Only American Idol would celebrate its final episode -- the denouement in which we learn who won this glorified talent show -- by padding out the run-time with performances by previously ousted contestants who were deemed unworthy to continue vying for Idol's modest stakes. That's like a presenter at this year's Oscars announcing, "Before we reveal tonight's Best Picture winner, please enjoy these five minute clips from Gigli and The Cat in the Hat."
May 2004 Archives
Hmmm? What's that? Friends signed off earlier this month? Gee, I can't believe I missed that. You would have thought there would have been some coverage of that in the newspaper or a couple of NBC promos at the very least.
Well, Friends may be gone, but Fraiser is here to stay! Tune into NBC, as those irrepressible Crane boys argue each week over who's fussier and more refined in a comedy that just keeps getting funnier year aft...
Huh? Really? Damn.
OK then, smart guy, if those shows are gone, what's left at NBC? Will & Grace? Oh, come on -- that show ran out of gags back in 2001. Two seasons ago, it was going through the motions. Besides, thanks to syndication, you can probably flip on the TV at any time in the day and stumble upon a rerun of the show from back when it was funny. And you expect me to believe NBC allowed two high-profile, long-running comedies to leave the air simultaneous without having anything better than the tired, played-out Will & Grace to take up the mantle of the network's flagship sitcom? Riiiiiiiiiiiiiiight. Even the knuckleheads at NBC aren't that dim.
What do you mean, they did? Let me check my notes here... Holy crap, you're right.
I hope you can understand my confusion. For my entire adult life -- save for a three-year period in the early '90s when Cheers and The Cosby Show were gasping for breath and Seinfeld and Friends had yet to really take off -- NBC has usually been at the top of the ratings pile. Or, if not at the exact top, at least well positioned enough to kick CBS in the shins. And the way the network got there was through a healthy stable of flagship shows, usually sitcoms. I mean, they even coined a phrase -- "Must See TV" -- which ensconced itself in the popular lexicon. Can you say the same about ABC's "T.G.I.F." lineup or CBS' "Welcome Home" promo or Fox's "Who the Hell Are You to Judge Us?" slogan?
And now? With Friends and Frasier now in permanent reruns, what does NBC have left on the shelf? The aforementioned Will & Grace? Yawn. The West Wing? Not unless someone quickly build a time machine and travels back to retrieve leftover scripts from Season Two. ER? That show should have been consigned the boneyard long before we even got around to eulogizing Friends or Frasier. Any one of the five dozen versions of Law & Order currently on the air? Only if this is TNT, and the alternative is another showing of Bad Boys. Scrubs? Hey, I think Scrubs is on the shortlist of the best shows on television, but with the program repeatedly pre-empted and kicked around the schedule and shortened so that Will & Grace can pack in five extra minutes of Sean Hayes swanning about, it's clear that view isn't exactly shared by the folks running things in Burbank.
Ah, but do not weep for the Peacock. NBC may have lost a few of its prime-time players, but the network believes it already has the perfect show to keep its Thursday night in its customary position near the top of the ratings -- the logical heir to an evening of programming that, over the past two decades, has brought us The Cos, Alex P. Keaton, Sam Malone, Kramer, Chandler Bing, and that Italian cab driver on Wings. And his name is Donald Trump.
No, I didn't just make that up so that NBC employees reading this would feel any worse about themselves. The network is, in fact, chancing its fortunes for the next season on the proposition that America continues its odd love-affair with the self-important braggart whose hairpiece contains material not normally found in the physical world.
But don't take my word for it -- ask Jeff Zucker. "Who knew that the replacement for Friends would be Donald Trump?" Zucker, grand pooh-bah of television at NBC told the New York Times. No word as to whether Zucker immediately fell to his knees sobbing and begging God's mercy for what he'd done to television.
Yes, for the first time since 1982, when the TV version of Fame set America's toes rhythmically tapping and its shoulders indifferently shrugging, NBC will begin a fall season without a two-hour block of comedy headlining its Thursday nights. Instead, NBC is handing over its Thursday-at-nine slot to Trump and his inexplicably successful reality series The Apprentice. NBC is jumping feet-first into this reality thing -- it plans on broadcasting The Apprentice for 34 rerun-free weeks, with The Apprentice 2 making way for The Apprentice 3 round about the new year. And while I'm trying not to be skeptical here, isn't that asking people to spend a lot of time around Donald Trump? I mean, Ivana and Marla both eventually got tired of listening to that blowhard talk about how great he was, and I imagine they were probably well-compensated for their time. We're supposed to endure the guy until next May for free?
The Apprentice isn't the only reality program NBC hopes we won't be tired of by October. It's also bringing back Average Joe -- or Plain Jane or Ugly People Want to Have Sex, Too or whatever guise the show is assuming these days. That program will eventually make way for The Contender, the latest reality TV production aimed at helping Mark Burnett light his cigars with crispy $100 bills instead of the crinkly $20s he's currently forced to use. In The Contender, fake boxer Sylvester Stallone will help other fake boxers train to become real boxers. If this series proves successful, look for Stallone to appear in other reality programs based on his movies in which he helps ordinary people become country music singers, arm wrestlers, international assassins, gun-wielding judges from a futuristic dystopia, and goalkeepers on a soccer time made up of plucky POWs.
