TV MONTH: Modern Family

In Treatment (2008-2011)

GOTTA LET IT BYRNE

by Tess Lynch

The HBO series In Treatment, the second season of which ended last spring*, is the most successful—by which I mean it’s realistic to a fault and meticulously controlled, and that it occurs in real-time (or nearly so) and always in the same room (or nearly always)—portrayal of therapy I’ve ever come across. To say this is to acknowledge that In Treatment often tests my patience by boring me; I used to dread certain days of the week, certain sessions, because I found the patients/actors/characters to be dull, narcissistic human beings who were trying to manipulate dear little Dr. Paul Weston and me, the viewer. Paul’s sessions with Gina are usually the toughest for me to get through without reaching for something to read on the internet, glancing up occasionally to scan around and see if Paul is smashed against a bookcase, emoting, or if Gina is poking a fire in her beautiful house’s phenomenal fireplace (I care about Gina’s house). That’s the extent of “watching” I do for Paul and Gina.

Gina, you sleepy spider.

And yet, I recorded them every week for both seasons, forcing myself to catch up, because I cared so much about other weeks (from season 1: Laura, Sophie, sometimes Amy and Jake; from season 2: April) that it was important for me to feel like I had every scrap of information I might need to enjoy them to the fullest extent of the TV law. I’ve always nursed some secret fantasy of being a therapist, but I’m probably too much of a gossip, and it would be difficult for me not to offer a lot of unsolicited advice and anecdotal information to my patients to the extent that they would undoubtedly find obnoxious and not at all professional. In Treatment nurtures that fantasy, by rewarding the viewer’s patience with moments of really wonderful insight and the kind of understated-but-effective drama that comes from following a character so closely that you do find yourself, months later, wondering after them.

I think about Phlox Lombardi from The Mysteries of Pittsburgh sometimes (when I see a woman who is shaped like a guitar), and I also think of Sophie, the teenage gymnast from last season’s In Treatment. Not with quite the same frequency with which I think of Tony Soprano or Paulie Walnuts, or even Livia, but I also didn’t expect to ever think of Sophie again, at least until the very end of the season. There’s so little action, so little dynamism or pyrotechnics, that you enjoy this show slowly, and sometimes, you don’t enjoy it at all.

Melissa George didn’t win me over until the end, even with that smize.

Earlier this year I was at a party, talking to a friend. We were set off a bit from the rest of the crowd, probably fixing gimlets or something tacky with ice that had been chilling beer in a cooler. There were a lot of kind of boring guys in sweaters and girls who were being really bossy about playing beer pong and I think the riff raff had started to seep in. “Look at all of those people,” my friend said, “all of their problems are just as important as your problems and they feel things just as deeply as you do.”

“Not that guy though!” I said, because there was a particularly weird guy there who showed up from next door even though he didn’t know anybody, and who had brought three of his own folding chairs and a tiny dog on a leash. He was aggressively trying to make conversation with anyone about anything at all, and he was wearing a paper party hat.

“Yes, he does,” insisted my friend. “His thoughts and preferences are just as important as yours, his life is just as full.”

I battled with him for a bit about the one guy, but the sentiment made an impression on me. This is also why In Treatment is wonderful: each character gets a whole episode, with very few deviations (Paul has some moments allotted now and then for his back-stories: divorce, some drama, blah blah blah. I wish he’d save all of this for his snore-sessions with Gina). Every half hour’s problems are equally important. You will have preferences and opinions regarding the session’s importance and significance within the context of the whole show, sure, but part of watching In Treatment is about the experience of sorting out the importance of each session within Paul’s life, his own relationships to certain patients. Many of the most obnoxious patients—so off-putting in their first and second sessions—ultimately have the best pay-offs, the moments you wait for all season.

A couple (Jake and Amy), each pretty flawed and grating in their own way, have a pretty killer argument (read: great to watch) during their couples’ session in which Jake records Amy on his cell phone and then plays it back a couple of minutes later to prove a point. In the context of such a talky show, which generally maintains an air of such detachment, it is the zingiest move in the world. I wasn’t sure if it was brilliant or a violation of some code of humanity. I tried it out once, but the payoff isn’t as good in real life. Trust.

Isn’t this image ridiculous? Also, doesn’t Jake look like some guy you know? He looks like five guys I know.

The show is heavily based on the Israeli series BeTipul, the promo for which looks really good (here it is on Youtube) — I kind of like it without subtitles. It’s very relaxing. Like a Quaalude.

When you Google Image Search “Quaalude” this comes up right away!

Part of what is fascinating about the premise of BeTipul/In Treatment is that you only see the characters form one relationship: their relationship to Paul. I guess you could also argue that they’re forming new relationships with themselves, too. This is a rare view, narrower than most vistas you get of HBO heroes: on Big Love, we see the Barb who interacts with her mother and her sister, the Barb who steers Bill’s decisions and manages the household, the fragile Barb who struggles with secrets, the Barb who charms the neighbors. Our point of view shifts between the these versions of each character, their chameleon-responses to different situations and all manner of unpredictable circumstances. And then we leave them for another character related to the first, and then another…

During In Treatment, we cage the characters in a room with a mirror, and let them go about unwrapping themselves for us. It’s not always interesting (Diane Wiest, who plays Gina (Paul’s therapist), and who I think is so beautiful and great in everything, didn’t get half as much to do as I would have liked; though season one’s Alex plot-line built to an impressive crescendo, there was a lot of stodgy posturing stuffed into his first few episodes), but that is precisely what forms this absolutely normal, often bleak landscape. Everything becomes so familiar, it actually seems to be genuine. It’s almost a comfort: the routine, the same room every time, and Dr. Paul Weston’s chin resting on the back of his hand with the same old books in the background.

Gina’s water pitcher and glass set make me so thirsty — why? Does that mean it’s effective design? Or is it ineffective, since its PURPOSE is to make me un-thirsty? I should get a therapist and ask them what that means.

I don’t know if this is just me BS-ing around or if there’s any validity to what I’m about to say, but it’s hard not to consider the fact that Israel was having a pretty intense time when BeTipul premiered in 2005, and by the time the American adaptation had aired in January 2008, we were, nationally, freaking the fuck out. If the show had appeared back in the good old days (and no, I guess they weren’t THAT GOOD, but when you compare the 90’s to 2008? Can we agree? You know, back when I actually would pause to wonder, oh, will Miranda and Steve get back together?), it would not have affected me as much as it did.

We could take solace in this self-absorption, because it meant that things couldn’t be so bad, if there was still something else to talk about. There’s something noble about people struggling with these mundane problems, these issues that are objectively so trivial—and this in contrast to the never-ending pounding noise of terrible news; a reality that was becoming more and more impossible to avoid (war, economics, despair; the things behind the things that drive us into the therapist’s office, the reasons that are, for everyone existing in a certain time and place, the same)—and maybe what it is is an assurance that, no matter what, we will go down clinging to our own problems, that the light at the end of the tunnel is that these things mattered, just because we uttered them out loud to someone once.

Tess Lynch was an original staff writer and associate editor for A Bright Wall in a Dark Room, but has since mostly moved on to far more glorious internet pastures (Grantland). We still miss her.

*This essay was originally published in October 2009

TV MONTH: Breaking Bad (2008 - present)

THE EXISTENTIALIST ANTIHERO.

by Justin Langdon

Jesse: “A guy who actually wants to be in prison?”
Walter: “There’s more than one type of prison.”

The word “existentialism” seems to strike a perfect balance between nebulous and highbrow, facilitating a wide usage with sparse understanding. It is a term that’s used about as consistently as, say, “irony” is, with a meaning that seems to morph to fit its surrounding context. So it’s perhaps no surprise that, sometime in the middle of the second season of Breaking Bad, I caught myself excitedly saying aloud to a room of no one, “Walter White is an existentialist!” I, too, am guilty. But before you judge, allow me to elaborate.

