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What will the future of TV look like?
future from E1
dramas, goonier comedy and more humiliating reality shows. It’s also a convenient time to discover shows you’ve overlooked. Using the season finales, the arrival of summer TV and my own wishful thinking, I’ve started making a list of people or things that look like the future of TV:
More corporate rah-rah
CBS’s “Undercover Boss” was a ratings smash this spring, which is too bad, because it was supposed to act as a catharsis to our Great Recession-era resentment of the Man. Instead, it exploit- ed the working class it claimed to champion. Also — this is key — the show bestowed invaluably sunny, unquestioning PR on the companies it featured. I’m afraid we’re in for more “reality” programming that veers into infomercial territory, at length and without shame. Acting on the continued success of “The Biggest Loser,” which prefers shilling for dietary snack foods over narrative every time, NBC will unroll “Los- ing It With Jillian” (premieres June 1) — in which the temperamen- tal trainer visits fatty Americans at home, barks at them a lot and offers viewers still more opportunities to buy “Biggest Loser” diet books and sponsors’ yogurts and nutrition bars.
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SUNDAY, MAY 16, 2010
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‘COMMUNITY’: If the show were built around Danny Pudi’s Abed it might be a bigger hit.
NBC
Cancer as a theme, not a plot point
The incomparable Laura Linney will star in Showtime’s new series “The Big C” (premieres Aug. 16) as a teach- er who gets a cancer diagnosis. Oliver Platt plays her husband, and Gabourey Sidibe plays one of her students. TV feels late to the cancer movement (the walkathons, the pink ribbons, the memoirs, the blogs), preferring to use cancer as something that happens to characters instead of building a show around an entire culture of disease and responses to it. TV has also been naive, somewhat, about cancer’s emotional spectrum. It does fear and death and tears, all right, but forgets about the dark humor, the cynicism, the people who don’t always respond with appropriate, positive cheer. Perhaps “The Big C” will change that.
Brilliant disorders
If the producers of “Community” (season finale airs May 20 on NBC) had built their show around actor Dan- ny Pudi’s Abed character instead of Joel McHale’s Jeff, they might have had a breakaway success, instead of a fairly well-rated show that often feels rote and flatly pre- dictable.
JORDIN ALTHAUS/SHOWTIME
‘THE BIG C’: Gabourey Sidibe
co-stars. The C stands for cancer.
STUDIO LAMBERT
‘UNDERCOVER BOSS’: Roto-Rooter chief Rick L. Arquilla fixes a bathtub. The show exploits the people it championed.
Bigger and longer story arcs in procedurals
Reality shows as character studies
At some point, someone is going to hit it big with a reality show that is not built around a contrived ensemble (such as the “Real Housewives” franchise, “Jersey Shore” or families with eleventyse- ven kids), but instead is an old-fashioned, documentary-style char- acter study that follows the life of an average-seeming person for several seasons. Style network’s careful, deliberate pace with “Ruby” (just fin- ished season 3, now in repeats) would seem like the most boring show on cable: A morbidly obese, socially sheltered woman in Sa- vannah, Ga., works to lose weight and recover some childhood memories that she apparently repressed. Rather than turning Ru- by’s weight loss into a race (such as “The Biggest Loser”), the show has stuck around while Ruby struggles. The result is fascinating and tender; viewership has steadily grown. It’s a refreshing change of mood, reminding us that everyday life is more fascinating than qua- si-celebrityhood.
‘RUBY’: A refreshing change among reality shows.
DAVID M. RUSSELL/CBS
‘THE GOOD WIFE’:Julianna
Margulies in the title role.
Counterintuitive to the self-contain- able “CSI” episode formula (which fa- vors syndication possibilities), “The Good Wife” (season finale airs May 25 on CBS) successfully shows us that a story arc can run parallel to a cinchy solve-the-mystery aspect of a typical procedural drama. Of course, we’ve known this for years (“L.A. Law,” any- one? “E.R.”?), but it’s nice to see that it might be coming back. The story of Alicia and Peter Florrick’s high-profile, faithless marriage (as portrayed with steely confidence by Julianna Margu- lies and Chris Noth) is more complicat- ed, and potentially epic, than the origi- nal premise.
Enough Americans are now related to or know some- one on the autism spectrum. Characters like Abed and the Asperger-ishly awkward and much beloved Sheldon on “The Big Bang Theory,” played by Jim Parsons (sea- son finale is May 24), suggest that there is great poten- tial in finding a way to translate the array of behaviors related to Asperger’s and high-functioning autism into a comedy that could be tinged with struggle. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting there’s a hilarious au- tism sitcom waiting in the wings (or that “Glee” needs an autistic cast member — though there’s a thought), and nobody wants or needs a television version of “Rain Man.” But I do know that people affected by autism and Asperger’s, especially parents, love to talk about these disor- ders and crave more stories — anecdotal or imagined — that re- flect their world.
