Television
Many have said that television has nothing to offer, has no redeeming qualities, and can rot our minds. Bollocks. I watch it, and look how I turned out. — Steve
A the time of writing, all of these television programs were available on DVD or were currently airing.
Battlestar Galactica
This is a re-imagining of 1979's campy, cult-classic, sci-fi program of
the same name, but like Steve Austin, it is better, stronger, and faster
than it was. The new Battlestar Galactica is better written, better
acted, deeper, and more relevant than its earlier incarnation. In this version,
the characters have real motivations, desires, and emotions. Gaius Balthar,
for example, does not betray the human race out of simple greed, but because
he is duped by sentient Cylons who have managed to evolve themselves to
appear and act human. Because of this evolution, the Cylons themselves have
developed real motivations, desires, and emotions, making them interesting
characters rather than just the targets they were in the original series.
They have developed a significant religious difference from their human
adversaries, one that makes war with the human race inevitable: The Cylons
have become monotheists and reject the pagan polytheism of humanity. Battlestar
Galactica has become a program about a religious war, and television
hardly gets more entertaining than that.
Black Adder
The great ensemble series Black Adder no doubt contains some of the
funniest British comedy ever put together. If you like British comedy, you’ll
no doubt love Black Adder; you should buy the boxed set that contains all
four series and the specials. If you don’t like British comedy, but
you still like a good laugh, you might still want to rent one of the series
(I suggest you start with the fourth series) and giving it a try. It really
is that funny.
Coupling
Okay, Coupling is just a British sex comedy, but it’s a generally
well-written comedy with interesting and entertaining characters, and it’s
worth a few bucks to rent or purchase it. You won’t be edified, but
you will laugh.
Fawlty Towers
Only twelve half-hour episodes were ever made of this wonderful series,
and I will assert right now, my dog sitting at my feet to guarantee my truthfulness,
that these are quite possibly the six funniest hours of television ever
produced anywhere, in any country, at any time. I have never laughed so
hard, before or since, as I did upon watching the episode entitled “The
Germans.” I don’t know how many times I’ve seen it, but
I’m guaranteed to laugh each and every time.
Firefly
Television networks are businesses, and businesses are in the business of
business, that is to say, they exist to make money. That doesn’t mean
they don’t still suck. Firefly, like many programs, was canceled
before it had time to find an audience, or, for that matter, a timeslot.
Only fourteen episodes of Firefly were produced, and only ten aired (at
various times on various nights), before the program was canceled, and yet
it was a great program. Firefly was a science-fiction program set
in a distant solar system, in a distant future, sometime after everything
has gone to hell in a handbasket, and it might be regarded as the anti-Star
Trek. It was funny, entertaining, simultaneously jovial and pessimistic,
and just a lot of fun. This year (2005) a spinoff movie called Serenity
made it into the theaters and was very well received by most critics. Good.
I loved it, too, and I’m waiting for the next movie to come out.
Mad About You
Jamie and Paul Buchman love each other, and yet they sometimes drive each
other crazy. This probably sounds like the premise for every married couple
sitcom ever made, but Mad About You will probably long remain a favorite
exemplar of the format. Very few programs have ever come close to being
as quirky, funny, well-written, and true.
MI-5 (Spooks)
Great Britain has two spy agencies to protect its citizens from threats.
The more famous of these organizations is known as MI-6; in the world of
fictional spies, this is the agency that James Bond works for, and it works
something like the CIA in that it focuses its attentions on threats from
abroad. Spooks is about the other organization, MI-5 (as this
British series is titled in the United States), which, like the FBI, has
a mandate to operate within Britain’s national borders, but unlike
the FBI is a spy organization rather than a police organization. MI-5
is a taut, well-written, well-edited series about the agents who must live
double lives in a world of lies, and how all the lies affect them. What
makes this show work so effectively is that it is about what the agents
do as well as about why they do it, and throughout it remains always about
the agents themselves.
NewsRadio
Four great seasons of bright and original comedy, and a fifth to say farewell.
When Phil Hartman was murdered during the hiatus between the show’s
fourth and fifth seasons, he took the soul of NewsRadio with him.