Existentialism is better understood as a cultural movement than as a definitive school of thought, which perhaps lends reason to its modern day ambiguity. Nietzsche’s notorious exclamation “God is dead” and his focus on the vacuum that ensues is an important precursor to the movement. Absent a God, humanity is without an external creator of meaning and arbiter of values. Couple this with the inherent inability of science to make headway in the world of “oughts” and suddenly there may be no objective basis to morality. This is a scary place to be. It’s too easy to slip into a passive, nihilistic disposition where there is no meaningful reason to act one way over another, and where “good and evil” are simply words detached of any transcendental importance. Nietzsche had his way of responding to existence in an indifferent universe, and the Existentialists, namely Sartre, had theirs.

Rather than succumbing to despair, existentialism confronts the meaninglessness pervading the human condition by prescribing action. In a crude way, it is philosophical self-help for those who find the state of our existence to be fundamentally unsettling. Because humans are purportedly without any preordained essence, we must define ourselves through the choices we make. To exist is thus to be free, and to be free is to navigate your own vessel down a river rife with forks. Meaning may not objectively exist to the existentialist, but it is there for each individual to create on her own terms.

Walter: “Look we all in this room, we love each other, we want what’s best for each other and I know that I am very thankful for that. What I want… what I want, what I need… is a choice.”

Skyler: “What does that mean?”

Walter: “…sometimes I feel like I never actually make any of my own choices. I mean… my entire life it just seems I never had a real say about any of it. This last one, cancer, all I have left is how I choose to approach this.”

Breaking Bad begins with a Walter White who fits easily into the spineless nice-guy archetype. He’s a good father, a mild mannered husband, and vastly over-qualified to be teaching high school chemistry. It even seems that his willingness to fit the mold that external circumstances have carved out for him has prevented him from reaching his potential. His passivity has trapped him somewhere near the top of Maslow’s hierarchy, but falling just short of reaching self-actualization. Early Walter White is an everyman, representing the vast majority of individuals in a post-industrial society who hover around the peak of the normal distribution curve of our capabilities, but are either too timid or too willing to exercise self-deception to do anything about it.

The story wastes no time getting to where it wants to be; in the pilot episode, Walter learns he has terminal cancer. Death loses its innocuous status as an uncomfortable thought pushed to the margins of the mind. It’s there in the forefront now, leaving Walter no choice but to acknowledge his finitude. It’s a narrative that’s hackneyed by now—a weak man experiences impending death, is reawakened, and comes to live on his own terms—but what keeps Breaking Bad so fresh and enjoyable is the authentic existence into which Walter White enters.

Jesse: “It’s weird is all, okay? It doesn’t compute. Listen, if you’ve gone crazy or something…I mean, if you’ve…if you’ve gone crazy or depressed, I’m just saying…that’s something I need to know about. Okay? I mean, that affects me.”

[long pause]

Walter: “I am awake.”

In existentialism, the concept of authenticity is the standard by which we evaluate our lives. It is a normative way of being, a value assumed as foundational within a world devoid of any preexisting values. To live authentically, in an existential sense, is to live in a manner that is one’s own and to which one commits oneself. This all sounds vague—and philosophers do like to be vague—but the idea here is that you should not imitate how a _____ person lives, the blank being any identifying social role. You should not try to live as a “writer” lives. You should not try to live as a “professor” lives. Or as a “sports enthusiast” lives. No: to live authentically is to make decisions because you want to own them, and these decisions reveal the values that only you can establish.

So, yes, Walter does adopt a new outlook on life once he fully comes to accept he’s a perishable good. But the true beauty behind Breaking Bad is how euphoric it is to watch a character come to own his own existence. We get to see a man who realizes that to live is indeed to be free—that we are irrevocably faced with choices of what life we want to lead every single day, and it is up to us as individuals to make these choices. This freedom is scary, and we find routine ways of evading it—ways of tricking ourselves into feeling trapped and even like victims of our own lives. Walter shows just how illusory such limitations are by refusing to act as a slave to the social expectations placed upon him. His bravery extends well beyond the occasional tough guy act: it is existential bravery. And I think perhaps this is why we return to watch his transformation time and time again. Because one can’t help but feel a little awe, seeing someone achieve this rare state of being.

Existentialism places the burden of becoming what you want squarely on your own shoulders. The responsibility cannot be shed; it is a condition intrinsic to the nature of our existence. Walter took it upon himself to become who he wanted. Actions that began as thinly-veiled altruistic gestures for his family eventually revealed themselves for the self-interested beasts they truly were. The intrigue with which he holds Hank’s gun and the interest he shows for the meth money both preceded any knowledge of cancer.

Walt knew all along that he wanted to be “the man doing the knocking,” and it’s terrific fun to watch him get there.

Justin Langdon is a twenty-something living in New York City who knows exactly what he is doing with his life. He once took a class on existentialism and it scarred him permanently. He tumbls here.

TV MONTH: Twin Peaks (1990)

THE TWIN PEAKS PILOT EPISODE: Or, You Didn’t Know Laura Palmer

by Elizabeth Cantwell

April 8, 1820: A peasant named Yorgos Kentrotas discovers a strange piece of marble buried in the ancient city ruins of Milos. The marble is excavated (in two pieces), cleaned and nearly sold to Turkey—when a French ambassador, recognizing the importance of the discovery, stops the statue from being loaded onto a boat bound for Constantinople. The marble is then taken to the Louvre. People wonder what happened to its arms. They call it the Venus de Milo.

April 8, 1990: Pete Martell, an aging man out for a morning fishing trip, hears the blow of a foghorn. He sees something white peeking out from behind a large mass of petrified wood. It is a figure wrapped in white plastic. A figure with hair, with flesh-colored shoulders. It is Laura Palmer, a lovely 17-year-old resident of sleepy Twin Peaks, Washington, now dead.

What does the unearthing of a famous Greek sculpture have to do with the opening scene of David Lynch’s relatively short-lived TV series? Well, a lot, I think. Both of these events have something primal to do with the human capacity to discover—and with the human inability to understand those discoveries. Both are shrouded in mystery (that Lynchian buzzword), in accident, in those elements that make mankind immortal—art, confusion, death, fear. The terrifying moment of recognition when some tiny round thing that may be yourself is suddenly reflected in a blank face.

Though 30 episodes of Twin Peaks aired, only six were directed by Lynch himself, including the two-hour pilot episode. I think it’s interesting to watch the pilot as a self-contained event, almost as a feature film in its own right. Okay, sure, it’s not self-contained at all if you think of “self-contained” as meaning “having closure.” But it is, in some sense, “complete in itself” (as Merriam-Webster would have it). After all, Lynch himself said that agreeing to reveal Laura Palmer’s killer during the second season was one of his greatest professional regrets. In his mind, the purpose of the series was the mystery (not the solution). There ought to be no teleology applied to Twin Peaks, no drive towards a concrete goal. Instead, the closer you seem to get to something, the more fragmented and sprawling and un-goal-like it ought to seem.

The pilot episode is also self-contained in the way it answers the question: How do you build a Lynchian world?

First: industry. Something loud and clanging and piston-y. Machines almost violent, violating, in their raw power, their disregard for the people who built them. Next, add Kyle MacLachlan (seen here as FBI Agent Cooper). Insert body parts or bodies themselves lying on the ground. Fold in a somewhat upsetting singer on a somewhat upsetting stage in a room that’s darker than it ought to be. Now, a sprinkle of dangling telephones—interrupted communications. Stop lights that only ever turn red. Back it all with music that may seem ridiculously melodramatic until you start to doubt yourself and what you’re seeing, at which point it just becomes frightening.

Perhaps my favorite part of the pilot episode (though really, there are so many favorite parts that it’s hard to choose) is when Agent Cooper and the local sheriff (just a regular guy named Harry S. Truman) walk into a conference room in a bank. In the foreground, a severed deer head lies menacingly on the table. Its eyes, though blank, bleat distress. Something is off, we feel. Something dangerous is coming. Something primal and gut-wrenchingly I-didn’t-want-to-know. But as Kyle MacLachlan’s face registers a hint of mild disturbance, the bank employee blurts matter-of-factly, “Oh, it fell down.” A sigh of relief, perhaps even an appreciative laugh, escapes our lips—thank god! Just a visual sight gag. After all, there’s nothing at all menacing about an accidental failure of wall-mounting—is there?

