TV Watch: In series TV, how much is too much?

This week we said good-bye to Burn Notice.

by Ken

* This week we said good-bye to USA's Burn Notice, after however-many seasons and however-many episodes. (If you care, you can look it up as well as I can. LATER: Okay, I looked it up: seven seasons -- of 12, 16, 16, 18, 18, 18, and 13 episodes.) My instinct is that it went on a couple of seasons too long, and this despite the creative team's diligent work at creating new and different hells for ex-CIA spy Michael Westen (Jeffrey Donovan) and his crew -- (ex-)girlfriend Fiona (Gabrielle Anwar), old pal Sam (Bruce Campbell), later-in-the-run add-on Jesse (Coby Bell), and of course Michael's indispensable mother Maddy (Sharon Gless) -- the plots kept coming out the same. And while the detailing was probably as fastidious as in seasons past, it just didn't matter to me. In these late seasons when I half-watched an episode, I didn't feel any need, as I used to, to go back and watch the whole thing properly.

It was certainly clever to make this season's "villiain," James (John Pyper-Ferguson), something closer to a good guy than most of the supposed good guys. That wasn't the change that registered for me, though, which was having Fiona really and truly trying to put Michael in the past and get on with her life. Now that was a change, perhaps because what kept the show going, and kept me watching, was the tight bonds among that core ensemble. In retrospect, the addition of Jesse in Season 4 was a masterstroke. It not only added a core character but added one with no past ties to the others, so that the bonding process with them became an intriguing process in its own right.

The show certainly never embarrassed itself, and had a number of compelling and original seasons, and maintained a certain viability to the end.

* Also this week, USA's Royal Pains, featuring Mark Feuerstein as newly minted Hamptons "concierge doctor" Hank Lawson, completed its fifth season (seasons of 12, 18, 16, 16, and 13 episodes), and here again you can't accuse the creative team of repeating itself. But their idea of "new" ideas has always veered to the preposterous, like the whole business of zillionaire Boris Kuester von Jurgens-Ratenicz and his on-again, off-again hereditary illness, made bearable by Campbell Scott's unflappable dignity in the role.

Again they've held on to an appealing "core" group, but additional supporting players have been shuttled in and out. I've been increasingly put off by the element that probably the producers and much of the audience considers one of the show's fascinations: the leering ogling of the Hamptons' richfolk. At the end of the show, we were told to watch for a new season in summer 2014. I can wait.

* Fawlty Towers racked up a total of 12 episodes in two seasons (1975 and 1979), three-plus years apart. John Cleese, who co-wrote all 12 episodes with Connie Booth, has explained that the reason there weren't more episodes is that they were so hard to write. I've always found it fascinating that in the first season they were still married, and in the second season they weren't.

If there's anyone who disagrees that those 12 episodes represent one of the greatest achievements in TV history, I'm guessing we wouldn't have much to talk about. By the way, I note in the Wikipedia article that BBC execs of the period have fallen over themselves saying that they didn't see anything funny in the scripts. Raise your hand if you're surprised.

* Recently I wrote with awe and delight about a DVD re-watch of seasons of Friday Night Lights, the amazing series focused on a small town in Texas and the role high school football played in its life, with career-defining performances from Kyle Chandler as coach Eric Taylor and Connie Britton as his wife, Tami -- and a large and superlative surrounding cast. The show was on NBC's chopping block after most every season but managed to make it to five seasons -- of 22, 15, 13, 13, and 13 episodes).

In a DVD audio commentary for one of the early seasons, executive producer Jason Katims and co-executive producer Jeffrey Reiner talk about the unusual way their show was produced: shooting enough material to produce an initial cut maybe a half-hour longer than most shows do even before they cut down to the 42 or so minutes of a network prime-time drama. The key was to provide material to create the best possible show in the editing process.

That has to be an expensive way to produce a show, and I assume has something to do with the network's paring down of the later seasons. But in a later audio commentary, I'm guessing for the Season 3 premiere, Katims and Reiner talk about how much they liked the 13-episode "arc." It did mean they couldn't do the kinds of individual-character digressions they'd done before, but it also meant that they could really plan out that "arc." Reiner wasn't around for them all, but the team produced three sensational 13-episode seasons.

