What's a Rerun?

I LOVE LUCY - "Job Switching"

Tue, 05 Jun 2012 10:37:00 -0500

(art by Aireen Arellano - to view larger version, click here)

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SHOW: I Love Lucy
EPISODE: “Job Switching”
FIRST AIRED: Sept. 15, 1952

In “Job Switching,” the Season Two premiere of I Love Lucy, Lucy and Ethel land jobs at a chocolate factory and find themselves battling the societal norms of the day – with mixed results.

Assigned to the candy-dipping department, Lucy lasts all of two minutes before she instigates a chocolate-doused slap fight with her co-worker. Later, the two gal pals attempt to wrap candy fed to them from a conveyor belt. Unable to contend with the belt’s unforgiving velocity, they resort to stuffing the chocolate in their hats, dresses, and mouths, leading to one of the show’s immortal lines:

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“Speed it up a little!”

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It’s no wonder these scenes stick like melted candy hearts in our collective pop culture consciousness. One of the foremost reasons for the indelible nature of these scenes is one of the most basic: goo is funny. Furthermore, goo is funny when it’s covering comedic performers who know how to guide the audience’s eyes and ears with the expert theatricality of magicians. When Lucy hears a fly buzzing, Lucille Ball cranes and cocks her head like a spooked pigeon, following the fly and attempting to pound it out with her chocolate-covered hands. By tracing Lucille Ball’s alert gaze, we’re allowed trace the path of the (nonexistent) fly, and when Lucy’s eyes land on her co-worker’s cheek, we already know what’s coming. Sure enough, the studio audience is lost in laughter even before Lucy slaps her co-worker with a thick dollop of chocolate.

On top of everything else, Lucy and Ethel battling a nonstop conveyor belt exemplifies the treasure trove of comedy that can spring from watching hapless victims battle a soulless inanimate object. It worked for Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times (1936), and like that film, the conveyor belt scene’s central conflict of “man vs. machine” transcends its own comedic raison d’etre by echoing with a ring of existential dread that underscores the dehumanizing quality of factory work. When Ethel cries, “We may be fighting a losing battle!” you can almost hear the ghost of Karl Marx going, “Exactly.”

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But in “Job Switching,” Lucy and Ethel aren’t just fighting the labor-dependent capitalist system, they’re fighting the patriarchy in which that system embeds itself. To anyone that finds quaint Westernized gender roles outdated, limiting, and reductive, the results of “Job Switching” are troublesome, to say the least.

The whole episode predicates itself on this little gem from Fred Mertz: “There are two kinds of people in this world: the earners and the spenders, or, as they’re more commonly known, husbands and wives!” With Fred and Ricky weary that their ungrateful wives overspend their hard-earned dough, and Lucy and Ethel countering that it’s hard work to run a household, the pairs decide to switch roles for a week: Ricky and Fred will cook and clean while the Lucy and Ethel get to bring home the bacon. It’s meant to be the I Love Lucy version of How the Other Half Lives.

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When it comes to domestic tasks, Ricky and Fred make one foolhardy decision after the next: they starch stockings, burn clothes, cook four pounds of rice, wash chickens with dish soap, and bake a cake by adding the frosting right into the mix. Their subplot culminates in rice exploding all over the kitchen when Ricky cooks four pounds of it.

After Lucy and Ethel endure their chocolate factory misadventure, they come home and discover the boys have had just as rough a go at it. They kiss, make up, and agree upon the lesson of the week: wives belong at home, and husbands belong out in the work force.

THE END!!! Don’t let the door hit your ass on the way out, feminists!!!!!

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So, okay. It’s easy – and, make no mistake, very on point – to criticize “Job Switching” for its apparent validation of sexist attitudes. In fact, the episode is sexist in both directions. Lucy and Ethel are found to be unfit for a hard day’s work due to the unfamiliarity of working in a factory, but arguably, even Ricky and Fred would flounder had they been placed in the same jobs. (A more precise explication of the episode’s premise would have been to have Lucy run Ricky’s nightclub and Ethel manage the apartment building, but where’s the messy chocolate in that?)

By comparison, however, the sheer idiocy with which Fred and Ricky approach even the simplest household chores defies logic. It’s almost as if there should exist a deleted scene in which the boys trip off their balconies and fall four stories, leading to decreased IQs and inhibited basic motor functions. In “Job Switching,” men and women are equally put down as idiots.

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Yes, we could treasure the chocolate factory scenes as sitcom classics, discard the rest of the episode for its sexist perspectives, and be done with it. Right? Almost. But first, it might help to consider the episode at the time in which it was written and broadcast, instead of with our own modern and, we’d like to think, more enlightened perspective.

After all, 1952 was a time when gender roles were so rigid and unflinching, they were all but understood as God-given. For the wives and husbands frustrated by the overarching social mores of the day, a sitcom episode whose premise at least somewhat poked at the status quo would have been a surprising and welcome bit of progress. “Job Switching” may not exactly be the pinnacle of revolution, but asking spouses to sympathize with each other was more progressive than much of the rest of the era’s mainstream entertainment like Father Knows Best and Leave It To Beaver, which weekly and without question extolled the virtues of having a woman in the kitchen and a man at work.

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It might be a corny sitcom trope now to have two characters switch places and learn how hard life is for the other, but in the case of the outdated gender politics of “Job Switching,” the trope might serve as a reminder that progress begins with sympathy. Instead of condemning the episode as reflective of the day’s sexism, it’s just as much a valid viewpoint to consider it as a stepping-stone toward questioning and shedding those narrow-minded societal norms.

To put it another way, in terms of strong female characters in sitcom-land, I Love Lucy made way for Bewitched, which made way for Maude, which made way for Murphy Brown, which made way for Parks and Recreation. Then again, I Love Lucy’s homestead, CBS, is currently home to Two and a Half Men, one of the most popular and woman-hating shows on television today, which goes to show that the gender issues unpacked by “Job Switching” haven’t exactly gone away in the last 50 years.

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Nonetheless, “Job Switching” propelled the cultural dialogue forward, if only by inches. Television isn’t a medium that thrives on jolts of avant garde and revolution, but in some cases, that can be a good thing. If the nature of art, fiction, and storytelling is to reflect society in hopes of changing it for the better, then sometimes a gentle push is more useful than an abrasive shove, just as a box of chocolates can prove more welcome than a chocolate-covered slap.

~ C.J. Arellano

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About the Art: This is such a classic, ballsy episode of its time. The topic was fairly simple, so I chose to take that route with this week’s artwork: use color to call attention to the gender role switch. I chose not to editorialize this time, instead aiming to have the image help open up the discussion on gender roles, both back in the day of I Love Lucy and today. ~ Aireen Arellano

THE TWILIGHT ZONE - "The Invaders"

Wed, 02 May 2012 23:21:00 -0500

(art by Aireen Arellano - to view larger version, click here)

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SHOW: The Twilight Zone
EPISODE: “The Invaders”
FIRST AIRED: Jan. 27, 1961

Submitted for your disapproval, an unspoken rule, a blasphemous observation, a cold hard dose of reality-shaking truth: half of The Twilight Zone’s episodes were just not very good.

Of course, the classics are the classics are the classics: “Where Is Everybody?” “The Midnight Sun,” and “The After Hours” live on as witty and memorable forays into the darkest corners of the human condition. But for every “Eye of the Beholder,” the writers served up a pile of other episodes that remain forgotten for a reason.

In looking at the lackluster1983 movie, the 1985 or 2002 TV reboots, or countless attempts to translate the Twilight Zone format to niche audiences (VH1 mounted a supernatural music anthology series in 2001 called Strange Frequency), one might wonder why no one can seem to replicate The Twilight Zone’s creative success. It may have something to do with the fact that the progenitor series had a middling success rate itself.

Rod Serling and company were anything but hacks. They were brilliant, daring dreamers who swung for the fences weekly. But the very nature of an anthology series nullifies the most reliable rules of thumb that writers follow to engage a television audience. Familiar characters, settings, and themes aren’t at the forefront. Ideas take center stage. Suggestions. Offerings.

This is what most if not all Twilight Zone episodes were: not taut stories but provocative “What if?” prompts meant to do nothing more than propose a devilish idea and pin it with a neat little twist. Many of these episodes weren’t fully formed works of fiction. They were narrative zygotes.

All of this makes Season Two’s perennial classic, “The Invaders” that much more thrilling: in a five-season collection of hit-or-miss episodes that lacked resolution, meaty character arcs, or (let’s face it) good old-fashioned logic, this macabre tale of man vs. monster really does have it all.

Agnes Moorehead plays a woman living in a rural desert-nowhere place, “untouched by progress,” as Serling’s characteristically succinct narration phrases it. Her only lot in life seems to involve figuring out what to cook for dinner. As she prepares her meal over a rustic wood-burning stove, she seems content with simplicity. She wants for nothing.

Then a UFO lands on her roof and it all goes to shit town. Two tiny beasts emerge from the flying saucer and terrorize her with sonic waves that disorient her and somehow give her warts. She locks herself in her cabin. She defends herself with the barest of weapons: an oar, a lantern, a rusty blade. Despite their diminutive scale, the tiny alien men seem to have the advantage over her. They burrow in through walls and openings like clever little bastard spiders and even manage to carry the woman’s giant knife and stab her with it a few times. But even in this out-of-the-way place untouched by progress, the universal rule still holds: don’t get in between a foodie and her dinner.