Or is the knowledge that the silly, accidental things around us will always appear more scary than the things we actually ought to be frightened of—which will, all too often, look dignified and wood-paneled and polished—is that knowledge in and of itself enough to drive us crazy?

The Twin Peaks pilot also produces a strangely heady sense of repetition and unthinking motion: a going forward even in the stopping, a denial of the relief that comes when an answer is reached. The lights may turn red, but the cars are still going through them. Donna (Lara Flynn Boyle) is still staring hugely and mournfully with those eyes, Mrs. Palmer is still making strangled grief noises, Agent Cooper is still dictating to an unseen and unknown “Diane,” the mill is still spewing smoke and noise, Lucy is still describing to which phone she’s going to transfer the call, the Log Lady is still holding her log. Laura Palmer is still dead. Nadine Hurley is still opening and closing her drapes, staring defiantly out from behind her eyepatch.

In fact, though it may be these repetitions that prompt people to call Lynch’s films “surreal,” it is precisely these repetitions that make his work hit so close to home. Because that isn’t surreal at all. That’s how we live. Things do repeat over and over, there is no end in sight beyond the false ends we create for ourselves—to-do lists, parties celebrating the completion of projects, calendar years. It’s the concept of closure that’s dream-like and surreal, not the concept of mystery. Mystery is all too realistic and common.

Some people believe Lynch’s work exposes a seedy underbelly in quaint suburban communities or small towns, which proves that evil lurks everywhere, not just in those “dangerous” big cities. However, it seems to me that Lynch is saying that these small towns can actually be more dangerous than big cities. That a greater proliferation of opportunities to connect to your neighbors—to know their faces and their dogs’ faces and their favorite records to play on Friday nights—actually breeds something more terrifying and visceral than anonymous interactions on a subway in a large metropolis ever could.

That truly knowing each other is frightening and inhuman.

“Mr. Cooper, you didn’t know Laura Palmer,” says Sheriff Truman. But who DID know Laura Palmer? What does it mean to know anyone? Looking into their eyes, all you see is the reflection of yourself. Or perhaps, if you’re lucky, the reflection of a telltale motorcycle, which may or may not be carrying the man who holds the other half of your broken heart. Who may or may not be responsible for the stillness of your body when it is wrapped in plastic, lovely and white like a buried statue.

Elizabeth Cantwell is a writer living in Los Angeles. She tumbls here.

TV MONTH: Daria (1997-2002)

HOW ABOUT THINKING PEOPLE SHOULD ACCEPT ME FOR WHO I AM WITHOUT MY HAVING TO CHANGE?

by Katherine Spada

A lot is being made of the impact Lena Dunham’s new HBO series Girls is having, and how refreshing it must be for all of us twenty-something single white women to finally see accurate reflections of ourselves on television for the very first time. And while I don’t dislike Girls, I have chosen to watch it objectively instead of struggling to identify with its characters, all of whom seem more like stories of people that my friends met one time in college, rather than women I actually surround myself with. Girls, just like last year’s Bridesmaids, is being heralded as “groundbreaking” in its portrayals of honest, funny, complicated female characters—without being the first of its kind at all.

This may be because most of the people making these types of statements have a few years on Dunham and myself, so they didn’t see what I saw growing up in the ’90s and ’00s. I was a child, watching My So-Called Life with my teenage sister, and later watching Daria religiously without ever having seen her pre-spinoff on Beavis and Butthead. Along came Gilmore Girls, Freaks and Geeks, and eventually Veronica Mars. As I grew up, I saw these girls on TV and they shaped and reflected my young life. In the years before and since, there have been various outspoken feminist icons on television, but the ones that helped me become confident in who I am were the awkward teenagers, too smart to be very happy, hopelessly drawn to the bad idea with the floppy hair and grungy t-shirt, but grounded in the knowledge that there’s got to be someplace better than high school on the horizon.

I went to an all girls’ prep school from 4th grade until the end of high school.  Outside of a couple of dates with boys I’d met at driver’s ed or 9th grade dances, I saw teenage boys so infrequently that they were almost like unicorns: spiky-headed creatures to be stared at and fascinated by. Senior year, I went to an admitted students function at the college I ended up attending, where I was, for the first time, part of an environment with almost as many boys as girls. I thought I might faint from the nerves. I looked around at the other girls, in their shorts and halter tops, and I looked at myself, with my thick bangs, glasses, thrifted boy’s t-shirt, and jeans from Costco.  The very next day I made my dad drive me to the mall so I could by a spaghetti strap top, denim miniskirt, and Rainbow sandals (years of pointe shoes meant I rarely strayed from Chuck Taylors in the shoe department, lest my callused toe knuckles invite scorn).

I felt so weak and guilty in that moment; I felt even worse when I got so many compliments wearing the new outfit. In episode #301 (“Through a Lens Darkly”), Daria tries wearing contact lenses but struggles with the implications of vanity that come from shedding her glasses. I, too, had tried contacts for a few months when I was in middle school, but quit on them because I could never get used to the feeling of slimy plastic on my eyeball after wearing glasses since the age of three. In fact, I was recently encouraged to try using them again when I play sports, but I was so overcome with emotion when I merely tried them on in the ophthalmologist’s office that I know now that glasses are just part of my face. Daria is embarrassed to think that a desire to wear contacts will show the world that she cares about her appearance. Her friends and family rightly tell her that there’s nothing wrong with a little overt vanity, and that it won’t change who she is. Jane references Jodie as another character who, like Daria, has standards too high to live up to.

I wore my tank top, my short skirt, and my sandals as much as I could bring myself to. It didn’t take long before I was back in my tomboy clothes. At 17, it’s hard to push past the comfort zone even if now, years later, I hardly ever wear jeans anymore. I revisit “Through a Lens Darkly” whenever I am feeling a little self-conscious, and it helps me to know that it’s okay to worry about superficial things, and that it feels great to come out on the other side knowing that “we’re all just human,” as Brittany (Brittany!) says. Just like in episode #212, “Pierce Me,” when Daria gets her belly button pierced so that Jane’s brother Trent (a cartoon character on whom we all had crushes) would be impressed. This is Daria’s Jordan Catalano moment, after which Jane tells her, “You did something stupid for a guy.  Gee, you may join the human race after all.”

I realize that I may be focusing a lot on rather superficial themes from this show, but image is so much of what Daria is about. It’s about high school, after all. Helen and Jake Morgendorffer always want to appear professional, a perfectly happy family. Kevin and Brittany are desperate to never be confused with “Brains,” but they worry almost as little about how they present themselves as Daria does. Quinn, of course, is Vice President of the Fashion Club, and to her, cuteness is everything; her struggle to constantly present a certain image is taken as far as an actual consultation with a plastic surgeon. 

But Daria and Jane, like a lot of “counterculture” teenagers, are fascinated with image, because to most Lawndale High students who won’t take the chance to get to know them, image is all it takes to differentiate them. In episode #201, “Arts ‘N’ Crass,” Jane and Daria design a poster to subvert the school’s naivete about serious issues, but their bulimia satire lands them in trouble. A few episodes later in “Monster,” they learn a lesson when their documentary about Quinn proves that they can be as wrong in their superficial judgments of others as people have been about them.

I never quite blended in with the other girls who (I assumed) didn’t have to force themselves to wear short skirts and tank tops. But time and time again I learned the lesson that anyone who mattered was going to get to know me regardless of what was on the outside. Those friends that have known me throughout years of aesthetic changes have grown with me, and our relationships are stronger for having been through so many different things. In my friendships, I strive to be like Daria and Jane who, even after fighting about the track team, and especially after fighting about a guy, can say to one another, “You know exactly who you are, and nobody’s going to con you into thinking you don’t. I wish I’d had you around just as a role model.” Even if nobody knows exactly who they are, when friends feel that lucky just to have each other, it makes all the peripheral nonsense meaningless.


Katherine Spada is a Hollywood assistant and writer. In her free time, she trains in Muay Thai and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, and was inspired to study American Sign Language after becoming obsessed with teen soap Switched at Birth on ABC Family. She makes time to watch a lot of TV shows, but still complains about how busy she is.