* Speaking of the importance of the editing process, Six Feet Under creator-producer Alan Ball has said that it played a huge role in his show, which had three seasons of 13 episodes followed by two of 12 on HBO. As I recall, he credited the intensive editing experience with the capacity to transform a good episode into a great one.

One of these days I plan to rewatch SFU start to finish. My recollection is that there were a lot of great episodes.

* If you haven't seen E! Entertainment's hour-long tribute to Modern Family, obviously occasioned by the show's leap into syndication this fall, as it enters its fifth season of new episodes), you should try to. There's the obvious pleasure of tracing the history of a show in which all the important decisions, but there's also a fair amount of information that may surprise you, as it surprised me.

Notably, there's the information that once the show got into production, co-creators and co-showrunners Steven Levitan and Christopher Lloyd, both of whom were used to running shows on their own, found themselves stepping over each other during actual production, with too much time being consumed by it to produce its order of 24 episodes (which all four of its seasons to date have been -- it seems to me that 22 or 23 has become a more usual number). The solution they arrived at: They alternate episodes as showrunner.

Now 24 half-hours a year seems to me a brutal drain on a creative team's resources. Can you imagine John Cleese and Connie Booth, plus however many other writers they would have had to bring in, cranking out a few 24-episode seasons of Fawlty Towers? Modern Family seems to me the exception that proves the rule -- far from exhibiting signs of strain, the show seems to me if anything stronger than ever going into Season 5.

Obviously it matters that the show relies on a large cast of characters, which makes it that much less unlikely that any individual character is played out. It matters too that Levitan and Lloyd have assembled a team of outstanding writers, and that for story ideas they're drawing on their accumulated experience of family life. But I wonder if it doesn't also help that the co-showrunners, who I assume are both involved in the planning of all the episodes, each have on-the-ground responsibility for only 12 episodes.

I can't wait to start rewatching the older shows. I've written about my experience with The Big Bang Theory, which I like a lot in first run but didn't come to really appreciate until I began seeing the same episodes over and over and over in syndication. I had no idea (a) that they would hold up that well and (b) that I would keep discovering new cherishable things in each episode.


Is Modern Family going to hold up in syndication as well as, say, The Big Bang Theory?

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For a "Sunday Classics" fix anytime, visit the stand-alone "Sunday Classics with Ken."

TV Watch: Finally I understand why ABC hasn't been able to find a show to go with "The Middle," "Suburgatory," and "Modern Family"

Polly (Sarah Chalke, mercifully back to camera), stepdad Max (Brad Garrett), and mom Elaine (Elizabeth Perkins) in ABC's latest hit, How to Live with Your Parents (for the Rest of Your Life). In case you hadn't heard, Max only has one ball. You can see a "Just the Jokes" clip here.

by Ken

The things I do in the name of blogorific responsibility!

As we all know, ABC has -- for a change -- a hole in its Wednesday-night comedy lineup. Amazingly, the hole doesn't seem to have been plugged by this fall's The Neighbors, which I've seen described (and not pejoratively!) as a "suburban alien comedy." Somehow you could tell that The Neighbors wasn't going to be Third Rock from the Sun, which showed that you could actually have an "alien comedy" that was smart and funny.

So this week ABC was promoting a newcomer to the Wednesday lineup, a surefire hit called How to Live with Your Parents (for the Rest of Your LIfe)?" Well, okay, you think, shows with even hideouser titles have not totally sucked. No, I can't think of one offhand, but my memory isn't what it used to be.

Wait, two seasons ago CBS offered us $#*! My Dad Says, a breakthrough of sorts: a show whose name literally couldn't be pronounced. It wasn't horrible, but it wasn't good. More recently ABC itself offered us the resplendent Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23, which I've seen a supposedly respectable critic defend as some sort of breakthrough, though to me it seemed peopled with stunningly repellent characters I hoped would all become victims of the slasher who would be introduced in a mid-episode genre switcheroo.