NBC is not totally forsaking its comedic roots -- nor is it entirely ready to stop suckling at the Friends teat. Kicking off Thursday nights is Joey, a Friends spinoff showcasing, appropriately enough, Joey Tribbiani. NBC took the unusual step of showing the entire pilot to TV critics during last week's upfront -- only The Cosby Show and Golden Girls ever received similar treatment -- and the critics lauded Joey as "remarkably competent." Considering last year's high-profile rookie sitcom was "Coupling," remarkably competent qualifies as dramatic progress.
In fact, if Joey proves successful, perhaps NBC should abandon the idea of coming up with new ideas for comedies entirely and just create sitcoms featuring beloved supporting and secondary characters from its more popular programs. Wouldn't you tune in for Newman!, a show about the hilarious misadventures of Seinfeld's diabolical mailman, or Eddie!, a sitcom about Frasier's dad's dog out on his own and looking for love, or Meg!, a show about the bug-eyed teenager from American Dreams?
What do you mean, American Dreams isn't a comedy? Not to you, maybe.
Joining Joey as the only other new sitcom -- and one of only four on NBC's fall schedule -- is the animated Father of the Pride. This CGI-based series -- created by the people currently rolling around naked in piles of money screaming "Wheeeeeeeeeeee!" thanks to Shrek -- chronicles the exploits of a group of white lions who appear in the Siegfried & Roy show in Las Vegas. That'd be the same Siegfried & Roy show that no longer appears in Vegas, after Roy got mauled. By lions. Who are now the subjects of an animated series NBC envisions as fun for the entire family.
Not so difficult to understand why NBC is backing away from sitcoms in favor of Donald Trump, huh?
Centering an entire sitcom around the animated adventures of lions who nearly killed their keeper certainly takes the prize for NBC's most nonsensical idea, but the premise behind LAX runs a surprisingly close second. According to NBC, the show stars "television favorites" Heather Locklear and Blair Underwood in a "dramatic series centered in a world unto itself: a major international airport." I don't mean to burst NBC's bubble, but thanks to an ever-changing set of life circumstances, I spend a fair amount of my time these days at a major international airport—to be specific, the exact same major international airport where NBC's new drama is set. And I spend every second of my time at LAX wishing that I was just about anywhere else. Now, on top of the two hours I have to allot to get through security, NBC wants me to spend another hour of my week reliving the excitement of waiting for my plane to depart? Uh, thanks... I'm just going to be flipping over to SportsCenter now, but thanks just the same.
Oh, but not to worry, NBC assures me -- "when it comes to stories to tell [on LAX], well, the sky's the limit." Yeah, I can only imagine. Thrill, as you learn that the 7:50 to Oakland International has been delayed for no apparent reason! Gasp, as you realize you've just paid twice as much for a cheeseburger at the McDonald's kiosk than what you would have paid at the McDonald's just a few miles away from the airport! Shriek, as some down-on-his-luck hobo tries to sell you poems for $5 while you wait for your plane to start boarding!
Also, if there is anyone who looks remotely like Heather Locklear working at the real LAX, she is spending her time in a different terminal than the one I'm flying out of. In NBC's defense, however, I think Blair Underwood tried selling me a poem for $5 the other day.
LAX will air at 10 p.m. on Monday, right after Las Vegas -- the only one of NBC's six freshman series from last fall to return for a second season. (Besides the epic implosions of Coupling, Miss Match and The Lyon's Den, this tally also includes the slow, painful deaths of Happy Family and -- praises be! -- Whoopi. America need no longer avert its gaze from NBC on Tuesday nights.) Just keep that stellar track record in mind the next time you come across a quote from Lord High Programmer Zucker -- "We are so much stronger than anyone expected us to be, including ourselves," he tells the Times -- declaring what a bang-up job he's doing.
NBC will introduce two other shows in the fall. Hawaii will kick things off on Wednesdays, featuring your typical cops-fighting-crime storylines airlifted over to the Aloha State. If that sounds promising, keep in mind that the last time NBC tried to set a prime-time series in Hawaii, it featured Bo Derek mooning over Lee Horsley. The other show -- known as Medical Investigation solely to throw the attack lawyers for Anthony Zuiker and Jerry Bruckheimer off the track -- will air on Fridays at 10 and feature medical investigators... um... investigating... well, medicine, I guess. It stars the guy who played the deputy district attorney in Boomtown, since he was available after NBC knee-capped that series.
The network also unveiled plans for midseason replacement shows last week. "This is no longer just about the fall season -- it's all season," Zucker says in the Chicago Sun-Times. "All the excitement of Premiere Week brings a lot of attention and a lot of coverage, but the truth is, we are now committed to 52 weeks a year of original programming, all year long, and we are going to introduce [at midseason] what normally would have been some of the strongest components of a fall schedule."
