By Don Jacobson
As a TV viewer, I have a lot of rules. All of these rules must be strictly met or the corporate Hollywood types who blithely assume I’m a typical drooling idiot out here in flyover country are never going to get the satisfaction of adding me to their roster of patsies. So, given that the stakes are so high, I have a load of conditions that must be overcome for me to actually invest even an ounce of loyalty to a network TV show.
This is especially true with comedies.
Yes, I am difficult to please, but multiply my built-in baseline by 10 and you’ll begin to understand my highly emotional relationship with comedies. To me, comedy is of the essence. You can make a bad show about cops or doctors or psychic profilers or girls that talk with God and I’m not going to take it personally. So if CSI: Miami is egregiously cliched or if Law and Order seems like a kind of meaningless tribal ritual–no skin off my nose. After all, whether I get the satisfaction of knowing that it was the guy’s parole officer, NOT the guy himself, who actually stole the money and shot the woman, ultimately means nothing to me. Puzzle solving does not get me high.
But laughing, that’s completely different. I take laughing so personally that failure to deliver is a serious offense in my book. So network TV comedies have a lot of hurdles to jump to get from point A (the smoke-filled Burbank writers’ den) to point B (my funnybone).
Here are a few of the rules I have (just a few of them, mind you):
1. It shall not have a cute kid who can’t act (that pretty much eliminates anything from the 1980s).
2. It shall not have any episodes involving The Prom.
3. Any “lessons” to be “learned” must be done in such a way that you don’t know you’ve learned any lessons at all.
4. It shall not involve un-ironic suburban families (i.e., Tim Allen).
5. It shall never have an episode revolving around a dog or cat.
6. Nor shall there be any storylines about a rich, fun-loving uncle who’s actually broke.
7. Or any “special episodes,” like the one on Diff’rent Strokes where Arnold is stalked by a child molester. They should all be special episodes. If they’re not, then why the hell am I watching?
I could go on. With all these rules, it may seem unlikely that any comedy could get even half-nodding approval from me. But we are indeed living in a golden time, my friends, because there are not one, but two new comedies on network TV that, so far at least, have cleared my fearsome humor hurdles.
Both new shows, despite the denials of their creators, are picking up Arrested Development‘s slack in the no-laugh-track, seemingly-improvised-dialogue category. ABC’s Sons and Daughters (Tuesdays, 8 p.m.) and Fox’s Free Ride (Sundays, 8:30 p.m.) both boast that wonderful kind of humor that until very recently has been rare on TV sitcoms–smart, character-driven sarcasm, usually triggered by the truly distressing personal defects of family members. I mean, how much more like real life can it get?
I really approve of this trend. It seems to me that snarky comments about your teenage son’s constipation problem–a problem that’s complicated by the fact that you don’t know how to deal with it because you’re living with him for the first time since he was six–is gold, whereas strained wacky hijinks involving Lucille Ball-type schemes to keep your boss from finding out you’ve trashed the assembly line (where most sitcoms still go) is deadly.
On Sons and Daughters, Fred Goss, who stars as the guy with the constipated son and also is the series co-creator and writer, one-ups Ron Howard from Arrested Development; while the Bluth family in the latter show were hilarious but all caricatures, the Walkers on Sons and Daughters are just as funny but also uncomfortably real. It’s as if the stream-of-consciousness comedy dialogue of Arrested were put into a Christopher Guest mockumentary set in suburbia.
The main relationships in the show (and there are a ton of cast members) are between Cameron (Goss), the 40-year-old family breadwinner, his second wife Liz (Gillian Vigman, and Henry, the pissed-off teenage son from Cameron’s first marriage (Trevor Einhorn, who played Frasier and Lilith’s son on Frasier— he’s a revelation) who has just come to live with them.
The byplay between them is awkward, and so very funny. With resentment of his dad barely under control, Henry comes into his parents’ bedroom desperately trying to find a way to solicit advice about his chronic constipation problem without involving his father:
Henry: Ummm, hi. Is this OK?
Cameron: (surprised) Uh, yeah, sure. Usually it’s one of the little ones coming in.
Henry: Yeah, I don’t like coming in here. Um, I kind of need to talk to you about something.
Cameron: Sure.
Henry: No, not you. Liz. If that’s OK?
Liz: (surprised) Oh, sure. (They go into hallway). It really means a lot to me that you want to talk.
Henry: Yeah, well, this is really awkward . . . When I pull down my pants, it . . . (cut back to Cameron, pacing and upset in the bedroom. He puts his ear up to the door) . . . I really don’t want to be talking about this anymore, he could be listening!
Liz: No, of course he wouldn’t (re-enters the room).
Cameron: What did he say?
Liz: He asked me not to say anything.
Cameron: If I guess it will you nod? Just a little nod?
See, there’s no laff-out-loud gags here. It all derives from the premise. And lessons get learned, but in a really nice, unobtrusive way–the way it should be.
The executive producer is Lorne Michaels. The show also has this warning at the beginning of the show, which I can’t quite decide is legitimate: “The dialogue on Sons and Daughters is partially improvised.” Should we be afraid or something?
Over at Fox, where Arrested Development spawned a bit of a movement before being axed for low ratings, another laugh track-less comedy has emerged, this one on Sunday nights after Family Guy. Free Ride also has the improvised dialogue and ambition to say something about screwed-up modern family relationships, but in a dumb-guy kind of Fox way. That’s how it’s done there.
Free Ride, despite a nice turn by Canadian hottie Josh Dean as the lead–an ineffectual, sensitive surfer boy who has to return home to bleak Johnson City, Mo., and face the screwed-up parents–he belongs lock, stock and barrel to Chicago Second City and MTV alumni Dave Sheridan. Sheridan is the thinking man’s mullet-head. He’s one of those big, loud, very stupid guilty pleasures that Fox always has seemed to have up their sleeves.
His character, Mark Dove, drives a jacked-up pick-up and takes over Dean’s life like the long-lost friend he never was. In fact they barely knew each other, but that doesn’t stop the oblivious, party-hearty Dove from stompin’ a mudhole in our hearts. Dove is the kind of arrogant but ultimately well-meaning buffed-up guy who’ll join a heavy metal band and not figure out they play Christian rock until he’s forced to go to church with them on Sunday morning. He wins the shopping mall tanning contest for three straight years, comparing himself favorably to a rotisserie chicken. He has a tattoo of Kip Winger.
Free Ride is, above all else, a put-down of the kind of dumbshits that make the red states so damn red, and coming from Fox, that means something. It’s surprisingly light on the toilet humor and on the Life Lessons Learned sitcom scale; with one being obnoxiously obvious and 10 being barely noticeable, I give it a healthy 8.5. But watch it for the mullet-man. He knows his stuff.
Posted on March 29, 2006