Hey, sitcom writers! You’re hurting America — and not because we’re rolling on the floor laughing. You’re still writing comedy that’s so bad, it’s painful. Sure, you thought that you stopped that almost a decade ago, when a huge swath of shows with names like “Two Guys, a Dog and a Jar of Mayonnaise” were swept off the air to make room for bad game shows, bad reality TV, and any other bad idea the network executives could latch onto that might save their lily-white hides from the oncoming digital revolution. Since the golden age of “Seinfeld” and “Friends,” fewer and fewer sitcoms have been produced, fewer and fewer sitcom writers are gainfully employed, and the sitcom industry — if you can really refer to a roomful of insecure narcissists trading barbs while ripping the labels off their Fiji bottles and pasting them to the walls for 12 hours a day as an “industry” — has been squeezed beyond recognition.
You would think that the remaining sitcoms would be really good, but no. What’s truly remarkable is that almost every sitcom in existence is bad in one way or another. Even if there are plenty of decent jokes (“Better With You”), an original (if obnoxious) premise (“Outsourced,” “Raising Hope”), a great creator and cast (“Running Wilde”), there are still so many bad moments that they practically erase the good ones, leaving viewers queasy and ambivalent as the credits roll. Even though we can recognize, objectively, that the work of being funny and original is hopelessly difficult, even though we not-so-secretly envy and identify with those insecure narcissists in their writers’ room, since we’re all insecure narcissists these days and we’d all rather get paid 10 times more to paste Fiji bottle labels to the wall than do actual work, that doesn’t change the ugly truth: These new sitcoms that we struggle to rally around each fall are just not that entertaining, let alone that funny.
The comedies that are firing on all pistons these days — “30 Rock,” “Parks and Recreation,” “The Office,” “Community” — are working because the writers don’t mistake the show’s premise for its stories. Watch “Running Wilde” or “Raising Hope” or “Outsourced,” and in every single scene you’re reminded of the main idea of the whole show. Guy uncertain how to woo girl. Guy uncertain how to raise baby. Guy uncertain how to manage stereotypical foreign peoples. After three or four episodes of this, no matter how witty the writing is, we don’t care anymore. There just aren’t enough great characters or intriguing situations to keep us hooked.
All of which makes the continued supremacy of ABC’s “Modern Family” (9 p.m. Wednesdays) as king of the current sitcom lineup all the more impressive. Against a backdrop of haphazard, unremarkable shows and a handful of reasonably consistent standouts, “Modern Family” demonstrates the enormous comedic possibilities that spring out of simply honoring your characters, and adding new, believable layers to those characters as your show matures. In its second season (which easily stands up to the brilliance of the first), each character on “Modern Family” is idiosyncratic but still real, and show creators Steven Levitan and Christopher Lloyd work hard to find new ways to reveal each character’s particular quirks. Take patriarch Jay (Ed O’Neill) and his much younger Colombian wife, Gloria (Sofia Vergara). Instead of dwelling on their most obvious traits — her hotness and their age difference — the writers locate the cultural disconnect between Jay and Gloria and exploit it brilliantly. In a recent episode, when the neighbor’s constantly barking dog disappears, Jay becomes suspicious that Gloria might have done something brutal to the animal.
Jay: (to camera) Gloria’s grandfathers and uncles were butchers, so she’s always had a certain comfort level when it comes to … killing. One time we had this rat …
We cut to Gloria, wearing a pretty white lace dress, holding a shovel, as Jay cowers nearby.
Gloria: Whaaat? First you smash it (slams shovel to the ground on unseen rat), then you cut the head off. (Turns shovel and makes cutting motion while Jay flinches.)
Jay: (voice-over) It was like nothing to her.
Gloria: (handing Jay the shovel) I go to church now.
Jay: (to camera) She left the head out there to send a message to the other rats.
Likewise, gay couple Cameron (Eric Stonestreet) and Mitchell (Jesse Tyler Ferguson) keep us interested not by spewing a steady stream of “we’re gay!” jokes like they might on other shows, but by taking pains to politely tolerate each other’s flaws and sidestep conflict like all couples do. When Mitchell gushes about building their adopted daughter, Lily, a princess playhouse, Cameron explains to the camera that Mitchell has a bad habit of injuring himself and others when power tools are involved. “If an accident does happen, I hope he kills me,” Cameron tells the camera, “because I don’t think I would be a very inspiring disabled person.” Later, Mitchell enlists his dad Jay’s help in building the castle.
Mitchell: Remember how much fun we had putting that bookshelf together?
Jay: (to camera) That was my Vietnam. And I was in Vietnam.
Of course the show’s writers take plenty of comedic advantage of the fact that Cameron and Mitchell are gay — they just do it with relatable or familiar situations, or by highlighting the generation gap between Jay and his son. And almost any scene with Jay and his son-in-law Cameron is memorable, simply because Stonestreet’s depiction of Cameron’s very gentle awareness raising is so sweet and spot-on, while O’Neill’s grumpy straight patriarch walks the perfect line between macho buffoonery and a very earnest desire to get up to speed with the changing times.