And that sounds impressive and all, until you remember that most of the words coming out of Zucker's mouth could be used to fertilize a couple acres of farmland. So let's just assume NBC is stocking up on back-up programming in the unlikely event that America tunes into Father of the Pride and is disappointed to discover that the show doesn't feature weakly, animated maulings.
Revelations, which stars some component of the Bill Pullman-Bill Paxton-Jeff Daniels triumvirate, is already on the schedule to give The West Wing a breather. In this limited-run series, Pullman or Paxton or Daniels teams up with a nun to stave off the Apocalypse. Not that you should consider Dick Wolf's dominance of prime-time a sign of the forthcoming Armageddon, but a fourth Law & Order series -- Law & Order: Briscoe! -- is waiting in the wings until the last remaining Third Watch viewers lose interest in that series. Having not learned its lesson with Coupling, NBC tries to remake another well-regarded British comedy with an Americanized version of The Office. The final two replacement shows are Crazy for You and The Men's Room, two comedies about a mismatched, neurotic romantic couple and a trio of men in their 20s, 30s, and 40s, respectively. You may recognize these shows from nearly every sitcom to hit the airwaves in the last 15 years.
And that's the problem for NBC. It's been so long since the network came up with a truly original programming idea that it's seemingly forgotten how. The network stumbled across Scrubs by accident and still doesn't know what to do with the show. NBC's last two hits, Will & Grace and The West Wing, debuted seven and six years ago, respectively, and it's been a long time since either was very interesting. And now, Friends and Frasier are no longer around to keep things afloat until the reinforcements arrive.
So where does that leave NBC? Spinning off characters from old hits and building reality shows around the same formats and hoping that nobody notices that each copy is making the original idea more fuzzy and faded. For years, NBC has managed to coast on the momentum of its past successes. But there's a funny thing about momentum -- eventually, it runs out and things come grinding to a halt. And as NBC is about to find out, when that happens, it's really hard to get things moving again. Even when you're getting a push from Donald Trump.
If I'm going to hurl abuse at the richly deserving Fox network when they do something wrong, I figure the least I can do is say nice things about them on the rare occasion when they get something right. Which, in this case, would seem to be renewing Arrested Development for a second season. With any luck, they'll air reruns of this sharp, elegantly funny show over the summer, allowing new viewers to clue in to its general hilarity by the time fall rolls around. So thank you, Fox-- you made the right choice. I promise to insult your inevitable future boneheaded programming decisions with slightly less vitriol.
Also, the five or six fans of the solidly mediocre (but apparently improving) Tru Calling will probably rejoice to know that it, too, seems to be renewed for a second Jason Priestley-enriched season. Because Eliza Dushku is pretty or something, I guess.
What is it with the UK and Friends? Four years ago I took a trip to England and the first time I turned on a TV set, I didn't see Doctor Who or Coupling or Jonathan Creek... I saw Friends.
I mention this because I'm on another trip to the UK right at this very moment, and when I turned on the TV in my hotel room, what show did I find?
Yeah. Friends again. Is there a channel in England that just plays Friends 24 hours a day?
As I type this sentence, Frasier is leaving the airwaves. I don't intend this to be a eulogy for the show because, while I recognize the show's quality, I haven't watched it in years, and, really, I wrote that piece last week.
Instead, I'd like to pass along something occasional Vidiot David Burkhart just reminded me of -- a conversation we had more than a decade ago over beer and ribs at a downtown San Diego eatery. As Dave remembers -- and really, I'm in no position to dispute him -- I swore vehemently that the planned Cheers spin-off starring Kelsey Grammer wouldn't last three episodes. The AfterM*A*S*H* of the 1990s, I think I predicted.
Or to put it another way, why do you people even waste your time reading the nonsense I spew, since I'm clearly wrong about everything?
The clock is ticking down to the inevitable moment when some political pundit makes allusions to Wednesday night's baffling American Idol result and concludes that we're a nation of idiots who can't be trusted to make the right choice at the electoral booth. To that, I say -- well, maybe. But not for the reasons likely to be cited: general lack of taste, racism real and imagined, the entire state of Hawaii voting repeatedly until telecommnications cables popped and fizzled on the Pacific sea floor.
Lay the blame instead at the feet of America's gigantic narcissistic personality disorder. We have gazed upon the face of Jasmine Trias -- an activity best done while the mute button is employed -- and she is us. No way we're letting her, or Miss Piggy manque (regrettably, I didn't think this one up on my own; credit Lisa DeMoraes of the Washington Post) Diana DeGarmo off the air.
The final four in the contest came down to these two camps: the mediocre teenagers versus the talented, polished performers who gave every indication of being adults. The two most talented singers are also those with the most fully grown-up lives; they're parents, and they seem to have a clear perspective that who they are is not necessarily tied to how well they do in the competition
Jasmine and Diana, on the other hand, are at that breathless, overdramatic stage where they are what they do; vote one of them off the show, and you're likely to see an emotional meltdown that makes Paula Abdul's histrionics look dignified by comparison. The teenagers are quite visibly still trying to work out who they are and what they can be. They haven't had to live with the consequences of any big decisions yet. They are all promise.