It's hard to believe, but somehow I forgot to record HTLWYP (FTROYL). I actually checked ABC's "On Demand" listings, and it hasn't turned up there, at least as of yet. So I cooked up this idea of writing a post called something like "Say, did anybody watch that How to Live with Your Parents (for the Rest of Your LIfe)?"

But no, it occurred to me that I might be able to watch it online, and alas, I did. (You can too, here.) Now, it has to be possible to do a show about an adult child moving back in with his/her parents, which is certainly a theme for our times. And no, I don't mean the assaultively hideous (and now mercifully canceled) Enlightened, which at least does make it clear what a horror it is in this case for the afflicted mom, suddenly re-saddled with her monstrous self-absorbed leech of a brain-dead offspring (played, in somebody's idea of a joke, by actual mom-and-daughter Diane Ladd and Laura Dern). I've actually seen an admiring critic -- come to think of it, I believe it was the same critic who thought Don't Trust the B---- in Apartment 23 was something special who I've seen claim that Amy, the Laura Dern character, is "idealistic" and "pure." Say, is there drug testing for TV critics?

Even in the promos for HTLWYP (FTROYL), it was surprising to see so many familiar faces, or maybe I should say "recycled" faces. The tail-between-her-legs daughter-mom is Sarah Chalke, and while I am one of the few people who didn't think she absolutely sucked as "the other Becky" when Lecy Goranson took her college leave from Roseanne, and I watched Scrubs occasionally and would concede that she was by no means the most obnoxious feature of the show (with Zach Braff leading the obnoxiousness charge every week, how could she hope to be?), I cringed my way through an episode of this.

Like when her twerpy boss at the upscale food store where she's gotten work in the six months since she moved in with the 'rents turns out to be trying to get her attention to call that attention to the cute guy in the store, and she actually collars him for a date, is there anyone who doesn't know that it's going to be a disaster? At the same time, is there anyone who cares which species of TV disaster date it's going to be? For the record, he gets falling-down drunk, and forces Polly to draw on the services of her still-hanging-around ex-husband, the goofily Peter Pannish Julian (Jon Dore), who I think is supposed to be charming. You can decide that one for yourself.

Then there are Elizabeth Perkins and Brad Garrett as Polly's mom and stepdad, Elaine and Max. Elaine may in fact be a breakthrough sitcom character: a mom who's a rummy and a slut. The only thing you need to know about Max is that he has a stud or something in one ear, and he has only one ball.

I noticed online that one writer detects some influence from Arrested Development. See note above about drug testing for TV critics.

You may be thinking, it doesn't sound all that awful. Actually, I'm not making it sound as awful as I found it -- the details are just too preposterous, and nauseating.

But watching it did make me focus on, and I think finally understand, the problem ABC is having trying to plug the holes on Wednesday night. It all goes back to the fall of 2009, when The Middle and Modern Family were introduced as part of the network's newly created Wednesday comedy night. That's two genuinely first-rate shows -- one of them in fact looking like it's going to be one of the historic TV comedy triumphs -- introduced on the same night in the same season. How often does that happen?

But what I suddenly found myself thinking was: Nobody at ABC knows (a) how those shows got on its schedule or (b) why they were successful. Certainly neither has anything in common with anything else that ABC has offered in modern times as comedy. So how then would you intentionally introduce two more shows to fill out the two-hour block? Looked at this way, it's something of a miracle that the network last season came up with Suburgatory, which looked like it was just going to be endless cheap shots at boring suburbia (which I'm assuming is what the ABC execs thought it would be) as divorced father and blossoming teenage daughter George and Tessa Altman (Jeremy Sisto and the radiant Jane Levy) move from hip New York City to stultifying whatever-the-name-of-the-town-is. However, the writers have made it something quite different from that, involving basic issues of parenting and growing up, of fitting in and not, of insider vs. outsider status, of hopes and especially disappointments.