The couple also presents the perfect opportunity to deconstruct the precious, oppressively p.c. realm of liberal parenting while simultaneously underscoring the ignorance that’s still afoot. In a recent episode, Cameron and Mitchell are told that being gay dads with a Vietnamese adopted daughter will make Lily a shoe-in at the prestigious Billingsley Academy preschool. They’re feeling pretty smug about their chances while waiting for their interview, until they spot their competition: a lesbian couple, one of whom is in a wheelchair, with an adopted son from Africa. “Disabled interracial lesbians with an African kicker!” Cameron gasps.
During their interview, Cameron pretends he’s an American Indian out of desperation. “The tribe elders foretold that, though I lay with fire-haired man,” he says, gesturing toward Mitchell, “the Giving Hawk would bring us baby, with her skin the color of sweet corn, which my people call maize.” Stupid and goofy, sure, but this is the flavor of stupid and goofy that, against a backdrop of sharp cultural commentary, hits the spot.
In another episode, though, Cameron gets Lily a spot in a TV furniture ad, only to find that there’s a woman doing a cartoonish Japanese voice-over every time she and another Asian child appear on-screen. “Lily is Vietnamese, not Japanese, but you wouldn’t know that,” Cameron tells the director, “because you’re only interested in seeing these children as interchangeable stereotypes, not human beings!” Then Cameron marches over and picks up the wrong kid.
The show’s most traditional family, the Dunphys, might seem relatively pedestrian compared to Jay and Gloria and Manny (Rico Rodgriguez) or Cameron and Mitchell, but Ty Burrell is so absurdly good as self-congratulatory loser-dad Phil Dunphy that there’s a built-in safety net with any of their storylines. Likewise, every time Haley’s (Sarah Hyland) hapless boyfriend Dylan (Reid Ewing) enters the picture, things liven up. One day when Claire (Julie Bowen) is sick with a cold, Phil warns Dylan, “Don’t get too close to my wife.” Dylan responds in shock, “Haley told you about that? It was just a dream!”
Just as the writers use Cameron and Mitchell to capture the absurdities of hothouse-flower parenting of small children, they use Phil and Claire not only to demonstrate the perils of raising bigger kids, but also to capture the existential dread that creeps in once your kids get older.
Claire: A minute ago, they were babies. Now they’re driving. And soon, we’ll be dead.
Phil: Whoa! You’re leaving out a few great minutes there! Retirement, old age, a cool chair that goes up the stairs!
Claire: I’m sorry, I’m being ridiculous.
Phil: Don’t apologize! I love you when you’re human.
Even though “Modern Family” features imaginative storytelling and vivid, layered characters that hold our attention week after week, every one of its characters is human, first and foremost. Rather than delivering up cartoonish stereotypes, “Modern Family” offers us thoughtful characters whose flaws and prejudices are balanced out by a glimpse of their big-hearted urges and pure intentions. They’re hapless, smug, confused, pathetic and human — and we love them for it.
My youngest daughter, who is 19 months old, has no self-restraint. She can’t walk by the dog’s water bowl without plunging both of her hands into the water. If she sees a Barbie shoe somewhere, it must go into her mouth immediately, even if there are two other shoes in there already. The second she gets tired of her milk, it’s time to pour it all over her chair. If she’s naked, then she’s looking for a good spot to pee, preferably in some carpeted corner where the smell won’t come out.
Network TV writers remind me a lot of my daughter. I imagine them, sometimes, sitting around in the writers room together, shoving Barbie shoes into their mouths, pouring their Fiji bottles into their laps and peeing in the corners of the room, all the while shouting at each other, “The murder victim should either be a stripper with a coke habit or the cheating wife of a very rich, very powerful man!” “No, no, she should be a depressed midget who travels with the county fair as a carnival freak!” “And one of the hostages should definitely have asthma, or a heart condition … or leprosy!” “And then the murder victim’s son should be so traumatized by what he saw that he can’t speak … or maybe there are twin sons, who speak a secret language all their own!”
OK, maybe the writers are shoving pizza in their mouths instead of Barbie shoes, but the level of impulse control is about the same. When your main objective is to capture a national audience’s attention and never, ever let it wander, the slightest interest in nuanced storytelling or subtlety or believability falls by the wayside immediately. You don’t need a compelling premise or some layers of meaning or a distinct perspective or anything resembling a larger message. What you need is sex, drugs, rock ‘n’ roll, murder, infidelity, Russian spies, lovable mommies, arrogant businessmen, chicks in bikinis and chain-smoking pimps, all before the first commercial break.
Considering the fact that the needs of the modern audience roughly resemble the needs of your average crack-addicted 14-year-old, it’s not hard to understand why CBS’s “Hawaii Five-O” (10 p.m. Mondays) is one of the big new hits of the fall season. You start with a familiar rock tune (the Rolling Stones “Gimme Shelter,” Red Hot Chili Peppers’ “Higher Ground,”), cut to an aerial shot of crystal blue water and white sand, skitter over to a close-up of a few juicy butts hanging out of bikini bottoms, pan across a sunny Waikiki skyline, zoom in on a cool surfing stunt, and then start with the story du jour, already in progress. Bad prisoner guy holds guard at gunpoint, escapes from jail, leaving cops confused! Surfing legend catches a wave at an exhibition, then collapses suddenly. He’s been shot! Woman is attacked and killed, her husband runs from the cops, holding a bloody knife … but did he really do it?