Which is why they'll be the last to go. Americans love the idea of perpetual potential, the premise that we can always do or be better if only we have the chance. America loves its strivers, its underdogs, its malleable people always on the edge of becoming something else. This shows up in other TV shows. Teenagers are among the most obnoxious of God's creatures, yet there are countless shows about them. Why? Because watching someone else's larval development lets us viacariously live the premise that we're going to always be moving toward something, unfettered by consequences and decision. The future's the narrative currency here.
All four of those girls will have futures. But only two of the finalists embodied the protean promise of adolescence, the fantasy that one day, an A&R rep will sweep you out of geometry class and plant your mug on MTV. For an America unwilling to admit that sometimes, there's a good reason the underdog's on bottom and eventually, our lives are shaped by what we did as opposed to what we can do, voting for Jasmine Trias is the raging protest against the idea that sometimes, wanting to be something isn't enough.
So when I wrote my station break for Wednesday noting that the American Idol voting results show was being delayed by both an extra-long That '70s Show and a promo for another dopey movie directed by that hack who ruined Godzilla, I kind of figured that the show's 8:54 p.m. start time meant that we were going to be treated to a six-minute results program. And a good thing too, since those things were ridiculously padded when there were 10 finalists, let alone just four. Besides, the only way it could be more obvious that Jasmine Trias is going to get voted off tonight would be if she came out on stage wearing a red ensign shirt and if people started inadvertently referring to her in the past tense.
[UPDATE: I'm not going to spoil the result if you haven't actually watched the show... but dear heavenly God, America. Why do you hate popular music so? Particularly those of you in Hawaii?]
But no -- Fox decided that the most anti-climactic American Idol installment in recorded history needed to be padded out to a horrific, unending dear-God-make-the-hurting-stop hour-and-six minutes. So all us lucky home viewers got treated to pulse-pounding segments like the remaining contestants sitting down for interviews with a mentalist -- no, really -- and a medley of Donna Sommer hits in which the final four -- all females, by the way -- happily and unironically sang "Bad Girls," Ms. Sommer's haunting disco number about the heartbreak of prostitution.
OK -- that was pretty cool, actually. But probably not in the way it was intended. Let's try giving those lyrics a look-see first next time, all right, ladies?
Now I must go. Someone left my cake out in the rain. And I don't think that I can take it because it took so long to bake it. And I'll never have that recipe again.
I actually can't disagree with Phil's assessment of Wonderfalls based on its pilot episode. I thought it had a lot of potential, but there were numerous things in the Wonderfalls pilot that rubbed me wrong, the lead character Jaye being the biggest problem. She wasn't just quirky, she was nasty and generally unpleasant.
But for whatever reason -- mostly because I don't believe that you can tell all from a pilot -- I stuck with the show. And every week it got better. By the time its last episode aired, it was hitting all cylinders, a drama with a weird Malcolm in the Middle comedy vibe to it. (As opposed to Joan of Arcadia, which had a good first eight episodes and then basically cratered... but that's another article.)
I see the failure of Wonderfalls as being yet another example of Failed Pilot Syndrome. My favorite example of this is the failed X-Files spin-off The Lone Gunmen. That show's pilot was absolutely, mind-bogglingly atrocious. And yet, the successive episodes got better and better. Taken as a whole, Lone Gunmen was a creatively successful show. But it didn't matter -- viewers tuned in for the pilot, got a load of crap, and tuned out forever.
It makes you wonder. For all of the grumbling of producers who have to re-shoot their pilots, sometimes it's probably for the best. Sometimes I think TV reviewers should always watch a show's second episode before reviewing the show. (In fact, most of our fall TV reviews at TeeVee are late for that very reason. The pilot's just not enough.)
And now the exception that proves the rule: Firefly's original pilot kicked ass. The "replacement" first episode mandated by Fox? Not so much.
Unless, of course, you really didn’t care for the show.
Hard to believe, I know. As the show’s very vocal boosters weren’t shy of informing you, to know Wonderfalls was to love, love, love it. Several weeks after Fox did its dirty deed, it’s remains fairly clear in the public consciousness that everyone who watched an episode embraced Wonderfalls’ quirky premise, its unique characters, its whip-smart writing. And so, after Fox canned the show after just four episodes, a cry arose from fans, TV critics, even the show’s producer that Wonderfalls was on the short end of the greatest injustice since the Jackson Administration asked the Cherokee if they wouldn’t feel more comfortable in Oklahoma. After all, the reasoning seemed to go, it would take a real knuckle-dragging, open-mouthed-breathing, drooling ape not to appreciate the genius of Wonderfalls.
Well, I’ve been able to walk upright some time, I’m only an open-mouth breather when performing strenuous exercises, and, I’ve mostly got the drooling problem under control. And I fail to appreciate the genius of Wonderfalls.
I wanted to like the show. I was inclined to like the show. Whenever something carries the “Best New Show of the Year” buzz — even during a season where test patterns are in the running for that distinction — attention must be paid. When Snell — no pushover, he — gave the show his seal of approval, that was enough for me: Wonderfalls would have my full and undivided attention.
At least until the pilot episode drove me up a wall.
