A Pointless Waste of Your Time

Did you miss me? I've been a little erratic lately in my appearances, and if this column is something that you like reading and have missed, first of all thank you from the bottom of my heart. Next, by way of explanation, I'm finally nearing the end of a re-building period following a series of bouts with my computer's ability to... well, work. While certainly fascinating to me in its labyrinthine splendor, I'm reasonably sure that most of you have stories that are similarly horrific. I'll spare you the wretched details, and allow you to surmise that my computer situation is once again approaching normalcy.

Anyway, if you've been reading this space for any length of time you may remember what a foul tempered spoilsport I was last year in the Christmas issue, so I've decided to take a different tack. I'm lobbing myself, and you, a great big softball. For me, this will be a way to ease back into doing this again, and for you it will be a pointless waste of time (which is what the Internet is really about anyway, isn't it?). I'm going to spend a little time telling you about what I like about television. Specifically, I'm going to tell you some of my favorite things on tv. And, of course, go on at considerable length telling you why.

I suppose you'd have to say that the one thing I look for in television is programming that challenges me in some way, or that gives me food for thought. I also love good drama, and that encompasses good writing, direction and acting. I'm a sucker for good documentary, too, so there'll be (I hope) a bit of everything here.

Comedy
I like to think of myself as a student of comedy. Television is a perfect place for comedy, particularly in the old days. All those family sitcoms fit the small screen so comfortably; it was a great match from the start. My first tv memories are of those old 50's chestnuts like Leave it to Beaver and Father Knows Best. Even as a very young kid, these shows, while entertaining, struck me as kind of insipid. If Beaver skinned his knee in one episode, why wasn't his knee still skinned in the next episode? None of it seemed very realistic, so the humor rang hollow for me. Pretty precocious for a five-year-old, eh? Obviously, I'm using my adult vocabulary to give voice to questions for which I didn't have words in those days. What I craved in television, and I would later find that this stretched to more than just comedy, was at least a degree of realism. If I'm going to be expected to buy into these characters as human beings, give their lives some measure of believability.

The Dick van Dyke Show came along at just the right time. At last there was a situation comedy where the lives of the characters made sense. Of course, the show had something else going for it - it was incredibly funny. Sure, there were a few small concerns. For instance, Richie had to have been the most convenient child any couple ever conceived. He was only seen when he could help advance the plot; otherwise you would never have known that Rob and Laura even had a child. But for the most part, these were believable people who had some damn funny things happen to them.

In the 60's, though, the van Dyke Show stood out as just about the only example of high-quality sitcom with any measure of realism. And then CBS took a chance on a show other networks had passed up, and American television was never the same. Loosely based on an English comedy called "Till Death Do Us Part," All in the Family was unlike anything that had ever been on television before. After seeing the outrageously funny and utterly believable story of the Bunker household, it was going to be tough for any tv show ever again to not allow the characters to live and grow and be three-dimensional human beings.

So you can probably tell that All in the Family would have to be ranked among my favorite tv shows of all time. Lots of great comedies have come along since Archie, Edith, Gloria and Mike (and of course, Norman Lear) changed the face of television, but almost all of them owe at least a small debt to the Bunkers. There have been a lot of remarkable comedy shows over the years, and some of the ones that I've enjoyed most have been The Mary Tyler Moore Show, and both of Bob Newhart's wonderful shows. (The final episode of his second series, Newhart, has to be one of tv's all-time great moments. In it, Bob wakes up next to Emily, his wife from The Bob Newhart Show and played by Suzanne Pleshette, having dreamed the whole series in the course of one night in his old series. I think this is probably the most brilliant postmodern practical joke ever played on the American viewing public.)