Once you get the basic idea, we cut to that old familiar “Hawaii Five-O” theme song — which is, not incidentally, one of the best theme songs in TV history — and then you’ve got more crystal blue waves, more juicy butts, plus some macho men running and jumping and shooting. Before you know it, you’re hooked. It’s like “CSI: Miami” but without the sepia-toned swamps and the alligators reflected in David Caruso’s ugly mirrored sunglasses. It’s like “Law & Order,” but with sunshine and delicious tropical fruity drinks where a grumpy Jerry Orbach should go.
But if we’re hooked, we’re hooked like a toddler with a mouth full of Barbie shoes — eventually, we’re either going to choke or projectile vomit all over the room. That’s about what it feels like to watch a whole episode of “Hawaii Five-O,” too. Because after the guy who just killed his wife (but obviously didn’t really do it, since he’s holding a bloody knife) goes to the battleship and holds a bunch of tourists hostage, we know that our hunky star McGarrett (Alex O’Loughlin) is going to use his Navy SEAL background to swim under the battleship and climb up the side like a really hot modern pirate, squinting all the while (because that’s how macho guys hold their faces, to show that they’re tough). Then he’s going to put himself in harm’s way and save the hypoglycemic hostage and truly empathize with the murder suspect and all along, he’s going to urge his men to solve the murder, because despite the evidence, he just has a hunch that this man didn’t kill his wife!
But that alone wouldn’t be enough to keep our interest, of course. Along the way, McGarrett also has to meet up with a wise old veteran who overhears his name when he’s on the phone and realizes that he once served on the Arizona with McGarrett’s grandfather, who died at Pearl Harbor. Suddenly, the action stops completely and the old guy is getting all worked up and patriotic and McGarrett looks deeply moved (because he’s not squinting for once). The music swells as the old guy tells McGarrett, “The man that you are named after was a real hero. You should be very proud!” “I am proud,” McGarrett replies, and the faintest trace of tears come to his eyes. Aww, hot guy sad. Patriotism and old guys and honor and stuff. Sniff. Awesome.
Even though this tidbit has nothing whatsoever to do with the story, we need it like we need blue skies and Hawaiian shirts and white sand and shave ice. Of course, we also need the little girl whose mommy was just killed right in front of her pretty saucer eyes. We need Boomer — err, I mean Kono (Grace Park) — to slowly gain the little girl’s trust by taking her out for … shave ice! By the beach! Because then a big Hawaiian guy whom Kono calls “Uncle” can serve the shave ice to them, and the little girl can lament the fact that Daddy loves lemon shave ice, and then the little girl can explain that a bad man came and killed Mommy. Right after that, the Bad Man can show up and Bad Men in a van can grab the little girl and drive away, fast! Oh noes!
That’s when the writers go from pouring their Fiji bottles into their laps (Wise old patriot remembers your grandfather!) to peeing in the corners (Little girl reveals murderer, then gets snatched off the street by meaty-looking thugs!). Of course, we knew they were going to start peeing in the corners soon enough, because from the second Kono met the little girl, she kept telling her, “Don’t worry, you’re safe with me.” and “Nothing’s ever going to happen to you, not while I’m around” and “Thugs in vans aren’t going to just grab you right off the street in broad daylight, because that wouldn’t be remotely believable.”
And once the entire writers’ room smells like pee, well, then, what can you do? That’s when Danno (Scott Caan) chases a private jet down the runway in his sports car and the wise old veteran takes a bullet for McGarrett (“Leave no man behind, remember?” Oh yes, we remember.) and Daddy and daughter are reunited to the gentle strains of State Radio’s “Keepsake,” probably because they’ve used Israel Kamakawiwo’ole’s rendition of “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” three or four times by now.
And even though it’s a little strange that the Hawaii of 2010 so closely resembles the Hawaii of those very special episodes of “The Brady Bunch” where the Bradys fly to Honolulu and become convinced that they’re cursed until they return the mysterious idol that they found to the ancient burial ground (which itself closely resembles the last 20 seasons of “Survivor”), there is something vaguely appealing about “Hawaii Five-0.” Is it the clear blue waves? Is it the hot ladies in bikinis? Is it the two macho leading men, Danno and McGarrett, who bicker through each scene in the same teasing, testy way that every pair of mismatched cop partners have bickered for the past three decades?
Danno: (on the phone with McGarrett) You miss me, don’t you?
McGarrett: Oh yeah, I wish you were here. But you don’t swim, do you?
Danno: I don’t swim? I swim very well, actually, I just choose not to.
Old veteran: Are you talking to your wife?
McGarrett: I’m talking to my partner.
In case you’re unfamiliar with this show or its predecessor, Danno is the goofier, more talkative one, and McGarrett is the tough guy. McGarrett says stuff like, “I will literally pay you cash to stop talking!” and “I want this entire beach on lockdown!” and he’s always squinting, because he’s tough and he’s haunted. Danno is also tough but he isn’t haunted — except by a hair stylist who insists on combing his hair straight back like Gordon Gekko. And these two might make a good team, really… if they were secretly gay, or if one of them was really depressed and slept with the other one’s wife on the sly, or if they were up for the same promotion at work and their good-natured ribbing masked a deeper layer of resentment and contempt.