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Poor, simple, and defenseless Agnes Moorehead has had enough of these tiny bipedal critters. The rage gear in her brain snaps. She burns one of the aliens alive, and with bloodcurdling ferocity in her eyes, she takes an axe and hacks up their spaceship like she’s confronting them on a talk show. Then she hacks the remaining alien to death. And then she sighs and retreats into her cabin.

THE END!

There’s also a delicious twist ending to this story. If you don’t know it, we won’t spoil it here, but definitely watch this episode on DVD or Netflix or 2 A.M. some night on the SyFy Channel. It’s pretty terrific.

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It’s terrific because it’s one of the more artistically ambitious episodes of The Twilight Zone. Filmed with nearly zero dialogue and one person, “The Invaders” is the equivalent of a circus freak in a medium dominated by dialogue and character interaction. Needless to say, the two tiny aliens are mere puppets (and hokey ones at that), so Agnes Moorehead does all the heavy lifting here. Twilight Zone’s protagonists varied from tired stock figures to compelling figures. The unnamed woman of “The Invaders” stands at the pinnacle of the latter.

Moorehead’s performance is visceral and sympathetic. Every fearful cower and wince of pain bleeds onto the celluloid, and of course, not enough can be said for the cathartic climax in which she brutally butchers her antagonists. The scene is nothing short of watching a victor stand her ground and lose her soul all in one vertiginous rush. When character development comes off as so immediate and primal, it’s a moment to savor, especially in a show where the Idea reigns supreme.

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Nonetheless, the trademark Twilight Zone Ideas in this episode are plentiful. This simply told tale of man vs. monster comes packed with infinite interpretations and applications. Witnessing a battle between a big victim and tiny villains underscores the notion that no matter how much one might excuse herself from the complications of the world, it’s all but impossible to live a life without confrontation. Whether we’re running around the house trying to fend off a mouse or millipede, running for our lives from criminal encroachers, or even just running from harbingers of pesky modern technology, eventually we all must face our invaders. Meanwhile, the twist ending questions man’s innate desire to vanquish and conquer, a desire that often remains unchecked despite the prices we might pay in the process.

Several Twilight Zone fans count “The Invaders” as the show’s piece de resistance, and for good reason. Like most episodes, it offers a cornucopia of sci-fi philosophizing. The atmosphere is killer: the barren vistas and shadowy cabin walls make for the moodiest of battlegrounds. The score by Jerry Goldsmith plucks at the mounting fear in our character, and, rounding out her absorbing performance, Agnes Moorehead’s childlike screams and whimpers highlight her ascension from helpless victim to unforgiving brute. Yes, the tiny aliens look like toys, but the story and production otherwise is so full and rich that, frankly, the puppetry is worth forgiving.

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It’s not just anthology series that are notoriously difficult to pull off. It’s the nature of the short story in any medium. In a limited amount of minutes, pages, or illustrated panels, how can a writer introduce a character, make us care about her plight, immerse us in an atmosphere, and then resolve the whole setup in such a way that leaves us considering the world around us in a new light? Like the ax-wielding protagonist of “The Invaders” might tell us, simplicity is best, mystery is key, unflinching observation is vital, and sneaking up on your opponent – not to mention your audience – is usually the best approach. Life and literary lessons to be learned… in The Twilight Zone.

~ C.J. Arellano

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About the Art: This week’s artwork portrays the climax of “The Invaders.” I took compositional cues from Cold War Soviet posters and textural cues from the episode. Our protagonist’s primal rage in the climax is so powerful, desperate, and energetic, and those emotions are expressed here through the dynamic, diagonal line from the blade of her ax down through the folds of her dress, and the flow of motion of her hair. My original plan was to keep her confined within the box I created, but while working on the artwork, I realized it made more sense for her to be bursting out of the confines of the box, much how she bursts out of the confines of her fear, albeit in a murderous and horrific way. I kept the brightest part of the artwork focused on her face. Look at how frightening her face is! I think this sums up the episode wonderfully: The frightened become the frightening. ~ Aireen Arellano

THE X-FILES - "Elegy"

Mon, 16 Apr 2012 17:07:00 -0500

(art by Aireen Arellano - to view larger version, click here)

SHOW: The X-Files
EPISODE: “Elegy”
FIRST AIRED: May 04, 1997

In nine years of ghosts, monsters, beasts, aliens, and vampires (one of whom bore a striking resemblance to Ham), Fox Mulder himself remained the most improbable X-File. Prone to absurd leaps of logic yet always right, he somehow remained employed at the FBI despite spending our hard-earned tax dollars chasing bumps in the night.

As the supposed central figure of The X-Files, he fulfilled every mythological definition of hero, man on a quest, man vs. the system, man vs. the world, man vs. himself. He’s everything taught in a high school English class. But while the show’s writers insisted on casting Mulder as a Christ figure (no, seriously), as his partner, Scully traversed a journey more human and humane. “Elegy,” Season Four’s exploration of the most funereal aspects of Scully’s inner workings, demonstrates that while Mulder reflected our primal desires for possibility, ideals, and untainted hope, Scully bore the burden of reality, uncertainty, and death. Mulder might have been out there, but it was Scully who contended with bleak truth.

“Elegy” begins with the same launching pad of all episodes of every crime drama ever in the history of television: someone’s been killing beautiful white women!

In the teaser sequence, a bowling alley proprietor investigates a malfunctioning lane and sees a ghost caught in the machinery. Her lips move despite her very slashed throat. Horrified, he runs across the street and finds a cavalcade of police surrounding… the corporeal dead body of the woman whose ghost he had just seen. (In a classic bit of X-Files logic both savory and absurd, the weight of a ghost can disable a bowling pinsetter.)

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With three women dead under similar circumstances, Mulder and Scully arrive on the case. Mulder and Scully investigate the bowling lane where the proprietor claims to have seen the ghost, and Mulder discovers a cryptic message etched on the floor: “SHE IS ME.” Hearing of an anonymous 911 caller who claimed “SHE IS ME” were the victim’s dying words, the agents trace the call to a psychiatric care facility. They single out one of the residents, Harold Spuller, due to his employment at the bowling alley. When they interview him, the autistic Spuller cooperates but becomes agitated when Mulder asks if he’s seen a ghost.

It’s all X-Files case-of-the-week business until Scully’s nose starts bleeding, a symptom of her recently diagnosed cancer, specifically an inoperable nasal tumor. She runs to the bathroom, where she sees a ghost of a woman in a college sweatshirt with her throat slashed, followed by a mystical appearance of the phrase “SHE IS ME” painted on the bathroom mirror in blood. The ghost and the message disappear, just as Mulder informs her of Victim #4: a college woman with her throat slashed.

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A shaken Scully dismisses herself from the case without telling Mulder of her ghostly vision. Instead, she runs to her therapist and attempts to delineate her feelings in the midst of her condition and freaky supernatural bathroom encounter. The therapist suggests that Scully has kept on working despite her diagnosis due to feeling indebted to Mulder’s support, a notion that Scully hesitantly validates. Desperate to explain away her vision of the ghost, Scully reasons that it may have been due to stress or, oddly enough, the fear of failing her partner.

Here, writer John Shiban raises questions central not only to the episode but to Scully’s entire series-long arc: Why does Scully the skeptic strive so hard to do right by Mulder the believer? And if she fears failing Mulder so much, why doesn’t she simply tell him that she saw a ghost, something that would probably send him singing upon hilltops?

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When Mulder further questions Spuller, Spuller sees a ghost of his boss, the bowling proprietor. Soon after, the proprietor dies of a heart attack. To help break a hunch into a theory, Mulder consults with the off-the-case Scully, praying at home. He tells her that the witnesses who had reported seeing apparitions of the murder victims all had one thing in common: they themselves were dying. Mulder’s observation doesn’t bode too well for Scully, who can secretly count herself among those who have seen a victim’s apparition. He asks her to confirm his theory that Spuller is dying.

No longer a suspect in the case, the police return Spuller to the care facility. The registered nurse on staff, Nurse Innes, berates him and mocks his friendships with the dead women. When Mulder and Scully arrive, Nurse Innes claims that Spuller attacked her and ran away from the facility. Scully interviews Spuller’s roommate Chuck, who reveals that Nurse Innes had been stealing Spuller’s medication. When Scully confronts her, the nurse attacks her with a scalpel. After a fight, Scully disarms and arrests her for the serial murders.

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(The X-Files team doesn’t just borrow the trope of the abusive psychiatric nurse from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Sydney Lassick, who played Chesswick in the 1975 film, plays Spuller’s roommate Chuck, who continually insists, “I’m only a human being,” a phrase repeated so often in the episode, it should be on a T-shirt somewhere.)

