How To Make a TV Show That Doesn’t Suck (Part One)
Like any good American I have spent a vast portion of my pathetic life planted in front of a TV set watching crap.
But on the other hand I’ve gone long stretches in which I didn’t own a TV or didn’t have cable (which in downtown Philadelphia means you don’t watch TV); I used to read books in those days, and I attribute to those TV-less periods the fact (or my claim to the fact) that I still have a slightly discriminating brain.
Perhaps it’s evidence not of a discriminating brain but of a yawning character fissure, but I never liked M*A*S*H, and I wasn’t impressed enough by some shows that seemed not to stink completely like Hill Street Blues and N.Y.P.D. Blue to make a special point of watching them; I’ve never watched an entire episode of St. Elsewhere or Chicago Hope or E.R. or Grey’s Anatomy. I get bored easily and I get annoyed easily.
But I’m not a total crank; there are shows I have watched and enjoyed on a regular basis, and I even dabbled momentarily in writing for episodic TV myself until I realized that I just didn’t give enough of a fuck and preferred to haul garbage for a living while writing plays that fifty people would come out to see on a really good night.
So in other words, just as anyone who has ever watched one inning of a neighborhood softball game thinks he could manage a major-league team to the World Series, I think I am qualified to pontificate briefly on the elements that make a TV show good and on how a paucity of these elements are what make a TV show suck.
Ladies and gentlemen, presented for your consideration: Mad Men.
Contributors to Newcritics’ live-blogging of Mad Men, like Tristan and Karen, are probably right about the show’s faulty representation of 1960 America. For instance the scene where one dad smacks somebody else’s kid at a birthday party — I’m of the generation of the little kids in the show and my dad (true, he was a tool-grinder and not an ad man) would have absolutely kicked the living shit out of anyone else who laid a hand on me (unless of course that person was a nun, a priest, or a sadistic Cardinal Dougherty High School lay-teacher).
And then there’s just the general squareness of most of the characters. At one time I did a lot of research on the early Sixties — lots of fun, and a lot of it consisted of poring over old magazines and papers, and, yeah, people were weird back then, as they are now, but these advertising guys would have been at least slightly hip, or at least not quite such a pack of cubes. Their livelihoods depended on knowing all the latest. Check out a Mad magazine from 1960. (These ad men would have.)
And James Wolcott and everybody else is so right: the jury may still be out on Mad Men, but the ad agency in the show definitely sucks. All they do is walk into meetings completely unprepared and come up with no ideas. Then they slink out and hit on the secretaries. Hey, if it was that easy I would be an ad exec myself.
But I can live with bad verisimilitude. I doubt that Deadwood was very historically accurate, and I doubt that The Sopranos was much like real mob life. (Definitely not like down here in Philly, anyway, where the mob guys live in row houses instead of McMobmansions.) I don’t watch TV for its true-to-life representation of life. I think the first season of Twin Peaks is my favorite show ever, and how real was that?
People have also complained about the lack of plot in Mad Men, but I could also live with a reasonable lack of plot. I hardly ever knew what the hell was going on in The Sopranos or Twin Peaks or especially in Rome or in Deadwood, and most of the time I didn’t really care. But one does want to feel that something is going on, even if you’re not terribly sure what it is.
What I do want from a show are great characters.
My own quaint theory is that to have a really good TV show you need good — and preferably great — lead characters, and you need more than one of them.
The Sopranos had wild and memorable people in it — not just Tony and the regular gang, but all these guys who would come on for a season or two, wreak some havoc and then get killed off, like David Proval’s Richie Aprile and Joe Pantoliano’s Ralphie Cifaretto and Steve Buscemi’s Tony Blundetto. Same thing with Deadwood — Al Swearengen, E.B. Farnum, even the seemingly eternally constipated Seth Bullock — they kept me watching that show even when after two or three episodes into the third season I was wondering if anything was ever going to fucking happen ever again in the town of Deadwood.
Now it is possible to have a good show that has only one great or really cool regular character, but then you have to have him wander around and meet other cool characters. The 1960s were great for this. Please see Have Gun, Will Travel, or Run For Your Life or my personal all-time favorite, Then Came Bronson with the great Michael Parks. (That’s Parks on the Sportster in the photo accompanying this piece.) All these shows had a cool, endlessly interesting lead guy, the kind of guy you’d actually like to know, and in every episode he’d meet up with one or two or three other interesting people, and always played by some terrific character actor or actress like Jack Klugman or Albert Salmi or Shirley Knight. Oh, and yes, there would be a problem. A problem for the star and a problem for the guest star. It wouldn’t be just, “Oh, hi. You seem like an interesting person.†No, something would be the matter, and you’d want to see how your lead character and your guest stars would deal with it.
So first you need some good characters; then you need some problems for the characters; and then you need some dialogue that’s not quite as boring as the dialogue we hear every day out in so-called real life.
So far in Mad Men you’ve got great production design, great hair and costumes; and you’ve got Don Draper who isn’t too boring and four or five women characters who are sketches of non-boring characters; everybody’s problem — at least the ones who appear to have problems besides the fact that their personalities are boring clichés — is basically that they’re just a little bit dissatisfied with life; and you’ve got dialogue that’s about at the same level of the mundane crap we hear in our own sad lives.
Maybe this is enough to make the show a hit. God knows, lots of shows have run for years that I couldn’t stand watching more than a few minutes of, and usually it was because I thought the characters were dull. I really wanted to murder the whole cast of thirtysomething for instance, and I finally stopped watching Six Feet Under because finally the two somewhat interesting characters, the younger sister and the gay brother, just weren’t enough for me amidst the tedium of the other brother and his fucked-up girlfriend and her more fucked-up brother; no, sorry, when it comes right down to it, sometimes I’d really rather read a book.
Maybe the writers of Mad Men have something up their sleeves.
I thought they were going to try to make Vincent Kartheiser’s Pete Campbell into the evil antagonist of the show. But then this somewhat interestingly vile baby-faced cad comes back from his honeymoon and all of a sudden he’s de-balled, and he actually likes being married. What’s up with that shit? Kartheiser when he was only eighteen or so turned in a brilliant turn as a junkie thief in Another Day in Paradise; so let him play a real scumbag and give us a villain to root for.
Give us some characters that are just a little bit more interesting than the dullards we meet every day when we go out the door, or when we watch MSNBC or reality TV.
Let’s have that supposedly scandalous divorcée do something really scandalous and tell the Good Wives Club to fuck off and die.
Let’s have Betty the nice but neurotic wife start doing the postman. Give her something; give us something.
Let’s have Miss Menken the department-store owner walk into the next ad agency meeting and say, “Hey, ya know what? Fuck you, you incompetent anti-semitic and boring assholes. You’re fired, and I’m going with the Jewish agency down the street.â€Â
Maybe the Jewish agency down the street could spin off into its own show.
And maybe it won’t be boring.
See ya this Thursday at 10 PM EDT.
(This Newcritics exclusive has been the first in an eighty-three part series under the umbrella title We Who Have No Lives. A Quinn/Martin Joint. Abject apologies to Blue Girl for using the word “suckâ€Â. For sublime fiction and poetry, please visit my place.)
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