Again, it's about as far from an "ABC comedy" as one could imagine. And that, I think, is the ABC programming department's Wednesday-night problem: having to think as if they're not ABC programmers.

I think, by the way, that's how they came up with Happy Endings, which I see has just returned to the schedule. Weh's mir. As I recall, the same critic who thinks Enlightened's Amy is pure and idealistic thinks Happy Endings is something special. To me, it's Friends with a set of characters who might have been interesting and appealing but were instead made, by virtue of arrogance, abjectness, or just plain obnoxiousness, generally revolting. I really tried with this bunch, but in the end all I could think of was hoping that that slasher found his way onto this show too.

Meanwhile, this week Modern Family had a simply spectacular outing, and made what must be incredibly difficult look effortless. Pride of place went to the Dunphy household, with Claire (the astounding Julie Bowen, doing one of the tube's stellar characterizations)


OMG, IT'S THE RETURN (FINALLY) OF MAD MEN!

Two hours' worth on AMC tomorrow night. And next Sunday it's the season premiere of Showtime's Nurse Jackie, with the final season of The Big C launching Monday the 29th. Thank you, TV gods!

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Would history have been changed if Gandhi had been able to find someone to eat with him in the school cafeteria?

It's a tricky business building an episode around an event focused on one of the three households that make up this "modern family" -- last night it was Alex's middle-school graduation -- since the show depends on having all three households in (barely) controlled chaos. Fortunately, the creative team was up to the challenge in the "See You Next Fall" episode; there were repercussions from everything that happened in this compressed version of the opening sequences.

by Ken

I want to say that I was blown away by Modern Family's season finale last night, "See You Next Fall." The only problem is that, while I see that a number of bloggers also thought the show had the look and feel of a season-ender, according to ABC the season finale is next week -- though the episode listed on the website is clearly a repeat. A wonderful episode, easily worth another look, but still a repeat.

It's no great surprise that brainy Alex, Claire and Phil Dunphy's middle offspring, turned out to be her class valedictorian, even if it took an unlucky twist of fate for her lead rival. And so the ongoing clash between Alex and older sister Haley took this form.

ALEX [alone in her room, rehearsing her graduation speech off 3-by-5 cards]: It's ironic that I stand up here representing my classmates when for the past three years most of them have treated me like I'm invisible. It's my own fault. I was obsessed with good grades instead of looks, popularity, and skinny jeans.
HALEY [walking in toward the end, horrified by what she's hearing]: What? Is that your speech?
ALEX: Get out of here!
HALEY: You cannot say that!
ALEX: Yes I can. And you want to know why? 'Cause it's the truth!
HALEY: No one wants to hear the truth! It's very simple, Alex. In order to give a good speech, all you have to do is take a song and say it, like "Don't stop believin'," or "Get this party started."
ALEX: That means nothing!
HALEY: Who cares? Nobody wants to think! It's a graduation, a celebration of being done with thinking.
ALEX: People want to be challenged. They're going to respect me for it.
HALEY: No one's ever going to talk to you again.
ALEX: Mahatma Gandhi went on a hunger strike for what he believed in.
HALEY [as ALEX leaves the room]: That's 'cause no one would eat with him in the cafeteria.
ALEX looks back in her room at HALEY, gesticulates and makes a sound of wonder and dismissal, then rushes off.

Can Haley (Sarah Hyland) save Alex (Ariel Winter) from becoming, as she puts it, "a social piranha"? In this later scene, Alex finds out some things that shock her -- most importantly, apparently, that Haley think's she's pretty.

It's an alarming enough insight that high school, which we some of us like to think of as at worst a rite of passage, which is to say something we get through, is in reality the prototype for an uncomfortable lot of Real Life As We Know It. But consider that young Alex Dunphy hasn't even gotten to high school and already feels stranded on the Nerd side of the Nerds vs. Cool Kids divide.

Now it could be that Haley doesn't have the absolutely full weight of history behind her with her unexpected insight into the motivating force behind Gandhi's social activism. But I ask you, do we have any record of just who he ate lunch with in the school cafeteria?