But this isn’t “Mad Men,” see? This is network television. This is “Fantasy Island,” a quarter of a century later, with fewer opportunities to overuse dry ice and demean midgets. The people who create this stuff have no impulse control, and they’re handsomely rewarded for it.
But you know what? When you pick up one of those really rubbery Barbie shoes? It sort of begs to be put in your mouth. And it’s so soft and springy in there, you just have to chew it a little. At that point, are you really going to take the Barbie shoe out of your mouth and dry it off? Are you going to search long and hard for a provocative but subtle way to encapsulate your lead character’s frustration with the complicated sociocultural pressures of his position? Or are you going to shoot the surfing legend in the head while he’s riding the Pipeline?
Sometimes it’s easier to shrug and say, “Let somebody else make good TV. I just want to dunk my head in the dog’s bowl.”
We are neutered animals. Our culture’s insistence on “healthy” or “professional” communication and “appropriate” language and behavior — at work, in public, at home — reduces us to soulless shadows, mumbling polite clichés to smooth over each exchange. We ask our children to please say please, we thank our bosses for offering us the opportunity to remain underpaid for another month, we tap out increasingly warm and friendly e-mails to co-workers, we thank the surly cashier at the deli for offering us the opportunity to pay too much for a crappy sandwich, yet again. The scope of emotional behavior that’s considered acceptable by mature adults these days ranges from Mildly Satisfied to Ever So Slightly Grumpy (but only due to lack of sleep rather than some fundamental contempt for life).
No wonder online comments sections have revealed an enraged, tearfully sentimental, depressive, effusive, resentful, anxious populace, feverishly passionate about every shred of trivia that crosses its path. Unable to express the depth of our emotion in any other context without being considered unhinged, we’re left to pour our volatile, crippling emotions out to total strangers on the Internets.
Considering the repression and resignation of modern adult life, it’s not hard to understand why the common aging frat boy (aka fraticus boyalis) stubbornly refuses to give up his way of life despite outside pressures to do so. As juvenile as his shenanigans might seem to the casual observer — getting fall-down drunk on pints of draft beer, referring to his male cohorts with demeaning nicknames, engaging in games of foosball or PacMan or pool with the feverish conviction of a missionary speaking in tongues — the frat boy’s immaturity should be understood as an elaborate rejection of the crushing responsibilities of adulthood. When viewed through the proper lens, the frat boy’s spirit of camaraderie, his utter refusal to accept the limitations of adult life, his stubborn commitment to continue drinking to excess and vomiting all over his shoes until he’s old and gray, mark him as a true modern rebel.
Instead of encountering the surly man-children of FX’s half-hour comedy “The League” (10:30 p.m. Thursdays) as pathetic 30-somethings clinging to the “Whassup, dude”s and the “smell ya later”s of the distant past, then, we’re forced to confront the ways that their childish rambling subverts the dominant paradigm. Rather than crafting that carefully worded, willfully upbeat e-mail to your boss, wouldn’t it be much nicer to get the man in a head lock and tell him to, “Smell my shorts, dillweed”? Instead of warning your children that further bratty outbursts will result in an immediate timeout, wouldn’t it be refreshing to pour them a big plastic cup of cheap beer and shout, “DRINK DRINK DRINK, YOU IDIOT, DRINK IT DOWN, NOW!”? Rather than engaging in another delicate conversation regarding recurrent conflicts with your spouse with all of the self-conscious politeness one might reserve for high-level diplomatic negotiations, wouldn’t it be nicer to tell him to stop getting his panties in a bunch over nothing, then grind his face into the carpet while delivering a merciless noogie to the back of his head?
The insult-barking frat boys of “The League” open up a new world of emotionally free possibilities to the modern adult, revealing the joys that come not only from venting all of the raging aggression and competitiveness and horndoggery that lurks within, but also from elevating the kinds of silly games we used to love when we were kids to a sort of art form. By setting a fantasy football league at the center of the show and then treating the ups and downs of the season as legitimate plotlines, “The League’s” writers engage in the same tenacious trivia-minded tomfoolery as their characters, and reveal the distinct thrills of overreacting to even the tiniest setback or victory in what amounts to group exercise in the powers of the imagination. When Kevin’s wife, Jenny, tells him that she wants to join the league, he replies, “No one drops out. It’s like the Supreme Court, people just die on the bench.” To the members of the league, the league isn’t a game, it’s deadly serious. Real life is the game.
As ambitiously unambitious as it is, “The League” could be terrible, but instead it ranges from mildly engaging to truly funny. Although the show’s tendency to devolve into potty humor and jokes about masturbation puts a cap on just how brilliant it can be, the writers accurately capture the particular quirks of this subspecies of humanity with the charm and extreme obnoxiousness suited to its demographic. As with the similarly aggressive (and clever) FX comedy “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia,” “The League” pushes the limits of taste as much as it can, from Taco’s romance with a toilet seat made of cocaine to the boys discovering obsessive detail-oriented Ruxin masturbating while looking over his brand-new draft lineup. While some of the standard running jokes — like the fact that the guys call each other “ladies” — may be about as amusing as a 5-year-old beer commercial, they’re certainly a realistic depiction of the species.