Scully reasons that Nurse Innes, unhinged from taking Spuller’s medication, killed the women in order to destroy Harold’s happiness. Mulder reports that Spuller was found dead from respiratory failure. Scully responds by finally admitting that she, too, experienced a vision of one of the victims but couldn’t bring herself to believe it, fearing what it would mean regarding her fate. Mulder expresses frustration that she didn’t tell him earlier, but tells her that he shares her fear for the worst. After struggling to maintain her trademark stoicism throughout the entire case, she finally breaks down in her car and cries… before seeing an apparition of the recently departed Spuller.

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As a show that relied heavily on guest stars to carry the emotional brunt of playing the weekly villains, victims, and monsters, The X-Files often served up stand-alone tales in which Mulder and Scully have so little to do, they might as well be listed under the guest cast. Nevertheless, the show proved most effective when the central duo had an emotional stake in the case-of-the-week. Despite this episode’s anonymous status in comparison to more fondly remembered episodes of the show, “Elegy” is an exciting rarity: it’s an X-Files episode that starts out as a stand-alone, then seamlessly weaves in the driving element of the current season-long arc, in this case Scully’s cancer. Writer Shiban has essentially served us two versions of the same story.

After all, Harold Spuller has much more in common with Scully than either of them might imagine. The autistic Spuller suffers from what Scully terms ego dystonia, an acute form of obsessive-compulsive disorder. As such, at his job he insists on arranging the bowling shoes in their racks ever so, and he’s memorized the bowling scores of every single patron of the bowling alley dating back seven years. He recites the scores as a means to calm himself while under stress. Despite living under the tyranny of Nurse Innes, he finds comfort in his friendships with the women he meets at the bowling alley.

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Meanwhile, despite living under the dangling sword of her condition, Scully finds comfort in both her work and her skepticism toward the paranormal. Like Harold’s incessant reordering of the bowling shoes and recitation of the scores, Scully exhibits a strong need to file, categorize, and easily reference the world around her using science, reason, and law.

Even the bowling imagery could serve as another mirror for Scully’s internal struggle. Most of us experience a bowling alley from the same cleanly lit vantage point, never traversing the long corridor of the bowling lane toward the darkness of the pins and pinsetter, established in the teaser sequence as a place of death. As intrepid investigators who traverse the darkness every week, Scully and Mulder examine this place of death up close, but it’s the stalwart Mulder who bowls a strike in a playful bit of show off, in a sense “conquering” the darkness while Scully retreats from the place altogether. Meanwhile, not only does Spuller hide behind the pins and pinsetter but he practically lives there. In the course of the investigation, Mulder chases Harold through the pin area and discovers a sort of “nest” that Spuller has built for himself. As a man defined by longing, oppression, and ultimately death, Spuller is the darkness.

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So if Spuller is the dark side of Scully, then the crazed and villainous Nurse Innes might as well qualify as the dark side of Mulder. Not only does Nurse Innes seek to rob Spuller of his happiness, but she ultimately robs him of his life due to her systematic theft of his medication. While Mulder doesn’t exert that sort of cruelty toward his partner, his quest for the paranormal and Scully’s all-too-close encounter with it threatens the only comfort she can find in her trying time. The last thing she needs is to believe. To believe in Mulder’s crackpot theory-of-the-week would mean solidifying her death sentence. Comparing Mulder to Nurse Innes might shed light on the episode’s mystery of why Scully wants to please Mulder but refrains from telling him of her otherworldly experience. She’s grateful to him for his support, but perhaps resents him for forcing her to confront the possibility of her own death. The question of Mulder’s effect on Scully’s life grows even more unsettling when, only episodes later, Mulder learns that the show’s long-standing shadowy conspirators may have given Scully cancer in order to manipulate him for their own ends. Mulder, of course, isn’t a scalpel-wielding psycho nurse, but in many ways he was a source of Scully’s sorrow almost as much as her support.

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Gillian Anderson’s work during Scully’s season-spanning cancer story was enough to win her the only Emmy that either of the show’s two leads would earn during the show’s nine-year run. It’s justly deserved; Anderson’s mournful yet resilient performance never skews too melodramatic or too hopeless. Although she ended up dedicating most of her post X-Files work to the stage, her smart and subtle acting choices are tailor-made for the up-close intimacy of the camera. It’s not quite known what “SHE IS ME” is supposed to mean, though it may have something to do with Nurse Innes’s wish for the affection that Spuller felt toward his female friends. When pressed to explain the phrase at the end of the episode, Scully can barely manage a tired, “I don’t know,” and it might behoove viewers to do the same. One thing is clear, though: while Mulder doled out impossible hunches, choices, and maybe even ideals on a weekly basis, Scully engaged with the scarier questions of reality, life, death, and the questions in between. As a fictional character, her emotional and philosophical journey resonates on levels both genuine and universal. She is us.

~ C.J. Arellano

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About the Art: Since “Elegy” discusses the emergence of one’s soul after death, I thought the iconic ‘Day of the Dead girl’ imagery was appropriate here. Scully struggles to come to terms with her own mortality, as any of us would, but she does so in a graceful manner. She’s fearful and rattled, but she expresses that fear in an internal and beautifully understated way – the Scully way. In grappling with her fear, she turns to prayer and faith. At the episode’s end, she continues to be unsure and fearful, but maybe she has learned she can depend on Mulder as she continues her journey of acceptance. As for my color choices, the episode had a lot of dark blue hues via bowling alley shadows and ghostly lighting balanced with red hues via our fair share of blood throughout the episode. “Elegy” is also a very spiritual episode, and so Scully’s gold cross necklace is an appropriate use here, in addition to the ‘Day of the Dead girl’ imagery. ~ Aireen Arellano

SMALL WONDER - "Vicki's Homecoming"

Tue, 03 Apr 2012 10:56:00 -0500

(art by Aireen Arellano - to view larger version, click here)

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SHOW: Small Wonder
EPISODE: “Vicki’s Homecoming”
FIRST AIRED: Sept. 07, 1985

Delving into the history of syndicated television is like bargain hunting in a shady thrift store that smells like week-old meat, but offers shelves of tchotchkes that hum with novelty and history. Syndicated programming, which thrives in the off-hours of daytime and late night, has served as company to countless insomniacs, waiting room wanderers, stay-at-home parents, nursing home denizens, kids home with the flu, and dorm room loafers.

It’s the exact opposite of appointment television because it’s not designed to be talked about or, in some cases, even watched. While some of these shows, sold to local TV stations on an individual basis as opposed to broadcast networks, have been cultural touchstones – Baywatch, Wheel of Fortune, and Jeopardy! tops among the examples - most are produced just to provide content, to fill the hours, and, simply put, to be there.

Small Wonder was a gross and freaky syndication mainstay from 1985 to 1989. Many viewers alive during that time can probably remember watching some Small Wonder episode sometime somewhere, as hazy as the specifics might be. Revisiting the show in the harsh light of modern day, the best and worst of the show come back into sharp focus. Vicki the Robot was a cute oddity, the sloppy and weird character dynamics made for some strange implications, and the terrible jokes burned right through the bottom of the sitcom barrel. The biggest tragedy of the show is that, had the creators assumed that intelligent beings were actually watching and following the show, it could have been much more than the sum of its microchips here and there.

Small Wonder’s pilot, entitled “Vicki’s Homecoming,” introduces us to the Lawson family: Ted, his wife Joan, and their son Jamie, all of whom seem as if their auditions started and ended with being picked out of a Sears catalog. Joan is a blonde housewife who fixes dinner while wearing a belted polyblend jumpsuit, because that’s how they did things in the 1980s. Jamie comes home from school and declares, “Man cannot live by education alone,” and other things that no 10-year-old human would utter.

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Jamie expresses his desire to have friends. The nosy girl next door, Harriet, is a cloying busybody, so Jamie hates her. Joan alludes to the possibility of she and Ted having another child, but Jamie says, “That’s what you keep saying, but I don’t think you’re really working on it,” which is unsettling because he just made a veiled critique on his parents’ sex life.

Ted comes home carrying a case of what looks like human body parts. “It’s a computerized robot!” he proclaims, for anyone in the audience who might have suspected it was an organically grown robot. Ted works at “United Robotronics,” which has got to be a front company for offshore money laundering or something because 1.) “Robotronics,” and 2.) Ted was somehow able to build a whole robot without anyone noticing, not even the accounting department.

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Ted has brought the robot home because his boss refused to endorse the project. Maybe it’s because Ted has, for reasons that remain disturbingly unexplained, made the robot resemble a tiny human girl. He calls it a Voice Input Child Identicant - 3.) “Identicant” – because it can be operated by voice command. He achieves this by typing “RESPOND TO VOICE COMMAND” into a computer. (Yep!)

Excitedly, Ted posits about how it could revolutionize the care and education industries by making robots into our servants and teachers. He asks his wife if he can continue working on it at home, and she responds, “I’d be relieved if you were here at home. I’d know what kind of doll you were working on nights,” putting the Freudian implications of the show’s central concept on red alert. It’s such a twisted joke that even the compliant studio audience laughs with marked hesitation.

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Ted places the finishing touches on his little girl robot by placing her in her iconic red and white frock, which looks like an Easter outfit from 1952. He calls her Vicki and introduces the walking talking thing to his wife and son. Vicki speaks in monotone and has the dead-eyed stare of a demon wildebeest. In what can only be considered the fruit of meticulous writers’ research, Ted explains that “its eyes are solar cells, and its brain is a data-flow processor using wafer-scale integration with a data pad soaked into a self-organizing systonic array processor!” The writers also double-down on the ickiness when Ted sprays his wife’s perfume onto his new “daughter.”