TV MONTH: Freaks and Geeks (1999)

NO THANKS, I PREFER TO GET HIGH ON LIFE.

by Danielle Lee

“No one thinks you’re cool, you know.” – Sam Weir

“Trust me, I know.” – Lindsay Weir

All the dramatic moments in my high school career came in 14-minute intervals. They usually involved discovering my best friend cheating with my boyfriend or my other best friend cheating with my ex-boyfriend, or my ex-boyfriend who is my best friend cheating with my boyfriend’s best friend’s girlfriend. Half of the time this happened at prom.

This is why I initially didn’t trust Freaks and Geeks. They didn’t even have a prom. I don’t care that the show was cut short to a single season, there was room for at least four different proms in those 18 episodes.

In its defense, the Paul Feig-created, Judd Apatow-executive-produced show started strong. The opening shot of the pilot episode sweeps across suburban Michigan’s William McKinley High School—over the football field full of scrimmaging players to the bleachers, where pretty cheerleader Ashley and attractive football player Brett very earnestly discuss their feelings. The scene takes place in 1980, but the show itself debuted in 1999, one year after the Dawson’s Creek premiere that grabbed record-setting ratings, steering the course for now-dearly departed The WB’s teen TV renaissance and setting sexy expectations for every subsequently televised student-teacher, uh, conference.

So coming to this new NBC one-hour “dramedy” fresh off a full season of Joey Potter crawling through Dawson’s window to ruminate on puberty and Spielberg, I was put immediately at ease by this introductory tableau. But just as I was wondering whose ex-best friend would imminently disrupt the couple’s happy embrace, the camera pans down below the bleachers to the heavy strains of Van Halen’s “Runnin’ With the Devil.” There, we find the core “freaks”—before they were fully hazed into their current statesman roles in the Apatow fraternity: Daniel Desario (James Franco), Nick Andopolis (Jason Segel) and Ken Miller (Seth Rogen) smoking, discussing heavy metal and exalting the godliness of John Bonham. 

Protagonist Lindsay Weir (Linda Cardellini) lurks, before encountering her brother Sam (John Francis Daley) dodging bullies nearby with “geek” friends Bill Haverchuck (Martin Starr) and Neal Schweiber (Samm Levine). She’s wearing a green Army jacket that will adorn her throughout the series…and not since Angela Chase’s flannel have I seen a character so flagrantly disregard the disposable wardrobe of the typical American teen. We later discover the jacket was her father’s (Joe Flaherty), co-opted after the death of her grandmother. The scene where she explains her lingering existential confusion to an innocently befuddled Sam is touching, though probably shot at the expense of a very-special-episode scene of one of the pot-smoker freaks ODing. 

“I’m not a little girl, I’m a bionic woman.” – Bill Haverchuck

In place of a Jessie Spano-style life lesson, Freaks and Geeks presents a deeper theme that runs through the show. The cyclical nature of death hangs over all the characters in some way—from this literal family member death, appropriately eclipsed in dramatics by Nick’s reaction to John Bonham’s, to that irrevocably tragic death of childhood. Sam experiences this most brutally. We see his struggle beginning in the Halloween episode, when his decision to trick or treat with Bill and Neal as high school freshmen brings them neighborhood scorn, candy-stealing bullies and an egging—courtesy of Lindsay. She chooses the opposite side of adolescence, eschewing her Halloween tradition of handing out candy with her costume-enthusiast mother (Becky Ann Baker) to joy ride with her new crowd. These new friendships alone, replacing the childhood kinship she shared with people like fellow mathlete nerd Millie (Sarah Hagan), mark a kind of death.

Caught up in the new group’s Devil’s Night tradition of suburban vandalism, she unknowingly launches an egg at Sam. Her shocked realization at the identity of her target, pathetically immobilized in his robot costume made of silver-painted boxes and bearing his most pure “Et tu, Brute?” expression, is heartrending. Eggy and disillusioned, Sam returns home to reluctantly read his assigned book, War and Peace. His replacement of malt balls with teacher-administered “nihilism and moralism” is only eclipsed in later episodes by more explicit scenes of growing up: dumping his Star Wars toys into the trash after a bully (Rashida Jones!) tags his locker with “Pygmy Geek,” discovering the awkward reality of sex via a Desario-donated porn movie, uncovering the adultery of Sam’s affable father.

As Sam and Lindsay navigate the tricky path of adulthood, their parents equally struggle with those times a-changin’. In the same Halloween episode, mother Jean also faces a harsh new reality, her enthusiastically baked and distributed pumpkin cookies dumped by neighborhood kids’ paranoid parents, reeling from all the recent razorblades-in-apples scares of the day.

When Lindsay, remorseful of her accidental attack on her little brother, returns home to aid her mother with (now store-bought) candy duty, Jean’s cynicism erodes. Her husband’s, on the other hand, only compounds as he watches his children grow up in a world he sees through the lens of his Korean War service and the various deaths of acquaintances from bouts with smoking and premarital sex—prompting Sam to hilariously wonder if any of his dad’s friends are still alive.

As we’ve been recently reminded by Mad Men, disillusionment had already set in for the country by the time the Weir parents would have been young adults. But intolerance for the next generation’s strange behaviors and darkening outlook are a constant. “Every generation is afraid of the music that comes from the next,” Lindsay sighs to her father after his angry diatribe about the Sex Pistols’ spitting habits. “I’m sure your parents hated Elvis.”

“You need to find your reason for living. You need to find your big, gigantic drum kit!” – Nick Andopolis

The late ’70s rock that soundtracks the show is fantastic. In one fiscally bold move, an entire episode is dedicated to The Who’s catalogue. And anchored to this music (and other pop culture buoys) is that timeless desire to feel part of something greater and meaningful, while simultaneously trumpeting a seeming individualism.

I’ve never as fanatically declared my allegiance and disdain for various media as I did in high school, when making these judgments seemed critical to constructing an identity. Some of these decisions were made arbitrarily. When I found myself nodding along too readily to every song on MTV’s top 20 countdown, I would choose bands to futilely rail against. Presidents of the United States? I hate you, with your one-word-titled songs comparing women to fruit. You are the bane of my existence! The freaks reserve that outrage for the entire disco genre. Until one of them defects.

Lindsay’s identity continually shifts as she straddles her past and present, rejoining the mathletes temporarily but strengthening her friendship with resident freak chick Kim Kelly (Busy Philipps), whose sordid family life was too intense for NBC. (The “Kim Kelly Is My Friend” episode never aired on primetime, but was marginalized to ABC Family. Your logic will get you nowhere on that one.)

The geeks also cross clique lines—or at least temporarily lure people over them. When a cute new girl at school accidentally sits at their lunch table, they cram in as much extracurricular time with her as they can before she is inevitably absorbed into the popular crowd. And after Daniel goes through an identity crisis—as fueled by master thespian James Franco’s own artistic schizophrenia as any writer’s room story-boarding—embracing punk culture for a whole episode that likely served as an audition tape for his break-out James Dean TV-movie role, he also jumps to the geek side. Turns out the guys have their own version of Nick’s big, gigantic drum kit: Dungeons & Dragons. And Daniel makes an excellent Carlos the Dwarf.

Speaking of life-affirming instruments, Nick, inspired by his rock Gods, so desperately seeks an identity in his. “My drum kit, this is my passion, this is the essence of who I am now,” Nick proclaims in the pilot episode, unveiling his hilarious, 29-piece drum kit (almost as big as Neil Peart’s!) to Lindsay in his garage. Another show would probably drag out the storyline of Nick following this passion against the wishes of his father, who threatens to ship him off to military school if he doesn’t get his grades up. Instead, his growing affection for Lindsay leads to her role as the band’s Yoko, her misdirected support of Nick’s subpar drumming pushing him to embarrassingly tank an audition with the local band. His initial disappointment turns to self-effacement and an eventual contentment to keep pounding away in the privacy of his garage. He’s helped, of course, by Lindsay’s subsequent pity kiss.