What the show captures exceptionally well are the thrills and severe drawbacks of shucking off the heaviness of adult life for the powers of fantasy (and draft beer). Sure, there’s smooth guy Pete (Mark Duplass), slacker Taco (John Lajoie), type-A Ruxin (Nick Kroll), rich dork Andre (Paul Scheer), regular chump Kevin (Stephen Rannazzisi), and Jenny (Katie Aselton), Kevin’s wife, who knows more about football than the other guys combined.
And, of course, anyone who’s traveled in these sorts of circles immediately recognizes Ruxin’s brother-in-law, Rafi (Jason Mantzoukas), as a familiar breed of menace common to big groups of intoxicated men. Rafi (whom the others refer to ominously as “El Cunado” or “the brother in law”) inserts himself in the middle of every conversation, grabs other people’s drinks and finishes them, and just generally behaves exactly like that guy who would materialize and invade your personal space the second after you did a giant bong hit in college. Rafi doesn’t understand the unspoken code of the group. He takes the pointing and jeering and open hostility to an exaggerated, awkward new level. “I am literally going to sodomize you on the battlefield!” he cheerfully informs one of the guys. “I’m going to have nonconsensual sex with your face!”
Naturally “The League” traffics in the typical “Here’s how I trick my wife into letting me watch too much football” jokes of Budweiser lore, but the show is clever enough to make even these moments sing. “You gotta keep it spontaneous,” Ruxin says, explaining how he keeps his wife happy. “So that’s why every 2.6 months, I make a grand gesture. You know, the rest of the year I coast by. It’s like how studios release these big blockbuster movies, then the rest of the year they sort of fart out Katherine Heigl dreck?” In another episode, when Kevin brags that his wife gave him “very special sex,” the others jeer, “Is it real? Are there unicorns snowing teardrops of Elton John songs?”
Improvised, rapid-fire insults like those are, of course, the real draw of “The League.” Take Ruxin’s deadpan exchange with Taco after a big fight:
Taco: I can completely understand if you don’t want to be best friends anymore.
Ruxin: We’re not even regular friends.
Taco: You’re just saying that because you’re angry.
Ruxin: No, I’m saying that because I don’t respect you or like you.
While modern adult life is increasingly ruled by polite restraint, the unbridled nastiness of “The League” is soup for the overgrown frat boy soul. Whether it makes you giggle or change the channel depends, of course, on your stomach for extreme juvenile delinquency among non-kin non-juvenile males. But either way, you have to admire their passion and their commitment. Or, as Pete puts it, “God bless fantasy football. There are many things a man can do with his time. This is better than those things.”
Writers need day jobs. This is the moral of HBO’s “Bored to Death” (10 p.m. Sundays) and the moral to the story of every writer you’ll ever meet, from paid professional to aspiring amateur to little-known dabbler. Newspapers, magazines, books, online publications are all under the gun these days, with the purse-keepers pressuring editors and writers alike to squeeze out more lively, popular content using fewer resources. The gum-shoe reporter and the thoughtful columnist alike have been forever supplanted by the tireless young blogger with a strong angle on Lady Gaga’s latest bean burrito-shaped hat (“An ingenious commentary on the speed with which every consumable bit of pop product is digested and expunged from our collective cultural bowels!”).
Longtime professional writers are running scared, sniffing around for new ways to pay the bills without either bleeding the stone or rehashing press releases and wire stories in pace with a mob of monkeys with typewriters But we deserve punishment, don’t we? This is what keeps us in our exquisite bind, keeps us fractured and isolated from each other: Our suspicion that writing itself is a luxury, that no matter how hard we’ve tried to improve at our so-called craft, ultimately we’re just spoiled, soft-pawed neurotics who would better serve society by digging ditches or flipping burgers or doing almost anything else besides basking in the illusion that our silly little derivative thoughts and ideas matter to anyone other than ourselves.
One of the most pathetic (and therefore also one of the most accurate) depictions of the writer’s life ever to grace the small screen, “Bored to Death” quite appropriately presents writing as the choice of the wilty, self-involved narcissist, the sort of self-pitying loser who encounters impossible deadlines, ambivalent girlfriends, disrespectful editors and oppressive corporate publishing overlords with the same flavor of whiny disbelief. To the random hardworking surgeon or lawyer or business professional on the street, such a character might appear the epitome of ineffectual hipster solipsism. To the writer (or to the aspiring artist, or to the oppressed creative drone, yearning to breathe free), though, such a character seems downright heroic.
When Jonathan Ames (Jason Schwartzman), the young novelist at the center of “Bored to Death,” sets about scratching his “three rules of writing” on a chalkboard at the start of the show’s second season, we know it’s going to be good.
“One, it’s difficult,” Jonathan tells the class. “Two, there will always be more rejection than acceptance. And three, try to give more pleasure with every sentence.”
“But it’s easy for you to say there will always be more rejection than acceptance,” says a woman in the class. “You’re a published writer, you’ve already made it.”
“Well, actually, my second novel was just rejected,” Jonathan counters cheerily. “I have to pay back my advance to my publisher.” He turns to the chalkboard and underlines “Rejection,” mumbling to himself, “It’s pretty demoralizing.”