Meantime, if a delightful and twisted sense of ADD interests you, check out the low-budget, weirdly hilarious, computer-cam sketch comedy of “Jeffrey and Cole Casserole” (returns to Logo on June 25). It’s sort of like if “The Kids in the Hall” had baby brothers who aren’t allowed to leave the house.
LOGO PHOTO
‘JEFFERY AND COLE CASSEROLE’:
Delightful.
STYLE NETWORK
Saner househunting
HGTV, TLC, Bravo and others seem itching to return to high-dollar, wheeler-dealer real estate shows, where buyers flip and finance without a care in the world, but the reality of the housing crash remains at a fixed rate for now (indeed, there are forecasts that the worst, economi- cally, is still yet to come). Host Sandra Rinomato’s “Property Virgins” (weeknights on HGTV) is something of an antidote to the boom years, in which first-time home buyers cautiously navigate a world of houses they might actually be able to afford. There’s more math involved, as viewers are shown down pay- ment amounts and monthly mortgage estimates. (And a lot of these shows actually only pretend to house-hunt. In a nod to post-recession ti- midity, production doesn’t begin until buyers’ loans are approved and offers are accepted. It only looks like they’re deliberating over which house to buy.)
Fastfastfastfastfast!
ABC’s “Cougar Town” has its detractors and cer- tainly its annoyances, but I’m still in love with Courte- ney Cox and company’s boundlessly energetic style in this show. It’s all in the way it’s written (fast-fast-fast) and delivered (faster still). I imagine table readings with scripts that are written as txt msgs. Jokes zing and scenes change so quickly on this show that I sometimes have to watch it twice. The whole thing plays like it was written in the online reader comments field of sites such as Gawker. Viewers are re- warded week to week with inside jokes about jokes that were made in previous episodes — and to really enjoy the show, you need to bring your own stockpile of puns, cultural referenc- es and current dating and sex slang. If you snooze, you lose.
‘COUGAR TOWN’:
Courteney Cox’s energy is lovely.
ADAM ROSE/ABC
ure characters talking into the camera with varying degrees of success include “Parks and Recreation,” left, “Modern Family” — a breakout hit for ABC — and “The Office,” the show that started the mockumentary craze.
DANNY FELD/ABC
PAUL DRINKWATER/NBC
actual episode, and you may quake with laughter. The show soars on the looseness that mockumentary provides, and the strengths of a cast led by Ty Burrell as Phil Dunphy — a stereotypical doofus dad done with surprisingly new energy, who boasts of having once attended trapeze school and refers to his fists as the Cap- tain and Tennille. “One day I’m going to be a grandfa-
ther,” Phil announces at a family bar- becue, “and then everybody better hide their meat.” (Not so funny in type, is it?)
When the iPad is released, on his birthday, Phil confides to the camera: “It’s like Steve Jobs and God got together to say, ‘We love you, Phil!’ ” Fans of the show fuss and titter and Twit- ter and reenact (or send links to) each epi- sode’s best moments. It’s one of those half- hour comedies that you’d happily watch for another half-hour. It always feels too short, which means it’s just enough.
There was a recent episode of “The Office”
where I had an epiphany. It was in the way the characters were once again being “inter- viewed” one-on-one by a never-seen in- terlocutor. There is no documentary here. There is no faux reality show. There is no rea- son the cameras are at DunderMifflin, or in the Pawnee municipal building, or in the Pritchett families’ kitchens and living rooms. There are no cameras. Instead, these characters are talking to (and being observed by) God, or at least the vaguest hint of a god. They’re doing what all modern people have learned to do: They are
having internal monologues. They are sens- ing a camera’s presence. In a way, aren’t we all pretending to ap- pear in our own reality show? In a medium so secular as network television, could a mockumentary be seen an interpretation on supernatural omniscience? (And does that mean the audience watches from heaven?) Dwight Schrute’s schemes are really con-
versations with the Devil. Jim Halpert’s side- ways winks at the camera are a form of ac- knowledging his maker. Leslie Knope and Michael Scott struggle with self-anointed
TRAE PATTON/NBC
sainthood. And “Modern Family,” for now, is all that is
holy.
stueverh@washpost.com
Modern Family (season finale) airs at 9 p.m. Wednesday on ABC.
Parks and Recreation(season finale) airs at
8:30 p.m. Thursday on NBC.
The Office(season finale) airs at 9 p.m. Thursday on NBC.
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