We watch a lot of bad television because of this gig. Witless sitcoms. Tepid dramas. Watered-down Law & Order and CSI knockoffs so indistinguishable we can’t even keep them straight with flash cards and mnemonic devices. WB “comedies.” UPN “dramas.” And vice versa. It’s all a load of crap, and professional obligations prevent us from averting our eyes.
And yet, we get through it. We grit our teeth and gird our loins and think up clever, cutting things to say to distract us from the fact that, yes, indeed, that’s Kelly Ripa making monkey faces on our TV set and she brought her friends Faith Ford and Ted McGinley along for the ride. It’s either that, or our brains shut down in self defense. We’ve got it down to a science.
Except in one instance — for me at any rate. I can put up with insipid laugh tracks, mimeographed cop shows and just about any Tony Danza vehicle you can throw at me. After all, stuff like Homeboys from Outer Space and Shasta McNasty and Baby Bob never aspired to be anything more than the filler between blocks of commercials. But the one kind of show that I can’t bear to watch is one with pretensions of grandeur that falls spectacularly, wincingly, ineptly short of the mark. There’s something to be said for aiming to be great, I suppose, but not when you wind up several zip codes south of mediocre.
And no recent show has fared worse in that regard than Wonderfalls. At least to me.
My big problem was with the writing. It was too self-conscious, too pleased with its own cleverness and, as a consequence, never sounded like anything that could convincingly come out of the mouths of people not reading cue cards. The pilot episode had the mother of the main character, a woman in her late 40s, early 50s, toss around words like ‘snarky,’ which the young’ens these days have co-opted to the point that it sounds ridiculous when spoken by anyone in the over-40 set. But, so long as you have no problem with all your characters sounding alike no matter what their age, I guess that’s not really a problem. Every time I tried to lose myself in the story, the dialogue kept jerking me back into reality; I never, for one minute of Wonderfalls forgot I was watching a TV show.
I also had little use for the main character — a drab, awful, mopey young woman seemingly designed to repel as many viewers as possible. And before you start composing those “Well, obviously, you just don’t get that she’s supposed to be aimless and unappealing and, yes, snarky since the show is all about this bitter, sarcastic underachiever’s spiritual growth” e-mails, save your keystrokes because I do get that. I just don’t think the Wonderfalls brain trust pulled it off particularly well. It’s perfectly possible to build a series around a main character who’s flawed and a little damaged and not especially likable; it’s just not a good idea to build a series around someone who, in addition to being flawed and a little damaged and not especially likable, is also irretrievably boring.
There seems to be a tendency to ignore these flaws or to at least give Wonderfalls a free pass because the show is “different.” I can understand that inclination — with so much of prime-time network TV such an indistinguishable mess these days, it must feel like a relief when a show comes along that tries to break free from the box in which TV networks stuff all their programming. But “different” doesn’t necessarily mean “good.” Me pouring Magic Shell on myself while I reel off baseball statistics from the 1970s would certainly be “different;” it wouldn’t exactly qualify as “good,” any more than a show about an off-putting mope where everyone speaks in the same hipster lingo would be any good.
(If, however, you’re interested in 30 minutes of me covered in Magic Shell and listing the batting averages for the Big Red Machine, send $20, a VHS cassette and a stamped, self-addressed envelope to TeeVee.)
Of course, all that’s just my opinion. If yours happens to differ, vis-a-vis the quality of Wonderfalls, I’m perfectly willing to concede the point that you like the show better than I do, and give you my full and unequivocal permission to head to your favorite message board of choice and ruthlessly slag on my reasoning, my parentage and myself. Your opinion’s worth about as much as mine in the greater scheme of things.
Except in one case: when it comes to the task of picking shows I wind up watching, however, my opinion carries a tad more weight than yours. And my opinion, after watching the Wonderfalls pilot was that one episode of that was plenty, thanks.
Looking at the ratings, it’s not like I’m the only one who came to that conclusion.
So I can’t really take Fox to task for not giving Wonderfalls a chance; since I bugged out right after the pilot episode, it’s not like I gave the show much of a chance either. Yeah, in a perfect world, Fox might have burned off the remaining episodes — especially since it’s not like the network has anything better on the bench — the six dozen or so people who gave a crap would have gotten a chance to see their favorite program play out the string, and the rest of us could have continued to happily not watch nor care. Then again, if Fox was in the business of taking my advice, we’d be wrapping up the third seasons of Undeclared and The Tick right about now and Futurama would be well into a Simpson-esque run. Point is, if you want to sit down and tally all the dumb programming decisions over at the Rupert Broadcasting Network down through the years, we’d have long since taken off counted off all our fingers and toes before we got around to Wonderfalls. Canceling that show wouldn’t even crack the Top 50.
Of course, this is all old news, by now. Wonderfalls is cold and dead and has been for nearly a month and a half now. Unless someone like the WB or UPN decides to pick up the remaining episodes and watch their ratings crater, we’ve likely seen the last of Wonderfall until the commemorative DVD — now with special whining and carping commentary track — comes out. So there’s no point — other than laziness and cruelty — to my kicking even more dirt over the body, is there?