I watched Cheers from the very first episode, and think it still stands up well today, particularly the shows with Shelly Long. I loved the old Tracy Ullman Show. It was doing tv just for the sake of doing some really great tv, and how can anything be wrong with that? Of course, out of the Ullman show grew The Simpsons, which needs to be recognized for the towering television phenomenon that it is. Week after week, season after season, The Simpsons is always riotously funny and assiduously irreverent. And I'm pretty sure that it's the only cartoon show to ever have a character die. (I regard this as completely different from the weekly deaths of Kenny on South Park. Yes, I like South Park a lot. Yes, Kenny dies--and usually rats gather and begin to eat him!!--but like most other cartoon deaths, Kenny is back in the next episode.) The episode where Ned Flanders' wife dies in the grandstands at a race was a real strange moment (she stayed dead, too), and as you watched it all sorts of thoughts went flying through your mind. And that was the point. It's at times like that that I'm proud of television. You could make a good case that these shows are about the reason why we should be glad that there is a Fox Network. You wouldn't get too spirited an argument from me.

I think that Seinfeld certainly has a place in tv history. The best episodes were the ones where all the different story threads would suddenly collide in one brilliant punch line. But if you're going to give Jerry Seinfeld, et al. their due, then you'd better acknowledge the brilliant things that Garry Shandling has done with comedy in the medium of television. Shandling seems to hate the "fourth wall," and does everything he can to remove it. In It's Garry Shandling's Show he knocked down the fourth wall by showing the studio audience, driving between the sets in a golf cart, and just looking into the camera and talking to us. In The Larry Sanders Show, he drew us inside the television. We got to see what happens on a show while we're normally watching commercials, as well as all the dirty goings-on behind the scenes.

If you had to pin me down, though, my favorite comedy would probably be Barney Miller. Probably most of you will disagree with that, and you'd have good reasons to do so. Unlike a lot of the shows I've just mentioned, Barney Miller doesn't hold up well over time. A lot of the jokes were very much of their time, and don't make much sense if you weren't around while it was going on. But the writing and the flawless ensemble work were just perfect. Everybody on that show had amazing comic timing, and the results were astonishing, in my opinion.

Drama
Television is still riding the crest of a wave of great series drama that has been going on for well over twenty years now. The way I see it, the real beginning of that wave, the first ripple, was a pretty bold idea to begin with. Spin off a character from a sitcom into a drama. Lou Grant took Mary Richards' old boss and transplanted him to Los Angeles, as the city editor of a newspaper. It had an ensemble cast, and most importantly, it was one of the first shows to try to deal honestly with social issues. That set it apart from the rest of the crowd. A lot of great, innovative shows would come after, but Lou Grant was a landmark series.

Police dramas were, in my opinion, horrible throughout my life. All the Kojaks and McGarretts struck me as little more than vigilantes with badges. Shows like The Rockford Files or Colombo were entertaining enough, but weren't really great drama. Hill Street Blues changed all that. Never before had anyone tried to show the gritty day-to-day lives of police in an inner city precinct of an unknown city. Hill Street was audacious for its time in every respect. A large cast of mostly unknown actors showed with shocking honesty something of what it might be like to be a cop in a place like that. And all of it - the street violence, the swirling confusion of the precinct, and even the tender, intimate moments - was choreographed in front of very mobile, handheld cameras. Any way you slice it, Hill Street Blues was groundbreaking television.

And just as Hill Street Blues was not so much a cop drama as it was a drama about people who just happened to be cops, St. Elsewhere was a drama about people who happened to be involved in a hospital in Boston. I'd never seen a show before that could have me laughing so hard one second and on the verge of tears the next second. Once again, great writing, imaginative direction, and a gifted ensemble cast made for some truly memorable television. To my surprise, a few years ago St. Elsewhere was picked by TV Guide as the all-time best tv series, and I felt that way myself for a long time. Of course, the final episode of that show was a memorable television moment, too. In the final moments of the episode, it is revealed that the entire series - all the characters, their hopes, dreams and aspirations; all the situations; all the comedy and drama - took place in the mind of an autistic child. This was saying essentially the same thing as the Newhart finale: "HEY! It's all made up! Doesn't matter if an autistic kid found it in his mind or a tv character dreamt it. Somebody made it all up! It's nice that you cared about all of this, but there's an actual world out there. Go live in it." But while peoples' reaction to the Newhart finale was glowing, the St. E swansong was viewed with disfavor by most people. Maybe people just didn't want a drama to have a punch line. But it did.