Jamie immediately takes Vicki under his wing. He teachers her how to clean and cook and keeps her locked up in his toy cabinet, ensuring that the show follows in the footsteps of I Dream of Jeannie, in that the mystical female character is somehow the most powerful in terms of physical capabilities, but also the dumbest and most subservient. Ted instructs his family to keep the existence of Vicki a secret, so when Harriet spots her, Jamie tells her Vicki’s his cousin.

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Meanwhile, Jamie gets Vicki to prepare breakfast in bed for his parents as a wedding anniversary gift to them, but it backfires when she throws the tray of foodstuffs all over Ted and Joan. In a bit of false plot complication, this somehow gets Jamie in trouble with his parents, so to redeem himself, he goes to a department store to find a present. Vicki follows him to the store, and she ends up trapped in a storeroom. Using her brute android strength (and some help from the conspicuous props department), she barrels through the door and Jamie and her flee. They arrive home and Jamie makes up with his parents. The episode ends with Jamie admonishing Vicki and then apologizing to her (even though she’s a robot).

Adhering to the same storytelling stock and trade as Mork & Mindy, ALF, and other sitcoms in which human normals are beset by a fantasy creature, much of the pratfalls and hijinks come from Vicki’s misunderstanding of human ways, literalizations of human expressions, and the mortals’ determination to keep her existence a secret from outsiders. Those old comedy workhorses are decent hooks to hang the story on, but Small Wonder didn’t have to be so basic and antiquated in its overall approach of style and tone. The theme song, punctuated with singers vocalizing a trifle-y string of “La la la”s and plagued by schmaltzy lyrics and instrumentation, must have sounded aggressively dated even in 1985. The actors are dreadfully directed: each line is delivered as if trying to reach an audience seated five acres away.

…

…

In an irony of ironies, on the show about a robot learning to be human, all of the humans act as if they were robots learning to be human. As Vicki the Robot, Tiffany Brissette is as guilty of shameless mugging as anyone else on the show, but at least she has a good excuse. For obvious reasons, her acting approach is the only display of artifice that comes off as charming. Small Wonder, despite its odious nature, has a decent cult following to this day, and it wouldn’t be a stretch to declare that Brissette is solely responsible for the fact that this show is beloved or even remembered at all.

Small Wonder is billed as “sci-fi” on IMDb, something that might cause a virtual aneurysm in anyone who knows what “sci-fi” is short for. Still, in terms of thought experimentation and philosophizing that the best of sci-fi offers, Small Wonder had a decent starting point. Hell, Ted poses some of the most basic but endlessly compelling questions brought on by the idea of artificial intelligence: “Can it be programmed to have human values and emotions, or even human faults?” he wonders about his creation.

…

…

The concept also stokes ideas of humankind’s desire to create objects in its own likeness, the role of males in birthing and parenthood, how technology rules the domestic sphere, or the timeless mythological Pinnochio-esque yearning to become “real.” Needless to say, the show never explored any of these topics with any substantial fortitude.

As a fantasy lark, did it have to? Of course not, but its premise was so tantalizing and memorable that it would have been nice to see it pay off some of that storytelling potential. It might seem strange to dredge up a forgotten show like Small Wonder from the bowels of the 1980s just to put it on trial, but it’s worth examining how far sitcoms have come in terms of quality, especially in the fantasy genre. Much has been writ about how sophisticated American television and its audiences have become these days, but sadly Small Wonder has no such grown-up modern counterpart.

…

…

Previously corny subgenres like the workplace sitcom, the nighttime soap opera, or the police drama now have mature and artistic representatives in the TV canon, but the same can’t be said for the live action sci-fi/fantasy comedy, despite a long line of ancestry that dates back to Mr. Ed. Though syndicated programming is still a staple of modern TV, media execs can no longer make the assumption that no one is watching. Viewers who would appreciate a mind-bending mix of smart comedy and smarter sci-fi are still waiting for that small wonder. Until then, they’ll have to make do with Small Wonder.

~ C.J. Arellano

——

About the Art: I had fond memories of this show growing up. The passing of time and the recognition of a creepy premise can really change things! When I think of Vicki, I think of her wide, dead, glassy eyes and blank, plastic stare. I made her pupils smaller than usual to create a more penetrating expression. I added a dramatic gradient in the background to make the piece more menacing. Say hello to Vicki in your nightmares!

~ Aireen Arellano

THE GOLDEN GIRLS - "My Brother, My Father"

Mon, 26 Mar 2012 21:51:00 -0500

(art by Aireen Arellano - to view larger version, click here)

——

SHOW: Golden Girls
EPISODE: “My Brother, My Father”
FIRST AIRED: Feb. 06, 1988

The Golden Girls has gained a new level of respect by a modern audience that did not necessarily watch the show when it first aired. The passing of venerable actresses Estelle Getty, Bea Arthur, and Rue McLanahan and the career renaissance of Betty White have cast a new light on this sitcom, which before may have been looked at as hokey nostalgia. While this might be a show you watched in the ‘80s while you were over at your grandma’s house because she loved it, it deserves a reexamination.

The Golden Girls is that, but it’s also more. Particularly in a television culture perpetually obsessed with youth, can you imagine a show where all the characters are women over 50 (or barely over 40, if you believe Blanche); a show that deals with “women’s issues” like menopause, or that devotes episodes to elder abuse, the difficulties in being divorced or widowed, living on a fixed income; a show that depicts these characters and their real concerns AND doesn’t cover up the fact that not only the young and beautiful are concerned about their sex lives? 50+ year-old women with dignity and sex drives? The Golden Girls had two decades on It’s Complicated. The show was ahead of its time.

Season Three’s “My Brother, Father” is about identity and masquerading: the characters are all deceiving someone. We all know the canonical reading of the girls: Rose (White) is the dumb one from St. Olaf, Blanche (McLanahan) is the oversexed one, Sophia (Getty) is the quintessentially feisty 80-year-old, and Dorothy (Arthur) is the sensible one who keeps the girls together. In “My Brother, My Father,” all of these familiar elements are turned upside down by deceit.

The episode opens with the news that Sophia’s brother, Dorothy’s Uncle Angelo, will be visiting Miami to give Dorothy and her ex-husband Stan a blessing for their wedding anniversary. Angelo is a priest and hasn’t left Sicily since attending Dorothy’s wedding decades prior. Thus, he’s totally unaware that Stan and Dorothy are no longer married. Stan is now a “yutz” door-to-door novelty salesman who ran out on Dorothy for a woman half his age. Dorothy begrudgingly agrees to the charade: she and Stan will play the faithful and happily married couple, and Sophia will be the proud mother.

…

Meanwhile, Blanche and Rose put on personas of their own. They’ve been trying out for a community production of a musical. Blanche is upset that she wasn’t able to sleep her way into a starring role, but, all the same, she and Rose take on their ancillary characters with gusto.

When Angelo arrives in full clerical garb, the game is afoot. Dorothy does her best to gracefully play the role of devoted wife, but Stan’s doting and saccharine-y pet names start to send her over the edge. As she heads to the kitchen for some respite, Stan calls after her to hurry back. “My feet have wings, Barf Bag!” she responds as if pronouncing a declaration of eternal devotion, blows him a kiss, and, safely in the kitchen, breaks down.

…

…

She has to confess, maybe in both senses of the word, to Uncle Angelo about this ruse. At precisely this moment, Angelo comes into the kitchen to reiterate how happy he is to see Stan and Dorothy still so in love. He reveals that he disobeyed his doctor’s orders to make the trip to Miami … but it was all worth it. Dorothy is quickly able to repair the cracks in her mask of faithful wife.

The charade’s stakes are raised when Rose and Blanche arrive home from dress rehearsal early because of a hurricane warning. Unfortunately the two did not have time to change, so they enter the kitchen in full nun’s habits, as if they stepped out of an archival photograph from Charity Hospital circa 1955. Because the house is supposedly the family home of Stan, Dorothy, and Sophia, the “nuns” cannot reveal their true identities but introduce themselves as Sister Rose and Sister Blanche. Sister Blanche, who is holding the real Blanche’s dress and brassiere in her hands quickly announces to Angelo, “We’re here … uh … collecting lingerie for needy sexy people.”

…

…

The remainder of the comic relief in the episode ensues when they whole group get stranded in the house together because of the hurricane. The game of keeping up the deceitful personas becomes more difficult, particularly for Blanche. In nun garb she nearly blows her cover on a number of occasions. Dorothy and Stan’s not sleeping in the same bedroom is explained as them having a fight, which Uncle Angelo is quick to try to patch up: “Please sleep with this man!” And it is here that the unthinkable happens, forced to spend the night in the same room, Dorothy and Stan begin to reconnect. A spark is rekindled between the two of them as they reminisce the good memories of their failed marriage.