Just when we feel a pang of sympathy for Jonathan — or for George (Ted Danson), his editor, whose decades-old column at his magazine is abruptly cut by the board (his boss tries to encourage him not to be discouraged by telling him he’s “great at cocktail parties”) — we also recognize what pampered, rarefied little children they are. Take the aspiring writer in Jonathan’s class, who says she wants to write about “how hard and weird it is to be alive, even if your parents are middle-class and pretty loving,” or the fact that Jonathan quite clearly feels bad that his students believe that writing is a worthy ambition. “I just think it’s sad that all my students have this dream of writing a book,” he tells George. “Did you tell them no one’s reading anymore?” George replies. “Even I’m not reading. I got a Kindle but I dropped it in the tub.”
And later, when Jonathan laments, “I have no skills for the world! At this point I might have to move back in with my parents,” he echoes the gut feelings of a nation full of writers who wake up each morning, feeling like Dodo birds: irrelevant, slow and aging badly.
Without this acknowledgment of the self-pitying, maladaptive nature of the writer, without the near-constant whimpering and moaning of Ray (Zach Galifianakis), who portrays himself as a well-endowed hero in his comics but who plods through real life like a lost infant, we’d never get wrapped up in this farcical tale of writers on the verge of a nervous breakdown. The big kick of “Bored to Death” is the way the show lampoons the self-delusion of the man-child and self-proclaimed artist and long-revered professional writer alike, lumping them into the same silly, leaking boat together like three sad sailors who would rather puff more bong hits than bail out their vessel.
Likewise, the spirit of camaraderie among these overgrown boys, and the fragile friendships and bonds Jonathan forges with his clients, are part of the pleasure that the real Jonathan Ames and the other writers of this show bring to every page and every scene. The cop with an S/M fetish urges Jonathan to be discreet in his mission to erase an S/M dungeon’s hard drive, and Jonathan complies respectfully, always going that extra mile to honor each of his clients as a human being, first and foremost, even if that requires running through the streets of New York padlocked into a leather bondage suit. Some mix of this compassion for humanity, this boyish mutual respect between the three main characters, and an admission of the absurd preciousness of the creative life makes “Bored to Death” a pure, sweet joy ride every week.
What’s even more remarkable, though, is how the show has matured in only its second season. Far from an empty barrage of one-liners and absurd scenarios, “Bored to Death” offers one or two poignant scenes per episode, dramatic interludes that nonetheless feel organic with the larger, somewhat farcical mood. “You know, I was reading Joan Didion. She describes how her husband died just like that,” George tells Jonathan after being diagnosed with Stage 2 prostate cancer. “It just seems so unfair that we can be turned off like a switch, like we never lived, like we never mattered. I don’t want to be turned off.”
No one wants that, of course. But the writer, with his delusions of grandeur, with his unyielding sense of entitlement and predisposition for misery, finds the specter of mortality particularly unjust. This is why we laugh at writers, in all of their patheticness and obvious weakness and self-importance. And this is also why we keep reading.
America’s obsession with youth is rooted in nostalgia. Why else would a nation of old people want to watch carefree whippersnappers frolic recklessly about in hot pants on their TV and movie screens? We want some old familiar taste of the excitement and uncertainty of youth. In watching 20-somethings (and middle-aged people surgically altered to look like them), we’re trying to remember how it feels to be loud and energetic and confused, to leap before we look, to believe that an entirely new life might spring up around the next corner.
When I was younger, I thought it vaguely pathetic to fixate on the past, humming “Glory Days” and exalting the joys of high school or college, of all depraved and undeserving times. But once you’re old enough to have at least a loose notion of how the next decade of your life will play out, nostalgia for youth inevitably slips into the frame. The past takes on a sepia-toned magic hour glow: The big hurts and disappointments come to seem just as sweet as the good times.
Far from pathetic, though, nostalgia can bring the richness of the present to light, and illuminate what matters the most to us and what amounts to unnecessary trivia. Nostalgia allows us to view our lives through a more soulful lens.
No wonder, then, that FX’s “Terriers” (10 p.m. Wednesdays) may be the most soulful new TV show to air this fall. Nostalgia makes up a big part of the ambience on this detective drama, from its almost quaint focus on the charms of San Diego’s Ocean Beach neighborhood to its romanticized flashbacks of ex-cop Hank’s (Donal Logue) failed marriage. There are a lot of “formers” in the mix here: former wives, former lovers, former alcoholics, former convicts, former cops. It’s no wonder that longing and regret weigh on every scene.
Luckily, that heaviness is balanced out by a great sense of humor, just as the show’s patient, thoughtful pace is enlivened by its unpredictability. When Hank and his buddy Britt (Michael Raymond-James) decide to make private investigation their business, they do so with the casual “What do we have to lose?” spirit of two former dirtbags determined to create a new life out of the ashes of the past. Hank was a cop with a drinking problem that ruined his marriage to his soul mate. Britt was a criminal who did things he can never tell his girlfriend Katie (Laura Allen) about. Despite their nagging doubts about the endeavor and themselves when they’re each alone, Hank and Britt rally to a common cause when they’re riding through the streets of Ocean Beach together in Hank’s rusty old pickup.