Well, there’s some point, though I’ll grant you, it’s a fairly ridiculous one. Like anything in life, television is awash in conventional wisdom — beliefs accepted as facts that seem reasonable enough until closer examination reveals them to be completely and utterly wrong or, at the very least, wildly inaccurate and totally without nuance. You get it drilled into your head often enough that the Civil War was fought over slavery or that Archduke Ferdinand’s assassination caused Word War I, and you start forgetting that the Civil War resulted from multiple causes, largely regional and economic in scope, or that World War I stemmed from issues involving nationalism, colonialism and military build-ups a century in the making. So why would you even give television’s assorted pearls of conventional wisdom — that The West Wing landed in the toilet once Aaron Sorkin left the show, that Friends should rank among television’s greatest sitcoms, and that Wonderfalls was a well-nigh brilliant show which only craven and stupid Fox executives failed to embrace — a second thought?
Because each one of those statements is incorrect, that’s why. And while thoughtlessly mouthing them may help them become further ingrained in our minds, it doesn’t make them any more correct. And we have an obligation to challenge sloppy, inaccurate thinking wherever we see, even if it’s about something treated as superfluously as television. That way, when the aliens arrive centuries from now to study our long-dead culture, they’ll have some record that The West Wing started to drive off the cliff while Sorkin was still at the wheel, that Friends, while pleasant enough, was a vacuous, vapid non-entity of a show, and that Wonderfalls was not liked by a good many people, some of them with functioning cerebellums. Then, the aliens can turn their oversized brains to less important matters, like what caused World War I.
You can forgive fans for losing sight of that. After all, it’s the job of fans to love shows unconditionally, without qualification or nuance, and to regard those whose devotion is less than total as non-believers and apostates who must be put to the sword, lest they corrupt the faithful. Producers, you might figure, would act differently. Sure, they’re passionate about their creations, and yeah, they get as disappointed as the next guy when things don’t work out. But they realize that Hollywood, she is sometimes more of the cruel bitch goddess than those 1930s musicals let on. And that sometimes, for no reason at all, a perfectly fine show gets canceled, and all producers can do is smile and take it.
Apparently, Tim Minear didn’t get the memo.
Minear is the producer mentioned way back in paragraph three who has spent the six weeks it took me to articulate my Wonderfalls argument making a one-man pity tour of North America. Minear threw out the ceremonial first bleat when he announced at the above link board that Wonderfalls is history and concluded with an interview in the New York Times in which he beat his breast, cursed the fates, and joined the Times reporter in bemoaning the unfairness of it all.
And that’s his right. I suppose I’d be pretty irritated if someone and came on pulled the plug on TeeVee without much a warning (though when you write for a site whose existence depends not on revenue, critical acclaim or public interest but rather on your own stubborn refusal to find a more productive way to spend your time, that’s hardly a risk). But it still doesn’t answer the question: just what was Minear expecting from network television?
I mean, this is a guy who worked on Firefly, which got the shaft far worse than any indignity ever visited upon Wonderfalls. But even if he were some rube fresh off the turnip truck, the question remains: what was he expecting?
Or, to paraphrase some little known movie about the import-export business, this is the business we have chosen. Sometimes, shows are canceled for no better reason than the kid at the deli messed up some programming executive’s lunch order. You don’t have to like it. You certainly can do your best to change it. But if you’re going to complain about it, perhaps you’d find more job satisfaction in a less stressful industry. I’m just saying.
And no, you can’t have the job where you read baseball scores while covered in Magic Shell. I already dibbsed that one.
It's a testament to the depth of Survivor that my wife and I spent hours discussing the permutations of last night's Survivor: All Stars final episode.
Specifically, silly Jenna of the original Survivor, who chose to betray beloved Rupert in order to go to the final three. Not to get all sabermetric on you, but clearly Jenna's choice -- although it seemed logical at the time -- was logically unsound. Playing it "day to day" may sound logical, but it's really like playing chess while only looking a single move ahead.
Jenna had the choice of siding with Rupert, voting for Rob and presumably forcing a drawing of lots to see who would get eliminated, or betraying Rupert and voting him out. She chose betrayal. But consider the odds: if Jenna betrays the Big Ol' Bear, she's got a one in three chance of winning immunity and going to the final two. (Because we already know that lovebirds Rob and Amber are going to pick one another if one of them wins immunity.)
Now, consider if Jenna goes for the Paschal English Memorial Sack o' Rocks instead. Assuming that she and Rupert remain allied (seems pretty solid since Rupert's as loyal as a dog), that gives her a two-out-of-three chance of going to the final two. (Although I'll grant you, Rupert would win a vote against any of the final four.)
So basically, Jenna opted for a 100% chance at a 33% chance, rather than a 67% chance at a 67% chance. Do the math. She made the wrong choice, even before you consider that as someone who had never won a single challenge, she had almost no chance to win that final immunity challenge and reach the final two.
In any event, Rob and Amber, sittin' in a tree, counting their M-O-N-E-E. Maybe he can buy a new Red Sox hat now.