“Love is like homework. You gotta study if you want to get an A.” – Harris Trinsky

And just like that—no swelling of music, no rain, no YouTube fan videos edited to Edwin McCain—Lindsay is sort of unwittingly dating Nick. This sets the stage for the amazing scene of him serenading her with The Styx’s “Lady,” crystallizing everything that’s endearing yet unattractive about the Overeager High School Boyfriend. (Or so I’ve heard. On a mix CD I was given years after my breakup culminating with my supposed “theme song,” “These Boots Were Made For Walking.”) They break up because he’s, according to Lindsay, “really intense and always stoned,” but with the kind of emotional complexity that has no place on primetime TV.

Also not ready for must-see slotting: the way they shakily remain friends, not in Ross-and-Rachel agony, but in evolving teenage reality. Unacceptable.

Meanwhile, with cancellation nigh, the writers were forced to condense the characters’ evolutions and relationships. Lindsay becomes a Dead Head in the finale, following The Grateful Dead on their summer tour. Hilariously sarcastic Ken softens when he falls for the equally blunt “Tuba Girl.” And Nick embraces the dark side: disco. He does it for new girlfriend, Sara (Lizzy Caplan), whose crush on him we glimpsed sporadically, though it was lost on a clueless and Lindsay-smitten Nick. Sam’s series-long crush on Cindy Sanders (Natasha Melnick), had a similar dynamic before finally panning out in a Seven Minutes in Heaven victory; he was obsessed with her, and she with the basketball star.

These characters on the fringes, with their polished looks and varsity uniforms briefly captured in short tracking shots, are your typical teen TV leads. And yet, the people they have relegated to freak or geek status, who hang out under stairwells and on smoking patios and have absurdly badass geriatric friends that crash high school parties, are far more intriguing. Under less of a public microscope, they are free to follow ill-advised passions, try out new identities, and forge deeper friendships.

That is what infuses Freaks and Geeks with such joy. These characters—and, shockingly, the actors that play them!—are young and tough and stupid and anxious and brave. Sam wears a Parisian night suit to school, Nick competes in a disco dance contest, Lindsay gets into a scary car accident—all moments straight from Paul Feig’s life. They are hilarious and sad and touching and cringe-worthy. Above all, they are honest.

Now just tell me Brett and Ashley are still together.

If you are as obsessed with this show as Danielle Lee is, she suggests you check out the A.V. Club’s excellent five-part walkthrough of the show with Paul Feig. Or her Tumblr, where you might share other obsessions, like Breaking Bad or NCAA football.

The Singing Detective (1986)

THE LOVELIEST WORD IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE.

by marginal gloss

I am lucky enough to never have been to hospital. I may have been there once or twice as a child for the treatment of some minor ailment, but that was so long ago now I can barely recall it. So I don’t know if British hospitals are still anything like The Singing Detective makes them out to be. Presumably there is rather less smoking and there are rather more video screens.

But perhaps my lack of hospital experience is irrelevant. Though Dennis Potter’s classic TV series follows in the vein of other great works in depicting sickness as a realm of mental reflection as well as physical suffering, this series is less about the actual experience of being ill in a hospital than it is about being locked inside oneself. The exact nature of the condition which confines our protagonist to his bed is not the point; it may be shocking, but in narrative terms it is arguably more effective as a necessary plot device which forces an otherwise fiercely independent and proud man to be entirely reliant on others for a given period of time.

Michael Gambon plays Philip Marlowe, a writer of pulpy crime fiction who is effectively trapped in the hospital while suffering from a crippling bout of psoriasis that leaves his skin peeling and his body stiffly convulsed with agonizing joint pains. Michael Gambon also plays Philip Marlowe, the protagonist of his own novels: his alter-ego is a detective who moonlights as a jazz singer, stalking the shadows beneath a lamplit Hammersmith Bridge—while his creator is unable to so much as unclench his fists.

The first thing worth saying about this arrangement is that Michael Gambon’s performance is nothing short of stunning. As Marlowe the patient, the dreamer, our first sight of him is a shock, but what’s shocking is not so much the condition of his body as it his tense, overwrought demeanor; in constant pain, he’s barely able to move his lips, and so his voice comes out a bitter, harsh squeal that sounds as if it were being wrung out of him. Left alone, he is heard muttering to himself: ‘Bastards. I’ll wipe you out. Don’t you know who I am? I’m the singing detective.’

For a man as bitter as Marlowe to arouse our sympathies, he’s got to be funny as well as cruel, and when it comes to cracking wise, he is merciless. When asked what he believes in, he replies:

‘Malthusianism…Malthus, but mandatory. Compulsory depopulation by infanticide, suicide, genocide or whatever other means suggest themselves. AIDS, for example, that’ll do. Why should queers be so special?…I also believe in cigarettes, cholesterol, alcohol, carbon monoxide, masturbation, the Arts Council, nuclear weapons, the Daily Telegraph, and not properly labeling fatal poisons, but above all else, most of all, I believe in the one thing that can come out of people’s mouths: vomit.’

But in his dreams, the other Marlowe is cool. He’d never fall back on anything so crude – his verbal transactions are briskly economical even as they are poetic. ‘Ten cents a dance, fella.’ His movements have an easy grace, his voice is a rich mid-Atlantic drawl. We take him for one of the good guys, but this Marlowe’s taste for a Chandler-esque observation marks him out, like his creator, as one who prefers to observe and cast judgment from a distance. ‘The doorman of a nightclub can always pretend it’s lipstick and not blood on his hands,’ he purrs over the opening sequence of the very first episode: ‘But how’d it get there?…If he smacked some dame across her shiny mouth, then he’s got both answers in one.’ He shares his author’s own overriding self-interest, his casual contempt for the clumsy, emotive idiocy which surrounds him:

‘There are songs to sing, there are feelings to feel, there are thoughts to think. That makes three things, and you can’t do three things at the same time. The singing is easy, syrup in my mouth, and the thinking comes with the tune, so that leaves only the feelings. Am I right, or am I right? I can sing the singing. I can think the thinking. But you’re not going to catch me feeling the feeling. No, sir.’

The link between Gambon’s two characters is in the third Marlowe: a boy we see in flashbacks, living in wartime Britain with his impeccably middle-class mother and his rough, working-class dad. We first glimpse the kid in a stunning crane shot, drifting very high up in the branches of a very tall tree, all sunshine and light as Duke Ellington swings through the background. Like the man he will become, the boy chooses to isolate himself from the world, from his friends and his parents. ‘When I grow up,’ he says, ‘I’m gonna be a detective. I’ll find out things. I’ll find out who done it.’

Who done what? Questions pile upon questions. The connection isn’t clear between these men and this boy with a near-impenetrable (and now practically extinct) accent. The temptation is to see the scenes of young Philip as being a core of realism which sustains the fantasies which are to come, but this is misguided: both the boy and the detective have things to teach Marlowe the patient, above and beyond the basic answer to the question of why he became what he is.

Moreover, Marlowe’s recollections of his childhood repeatedly become lost in the narrative dead-ends of a number of peculiarly haunting incidents: here is young Philip sitting in a railway carriage with his mother, anxious under the glare of a pack of demobbed soldiers; there he is back in school, suffering under the glare of a nightmarish schoolmistress; here he is wandering through a forest, surrounded by the mocking chants of other children, moving towards a clearing which might hold the key to everything he doesn’t understand.

There’s a mystery here, but its solution becomes apparent to the audience long before Marlowe begins to remember. And when the revelation comes it turns out to be only one of a number of potential influences on the man in the hospital; it might give a hint to why he came to be such a misanthrope, but it sure as hell won’t make him feel any better about himself.

A further problem is that in the hospital ward he’s surrounded by other men who are just like him in the sense of being essentially disconnected from the world around them. One old man is a poor gibbering wreck, barely able to talk or move for himself except to twitch uncontrollably. Another, Reginald, unresponsive to his ever-whining neighbour, is quietly wrapped up in a novel which turns out to be titled ‘The Singing Detective’ by none other than Philip Marlowe.