The next day is the actual anniversary of Stan and Dorothy’s wedding. “Sister” Rose, not thinking as usual, suggests that Dorothy and Stan renew their vows … after all, Uncle Angelo could preside over the ceremony. Stan and Dorothy talk it over – Dorothy is hesitant, but Stan proclaims that it is Divine Providence at work. If God didn’t mean for them to be together despite all their history and heartache, then a priest wouldn’t have been sent to renew their vows on this special day.

…

…

Just as Dorothy gives in to Stan’s wooing, truth bursts forth onto the scene and all the deceitful identities are cast aside. Uncle Angelo confesses that he cannot officiate at a renewal of vows because he is not actually a priest! On his way to the seminary decades before he ran into the beautiful Filomena, whose behind fills Angelo with more celestial inspiration than the thought of celibate priesthood. Angelo and Filomena married, and he became estranged from the family so that nobody would know he broke his promise to his mother to become a priest. With this life-long case of false identity revealed, the girls feel free to declare their true selves as well: Rose and Blanche aren’t nuns (they’re actually “gorgeous private citizens”), Sophia is actually the not-so-proud EX-mother-in-law of Stan, Stan is a yutz, and Dorothy the sensible one again. But is she?

The bittersweet ending of this episode is that Dorothy actually started to believe the lie. The false persona began to eclipse the real one as the happy years of marriage flooded back over this two-day affair. The episode closes with Dorothy and Stan playing just as much a “part” as they did in the beginning. Stan confesses to only kidding about the whole renewal of vows suggestion, but doesn’t take the $50 Sophia offered him to act in this little drama, and Dorothy sits alone on the couch. The mask she wears of her sensible self now hides a real woman conflicted about her feelings for the sleazy novelty salesman in a bad toupee.

…

…

“My Brother, My Father” realigns our focus on the characters of The Golden Girls. In playing with the themes of identity, we are drawn into an even greater appreciation of who the girls really are. Rose and Sophia really get the least amount of treatment in the episode, but are confirmed in their roles, respectively, of the dumb one and the feisty one. Blanche is painted in the garish colors of the sexpot that even a religious habit cannot mute – in fact it brings them out more vividly. Dorothy’s easy assignation of the heart of the group, the one with a good head on her shoulders, the one who doesn’t put up with (too much) nonsense, is explored in this episode, revealing a woman who is strong but not impervious, smart but not infallible.

This episode also reminds us that love can reveal itself in the unlikeliest of places. It can unexpectedly appear between a young seminarian and a bar maid, or a “nun” and her paramour of the week; it can also take a divorced couple by surprise. But whenever it announces itself or to whom, this episode shows that a policy of truth is the best way of proceeding. It will save those smitten from unnecessary estrangement from their families or the trouble of starching a Roman collar.

~ Seth Alexander

Seth Alexander is a graduate student in theology living in Chicago. He enjoys The Golden Girls and loves his baby boat.

——

About the Art: Having not watched the show religiously while growing up, I approached this episode ready to latch on to any visuals that intrigued me. I thoroughly enjoyed the image of Uncle Angelo passionately telling our Golden Girls the story of how he fell in love with his wife and his undying adoration for a woman’s badunk – all while wearing a priest’s uniform. I interpreted the humor by giving the artwork a comic book noir feel. I also thought keeping the piece grayscale and adding a dramatic shadow made the cognitive dissonance a little more humorous. ~ Aireen Arellano

TAXI - "On the Job"

Tue, 20 Mar 2012 12:57:00 -0500

(art by Aireen Arellano - to view larger version, click here)

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SHOW: Taxi
EPISODE: “On the Job” parts 1 & 2
FIRST AIRED: May 07 & 14, 1981

Sadness. Despair. Dashed hopes. Broken dreams. Jokes about suicide. Welcome to the nonstop party room that is Taxi!

All sitcoms necessarily operate under the same mission statement: make them laugh, the end. Comedy writers deploy an array of tools at their disposal to get the job done. Pratfalls, double entendres, acidic insults, sight gags, sex, horrifying social situations, and bad behavior are the usual order of the day. And then there’s Taxi, the rare sitcom to have its feet planted firmly in melancholy.

Musings on regret, failure, and hardship are one of the richest wellsprings for laughter, yet not many studio sitcoms have really bothered to have their characters stare deep into the void of their own lives. Sure, most modern sitcoms have come to embrace the intertwining of comedy and tragedy with such fervor that the beloved term ‘dramedy’ has stayed in vogue for the past couple of decades. But unlike The Office or Weeds, Taxi’s brand of everyday bleakness was shot in front of a live studio audience. Weekly, the writers had enough honest chutzpah to take grounded and downright bummer situations and move a whole live audience to laughter.

Season Three’s “On the Job” gives our fearless crew of forlorn cabbies a new reason to laugh in the dark: they no longer have jobs.

Dispatcher Louie breaks the news to the cabbies that Sunshine Cab Company has gone broke due to employees’ “outrageous” demands like functioning brake pads. Faced with unemployment, the cabbies actually react with excitement. They’ve had it with their miserable and futureless jobs anyway, and agree to march forth to find brand new occupations.

A month later, they meet up at the local dive bar to swap stories about their new adventures in gainful employment. Their flashbacks make up the rest of the two-parter, with about 5-7 minutes of episode time devoted to each character. This was a format used at least once a season; other ‘one segment per character’ episodes include the cabbies sharing memories of a special cab, fork-in-the-road moments from their past, or their innermost fantasies. The annual device only underscored the creative team’s dedication to character introspection over zany situational comedy.

Tony, the dim and giddy boxer played by (who else?) Tony Danza, goes first: he’s been working as a collector for a bookie, and has paid a visit to his parish priest. The priest thinks Tony’s seeking counsel or absolution… but in fact, he’s seeking the $300 that the priest owes the bookie. Tony’s caught between doing his job and defending the helpless priest to the bookie. Though not amused by Tony’s soft stance, the bookie relents and lets the priest off the hook. This plot banks its humor on the sadly outdated audience notion that priests are morally infallible. Still, it’s a fun and quick piece in which Tony’s nobility renders him futile, which became something of a running theme for him throughout the show.

Bobby, the testy and insecure struggling actor played by Jeff “Hickey from Kenickie” Conway, tries his luck performing for children’s parties. He arrives at an Easter party dressed in that classic standby for humiliating a sitcom character: the head-to-toe bunny outfit. When he realizes that the host is a respected Broadway director, he goes to desperate lengths to prove his acting mettle to her. It culminates in the delirious juxtaposition of confused toddlers watching the Easter bunny perform a dramatic monologue in which his character is paralyzed from the neck down.

Bobby’s and Tony’s segments are the plainest of the bunch. They’re both sturdy enough for sitcom fodder and offer some insights into the inner engines of the characters. But as with most episodes, the real fun lays elsewhere from those two. Jim Ignatowski, Christopher Lloyd’s wild-eyed brain-scrambled burnout hippie, takes a job as a door-to-door salesman. He arrives at a WASP-y housewife’s apartment and dumps some dirt on her carpet, promising his amazing vacuum cleaner will lift it right out.

Then he spills cigarette ashes onto the pile. Then sugar. Then ketchup. Then grease. A lot of it. He mushes it all together with his foot in motions that qualify as a victory dance. All the while, she looks on with the horror of a mother watching someone kidnap her child. Finally, he removes his product from his carrying case: it’s a book. “Oh, that’s right,” he proclaims. “I didn’t get the vacuum cleaner job. I’m selling encyclopedias!” Black out.

Alex’s story takes the same approach as Jim’s, placing a high valuation on physical comedy. After a month of lording over a panel of surveillance screens as a night watchman, he’s taken to extreme measures to quell his boredom, including counting the hairs on his head and using his video screens to fuel his fantasy of being on The Alex Rieger Show. The Jim and Alex stories showcase the Taxi team’s fine understanding of how to craft scenes that would feel just as home onstage at a sketch comedy revue.

The stand-alone comedic sequence has oddly become something of a rarity in modern narrative comedy. Even the best of today’s sitcoms – 30 Rock, Parks and Recreation – are strictly story driven, almost never taking the time out to engage in an extended physical comedy sight gag, a la The Marx Brothers or Lucille Ball. Taxi offered the best of both worlds. Even more notable in regards to the Alex story is that the writers entrusted Judd Hirsch with a full-on one-man comedy routine, when as the unflinching and hapless moral center of the group, he usually found his brand of humor closer to his chest.

The true core of the episode, and by extension the whole show, can be found in the stories of Louie and Elaine, the darkest dark and lightest light of Taxi’s ensemble. Louie convinces the CEO of a trading company to give him a job as a stockbroker on the grounds that he’ll “get dirty.” Louie makes good on his promise, generating a dearth of business. However, he gets fired when the company complains about his lack of decorum, tact, manners, or good hygiene practice.

Elaine finds work as a secretary to a veteran paper pusher who takes pride in his anonymity at the company. Elaine, ever the optimist, tries at length to convince him to share his revolutionary ideas with his cohorts. At her behest, he breaks his longstanding tradition of keeping his mouth shut and boldly announces his ideas at a board meeting. For his troubles – and Elaine’s – they’re both fired.