Immediately after spending far too many words trying to bury Friends in the cold, cold ground and not doing a very good job at it, I've come across several articles that have managed to place the Friends oeuvre in its right and proper context. And I'm not just talking about Jason's, which you'll find by glancing immediately below this article or, if you've stumbled upon this entry in ArchiveLand, by clicking here.
Both Slate's Chris Suellentrop and the San Francisco Chronicle's Tim Goodman offer up excellent, original takes on the show's 10-year run, pointing out both its merits and its flaws without indulging in sweeping generalizations about the program's larger meaning. There's also a nice personal take from some writer we should really get to write for this site one of these days.
It was the monkey that did it.
I scoffed at Friends when it was announced. Another plastic sitcom with plastic twentysomething people. And yet, one night there was this monkey, and I was hooked.
I agree with Phil -- Friends really had nothing to say about us as a culture, nor did it tinker with the sitcom format in any meaningful way. Just as Pete Rose became baseball's all-time hit king because of a unique mixture of skill and longevity, Friends has lasted and had the impact it's had because of a few unique factors.
First, the casting. A show lives and dies by its casting. Just look at the Coupling, an excellent show inspired by Friends. The UK version is one of the best things on TV; the U.S. version didn't make it to a fifth episode. The big difference between the two? Casting! The UK cast of Coupling is lightning in a bottle; likewise, the group of unknown actors (hey, isn't that the girl from Family Ties and that Bruce Springsteen video?) starring in Friends were perfectly chosen. And more importantly, they stayed together for their show's entire run, eschewing the awkward, added-on character who invariably straggles in at the end of a long-running show.
Second, the humor. Friends is far from unique in being a funny sitcom. They aren't quite a dime a dozen -- as most of Friends' companions on Thursday night over the years have proven -- but they are out there. No, the impressive thing with Friends is that the humor has been consistent, almost throughout the 10-year run. At some point round about year five, the show stumbled, and it looked like it was the beginning of the end. But -- here's the Pete Rose part -- it righted itself. Last season was one of the show's best.
This year hasn't been quite as good, but it's still going out with rare characteristic #3: its dignity, intact. At least, I suppose, until we see Joey.
So I'm surfing through TVtattle and reading up on the assorted West Wing links, in part because I'm wondering if anyone's thought to offer a rebuttal to Ken Tucker's latest brooding on the show (I never thought I'd miss the days when he was mooning over Felicity, yet here I am ...) and in part because I am actually enjoying this season in a giddy sort of way, and I am amassing my background material for the likely-to-be-never-written magnum opus, "The West Wing: More fun now that it's gotten over itself."
The previous raving exposition sets up how I stumbled across the Texas City Sun's "Confessions of a West Wing Lover," which is either an absurdist parody on the order of "Waiting for Guffman" or a truly baffling collection of words arranged in an order that appears to make sense only until you actually read them. The part that got my attention is below:
Continue reading Gone With the 'Wing'.
That was back in 1996, and the primary reason I was watching Friends was there was this girl I was… well, not courting, exactly, but laying the elaborate groundwork for future courting, and she watched Friends so it gave us a common point of reference. (It has recently dawned upon me how many terrible movies and TV shows I have watched only because I thought it would give me an in with the ladies. The summer after I graduated from high school, I paid good money to see Ghost in a movie theater solely because a girl asked me if I wanted to see it, and I thought if I could endure two hours of misery, it would exponentially increase my make-out chances. It did not. So for all the young people out there, let me just give you some advice: do not watch terrible movies and TV shows just because you think it will obligate them to kiss you afterwards. It won’t, and all you’ll wind up with is bitter memories of having sat through Ghost and Mystic Pizza and whatever tedium Merchant and/or Ivory have cooked up for you this year. Make them watch your terrible movies and TV shows. Then, if they still talk to you, you know they’re hooked.)
Where was I? Oh, right… Friends.
I forget where I hopped on the Friends express — I think it was just before Ross and Rachel hooked up for the first time — and where I disembarked — sometime after Ross and Rachel broke up for the first time. And while I’d be hard-pressed to remember a single joke, plotline or Matthew Perry facial expression from the season-and-a-half of Friends I watched, I remember the show as being fairly funny, competently written and well-acted. It was certainly better than two-thirds of the laughless network shows identifying themselves as comedies back then and probably remains so today.
So why’d I stop watching? Because the show was about as relevant to my life then as a 19th century costume drama.
I am within the age range depicted on Friends, give or take a birthday or two, so it would be reasonable to assume that I could identify with the characters, that their on-screen adventures would speak to me as it had to countless others of my generation. Friends, as you know, is about six impossibly beautiful and thin people who have fabulously spacious apartments in New York City and wonderful jobs that still don’t prevent them from spending nearly every waking moment with one another or from pairing up in increasingly complex and borderline incestuous romantic couplings.