And like freelance spy Michael Westen (Jeffrey Donovan) of “Burn Notice” or Angela Lansbury’s retired novelist of “Murder, She Wrote,” Hank and Britt seem to stumble on people with investigation needs everywhere they go, whether it’s an executive at their local bank who suspects his wife of cheating or a kid who wreaks havoc in their local diner because he can’t remember his own name. As rote as private investigation can seem three decades after Magnum charmed us with his laid-back Hawaiian solitude and lonely bachelor ways, the new puzzles that this pair solve each week are consistently entertaining and unexpected. There are twists, yes, but not an endless supply of them; just one or two curveballs to keep things interesting, then some extended pondering of the emotional consequences. Unlike other detective shows that traffic in the black and white of good and bad characters, “Terriers” embraces the hazy in-between, from devious ex-buddies to ambivalent teenage accomplices to reformed thugs.
When they’re not empathizing with life’s losers or getting help from their three van-dwelling stoner-genius friends who hack into federal databases for fun and profit, Hank and Britt are typically engaged in some odd mix of bickering and messing with each other. When Britt discovers that the guy in the tux store that Hank just had him pickpocket is actually Hank’s ex-wife’s fiancé, Britt starts spinning a tall tale about how big the guy’s family treasures are. “His girlfriend probably hits her head on the ceiling trying to climb on top of that thing. And I’m not even talking about girth yet — you could screen a movie on that python!” Some of the show’s best quips, though, come from Maggie (Jamie Denbo), a lawyer they do work for who’s just had a baby. Along with reprimanding Hank and Britt for everything from looking scruffy to staring at her chest (“Stop staring at my son’s lunch”), she typically introduces each case with an aside about what dirtbags the two are (“These clients are important people. They’re better than you“).
Witty banter like this dominated the pilot, of course, leading viewers to believe it was full of empty shenanigans and lighthearted frippery. What has cemented the show with a small (very small) cadre of loyal fans is the slow and steady development of its characters into fallible souls anxious to move forward while the echoes of the past pull them back. “What’s wrong with me?” Katie asks Hank about her drunken indiscretion that threatens to ruin her relationship with Britt. “Why, Hank, when everything’s so perfect?” “Probably because somewhere, deep down inside you, you just don’t feel like you deserve it,” he replies. Hank may be as tenacious as a terrier, but his heart makes him as pliable as a puppy. Looking back at the past will make you soft like that.
Remember the ’90s, when we all thought we were crazy? Everyone ran out and got a shrink (New Yorkers got analysts — not just for Woody Allen anymore!). Couples’ therapy became a widely chosen ritualistic precursor to divorce, aimed at clarifying for each party exactly when and how their spouse became reprehensible. The middle-aged departed on healing retreats en masse to learn about centering and recovering their inner child. The most fragile souls wound up in stuffy hotel conference rooms under the banner of Werner Erhard’s Forum, where an authoritarian patriarch urged them to simply sweep away their “rackets” like so many dust bunnies.
Back then, everyone pathologized themselves and each other. We pointed our fingers at each other and proclaimed, “narcissist,” “borderline,” “bipolar,” “passive-aggressive,” “sex addict,” then unloaded our anxiety over the demons flying around our heads in our allotted 50-minute sessions. Why were the people who weren’t paying $150 an hour to be showered in unconditional positive regard so damn confused?
These days, the war of the sane versus the insane has usurped the political stage, both sides refusing to politely listen for another second, swapping out any agreement to disagree with an overarching proclamation that the other side is simply unhinged (and deeply stupid, to boot). With the globe in peril and abject lunatics threatening to take over the asylum, it seems we no longer have the luxury of dissecting each other’s colorful assortment of dysfunctional tics.
Maybe that’s why HBO’s “In Treatment” (premieres 9 p.m. Monday, October 25 and 9 p.m. Tuesday, October 26) feels like such an anachronism. While other dramas hurtle forward with action sequences and rapid-fire dialogue, a dizzying barrage of fisticuffs and witty quips and deep confessions flying past our heads every minute, this show unfolds with the patience and restraint of a play. We sit in the office of psychotherapist Paul Westin (Gabriel Byrne) and witness these thoughtful half-hour journeys into each patient’s psyche, grappling with defense mechanisms and reflexive lies and reactive emotions along the way. Rarely do any of Paul’s patients want to know the whole truth and nothing but the truth about themselves. Instead, they digress, beat themselves up, push back, roll their eyes, attribute intentions to third parties that don’t exist, and generally avoid the heart of the matter at all costs.
This makes watching “In Treatment” a little bit rigorous, like solving a mystery alongside our fearless detective. As Paul tries to guide each client gently through his or her rough emotional terrain, we’re presented with clues as to where the areas of resistance – and the answers – lie. Is Sunil (Irrfan Khan), a Bengali man brought to New York from Calcutta by his son after his wife died, paralyzed by a longing for his wife, or has he receded into an alienated state out of repressed envy of his son and daughter-in-law’s freewheeling Western lifestyle? Clearly gay teenager Jesse (Dane DeHaan) is struggling with his sexuality, his identity, his anger at his adoptive parents and countless other issues. But does Paul have any chance of steering him away from a pattern of blaming those who love him, while leaning on and confiding in those who only want to use him? There’s an undercurrent of violence and rage with these two patients that makes their interactions much more tense than usual.
