Most of the time, I enjoy "critically acclaimed" television shows: Hill Street Blues is still my all-time favorite show, and it pretty much defined "critically acclaimed," particularly during its early years when it struggled mightily in the ratings but swept the Emmys. And I have loved oodles of other programs that swept critics off their feet: The Sopranos, Deadwood, The Office (British and US versions), Twin Peaks, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Battlestar Galactica (the current-day one, not the original) are just a few examples where I think the hosannas are well deserved.
But there are shows that never click with me, no matter how much good press they get. One of the first "critically acclaimed" shows I remember not liking at all was Buffalo Bill, which starred Dabney Coleman as a crass, mean-spirited local talk show host. Its low ratings were often blamed on the deliberate unlikability of the main character.
For me personally, liking or relating to the characters isn't a prerequisite for enjoying a movie or TV show, so that wasn't a problem. I think Dabney Coleman is a fine comic actor, and his presence made me want to keep giving the show a chance. Heck, it even had Geena Davis in a supporting role, and I was harboring a major crush on her at the time (a crush that came to an end when she went into Streep/Close "I'm a serious wonderful actress so worship me, peons" mode sometime after Thelma and Louise). I should have liked this show!
But I didn't. The sticking point for me was that it just wasn't funny or smart enough. Yeah, it was smarter than your average sitcom, but not as smart as it thought it was being. As far as comedies about unlikable characters go, the equally short-lived Cheers spinoff, The Tortellis, made me laugh hysterically (Dan Hedaya has to be one of the greatest unsung character actors ever), and had all the smarts and moxie that Buffalo Bill never mustered.
Jay Tarses was the creator and executive producer of Buffalo Bill. Despite his pedigree as a writer for The Bob Newhart Show, a show that I love, I just didn't like the shows he came up with on his own. Tarses went on to create The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, which was part of the great "dramedy" boom of the mid-'8os (Doogie Howser, Hooperman, my beloved Frank's Place, etc.). Molly Dodd was another show that critics ate up with a spoon, but, like Tarses' previous venture, it left me both unamused and bored.
Since then, it seems to me that to every generation of television, a Jay Tarses is born. Every decade has its signature creator of multiple shows that find favor with critics, yet whose creations aren't as funny or smart as their perpetrators think they are being, nor are they as funny or smart as they are made out to be in the press.
For your reading pleasure, I have identified a Jay Tarses for each of the last three decades.
The Jay Tarses of the 1980s
Jay Tarses. (See above.)
The Jay Tarses of the 1990sAaron Sorkin. From the godawful script of A Few Good Men (I guess between Nicholson's rendition of such, which is constantly replayed on TV as a "classic scene," and Pacino finally winning the Oscar for Scent of a Woman, the moral of the story is that scenery chewing pays!), to his self-righteous White House posturing (The American President and TV's The West Wing), Sorkin continually sounds clever, while not actually being so. A specialist in the category of "dialogue no actual human would ever say," Sorkin's barrage of verbiage and many wise casting choices have beguiled critics, who really ought to be able to discern how second-rate and hollow his material actually is.
The only Sorkin creation I could stomach longer than five minutes was the first season of Sports Night. But in retrospect, I think that had more to do with an extraordinarily gifted cast - Josh Charles, Peter Krause, Josh Malina, and especially Felicity Huffman - transcending the torrent of words, and less to do with Sorkin's words themselves. Quality control on the second season fell off dramatically (Dan's sudden Jewishness being the most egregious "wtf?" example), so I went right back to hating Sorkin again.
The Jay Tarses of the 2000s
Judd Apatow. First came Freaks and Geeks, which I really, really wanted to like. It looked smart and funny. It was set in 1980, right in my cultural and musical wheelhouse. And the titular Geeks were 7th graders, as was the real-life me in 1980. And it had SCTV's Joe Flaherty in it!
Instead, I couldn't stand the show. The music they got right, I'll give them that. But the clothes and hair, aside from Linda Cardellini's character wearing dad's army jacket, seemed way off for 1980. Worse, the show was clearly written not only from the perspective of the geeks, but with no understanding of the other half of the titular equation. Initially the "freaks" - a gang of pot-smoking high school teens whom Cardellini's character befriended - were depicted as menacing, and engaged in behaviors such as mailbox destruction that are more closely associated with jocks, not potheads. To me, this showed that the show's creators and writers had no actual experience with "freaks," who would have been the least likely kids in school to beat up the geeks or engage in violence. In fact, the "freaks" I knew usually had a genial live-and-let-live attitude, and bullying would have gotten in the way of more rewarding pursuits like getting stoned in the boys' room while listening to 8-tracks of AC/DC. (Also, Flaherty's over-the-top performance made it seem like he was acting in an entirely different show, but I digress.)
As Freaks and Geeks' lone season progressed, the writers transitioned the "freaks" from menacing goons to lovable lummoxes. But this showed just as little insight into the "freaks" and reeked of rote series-writing methodology (hey, let's make the bad guys turn out to be the good guys!). Many of the pot-obsessed folks I knew growing up were actually bright, funny people who weren't sufficiently challenged in school - they were Mitch Hedbergs, not idiots. Apatow needed to spend less time in junior high cowering from across the lunchroom and more time actually getting to know these folks. And if you want to see high school life in the '70s and '80s rendered in loving accuracy, rent Dazed and Confused; Freaks and Geeks misses on all counts.
But Freaks and Geeks found a loyal audience among critics, who, one assumes, empathized with the show's "geeks" to such a degree that they failed to notice the program's many faults and chronic unfunnyness. Apatow followed it with another cancelled-in-its-first-season TV show, Undeclared, which failed to connect either with me or with audiences, though it too had reams of favorable press.
But we shouldn't cry for Apatow too much: he's become the reigning mogul of movie comedy. The 40-Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up did major box office as well as garnering Apatow's usual critical raves. Throw in protégé Seth Rogen (Superbad, Pineapple Express), whose movies Apatow usually produces, plus a host of recent Will Ferrell comedies that Apatow has written and/or produced, and Apatow Inc. has become an unstoppable comedy factory.
But I'm still not laughing at his stuff. I haven't seen every movie that I just named above, but what I have seen doesn't strike me as either that smart or that funny.
Honorable Mentions
- David E. Kelley, who isn't a Jay Tarses, but more of a category unto himself. He ruined the latter seasons of L.A. Law and his subsequent series crimes are legion.
- Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick. thirtysomething alone should earn them a special place in hell, but since I actually liked My So-Called Life and the first season of Once and Again, they're disqualified from Tarsesdom. They were up to their old freighted-with-unearned-meaning tricks with web series Quarterlife, though.
- Amy Sherman (I think she's dropped the "-Palladino"): Gilmore Girls I tried to love or even like, and I forced myself to watch most of the first and second seasons, but I kept on hating it. Right now, she's a leading contender for Jay Tarses of the 2010s. Keep an eye on this one, she's going places! Not places I want to visit, but places!
By : tatank,
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