend, Guster included. Turk not only supported J.D. through residency and beyond, but he had an interesting and complicated relationship to Carla and had meaningful interactions with the rest of the cast. Gus has far less of that characterization and almost no relationships that aren’t mediated or interrupted by Shawn, and thus he suffers as a character. But he surpasses the others in the central role of the Male Black Best Friend: alleviating the white best friend’s perceived dorkiness by being equally dorky.

The joy of watching Psych for me is watching Hill’s performance as the Male Black Best Friend to a character that is built out of hamming it up and irritating others (including his father and those who sign his paycheck). Hill finds a nice balance between joining in with Roday’s antics and giving a look of sharp displeasure or an annoyed tone of voice that serves as a helpful counterpoint. Psych never passes up a joke, a reference to an ’80s film, an antic, or a farcical conclusion,(except in a handful of darker episodes near the end of the last two seasons). And there is simply too much silliness in the show for one character to carry without the show self-destructing. Many are annoyed at Tony Shaloub being nominated for his portrayal of Monk yet again, but that show is nothing without his performance. Roday’s take on Shawn is too thin to do the work of carrying the show single-handedly. So we have Burton Guster to carry us through, to take the weight off Shawn, to serve as a bridge to the somewhat more realistic characters on the show, and to ground Shawn.

This ancillary nature of the MBFF is disturbing insofar as it suggests that a television show can’t survive with a black lead or further contributes to racial tokenism. And there is probably something significant in the fact that Hill’s most famous role was on The West Wing, where he was a late addition to the cast, forced by NBC to address complaints about its whitewashed primetime lineup. To their benefit, USA has always promoted Psych as a two-lead comedy, but unfortunately that’s not how the show actually works in terms of stories or characterization. Gus is no more than the MBFF.

But I return to Psych because it is funny and because of Hill’s performance. In one of the show’s few (mostly) serious episodes, Shawn is tracking a serial killer and finds he can’t work under the stress, so he asks Gus to be his surrogate and lighten the mood. Rather than aim for mimicry, Hill delivers a performance as Gus that takes Shawn’s levity into absurdly literal territory and thus makes a joke of the very idea that Gus could be funny. But the real joke is that Gus is the funny one. Shawn is the class clown, the big-joke guy who can’t take anything seriously. Gus is the classic straight man who gets more laughs with an exasperated look than the wildly gesticulating man beside him.

I’ve been inspired by at The Television, The Aughts, and I series at Cultural Learnings and the really excellent piece by Emily Nussbaum in New York Magazine called When TV Became Art to go beyond a typical Top 10 Best Shows of the Decade List and write something that is both personal and hopefully illuminates what happened this decade in television. This isn’t to disparage Top 10 lists; in fact you’ll probably see some Best of the Decade posts in the coming weeks on this site. Rather, I want to write about the convergence of technology and art that roughly coincides with the last decade of television, and I how I experienced this change.

My interest in television began in the summer of 2002. I had watched more television than was probably healthy while growing up, but television was an escape, a mindless activity to relieve boredom. I watched Saturday morning cartoons, CHiPs reruns, and other stuff that would interest a kid in the 1980s. A lot of the television I watched as a kid was old RKO and MGM movies on AMC, back when AMC was what TCM is now. In the 1990s, I watched TV Land on Nick at Night, where I learned about how a sit-com works and first encountered the Jewish Comedian Type by watching The Dick Van Dyke Show. I watched NBC’s TGIF line-up, and later its Thursday night block, so I saw ER and Friends from the beginning, but eventually lost interest in each.  Through all of this, I just watched TV for something to do.

When I started graduate school in the fall of 2001, I intentionally did not own a TV. I feared how I would do in graduate school and that such a mindless diversion might keep me further behind my peers. I should be reading novels. Russian novels. Important literature. In my first six months of graduate school, I read Notes from the Underground, The Brothers Karamazov, and Crime and Punishment. I know I read other things as well (I remember getting ideas from the Pulitzer Prize winners list), but the Dostoyevsky stands out. How else would this humble Midwesterner talk to these Ivy League snobs? What if my professor made some obvious reference to some book not in my field but that every educated person should have read?

By my birthday in January, I was ready to accept a television as a gift from my parents. I realized that not having that pressure valve I grew up with wasn’t going to help me any. I had a $30 VCR attached to the 19″ TV (which a friend convinced me was bigger than anyone really needed), and had wires that would connect my laptop to the TV so that I could watch DVDs. I was expanding my film interests via Netflix, then a relatively new service. I also tested it by renting a disc of a show I had heard about but never watched, My So-Called Life. I enjoyed the first disc enough that I decided to purchase my first ever TV on DVD box set. I watched the series through, and found myself interested in this world of a mopey teenage girl, her even mopier love interest, and a sexually confused teenager trying to forge an identity for himself. I was a bit embarrassed to enjoy a show like this, but I understood well enough that this was something more than just pandering to an audience. There was something very beautiful and moving about this portrayal of high school. The topic of the show might be embarrassing, but I didn’t feel embarrassed by what these characters were saying or doing. They were believable, they had lives, and I didn’t feel like the show was praising their self-centeredness as much as lovingly showing that this is how life was for some people. In some ways, it was the flip side to Freaks and Geeks, a show my roommates and I gathered weekly to watch during my senior year of college. We laughed at these geeks because we were these geeks. But here was a show that felt very unlike my own experience of high school, but that I completely believed was somebody’s experience.