The two stories are packed with Taxi’s signature ironies and twists that insisted on deflating the characters back to reality. Danny DeVito spent five years turning Louie DePalma into the most grotesque, despicable, and shameless concoction ever known to television. “Humans make eating noises when they eat!” proclaims his soon-to-be-ex-boss. “Yours aren’t eating noises!” He’s so piglike that not even a morally ambiguous financial institution wants anything to do with him. While Louie’s deplorable nature finds him without a job, so too does Elaine’s “anything is possible” attitude make backwards strides. Optimism is the lingua franca of many sitcom characters, but in the world of Taxi, anyone who dares to dream, most of all Marilu Henner’s sunny Elaine Nardo, only finds unemployment at the end of the rainbow.

The six segments have the succinct richness of a lovingly assembled short story collection. While they have varying approaches in terms of comedy and storytelling, together they play on the same grand theme of desperation and striving.

The episode ends with the restoration of the cab company. After hearing each other’s stories, the characters realize that they’re not fit for much else and return to their duties as cab drivers. Not once is the word “fate” dropped into the script, the way that more navel-gazing shows might do today, but that’s the crux of this episode and the whole damn show. For better or worse, these characters accepted their fate. In a country continually spellbound with the American dream, despite the shoddy state of the economy, this show spun a more immediate reality (the all-Caucasian cast in a show about New York taxi drivers notwithstanding).

It’s a hard sell for an American sitcom to take seriously the notion that some of us are not destined to fame as well-off actors, athletes, artists, or any of the other dreams held dear by the Taxi gang. But the creative team, led by the master of televised comedy James L. Brooks, found endless humor in the idea that some futures aren’t so rosy, and sometimes the best we can do is to find the people within our spheres that make the journey bearable. Perhaps the most poetic offering of the show was the opening credit sequence itself: against a haunting melody rife with pangs of reflection, a lone cab drives along a bridge, never speeding up or changing direction, but also never stopping. Such was the steady charge of the human spirit so beautifully encapsulated by the lost souls of Taxi.

~ C.J. Arellano

——

About the Art: When I saw how odd it was to see the cabbies in different jobs in this episode, I thought back to my days as a little girl playing with my paper dolls. The switch of an outfit made the doll completely different. Despite the changes, there was always one outfit that fit the doll the best. Like our characters of Taxi, we felt most at home seeing them as cab drivers, working to make it. ~ Aireen Arellano

QUANTUM LEAP - "8 1/2 Months"

Mon, 12 Mar 2012 08:31:00 -0500

(art by Aireen Arellano / to view larger version, click here)

——

SHOW: Quantum Leap
EPISODE: “8 1/2 Months”
FIRST AIRED: Mar. 06, 1991

It’s as durable and tested as a law of physics: think about time travel long enough, and your head will start to hurt.

Quantum Leap is as smart and beloved as American time-travel franchises come, second only to maybe Back to the Future in terms of warm-hearted cult appeal, but its implied mysteries are as uncontrollable as those of any time-travel story when you start to track the plot’s implications into endless chains of “if, then.” Given the added dimensions of body switching and the cloudy idea of revising history “for the better,” more questions than answers are not only inevitable for a show like Quantum Leap, they’re tantalizing and expected and enjoyed… if you’re into that sort of thing.

Season Three’s “8 ½ Months” takes the show’s cans of worms to new echelons of weirdness, as the writers dealt themselves the tangled subject of a pregnant male time traveler deciding the fate of a teenage mother and her kid in 1950s Oklahoma. (Right?)

For anyone rusty on the elaborate-but-elegant premise of the show, a quick refresher on the show’s iconic opening narration should suffice:

Theorizing that one could time travel within his own lifetime, Dr. Sam Beckett stepped into the Quantum Leap accelerator and vanished. He awoke to find himself trapped in the past, facing mirror images that were not his own, and driven by an unknown force to change history for the better. His only guide on this journey is Al, an observer from his own time, who appears in the form of a hologram that only Sam can see and hear. And so, Dr. Beckett finds himself leaping from life to life, striving to put right what once went wrong, and hoping each time that his next leap will be the leap home.

…

…

In “8 ½ Months,” Sam finds himself on a stretcher being wheeled into the delivery room – he’s about to have a baby. (Oh, boy!) Turns out it’s just a false alarm, and her confused mother figure, a hairdresser named Dotty, takes her back home to her salon.

Exposition bearer Al shows up and fills in the rest: It’s 1955, and Sam is 16-year-old Billie Jean. With the boy’s father unwilling to step forward and her own father having disowned her, Billie Jean has decided to give the baby up for adoption. According to Ziggy, Al’s know-it-all palm device that exclaims in blips and coos like the love-child of an iPhone and a Tamagotchi, Billie Jean will spend the rest of her future regretting the decision and searching for her child, a quest that will leave her unfulfilled and in ruin.

…

…

Sam refuses to sign the adoption papers, to the shock of Dotty, Dotty’s adolescent assistant Effy, and even Al. They express the obvious chorus to Sam: maybe it’s not the best idea for an unwed teenage mother with no family to try to raise a child. Trying to rearrange Billie Jean’s life in order to make it viable for her to keep the baby, he asks for help from Dotty, Billie Jean’s father Bob, and one of Bob’s employees named Willis, a meek teenage boy revealed to be the baby’s father. They all refuse to support Billie Jean due to claims of helplessness, frustration, and shame.

Though neither Sam nor Al can be sure whether Sam is actually pregnant, he exhibits all the symptoms of going into labor. The magic bullet of the plot comes in the form of Effy, who asks Bob to help, relating to him how her sister died in childbirth. It’s enough to do the trick: Bob relents and pledges to support his daughter. As a pained and bewildered Sam seems as if he’s about to give birth, Al reports that in the new and revised history, Bob and Dotty get married and help Billie Jean raise her child. It ends with Sam leaping out of Billie Jean just as the doctor commands him to push.

…

…

Watching “8 ½ Months” from the safe distance of enjoying a weekly help-the-helpless procedural like Touched by an Angel or the short-lived cult fave Wonderfalls, the episode is satisfying enough. It has all the earmarks of a solid installment of Quantum Leap. Foremost, there’s the endless and vicarious thrill of watching an actor muddle through a wildly different world and lifestyle and character each week.

Scott Bakula made the whole Quantum Leap project sing, and one needn’t look any further than the montage of opening credits for evidence that he was one of television’s most generous performers: through five seasons, he leapt into an elderly man, a pre-teen, Lee Harvey Oswald, a vampire, a magician, a housewife, a trapeze artist, Elvis Presley, and a chimp. The role was essentially ripe for embarrassment and humiliation, and watching a less skilled actor in the Sam Beckett role might have been a weekly dose of excruciating awkwardness akin to watching a game show contestant who buzzes in and doesn’t know the answer.

…

…

Bakula had to play across gender a handful of times throughout the show, and the stories range from the campy (he’s Dr. Ruth, lol-cats!) to the solemn (when he leaps into a rape victim, the “man is a woman” jokes are thankfully on mute).   “8 ½ Months” errs mostly toward the fun side of the spectrum. Of course, the writers must have had a field day in concocting a plot in which a male succumbs to the mystifying symptoms of pregnancy. Watch the clueless Y-chromosome-haver struggle through morning sickness! And cravings! And contractions! Yet Bakula strikes all the right chords, playing broad in those inevitably wacky scenes, yearning though restrained when he pleads with Billie Jean’s uncooperative social circle, and committing 110% percent, screaming and all, when he goes into labor.

In addition to watching another terrific Scott Bakula performance (seriously, no Emmys for this guy?), the story of “8 ½ Months” is clean and dramatic and moving in all the right places, like a smooth and easy viewing of Forrest Gump. You can accept that you’ve seen a well-produced and imaginative hour of television. But then… the questions arise:

-    So, hold on. Who is controlling his leaps? God? Time? Fate?

-    Why didn’t God, time, or fate just right the wrong the first time around?

-    If Billie Jean’s baby leapt with her into the Imaging Chamber, then why does Sam experience all those symptoms of pregnancy?

-    As Sam goes into labor, Al reports that the baby has disappeared from Billie Jean’s womb. We’re meant to infer that it’s now with Sam. But since it’s an established premise on the show that Sam’s body travels in time, and that everyone perceives him as the host is a mere trick of the eye, then ……………………………… HOW CAN SAM BE GIVING BIRTH TO A BABY IF HE HAS NO UTERUS?

…

…

-    Also, that premise where Sam’s body travels through time, and that everyone perceives him as the host is a mere trick of the eye… how does that make any sense even in the realm of speculative physics?

-    And what makes a version of history “wrong” and the other one “right”?

-    Surely, Billie Jean raising the baby with her father and Dotty won’t be a life completely without hardship. What makes that timeline better than the one in which the baby ends up with the adoptive parents?

-    Do Sam, Al, or the other members of Project Quantum Leap remember the original histories?

-    Does Ziggy?

-    How does Ziggy, a manmade computer invented in a certain timeline, account for and collect data from multiple divergent timelines, i.e., the original histories and the changed histories?

-    And if Al is a hologram, why does he cast shadows?