There's been a lot of great drama of late, too. Law & Order has been consistently high quality a long, long time, and shows no signs of slowing down. So much so that it's spawned two offshoots nearly as good. I particularly like Law & Order: Criminal Intent. Detective Goren, played by Vincent D'onofrio, is a great character, and I love watching him do his thing.

And then there's The Sopranos. Never have the ambiguities of modern life been probed so deeply on television as by this seemingly simple story of a Mob boss. Though he is responsible for loss of property and loss of life, directly and indirectly, Tony Soprano still believes himself to be a decent man. Pulled in two directions by his two families, on the one hand his wife, children, sisters, etc. and his Mob family, Tony seeks help from a psychiatrist. His voyage of self-discovery is a rough one, though, and it rarely goes well for him. Each episode of this show is a little feature film, and every one of them is spellbinding. There have been many times that my jaw has literally dropped while watching something amazing unfold on this show.

Maybe my tastes in drama are more mercurial than they are with regard to comedy, but my favorite is my current favorite. I get a rare thrill from watching The West Wing that I've never experienced watching any other tv drama. It's a peek inside the one place that we all wish we could have a peek - the seat of our country's power. Right-wingers who decry The West Wing as liberal hogwash are missing the point (what else is new?). So what if the president in the show is a Democrat and a liberal with a distinct point of view? If they don't like it, then they can write and produce their own damn Presidential drama, and can make the president as conservative as they want. The point is: this is a Civics lesson. The point is: you have to be awfully, awfully damn smart to run a country. Television is, in my opinion, at its very best when it entertains us while helping us learn things. The West Wing does that so well, so artfully. The good news is that so far the loss of Executive Producer, Writer and Mastermind Aaron Sorkin doesn't seem to have affected the show adversely. With the exception of one episode that I thought was entirely predictable, this season has been every bit as good as the past seasons. The grasp of issues and government is just as concise, the dialogue just as crackling.

Documentaries
Why have I saved documentaries for last? Well, if you've read this far, something must have held your interest, in which case it won't hurt to read on a little more, will it?

As I've said, I think tv that gives us the opportunity to learn about things we would otherwise know little is good, useful tv. Television is the perfect place to see documentaries, and there have been some great ones, particularly from PBS. Shows like Nature and Nova have been viewing staples for me for a great deal of my life. There have been monumental series from David Attenborough, such as Life on Earth and The Life of Birds to name only two. These were mind-boggling presentations, involving traveling to remote areas all over the planet, and shooting animal behaviors never before seen.

I've marveled with Michael Wood at Art of the Western World and the Legacy of ancient civilizations. His deep understanding of history and culture has made way for genuine insights into some of the things that make us human. Ken Burns' moving and evocative retelling of history, using the words of the people involved, is itself history-making television. No one can make a still, black and white photograph say so much or seem so alive.

But in the Autumn of 1981, for one hour on thirteen consecutive Sundays, the world came to a halt for me. If I had missed even a minute of Cosmos, I would have been very upset. To this day, I see Cosmos as possibly the best usage of the medium of television that I've ever seen. Blithely addressing such subjects as relativity, evolution, life on other worlds and the questions of infinity, Dr. Carl Sagan and co-writers Ann Druyan and Steven Soter fashioned a blend of science, art, educated conjecture, and just plain wonder. Even the effects, such as Sagan walking through the Library of Alexandria or the Cosmic Calendar, don't look too shabby by today's standards. Last year, my wife gave me the boxed set of Cosmos, re-mastered on DVD, as a Christmas gift. Watching these shows is a joyous experience for me. Each installment is as good as the others. So I would have to say that Cosmos is probably my favorite thing that I've ever seen on television, bar none.

So there you have it. Thanks for letting me drone on again. It's nice to be back. Maybe I'll tell you about my Florida vacation. Probably not, though. Something will probably get me riled up between now and then.

© 2004 - Karl Cable