In the end, the episode had the satisfying feel of a season-summer-upper, with almost everyone emerging from the crisis of the day, as often happens in real life, with some wholly unexpected new bit of understanding of their loved ones and themselves.


This is a preview of the Modern Family episode listed for next week, "Slow Down Your Neighbors." (Remember Claire and the speed bump?) It's a wonderful episode, and I'll probably watch it again, but it can't really be the season finale, can it?

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ABC's Modern Family has been steadily growing on me

The family: That's patriarch Jay (Ed O'Neill) at left with his new wife Gloria (Sofia Vergara) and stepson Manny (Rico Rodriguez); in the middle, Jay's daughter Claire (Julie Bowen) with her husband Phil (Ty Burrell) and (right to left) Haley (Sarah Hyland), Alex (Ariel Winter), and Luke (Nolan Gould); and at right, Jay's son Mitchell (Jesse Tyler Ferguson, holding baby Lily) and partner Cameron (Eric Stonestreet).

by Ken

Genuine originality isn't something we often have to worry about in TV, especially of the network variety, and so I sometimes tend to forget my personal cautionary tale: Soap, Susan Harris's very dark and very hilarious soaplike saga of the Tate (rich) and Campbell (not rich) families. I remember watching the first episode and not only not finding anything funny but being simply appalled by the atrocious taste of it all. In particular, there was the Tates' servant Benson (the great Robert Guillaume) joking about putting sugar in the coffee of Mr. Tate (the wonderful Robert Mandan), a diabetic. This, I remember thinking, is supposed to be humorous, feeding sugar to a diabetic?

The thing is, you had to know the characters. Once you got to know Chester Tate, the idea of slipping him sugar came to seem a lot less outlandish, and once you came to understand the weird relationship between Benson and the various Tates, you kind of wondered why he didn't. But I missed all of that the first time around, and it wasn't till years later, when the show was in syndication, that I came to appreciate its brilliance. The people who made the show had created their own comic universe, and they had it up and running from that first episode. They had the audacity to expect an audience to hunker down and get what they were up to. Luckily, it happened.

Of course, a good part of the Soap audience probably did think feeding sugar to a diabetic was hilarious. That's the thing about network TV. For a show to succeed big-time, it helps for it to work on multiple levels, for multiple audiences.

Now I'm not saying that Modern Family -- created and produced by Steven Levitan and Christopher Lloyd, who have some mighty impressive TV credits -- is on the level of Soap, at least not yet. But I am saying that I've come around a good way since I wrote about it previously. Consider this clip. With Mitchell, Jay's uptight lawyer son, having been unable to tell the rest of his family anything more than that he and his life partner of five years, Cameron (Eric Stonestreet), have been thinking of adopting a baby, now that they have actually flown to Vietnam and returned with Lily, the last possible moment for some sort of announcement seems to have been reached, and Cam has duly summoned everyone.



If you don't know and on some level understand the characters, my guess is that this clip is somewhere between pointless and appalling, a collection of crude clichés and tired jokes. (If you don't know the characters and you love this clip, I think we probably don't have much to talk about.) That's pretty much where I was when I wrote originally about Modern Family, dealing with it in a clump with two other ABC Wednesday-night sitcoms, The Middle, which I liked (and like) a lot, and Cougar Town, which I liked better than the people who make the show seem to think I should, given the nasty leer with which it's sent out to us.

Here's what I wrote before about Modern Family:

Speaking of people not grasping basic truths, you might think that the whole point of Modern Family is to show us an entire set of characters who go beyond incomplete self-knowledge and knowledge about the people close to them to complete lack of such knowledge. At any rate, you might think that was the point if you could think of any way that might give the show a point. Again I have to wonder how much network meddling got in the way of a program concept that might have been developed into something genuinely interesting and funny.

Maybe the idea is that somehow the show can rise above the massive pile-on of character clichés and cartoonish stereotypes and become . . . well, I have no idea what it might become. All that said, though, I notice that I haven't reprogrammed the DVR to stop recording new episodes. Is it possible that there really is something there?