So let’s see how I measure up: I was not then nor am I now impossibly beautiful or thin. At the time I watched Friends, I lived in a craptacular desert town where the only bookstores within the city limits all had the word “Bible” in their name. I had a terrible job at a rotten newspaper where I worked long hours and was paid far below market value. My apartment was cramped and mildewey, with an upstairs neighbor who played the same Credence Clearwater Revival record night after night and had particularly noisy and therefore emotionally scarring sex at two in the morning. My closest friends lived more than an hour away, seriously cutting into the time we could spend firing off bon mots at the local coffee house. Romantic couplings — complex or otherwise — remained largely theoretical.
I realize that verisimilitude and generation-wide relevance aren’t exactly top criteria for picking what sitcoms to watch, but when compared to my life back then, Friends may as well have been set on Mars. So, when I found other ways to spend my time on Thursday nights that didn’t involve the words “Must See,” it’s not that surprising that the absence of Friends left that much of a void in my life.
Which is why Friends tributes like the one penned by Joshua Levs over at CNN leave me baffled. Levs looks at the beautiful, emaciated characters and sees “friends of mine from college, friends of mine from high school, peers from just being a middle-class, white American entering the post-college world. It was a rare Hollywood product that seemed close to home, with its finger on the pulse of — at least a slice of — our culture.”
Well, Joshua Levs’ culture, maybe. Not mine. But hey, it’s his ridiculous commentary, so he can say make whatever sweeping claims he wants. One of the more nonsensical claims, however, merits some rebuttal:
It’s always struck me that most successful sitcoms say great things about America. … Yes, “Friends” isn’t actual reality, has taken pains to avoid anything remotely controversial — no real talk about politics or religion — and has had a notable paucity of racial diversity. It’s not a complete picture of anything in the real world, and it’s not supposed to be. But it has successfully captured a slice of life. And if, decades from now, people look back on this show — among other things, of course — to get some insight into the pop culture zeitgeist of 1994-2004, that’s fine by me.
Oh, I don’t know about that, Josh. Admittedly, I don’t set my watch to the fluctuations in the Ross-Rachel tide, but I’m not sure Friends has had much to say in the past decade, about America or anything else. It would be unfair to slap the show with the vacuous label, but the show doesn’t exactly offer up biting or incisive social commentary, either. You tune into Friends not for the piercing insights into the mindset of Generation X but because there’s a good chance you’re going to be rewarded with a laugh or three. That’s what’s allowed the show to remain at the top of the ratings pile for the better part of a decade. It didn’t have much to say, but it sure did say it humorously enough.
Then again, it’s unfair to pick on Levs for writing rhetorical checks that Friends simply can’t cash. A lot of pundits have fallen all over themselves in recent weeks to lend Friends the weight of historical perspective while only succeeding in underscoring just how lightweight the show actually is. Time’s James Poniewozik more or less concedes that Friends never claimed to have any higher purpose other than to be an affable sitcom, and then goes on to contradict himself several paragraphs later by assigning Friends a higher purpose — “The message of Friends… is that there is no normal anymore and that Americans… accept that.” But Poniewozik’s argument is a model of logical consistency compared to Carina Chocano, who offers up six theories on the ultimate significance and cultural import of Friends, each more convoluted and tortured than the last. And I think the difficulty critics are having in properly eulogizing the show just underscores how futile it is to assign cultural-touchstone status to a program that never claimed to be anything other than a pleasant diversion for a half-hour each week. That, or that Carina Chocano is a shitty writer. Either conclusion is acceptable.
If Friends must be assigned a legacy, I lean toward the one hinted at in The Christian Science Monitor — that the show’s success, while doubtlessly profitable for NBC and enjoyable for its massive fanbase, helped usher in the rotten era of sitcoms we’re currently being forced to endure. Executives at NBC and other networks saw the huge ratings tallied by Friends and its rather minimalist premise — beautiful twentysomethings face the challenges of the world with laughter and togetherness while saying clever things! — and falsely concluded that, and not stellar writing or a winning, cohesive cast was responsible for the show’s success. So for the past decade, we’ve been flooded by a stream of Friends imitators and knockoffs, with the returns diminishing with each new pale imitation. Still, it’s kind of unfair to blame the show’s creators for that, with the exception of the crummy sitcoms they created themselves to coast in Friends’ wake.
And that leaves us right back where we started — with Friends leaving the airwaves and us fumbling to say a few kind words for a show popular enough to remain on-the-air and in the public consciousness for a decade but not substantial enough to earn the forced platitudes TV critics are laboring to toss in its direction. Friends lacked the social impact of a M*A*S*H* or an All In the Family. It never challenged the conventions of a sitcom the way Seinfeld did. All it offered was a mastery of its craft — which sounds like a nice thing to engrave on a gold watch but not the sort of epitaph befitting such a universally beloved show.
Well, sorry — I can’t come up with anything better. I wish I could. But it’s hard to get that excited about the end of a show that, upon close examination, really isn’t that remarkable. Think about it — over the years, hairstyles have changed, weights have fluctuated, babies and Mrs. Ross Gellers have come and gone. But the characters have, with a few exceptions, remained the same. And that, perhaps, just underscores the show’s complete lack of relevance that I first felt eight years ago. I like to think that I’m a different person from who I was in 1994; you probably do, too. It’s a shame that Chandler and Joey and Rachel and the rest can’t really say the same.