Actually, that whining neighbour is more significant a character than he first appears. Mr Hall is the kind of man frequently satirized in Britain as a ‘Little Englander’. He’s a small-minded, proud, sanctimonious racist (probably a reader of the Daily Mail) and he has nothing but contempt for the staff and patients around him. Privately, he takes every opportunity to express his resentment for the nurses, but when he’s forced to confront the objects of his ire, he resorts to a shit-eating grin and a ludicrously theatrical politeness.

Trapped by his own absurd mannerisms, Hall’s character underlines the fact that there is nothing big or clever about the kind of misogynistic abuse Marlowe the patient regularly expresses against all those who care for him. Hall is like a grotesque right-wing parody of Marlowe without the wit, the imagination or the talent, and he proves that without those points in his favour, our hero would simply be an irritating, deluded fantasist.

Conversely, Marlowe the detective is immensely appealing. Just as everything ugly about Marlowe the patient can be encapsulated in the things that make him British, the American-ness of the detective is central to his appeal. America must have never seemed more wonderful than it did during the war and in its immediate aftermath, and it’s American jazz music which becomes the link between all three versions of Marlowe.

Now that all the kids want to be singers and dancers again maybe it doesn’t seem so odd that characters should burst into song part way through a serious TV drama, but what’s more unusual about The Singing Detectiveis that the characters aren’t really singing – they’re miming. And miming obviously, too. This is crucial: there’s no attempt made whatsoever to convince the audience that these characters could really sing in this way.

On one level, the musical sequences represent a basic exercise in wish fulfillment. Hasn’t anyone who loves music wished they could perform it to the level at which they find it most pleasurable? But there’s something else going on here too. As we later see, Marlowe the detective is based – at least in part – on the young Philip’s memories of his father singing in pubs, accompanied by his mother on the piano. For Marlowe, his father sang exactly as well as those records which defined his life, and so that music takes on new meanings; it doesn’t matter to him what those songs were really about or who really sang them because what’s important is what they made him feel. And how much finer it is to remember anyone that way; a benefit, if you will, of being trapped in this introspective and intensely subjective experience of reality.

One cannot remain that way forever. The palace of memory may be a pleasant place to visit, but it’s not a place we can stay for long. In the end, Marlowe finds comfort in setting aside his past and (literally) putting down the creations of his deluded imagination. His manner becomes gentle, more sensitive to those around him, and he starts to find an elemental thrill in words again:

‘What’s the loveliest word in the English language, officer? In the sound it makes in your mouth, in the shape it makes on the page? What do you think? Well now, I’ll tell you: E-L-B-O-W. Elbow.’

On one level this conclusion seems almost too tidy, too convenient after what has come before. Certainly it places a remarkable amount of faith in the psychiatric talking therapies the series otherwise does a great deal to ridicule when, having apparently recovered from his condition, our hero departs the hospital arm in arm with his loving wife. Is that all there is to it? Now that Marlowe has found ‘closure’ in the personal origins of his grief, can we all sleep soundly in the knowledge that pretty much anything in life can be explained by a combination of psychoanalysis and the attention of a loving woman?

Not really. Even after writing all of this I still feel like I’ve barely expressed even the tiniest part of what this series has to offer. The show itself has the same problem: too much is left up in the air, and nothing is really resolved by the end of The Singing Detective. There are whole plot points brought up and then forgotten about, like the bits with the Russians and the Nazi spies, and the dead man in the cupboard in the first episode. There’s a whole sub-plot involving a stolen screenplay for a film adaptation of the titular novel which is totally confusing and pretty much unresolved.

‘All clues, no solutions,’ thinks Marlowe, but then ‘that’s the way things are.’ Maybe Marlowe’s healing comes through not rejecting his necessary isolation, but in learning to live with his own necessary delusions. If his experience in the hospital can be said to mean anything to him, it’s not about coming to understand his condition, but more about learning to accept it with all its messy contradictions and uncertainties.

marginal gloss is a writer living in London.

TV MONTH: Louie (2010 - present)

LOUIE.

by Andrew Root

“This is how my brain works: It’s stupidity followed by self-hatred and then further analysis.”

– Louis C.K

1. Stupidity.

Who would approve a show like this? Who would take the structure of Seinfeld (single comedian, playing a version of himself living in New York, each show bookended by standup sets) and saturate it with dark, feverishly self-abasing characters and scenarios? Who would give complete creative control—including writing, directing, and editing privileges—to a single pot-stirrer with a history of delving headlong into palatably uncomfortable topics? It doesn’t make any sense. Why does Louis C.K. have his own show? Moreover, why would he want to devote years of his life to exploring the minutiae of topics like:

• Why he’s bad at caring for his daughters.
• Why he’s a bad actor.
• Why he’s in bad shape.
• Why he’s a slave to his overindulgent personality.
• How he’s playing the standup game all wrong.
• Why he’s a terrible date.
• How he hates everybody.
• How everybody hates him.
• An exploration of his masturbatory shame.
• Why he’s a bad son.
• How the only relationships he is capable of fostering quickly regress into murky, demented psychodramas involving repressed Elektra complexes and runs to the store for blueberries.

Unlike Jerry Seinfeld, who played an idealized version of himself, Louis C.K. mines the depths of his darker side to create a pathologically flawed version – the titular Louie. He reserves the right to call it fiction, but if he’s taking the luxury of reserving that right at all, why not just commit to an entirely fictional character? Why would he confront head-on one of the greatest controversies of his real-life career (that Dane Cook unapologetically stole one of his jokes) by inviting Cook himself onto the program for a not entirely flattering portrayal and a decidedly unresolved conversation? Why would he devote an entire episode to an intensely graphic description of the scourging of Christ, followed by the traumatic wailings of an eleven-year-old? Let’s go smaller: Why did he include a guy flipping off the camera in the opening credits?

It’s stomach-wrenching. It’s difficult to watch. I certainly can’t show it to anyone. What would I say? Picture yourself at a dinner party: Someone shares a story about how their child was bullied at school and they’re just beside themselves about what to do. And you pipe up with a synopsis of Louie’s encounter with those two crack heads on Halloween and how he straight-up threw a trashcan through a store window so the alarm would go off. Congratulations. You have just made everyone uncomfortable. But why do I – like that unfortunate party-goer – burst with the desire to share the demented goings-on of Louie’s everyday life? Is there something wrong with me? Because, honestly, there might be if I actively enjoy something like this.

2. Self-Hatred.

This is just a bad way to do business. Apparently, Louis C.K. turned down offer after offer for a show because he wasn’t being given enough creative control, which is kind of crazy when you add in a dose of perspective. When the show started, he was a stand-up comedian with a few credits under his rapidly expanding belt, but now he’s demanding that he gets to edit his own sitcom. You know who doesn’t get their own edit? Hardly anyone. In older stand-up videos, he’s not exactly breaking new ground… up until a few years ago when he first called his four year old daughter an asshole. I mean, he gives his daughter the finger in the show! She tells him that she likes living at her mom’s house better and as soon as she leaves to go, he flips her off! And this man is nominated for major awards!

This is the man who was permitted to show a man on screen literally decapitated by a garbage truck. I’m dumbstruck by this not just logistically, or from a standards and practices perspective, but in terms of its debatable dramatic function. Did it serve the story because he then gets to go on a date with a pretty woman? She doesn’t even like him! The whole segment functions to illustrate that shallow women are attracted to aloof men who are headed vaguely upward. The arrogance of using himself to make that point is beyond belief! And at the expense of a human life! He killed someone as the setup for a joke.

So, let’s take stock here: Louis C.K.’s got himself some show business success and he leverages that into a show sitcom wherein he appoints himself as a kind of sympathetic punching bag where for whom the ills of world (including those within our protagonist himself) serve only to illustrate what a bummer the world is. When he flirts poorly, it’s only because the woman he’s flirting with is ungrateful and blind to what a good guy he actually is. When he doesn’t go to the doctor very often, it’s only because his doctor is Ricky Gervais (both in attitude and portrayal). When he shouts down his own mother in the middle of a restaurant, it’s only because she’s been distant, unloving, and… attention-seeking for his whole… life… Wait…

3. Further Analysis.

I might have been a bit of a bummer. Louie does not live in a nice city. He does not have an easy job. He’s divorced, and his kids - in the genuine simplicity and directness that only children have - prefer their mother’s house. He’s lonely. And Louis - his creator - is struggling to do something new, something truthful. Watching Louie be hospitalized because of five pushups rings more true to our current human condition than the affairs of meatheads and socialites on any number of reality shows.