…

…

The show doesn’t exactly leave these questions unaddressed. As far as the pregnancy issues loaded into “8 ½ Months,” the story could have easily delved into blunt missteps. Certainly, given the recent rash of political discourse that arguably aims to limit women’s reproductive rights, watching this episode in 2012 might have carried an inadvertent sting of sexism, or it might have ended with the unfortunate conclusion that keeping the baby is bar none the best option for an unwed and pregnant teenager. But the writers, creator Don Bellisario and his wife Deborah Pratt, explore the material with as much thoroughness as 42 minutes allow.

Sam and Al might be two men deciding what a woman will do with her baby, but they use only the future Billie Jean’s intentions, hopes, and regrets as their guide in deciding how to proceed. The pros and cons of adoption are also given generous consideration before Sam rejects it on Billie Jean’s behalf. Given that one could only imagine NBC executives frantically marking up the script pages, it’s a surprise that abortion gets any mention at all, though only in the mysterious context of “Well, it was an option, but now it’s not.”

…

…

For any would-be teenage parents in the audience, Sam and Al go through lengthy discussions on the consequences and responsibilities that await both the mother and father. It’s not so much that Quantum Leap or any work of fiction should have the prescriptive function of saying, “If you’re in this situation, do this and don’t do that.” But while telling the story of a handful of specific characters – this girl gives birth and then grows up to regret giving her baby away – Bellisario and Pratt do give wise credence to the options and implications inherent in the premise.

And throughout five seasons, the show does occasionally address the crazier issues of the show that bend and curve the laws of time and physics to their most extreme breaking points. But the concept of the show necessarily limits our perspective. We never do get to revisit a host post-leap to see if Sam really did change history for the better. And we never pull back to see who’s pulling the puppet strings, though in the series finale, Sam meets a bartender who may just be God, who may just have all the answers for Sam but may just not believe he’s ready for them quite yet.

…

…

But instead of being maddening, like the now infamous audience-insulting resolutions that doomed the legacy of Lost, the questions of Quantum Leap are entertaining to entertain because they are questions about the intangible: the nature of time, consequence, right, wrong, science, theism, and what it means to make choices that change lives. These questions might find their beginnings in fiction, but they have no ends, certainly not ones that can be found in an NBC television show.

Quantum Leap is a fitting title for the whole show, more than its makers probably realized. The show required several satisfying leaps in the imagination to create and enjoy. And while it worked as an hour-long procedural on a basic molecular level, on a micro-microscopic quantum level the show became a twisty and frenetic network of existential insinuations that are still fun to meditate upon and follow into infinity. Oh boy, indeed.

~ C.J. Arellano

——

About the Art: This episode was about Sam guiding scared Billie Jean amidst a rough and lonely road: teenage pregnancy (in 1955, no less!). The long, rough road and eerie skies and colors reflect the dark plight of one in a desperate and lonely situation such as Billie Jean’s. Despite the daunting journey ahead, Sam is the glowing hope for the souls he helps as he leaps from life to life. ~ Aireen Arellano

THE MONKEES - "Too Many Girls"

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 15:15:00 -0600

(art by Aireen Arellano - to view larger version, click here)

—

SHOW: The Monkees
EPISODE: “Too Many Girls”
FIRST AIRED: Dec. 19, 1966

The Monkees is one of the most beloved rip-offs of all time. Its primordial soup is a cynical stew of corporate calculation, an A-to-B paint-by-numbers formula meant to cash in on the popularity of a certain 1960s rock band that also just happened to have a misspelled animal-inspired moniker, four bowl-cut guys with dimples and endearing personalities, and a sense of rollicking fun and romantic whimsy that pervaded their entire oeuvre onscreen, onstage, and on the turntable.

Still, despite what boardroom schemers may believe, eventually something new and exciting, unexpected and genuine has to enter somewhere into the boiling pot in order to capture our collective imagination. So even though The Monkees was constructed as a Hard Day’s Night-esque TV show first and a band second, and even though the group was widely known since its inception as “America’s answer to the Beatles,” what aspects of the whole enterprise transmuted it from mere carbon-copycatting into a fresh and memorable entry into the pop culture landscape?

As demonstrated in “Too Many Girls,” an enjoyable Davy Jones-centric outing from Season One of the half-hour sitcom, the magic of The Monkees depended upon two things: the creative team’s masterful use of the medium, and hey hey, the Monkees themselves.

…

The episode takes the trope of the adoring female fan and heightens it to cartoon absurdity. Already exasperated at girl-crazy Davy getting stalked by female fans wherever they go, even their own shared bachelor pad, the band is besieged by a crazy and conniving mother, Mrs. Badderly, who aims to push her reluctant daughter Fern into a relationship with the unsuspecting Mr. Jones, hoping that she’ll marry into his fame and fortune.

Despite Peter, Micky, and Mike’s efforts, Mrs. Badderly eventually gets Fern and Davy to perform together on a talent show. The Monkees rescue their forlorn resident heartthrob from the would-be mother-daughter con artists when they sabotage the talent show… and then, of course, break into a performance of “I’m a Believer.”

…

The Monkees’ brand of humor was one of the chief saving graces of the show. Weekly, it served up an eclectic blend of Abbott & Costello-inspired zaniness, fast-paced repartee, hyper-stylized editing, dreamlike non sequiturs, and a muted but omnipresent tongue-in-cheek snark that seemed to let the viewer in on the joke of the show’s own contrived artificiality.

It also was expert at taking full advantage of the television medium itself. The current “golden age of American television” is said to have begun in the early ‘90s with innovative shows like Seinfeld and The Simpsons pushing the kinds of storytelling tools available to the visual medium, and we’re now firmly in the land of single-camera comedy greatness, with Parks and Recreation, Arrested Development, 30 Rock, and time-toggling (if attitudinally quaint) shows like Scrubs and How I Met Your Mother, all of which take liberties with the notions of reality and linear storytelling. To varying and significant degrees, these shows all share The Monkees as their sharp, caffeinated, and rambunctious ancestor.

…

In the opening scene of “Too Many Girls,” Peter, Micky, and Mike try to fend off the girls that keep showing up to their apartment to admire Davy. Every time the three think they’re successful, the camera focuses on an apparently solo Davy… then zooms out to reveal another girl who, inexplicably, has defied the laws of physics and appeared out of thin air just to bat her eyes at Davy. The sequence eventually ends with the camera zooming out to reveal a whole gaggle of girls pawing at the lucky guy.

As broad and not exactly pro-feminist as it might be, the sequence is characteristic of how The Monkees pushed the tools of the medium. Its visual language was one that could not quite easily be replicated on a stage. Its sight gags depended largely on what the camera saw and what lay just beyond the frame lines. Meanwhile, its frenetic sense of humor also depended on the freeform editing style that presaged, for better or worse, the age of MTV and the reality show.

…

The Monkees was also pumped full of delightful non sequiturs that at once echoed the “third panel punchline” zingers of Sunday morning comics as well as the liquid and often bizarre narrative tendencies of French New Wave. When the four guys visit a restaurant where Mrs. Batterly first comes into contact with them under the guise of a tea leaf reader, the Monkees get up and depart their table, which – apropos of nothing – falls apart entirely like a house of cards.

Elsewhere, in one of the show’s funniest gags, the guys chain Davy to a large chair to keep him from Fern. Desperate to see her, he escapes. When the guys go looking for him, they ask pedestrians if they’ve seen someone matching Davy’s description hobbling down the street with a chair chained to him. The pedestrians point the guys in three different directions – apparently, there are several guys matching Davy’s description who have a chair chained to them.

…

These gags work precisely because there’s no reason for them. One might accuse the show of catering to the most short-stemmed ADD audience sensibilities, but there’s also a poking fun at the inherent artificiality of visual media here. Given the show’s target audience that they name right in the theme song (“We’re the young generation, and we’ve got something to say”), it’s not a stretch to surmise that these non sequiturs functioned as a kind of meta-critique designed to lambast the squarest of narrative conventions of film and TV ladled onto the table by none other than The Man himself.

Alas, no one truly remembers The Monkees because of its medium-pushing storytelling quirks. We remember the bandmates themselves. The Monkees might have been devised as nothing more than a drugstore-brand Beatles, but the team assigned to actually cast the four dudes did their job letter-perfect. Mike Nesmith’s sermon-serious yet light and open delivery made him the ideal straight man. Peter Tork got the brunt of the idiot jokes, but he somehow shined when given opportunities to display his particular brand of mock outrage. Micky Dolenz had an offhand smarm that made him ideal as the group’s resident kidder.

…

And, of course, what hasn’t already been said about Davy Jones, the heartthrob centerpiece of the whole project? His manboyish features, “gee shucks” mannerisms, and – ironically, considering the whole impetus for The Monkees – prototypical British charm made him all but genetically engineered to attract and galvanize throngs of hyperventilating female fans.

…

Individually, they were game performers not without talent, and together the four of them had insatiable chemistry. Decades later their onscreen rapport remains fresh as ever. The show’s scripts welcomed the four to improvise often, in some cases entire scenes, and that freestyle approach is the key ingredient that helped turn the factory-built origin story of The Monkees into a genuinely new and exciting theater for music and comedy.