In contrast, Frances (Debra Winger), a former famous actress, alternates between sweet smiles and moments of exasperation and self-doubt. She wrestles with her sister’s cancer diagnosis and her daughter’s abandonment, but doesn’t take any steps to repair either of those relationships. Instead, she’s funneled her frustration into her work, forgetting her lines in rehearsals for a play for the first time in her career. Despite this evidence of how our avoidance can create odd side effects, Paul himself is convinced that he’s developing Parkinson’s disease, just like his father, which we learn in his own sessions with his new therapist, Adele (Amy Ryan). Far from the matriarchal figure and professional advisor he found in Gina (Dianne Wiest) in the first two seasons, Adele is patient but clearly skeptical of Paul’s self-diagnosis, and she’s resistant to his constant tests to make sure she’s a therapist worthy of his time. (In their second session, when Paul demands that Adele tell him whether or not she understands his reference to Bartleby, I’m just dying for her to answer, “I prefer not to!”)
Paul’s shift from gentle professional to arrogant, resistant patient was always a little bit jarring, but it underscores the complexity of “In Treatment’s” perspective on therapy. Instead of offering us some illusion of the ideal, nurturing therapist – an illusion that anyone who’s actually been in therapy has embraced at some point – this narrative delves into the gaps in Paul’s understanding as vigorously as it does with any of the other characters. Similarly, far from celebrating the work of therapy as a straightforward adventure to the last frontier of a patient’s psyche, the show serves up a running critique of the therapeutic process. Paul often confuses Jesse with his son, and assumes that Jesse requires the same unconditional love and patience, to the point where Jesse, however hurt he might be by his circumstances, begins to look capable of abuse. It doesn’t occur to Paul that what Jesse is crying out for, more than love, is open confrontation and clear boundaries. Jesse’s mother and Paul may share an urge to avoid the darkness that Jesse continuously shoves in their faces.
If all of that seems like heavy lifting, well, it is. And as entertaining as “In Treatment” can be at times, the third season may be the most grueling of them all. It’s tough to see how any of these characters will find anything remotely resembling a sense of happiness before the season is over. Unfortunately, this season may also be the most simplistic so far. While it was never even close to obvious after three episodes what characters like Mia (Hope Davis) or Alex (Blair Underwood) really needed in their lives or what emotions they were meant to sort through in order to make progress, Sanil, Jesse and Frances don’t seem as mysterious or as complexly rendered. Sanil has some battle against his own desires that devolves quickly into a cliché of superego versus id, cultural repression versus indulgence, while Jesse and Frances quite obviously need to break down their defenses, open up their hearts and love a little.
It’s tough to tell if it’s the acting or the writing, but with Frances’ scenes in particular, we’re awkwardly aware of an actress performing a role, and this prevents us from viewing Frances as a real person. Granted, Frances is an actress, and maybe her therapy sessions feel like a performance, even to her. But it’s tough not to feel frustrated with the very surface-level conversations she has with Paul during the first three episodes.
Frances: Ava Gardner played the part in the movie. Did you see it?
Paul: Are you worried about being compared to Ava Gardner?
Frances’ remarks and Paul’s responses feel predictable, and offer none of the almost furious blurring of boundaries and emotions that occurred in Mia’s segments last season. With Mia, and with Sophie and other brilliant character portraits of the first two seasons, it was impossible not to become utterly engrossed in the setbacks and triumphs of their struggles for happiness.
What’s also strange is that all of the characters, Paul included, are less likable and harder to empathize with this season than in seasons past. Sanil is occasionally poetic and funny but mostly a little flat, Jesse is so sarcastic and bratty, checking his cell phone and pouting and storming out, that it’s hard to sit through his sessions at all, and Frances feels at once familiar and uninteresting. Paul’s current fixation on Parkinson’s doesn’t lead anywhere intriguing either – eventually he’ll either figure out that it’s psychosomatic, or he’ll have to deal with his diagnosis, but either way this battle isn’t something that leaves a lot of room for interpretation. I almost wish that the show would go back to having four patients, not three, so that there were another character in the mix who might offer the same layers of inner conflict we’ve come to expect here.
Instead, during much of the first few episodes, we feel just like Paul does when he tells his new therapist, Adele, “Listen to you! You sound like a textbook.”
Lily and Mitchell 
HAWAII FIVE-O is a contemporary take on the classic drama series about a new elite federalized task force whose mission is to wipe out the crime that washes up on the Islands' sun-drenched beaches. Left to right: Alex O'Loughlin plays Detective Steve McGarrett and Scott Caan plays Detective Danny âDanno" Williams
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©2010 CBS Broadcasting Inc. All Rights Reserved.(Credit: Mario Perez) 
THE LEAGUE: L-R: John Lajoie, Paul Sheer and Mark Duplass. THE LEAGUE airs Thursday, Nov. 19 on FX. CR: Patrick McElhenney / FX 
Ted Danson, Zach Galifianakis and Jason Schwartzman in "Bored to Death" 
Michael Raymond-James and Donal Logue in "Terriers." 
HBO's
In Treatment season III(Credit: Paul Schiraldi) 