What does it mean to be a character like Louie? He’s an observer—someone with enough capacity to recognize that he lives in an absurd world, but without the means to pull himself out of that world. There are moments when he gets just as railroaded as the rest of us. When his sister goes into premature labour (the longest and most traumatic fart joke ever seen on television), he is a criss-cross of conflicting impulses. His neighbours offer to help, but he also lives in New York and doesn’t know them. He has to choose between his sister losing her baby, or trusting a complete stranger with his sleeping children. God forbid that anyone should have to make that decision.

There’s an old single-panel comic strip called Herman, drawn by Canadian artist Jim Unger. It was similar in style and tone to Gary Larson’s iconic The Far Side, and usually featured one character stoically coping with some kind of absurd situation, from a husband’s bafflement at the giant pair of cymbals his wife brings into the car to keep him from falling asleep at the wheel, to a salad bar attendant whose customers order a lettuce and gin. The strip doesn’t feature recurring characters, just similarly drawn, variously blobby humans (and sometimes animals) who deliver mystifying one-liners and cryptic demands; a classic straight man/funny man formula, but never with the same two characters. Unger has said that none of the characters are the eponymous Herman, and simultaneously they all are. It was up to the reader to decide. I always thought that Herman was the one who took in the madness of the world around him, putting up with it the best he could.

That’s Louie. Louis C.K. has put a version of himself in a myriad of absurd situations, both internally and externally motivated. He’s blessed and cursed with insight, meaning that he hates the cruel world he lives in, but also the twisted, ice-cream scarfing creature it has made him into. And somehow, he’s managed to tap into something relatable. Louie’s an anti-hero of sorts, in the same way 30 Rock’s Liz Lemon is. He’s a mess so we don’t have to be, so that we can admit to ourselves that we’re kind of messed up, too. It’s still kind of a mystery why we like watching him so much. Does Louie speak to a larger paradigm of characters who have a hard time coping with the various side facets and responsibilities of their lives? From Mad Men to Parks & Recreation to Breaking Bad, modern television is littered with characters who just can’t hold it together. You don’t have to look too deeply into the lives of everyday people to see that maybe we’re not as held-together as we like to think.

Louis C.K. has tapped into something compellingly mysterious in the common person. I don’t think we ever realized that we could be this fucked up and still keep going, keep smiling. Because he’s made it his professional mission to constantly surprise himself, the audience never knows what he’s going to do next, but we know that it’ll be based in truth—in some kind of shared experience. Life is hard. It’s really fucking hard sometimes. But what are you going to do? You keep going. If Louie can keep going, the rest of us can, too.

Andrew Root has never watched Louie with another person and he probably isn’t going to. He tumbls here.

TV MONTH: My So-Called Life (1994-95)

GO NOW, GO!

by Brianna Ashby

“Why are you like this?”

“Like what?”

“Like how you are?”

I dyed my hair for the first time in 7th grade. I was 12 years old and had absolutely no idea who I was, but for the first time in my life I thought I knew who I wanted to be. I stood in the aisle at CVS comparing boxes, trying to find the right shade of red, the red that would free me from the oppression of my tired old brown hair, the red that would set the middle school on fire, the red that would change me. When I got to school on Monday, red Jansport backpack slung over my flannel-clad shoulder, I leaned against my locker and probably sighed a little as I waited for a friend who, right on cue, looked at me wide-eyed and said, “ANGELA!” 

I thought I would burst.

The day that Angela Chase got over Jordan Catalano, I was sure that I would burst.

For weeks afterward my friend Alex and I would dance around her room like whirling dervishes, flattening her plush carpet with our Doc Martens, belting out the lyrics to “Blister In The Sun” like a battle cry for beleaguered, heart-broken teenage girls all over the globe. I had little to no experience with boys, but had been harboring a devastatingly epic, totally unrequited, crush on one in particular for nearly an entire school year, and I had had enough. I longed for even a hint of the push and pull between Angela and Jordan, saying silent prayers that one day someone would kiss me the way that he kissed her, and teach me how to drive his car, and play a song he wrote for me (at least, I would think it was for me), and would confuse and confound me and occupy my every thought.

your humble author, aged 14

When I re-watched the series as an adult, I found myself longing for the same things, catching my breath as Jordan clasped Angela’s hand for the first time, readying myself for tears when the camera caught her face, glowing in elation and disbelief, recapturing for a moment a time when every glance, every kiss, every breath was a delicious thrill.

But, that sort of bliss is fleeting, and truthfully, Angela wasn’t ready for Jordan Catalano and everything he meant. He was a bridge to a particular aspect of adulthood that she wasn’t prepared for, because she was smart enough to know that if she gave in, if she had sex with him, that there was no going back. At the crux of her relationship with Jordan, and of the show as a whole, was the blurring of the dividing line between childhood and adulthood, and the seemingly impossible choice between what you would take with you and what you would leave behind when that line finally disappeared and you found yourself closer to becoming your parents than you ever thought possible.

“It’s such a lie that you should do what’s in your heart. If we all did what was in our hearts, the world would grind to a halt.”

I think about Patty Chase sometimes when I’m lamenting my age, cursing the wrinkles around my eyes, complaining to my husband that I don’t know what happened to me, when of course I know exactly what happened to me. I never imagined that there would come a time that I would relate to my parents, or to anyone else’s, but once you reach a certain age, it hits you like a ton of bricks. The relationship between a parent and a teenage child is complicated, and so is the relationship between a parent and their teenage, or at least younger, self. At the crux of the whole thing lies a great irony; children are perpetually looking forward, eager for the freedoms they believe that age accords, and adults start looking back for exactly the same reason. Most of us never seem to shed our insecurities, they just adapt to our changing lives.

The dynamic between Patty and Angela was familiar enough to be uncomfortable, but there was always hope, even in their most pained exchanges, that someday they would actually understand each other. And, in “The Zit,” I think they finally did. It took both of them being openly vulnerable to realize that their anxieties were shared, and that a blemish or a wrinkle doesn’t define who you are in the eyes of the people that love you. For a young girl trying to come to terms with her changing body, and the preferentially changing bodies of her friends, that particular episode was pretty powerful stuff.

Sometimes it seems like we’re all living in some kind of prison. And the crime is how much we hate ourselves. It’s good to get really dressed up once in a while. And admit the truth: that when you really look closely? People are so strange and so complicated that they’re actually… beautiful. Possibly even me”.

It’s a strange thing when you start to see your parents as human beings with flaws and needs that you have to come to accept as part of who they are, no matter how difficult it may be. While Patty’s neuroses were often on display, Graham managed to keep up appearances for Angela and Danielle (the requisite pesky little sister), while privately he was coming apart at the seams. He had a tremendously difficult time accepting his wife as the breadwinner of the family, and while he was always loving and supportive, he couldn’t entirely mask his feelings of inadequacy, which is part of what made him such an endearing character. At a certain point we are faced with the reality that our parents are far from perfect, but if you’re lucky, they never stop trying, never stop wanting what’s best for us, and never stop wanting us to stay away from girls like Rayanne Graff.

I was never brave enough to have a friend like Rayanne—rebellious, wayward, reckless—but her appeal was obvious. She was free-spirited, warm, fun, intriguing, and just dangerous enough to be irresistible to a girl who wanted nothing more than to leave her old boring life, and her old boring friends by the wayside. But whereas Rayanne was brash and loud and overtly sexual, Angela’s other new friend, Ricky Vasquez, was sensitive and soft-spoken: a baby-faced gay boy that kept the world at arms’ length.

While Angela was drawn to Rayanne because she was everything that Angela was not, she and Ricky shared the sort of bond that only two teenage misfits can forge. Both Rayanne and Ricky opened Angela’s eyes, and opened up a tremendous dialogue about things that made both parents and teachers squeamish. There was nothing overwrought or sensational in the way the characters faced these serious issues (teenage alcoholism, illiteracy, homophobia, homelessness, school violence and abuse). Instead there was always a sense of unsettling realism about the storytelling, making it painfully obvious that any one of those things might well be happening in our schools or neighborhoods at that very moment.