That show pales in comparison to the one that I discovered about the same time. Reruns were airing on weekends, and the commercials seemed pretty corny, more or less indistinguishable from Highlander and Xena. But I gave a chance to show called Buffy: The Vampire Slayer. And it turns out, it was pretty funny.

I was friends with a comedy writer at the time; he has written pieces for The Onion and McSweeney’s. He loved a character called the Mayor, and while he wasn’t willing to say he liked the show, he absolutely loved that incongruence between the 1950s TV dad and pure evil. What can I say? He was right about the Mayor. That gave me a little confidence to Netflix the first season of Buffy on DVD. (I’m not sure that we were using “Netflix” as a verb in 2002, but we certainly do so now.) What I discovered was that beneath the cornball exterior was a show that I really enjoyed. Here was a show working in a genre that I knew nothing about – horror – and yet I could understand that they were playing off genre staples, even if I had know real knowledge of those genre tropes. Here was a show that was incredibly witty where many of the best lines went to the most picked-on guy in school. Here was show where the very feature that made someone special and likeable was also what made them unpopular. Here was a show in which good battles against evil, but the lines are murky and the enemy is ever shifting.

Beyond all the elements that I liked about the show, one thing stood out to me then and made me fall in love with television as a medium. With BtVS, I discovered television’s power for serial story-telling. Unlike the sit-coms I enjoyed as a kid, or The Simpsons episodes I watched each day in college, this was a show that trusted the viewer to follow these characters through their lives. We trusted Joss Whedon to helm this story, a trust he earned in the show’s magnificent second season. Whedon trusted his writers ground the supernatural silliness in real human (okay, or vampire) characters, trusted his actors to switch from broad comedy to fear to grief in the coarse of a single episode or even scene, and ultimately trusted his audience to follow him through this world. This was a totally new idea to me in 2002. Here was a show that rewarded dedicated viewing in the proper order. It was a sea change in my thinking, the sort demanded by Alfred Hitchcock when he demanded that theaters allow no late entrants to Psycho.

And this was made possible by two emerging media: Netflix and TV on DVD. I think DVD has done more to help television than it has to help film. Studios may line their pockets with each successive technological improvement in home viewing (VHS, DVD, Blu-Ray), but the real change in movie viewing happened when VHS allowed people to watch films in their home on their own schedule. Television never performed well on VHS, so it was with the advent of DVDs that television entered its heydays. Netflix allowed one to sample these expensive box sets before buying them (or instead of buying them), and their contribution should not go unnoticed. But the real change happened with the ability to purchase an entire season of a television show and watch it as quickly as one dared. In the summer of 2002, I was taking an intensive Latin course, which I would rush home from each afternoon to plow through the newly released third season of Buffy on DVD. I didn’t have to wait 30+ weeks to watch the show as it aired; instead I could enter a world’s mythology and live in it for days or weeks at a time. This was unprecedented in the history of television. TV box sets of shows people loved in the ’90s, like Friends, The Simpsons, and Seinfeld were huge money-makers in the early years of this decade, but it was the ability to find more obscure shows that really transformed television.

Many others have told the story of what happens next. A show like Lost works because fans can devote themselves to rewatching it on DVD. A show like Survivor is heralded by the networks for its watch-now (read: no one cares about the DVDs) ratings. (A stunt less successfully attempted by Jay Leno’s move to prime time late in the decade.) A new business model emerges where shows like Family Guy and Futurama return from the grave because of strong DVD sales, shifting the emphasis from initial airings and syndication to initial airings, syndication, and DVD sales. (Later to be supplemented by iTunes rentals, Hulu viewings, and transmedia sales.) HBO can build its audience through fans discovering The Sopranos and Sex and the City on DVD. People can encounter international imports like The Office and Slings and Arrows for the first time. People can continue to be TV snobs, but in a new way. (“I don’t own a TV, but I love The Wire.”) Most importantly in this talk about the impact of TV on DVDs, however, is the thing that first drew me into the idea of television: a really good story told over a 6- or 13- or 22-episode season is a wonderful thing. A film may benefit from being concise and particular, but no film matches what a great television show like The Wire can do over five magnificent seasons. One hundred or more characters, each as focused and real and well acted as any on film, interacting in a complex drama set against the background of a city more real than any non-resident’s idea of the real Baltimore. And it’s not just The Wire. There are a dozen or more shows that have each used television’s unrivaled power of serialized, pictorial story-telling to achieve new levels of artistry. The technology and the shifting media models (let’s not forget the rise of cable) made it possible, but it was the David Simons and Ronald D. Moores and the Amy Sherman-Palladinos who rose to the challenge and gave us all a reason to appreciate what has happened this decade.

At this website, I hope to celebrate inessential things: things that are not necessary for survival, but that make life wonderful nonetheless. And television in the 200os was wonderful indeed.

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.