I think the most important thing I wrote there is that I had not stopped recording new episodes, and at this point I'm getting a much clearer sense, not of "what it might become," but of what it is. For example, in the clip we've already seen, once you do know the characters, the scene opens up.

Mitchell, for example, tends to assume that everything he gets from his family has to do with his being gay, and is meant to insult him. In fact, a great deal has to do with his massive insecurities and overly intellectualized way of looking at the world, and of course the whole complex of his relationships with his seemingly perfect sister Claire and their father -- and mother. As I mentioned previously, we've actually met Dede, in the person of Shelley Long, and now the casting is coming to seem to me fairly brilliant.



There was also a wonderful guest appearance by Benjamin Bratt as Gloria's ex-husband, Manny's mostly absent father. Despite Gloria's warnings about her ex's enormous charm, a resentful Jay is wholly seduced by Javier -- right up to the point where, like everyone else in the guy's life, he lets him down.

One thing that put me off is that, at least for me, none of these characters is easy to like, or even accept, except perhaps Claire. (How is it possible to dislike the lustrous Julie Bowen?) The flamboyant Cam is perhaps the hardest. But there's real human fullness as well as affection in the character, who really does represent a brave and sensible mate choice for Mitchell. Consider this scene:



Some background is needed here. Cam has mentioned to Mitchell that while in town he ran into Mitch's father with four of his cronies, and Jay introduced him as "a friend of my son." To Cam it's just something worth taking note of, but to Mitchell it's such a mortal insult that he drives into town and confronts his father.

CAMERON [indicating flowers]: Mitchell, how do these look?
MITCHELL: Like they're dying.
CAMERON: I know, right? I said something to the florist, and he said, "Oh, don't worry about it, they're going to come back." They're not coming back! They've crossed to the other side!
MITCHELL: You are a funny man.
CAMERON: Why?
MITCHELL: Because you're completely bothered by the flowers, but when my father introduces you as "a friend of my son," it doesn't faze you in the least.
CAMERON: Because the florist played me for a fool. Your dad didn't mean any harm. He's just being who he is.

When Mitchell asks whether his father would refer to his sister's husband Phil as "a friend of Claire's," Cam says, "I've heard him call Phil a lot worse."

We could all call Phil all sorts of names, but let's just settle for "boob." It's not that he's unintelligent, but that his brain is all twisted up in and consumed by delusions of hipness and special insights he simply doesn't have. Watch and wince. (Haley, by the way, is 15.)



Haley causes Claire all sorts of anxiety because she sees herself at that age, and remembers how that worked out. She has her own anxieties and terrors, not least of all things mechanical, a trait that, interestingly, she shares with her brother -- as Cam points out to Mitchell. When Claire is unable to figure out how to use the remote for the new home theater system Phil has installed, he's challenged to teach Haley how to use it in 20 minutes. And what's in it for Haley? "This is for all those times Mom told you she was right and you knew she was wrong." Needless to say, Haley becomes a remote-conrol whiz. Naturally, though, as with most everything else on Modern Family, this leads to more conflict and confusion.

I think it was the most recent episode of Modern Family that opened with husband and wife Phil and Claire fielding the question -- to the imaginary cameras apparently filming an imaginary documentary about this extended "modern family" -- as to whether people can change, and Phil announcing his unshakable belief that they can, which Claire points out kind of argues the opposite.

These characters do change. Take this little father-son exchange, after Mitchell has tricked Jay into thinking that one of his old cronies -- you know, the guys to whom Cam was introduced as "a friend of my son" -- is gay.

MITCHELL: I'm proud of you, Dad. You're growing.
JAY: Just, just stop it, please. Don't you see how hard this is for me? See, I used to be just like one of those guys. Now look at me. I got a house looks like Little Colombia, I got a gay son and a Chinese granddaughter.
MITCHELL: Vietnamese.
JAY [muttering]: Only you would know the difference.
MITCHELL: Don't worry, Dad, you're not growing too much.

By the end of the show, the case is being made that people can perhaps change, but only about 15 percent -- but that "Sometimes that's just enough."

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