For Rayanne and Ricky, Angela represented the ideal of a “normal” teenager whose life was only touched by trauma, but never embroiled in it. In adolescence, however, things don’t actually have to be terribleto be terrible; teenagers feel things so intensely, it’s a wonder that anyone makes it through the whole thing without combusting. “Simple” things like having an eternal crush on the girl next door or growing apart from your childhood best friend wreck daily havoc in high schools all across the globe—just ask Brian Krakow or Sharon Cherski.

“There are so many different ways to be connected to people. There are the people you feel this unspoken connection to, even though there’s not even a word for it. There’s the people who you’ve known forever who know you in this way that other people can’t because they’ve seen you change.”

Poor Brian Krakow. Awkward, bookish, and impossibly in love with Angela, Brian continually found himself holding the short end of the stick. The relationship between Brian and Angela was surprisingly complex—vacillating between moments of genuine tenderness, exasperation, and disgust. Neither one of them really knowing how to navigate their ever-changing friendship. They were young and inexperienced, neither knowing how to appropriately express their feelings to someone, nor how to let someone down gently if those feelings weren’t reciprocated. So, instead, Brian rode his bike in circles past Angela’s driveway night after night, and she took advantage of his perpetual desire to please her, because neither one of them knew how to break their bizarre stalemate.

Carrying friendships from childhood to maturity is a tricky business, and very few come through wholly intact. Angela and Sharon really put theirs through the ringer. I think everyone has known a girl like Sharon, the girl that “blossoms” before everyone else—popular, smart, beautiful—but she wasn’t always that way. Puberty really has a way of fucking with people, of making us feel that we are a whole lot more or less than we actually are, for entirely superficial reasons. So, while I related whole-heartedly to Angela’s self-consciousness and her desire to distance herself from someone whose physical changes (and the attention that came with them) made her seem like a stranger of sorts, I also saw that there was a price to be paid for being gifted with something you never asked for. It was so heartening to watch them find their way back to each other, not as girls, but as young women, who realized they were facing down the same pressures, and that they could do it together, no matter what their cup size.

It’s not particularly surprising that My So-Called Life remains relevant more than seventeen years after its cancellation, as it is still some of the most honest television I have ever seen. And, though I am now much closer to being Patty Chase than Angela, the sensitive, introspective, cautiously optimistic spirit of Claire Danes’ character still resonates. When MSCL was on the air, it was a strange and crucial time. Straddling the line between youth and maturity, I was grappling with many of the same problems I saw unfolding around Angela week after week, and I held on to that connection, no matter how tenuous, for dear life. I needed her to give a voice to the things that I hadn’t quite found the words for, and she did, with an awkward grace that will forever bestill my heart. However, my affection for Angela, and for the rest of the characters, wasn’t naïve; she, and they, were flawed, just like me, just like you.

Like most teenagers, she was selfish, self-centered, and insecure, but she was imbued with just enough self-awareness to elevate her above most of the bullshit that can make adolescence unbearable. The thoughtful, loving, and honest way that the characters were crafted is what made the show brilliant; the writers succeeded in creating people that felt real, people that were complex and contradictory, ordinary people that somehow seemed extraordinary. There was so much care and tenderness put into the portrayals of their lives, from the banal to the gut-busting, that you couldn’t help but start seeing your own life a little differently, as a little bit more interesting, as a little bit more beautiful.

“Each card has a name: The Magician, The Empress, The Fool, The Wheel of Fortune, Strength. They represent challenges and tests, twists of fate. No card is all good or all bad. Cards can be positive or negative depending on where they fall. When you read someone’s future, they must think of a question. They must hold it in their mind. The cards are read in sequence, each card leads to the next. We move from terror and loss to unexpected good fortune and out of darkness, hope is born.”

Brianna Ashby is still waiting for Tino to show up.

Reality Bites (1992)

I WAS TOLD THERE’D BE NO MATH ON THIS EXAM.

by Bailey Kennedy

I watched Reality Bites for the first time two weeks before graduating college, huddled with my roommates on the giant gray suede LoveSac in our living room. Up until that point, my life felt like a carefully plotted course consisting of various milestones, eventually depositing me at the best college I was accepted by. The closer I came to stepping into my cap and gown as the days wound down, the more lost I felt. It was the right movie for me at the right time—when Lelaina tearfully says that she thought she’d be someone by 23 and Troy responds, “honey, the only thing you have to be by 23 is yourself,” I felt instantly tranquilized.

We meet Lelaina, Vickie, Troy and Sammy swigging beers and celebrating on a rooftop post-commencement ceremony with “School’s Out For Summer” by Alice Cooper blaring in the background. Leilana, the budding videographer, records the festivities and captures testimonials. Sammy’s life goal? “My goal is to like, get a career or something.” Vickie’s collegiate experience has culminated in the ability to recite her social security number at warp speed. Troy is a few credits short of a degree in philosophy and broodingly rejects the importance of going back to finish it out.

Lelaina’s grainy footage of the group’s giddiness gives way to the rhythms of post-degree daily life. Troy loses his job at a corner store for stealing a Snickers bar and moves into ‘The Maxi Pad’ with Lelaina and Vickie, forcing the sexual tension between Lelaina and Troy to the forefront, ebbing and flowing between bickering and flirtation. The scales become tipped toward the contentious when Lelaina takes up with Michael, an earnest but cheesy executive at an MTV-esque station.

Lelaina is fired from her job in grand fashion after feeding inappropriate cue cards to her morning TV news host boss. She collapses into herself, becoming an extension of their living room couch and racks up $300 in charges dialing a psychic. As irrational as this seems, a tiny part of me recognized her search for external answers to internal problems, hoping for some kind of deus ex machina. In Lelaina’s case, Michael swoops in like a yuppy fairy godmother: he showed her documentary to people at his network and they want to buy the footage for a show.

The premiere party rolls around and to her horror Lelaina finds that her thoughtful documentary about the growing pains of Gen X has been stripped down into a Real World-esque reality show. She and her friends have been edited within an inch of their lives to fit into tidy compartments: apathetic bad boy, overachiever, party girl, and resident gay. Lelaina rushes home in tears to find Troy alone in the apartment. The chemistry they’ve been dancing around their entire friendship finally reaches the surface and they sleep together.

The morning after two friends consummate palpable tension there’s the sensation that a particularly challenging equation has been put to bed, a sense of relief and momentary peace. That is, until the Troy in your life makes a hasty exit off stage left. Troy panics and drives a wedge between them just when Lelaina thinks the pieces have finally fallen into place. After a blowout fight, Troy disappears for some time to visiting his dying father, unbeknownst to Lelaina. He reappears in her front yard after a week long absence, at the exact moment she is rushing out to track him down and find him.

My last year of college I’d been nursing the wound of a breakup that ended with him dropping out of school and moving fifteen states east without trading a single word before he departed. Not that at that point a conversation about his leaving would have made it less mentally and emotionally devastating than hearing it through the grapevine. As the days wound down to graduation I was feeling his absence in my life, and perhaps this is why Reality Bites hit me so hard at the time: Troy came back for her.

Years later, I’m a little disgusted by my buy-in to the Troy deus ex machina story line as the solution to Lelaina getting her bearings. I can appreciate the message that love is what anchors us in moments of uncertainty, carrying us through the chaos of building the framework of who we will be, but in my experience the Troy’s of the world don’t come through with a grand gesture. My 22 year old self, though, ate it up: it only confirmed the recurring fantasy wherein my best-friend-turned-boyfriend came back for me. But now I wish Lelaina hadn’t found her center in Troy. Troy was the type of guy who inevitably wouldn’t uphold his end of the bargain, it was only a matter of time.

Don’t wait for the sound of his car in your driveway.

Bailey Kennedy is a writer and rehabilitated closet romantic living in NYC. She made this Reality Bites Spotify playlist just for you.