This had been the perfect ensemble comedy, among the best ever, and all
of the actors in it depended upon each other to make it work. After Hartman’s
murder, Jon Lovitz was brought in to create a new replacement character,
but the replacement simply didn’t work. Setting aside Lovitz’s
many faults as an actor, the character of Bill McNeal was simply too elemental,
too central, to be replaced. If the show were to continue, the character
had to be replaced, of course, because one cannot have a show about a radio
station without a disc jockey. It was clear, however, that everyone involved
in the show’s production, actors and writers included, felt the loss
too deeply to give more than a halfhearted effort. Even with Hartman’s
absence, however, the show’s fifth and final season was better than
almost any other comedy made at the time.
The Office
This is a superior comedy that sneaks up on the viewer. At first, The
Office is less funny than painful, for, like most British comedies,
it finds its humor in personal embarrassment. As John Cleese explained in
the film A Fish Called Wanda, the British, more than anything else,
seek to avoid embarrassment. This avoidance becomes the source of so much
of their humor, and with the two seasons of The Office, creator,
writer, and star Ricky Gervais takes us to the extreme edge of that embarrassment,
with hilarious results.
Over There
This program is not as challenging as either The Shield or Rescue
Me, but it is the first program in many years to attempt to portray
the lives of infantry soldiers in combat. Over There loves its soldiers,
and while it makes no attempt at all to portray them as saints, it does
portray them as real Americans. Like all programs about the military, mistakes
are made in the way tactics, uniforms, and procedures are portrayed, but
the majority of these mistakes can be attributed to budget shortfalls and
dramatic license. What’s more important is that the soldiers on the
program are real humans, heroes when heroism is needed, tired, vulgar, and
scared the remainder of the time. For the most part, these are very much
like the real soldiers that I knew when I was in the Army.
Rescue Me
Americans are known to alternate between worshiping and demonizing those
who serve. When we are not calling our soldiers baby killers, for example,
we put yellow ribbon magnets on our cars that read “Support Our Troops.”
We do this for the military, the police, firefighters, and to politicians,
both current and historical, and there’s a reason for this: All of
these people are human. Rescue Me is one of the great television
programs to explore how even those who serve, those who sacrifice and risk
their lives to help others, can be just as fatally flawed as anyone else.
Jefferson kept slaves, Lincoln was depressed, Eisenhower had a mistress,
and New York firefighter Tommy Gavin is a drunken adulterer who speaks to
dead people, yet despite those flaws, he would not hesitate to run into
a burning building to save any one of us.
The Shield
Similar to Rescue Me in that the show’s protagonist is a flawed
public servant, The Shield presents us with detective Vic Mackey,
a bullet-headed thug who investigates and solves crime in his own way. That
is where the similarity ends, however, for Vic Mackey is not just a flawed
man, but a man whose flaws have taken him too far beyond the good. He has
become only very slightly better than the criminals he arrests. What makes
the show interesting is not Mackey’s flaws, but that he is well aware
of them. He knows he has gone too far, and frequently attempts to back away
from his own angers and greed, and even perform public penance whenever
he thinks doing so won’t expose his more criminal activities. As a
character, Mackey is either on the way up or on the way down; as viewers,
we simply do not yet know.
Sports Night
Before he created The West Wing, Aaron Sorkin created Sports Night,
a well-written “dramedy” about the people who create a daily
late-night sports program on a fledgling cable network. The writing is intelligent
and observant, the characters grow and evolve, and although ABC chose to
cancel the program after only two seasons, it is a superior program written
for thinking adults, not teenagers.
Third Watch
Third Watch is gone now, mainly because network executives tried
to kill it throughout most of its run; at least that is what I choose to
believe. Third Watch began as a realistic program about the police,
firefighters, and paramedics who patrolled the less fashionable 55th precinct
of New York City during the hectic third shift running from 4 p.m. until
midnight. The show is not about what these people did, but about who they
were. This, however, was apparently not sexy enough for the suits who make
decisions, and over time the stories became more plot driven, and eventually
involved everything from mob hits to terrorist attacks. Somehow, while hurting
the show, this decision never completely killed the show, and enough of
our interest in the characters remained to keep us watching. This is no
doubt attributable to some occasionally terrific scripting, great characterizations,
and first-rate acting.
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