Much has already been writ about the behind-the-scenes sturm und drang of The Monkees, which eventually resulted in the demise of the series, declining album sales, and a critically and commercially scourged feature film. But within the whole messy epic tale of grotesque commercialism that is The Monkees, if you looked close and hard enough, you could find sparks of originality, wit, and creativity: their names were Mike, Micky, Peter, and Davy.

~ C.J. Arellano

—

About the Art: Can you hear it? The screams! My hope is that you can hear the piercing screams of a girl stampede wanting to get a piece of cute li’l Davy. As one who grew up loving The Monkees, this entry is near and dear. I wanted to feature Davy’s shiny bright smile and his undeniable lady appeal. I thought it would be great fun to have the border as hands reaching out to touch Davy’s face. It was a challenge getting them positioned correctly to achieve the heart shape, but I think it works. Rest in peace, Daydream Believer. Your charm, talent, and undying love for your fans will always be remembered. ~ Aireen Arellano

GET SMART – “The Groovy Guru”

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 16:03:00 -0600

art by Aireen Arellano (to view larger version, click here)

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SHOW: Get Smart
EPISODE: “The Groovy Guru”
FIRST AIRED: Jan. 13, 1968

The opening scene of “The Groovy Guru” finds our hero Maxwell Smart sporting an unfortunate mushroom coif and color-clashed getup that makes him look like a Monkee caught in a thrift store explosion. He meets up with an agent undercover as a hippie chick who spouts fresh-off-the-shelf slang that all the kids are using these days: “Enough here for the fuzz to peel and freeze.” Quoth Agent 86 in response: “Huh?”

It shouldn’t take long for a viewer even dimmer than Max to realize that this is going to be a Let’s-Make-Fun-of-Youth-Culture episode. Get Smart, one of the looniest live-action cartoons to ever bombard television, was a veritable funhouse of slapstick and satire, designed to poke fun at the Cold War, foreign policy, xenophobia, the spy genre itself, and anything else that heated up the pop cultural and current event thermometers between 1965 and 1970. Its roundhouse punchlines and absurd sight gags amounted to that double helix of “dumb humor + smart satire” alive and well in modern fare like South Park, Arrested Development, or Childrens Hospital.

…

As a television show knee-deep in the 1960s, an episode skewing the hippie movement was almost as obligatory as having opening titles. Each episode of Get Smart had a plot, but in the grand tradition of genre parody, the story only served as a clothesline for whatever jokes and bits the writers’ had up their sleeves. The comic-strip plot of “The Groovy Guru” has Control concerned for America’s children (somebody please think of them!) when teenagers start falling into a mindless dance trance. They’re hooked on radio broadcasts courtesy of the eponymous villain of the week, a DJ and faux revolutionary who plans to take over the world via mind control.

Before delving into some recon on the Groovy Guru’s headquarters, Max and his partner 99 arm themselves with pills that inhibit one’s ability to tell the truth. Of course, Max accidentally swallows one of the pills ahead of time and in a digressive extended joke typical of the show, he spends much of the first act spouting fabrications like, “My name is Fred.”

…

Soon after, Max and 99’s infiltration of the Groovy Guru’s lair works a little too well – the hip-talking would-be cult leader ends up holding them prisoner. In an expositional dump worthy of any self-respecting villain, he explains that he’s going to televise a performance by The Sacred Cows, a popular rock band of the Groovy Guru’s own making. Once the kids hear the Cows’ song laden with subliminal mind control lyrics, the Groovy Guru will command his throngs of followers to… kill everyone in sight! Alas, Max renders the Groovy Guru unconscious and 99 pulls the plug on the broadcast, keeping the nation’s youth safe from pop music and phony anti-authoritarian figureheads if for just another day.

…

It’s usually uncomfortable to watch television writers go through the motions of writing episodes that poke fun at youth culture. Whether it’s a sitcom about a harried dad or a crime drama where the lovelorn drug-addict teen is the suspect on the witness stand, the plots too often rest on the same crutches: “They’re all hipsters! All they do is text! And they’re all driving drunk to sex parties!” Somehow, once a TV writer is tasked with writing about teenagers, viewers are forced to sit through a story that amounts to little more than a Ray Romano rant of an old geezer befuddled by anyone too young to know who [insert legendary musician] is.

Certainly, “The Groovy Guru” is stocked with these sorts of jokes. “Do you have any idea the damage that 10 million teenagers can do to this country?” asks the Chief. “I’d thought they’d already done it!” says an incredulous Max.

…

What makes “The Groovy Guru” work as effective satire is the reason that Get Smart worked as a franchise: everyone in the land of Kaos and Control is clueless. Max was known as the primary dolt, but even Chief and 99 display grave lapses in logic, the foremost one being how on earth they not only keep Max employed but consider him the country’s top spy.

By the same token, each character takes turns being the straight man forced to reckon with the dope in the room… funnily enough, even Max slipped into the role every once in a while. The writers’ tactic of equal opportunity lunacy meant that there was no Michael Bluth or Tim Canterbury here – no one whose function was to be Above It All.

…

As a result, when Get Smart makes fun of international diplomacy, the excesses of government spending, or in “The Groovy Guru,” those damn hippies, they’re merely folding the satirical object into their grander picture of a madhouse where no one knows anything. Five seasons of Control and Kaos, America and its enemies, Us and Them endlessly battling for world domination had the same winking if fatalistic viewpoint of Dr. Strangelove, the ultimate political satire.

Not to say that the youth-specific jokes served up by “The Groovy Guru” are invalid. On the contrary, they were hilariously prescient. When two teenagers in that mindless trance are brought into Control headquarters, their jerky dance moves driven by music pumping from earbuds connected to handheld devices are eerie dead ringers for those iconic iPod commercials of the 2000s. Later, when the Groovy Guru unveils the Sacred Cows, their nefarious mind control lyrics – “Thrill, Thrill, Thrill! Kill, Kill, Kill!” – are not only one of the series’ best jokes, they also unfortunately presage the blunt repetitiveness driving much of today’s popular music. (“Baby, baby, baby – oh!”)

…

“The Groovy Guru” exemplifies Get Smart’s lasting ability to avoid an expiration date. TV comedies have a way of prioritizing timeliness at the expense of timelessness. But as long as there are forces in the world like developed nations, fearful government agencies, or just plain grown-ups trying to do something as absurd as control the chaos, there will always be room at the satirical table for Get Smart.

~ C.J. Arellano

—

About the Art: Get Smart was a parody of the ’60s spy genre. This episode had a thinly if at all veiled message about rock and roll corrupting the teenagers of its time, but the writers still had fun with it. I decided to do the same and pay homage to one of the best secret agents in the biz with an era-specific rock/movie poster approach. I loved the psychedelic set during the episode’s third act where Max and 99 get stuck in an elaborate death chamber of groovy torture. I knew I wanted to incorporate that set background into this week’s art. Since the episode included brain-washing music that placed America’s youth in a trance, I focused on the poster having a similar effect to the eyes with the use of crazy-bright color and pattern. ~ Aireen Arellano

THE WONDER YEARS – “Math Class” / “Goodbye”

Wed, 22 Feb 2012 21:52:00 -0600

(art by Aireen Arellano - for larger version, click here)

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SHOW: The Wonder Years
EPISODES: “Math Class”/”Goodbye”
FIRST AIRED: Oct. 10, 1989/Apr. 24, 1990

Broken into its Greek roots, “nostalgia” literally means “the ache of coming home.” It’s no great mystery, then, that the word comes to mind for virtually anyone who ponders The Wonder Years, a show that, technically speaking, aired from 1988 to 1993 and took place from 1968 to 1973, but more appropriately exists in a forever-loop of an indefinite epoch known as The Hazy Long-Ago Past. We fondly remember the show that fondly remembers a time worth fondly remembering. The show isn’t nostalgia overload, but it’s certainly a nostalgia nesting doll.

Although The Wonder Years has its head and heart forever trapped in the cloud of yesteryear, Season Three’s episode, “Math Class,” and its bookend episode, “Goodbye,” both demonstrate why the series resonated back in 1989 and still resonates today for any fan relieved to see them on Netflix Instant after all these DVD-deprived years. The delicate and specific depiction of an unlikely relationship that arcs from “Math Class” to “Goodbye” has all the humanity and grace of something happening in the present. The two episodes employ the modus operandi of any indelible work of fiction: it plucks something from the stretch of the past and imbues it with the immediacy of the Now.

“Math Class” opens with our narrator, the grown-up Kevin Arnold, drawing a grandiose comparison between the moon landing and his first day of eighth grade, the two flagship events of 1969 as far as his 13-year-old self is concerned.

…

Adolescent Kevin’s breezy BMOC attitude grinds to a halt with the introduction of Mr. Collins, the new math teacher whose stern, businesslike, and motormouth lectures on all things algebra frighten Kevin and his classmates into a stunned stupor. (Most of the students are frightened, anyway – in a characteristic Wonder Years oddball moment, Kevin’s blank-smiled classmate asks, “Mr. Collins? How did you learn to draw such perfect circles?”)

Kevin is shocked that Mr. Collins keeps awarding him D’s, which come complete with Psycho music cues in Kevin’s imagination. He tries to “reason” with Mr. Collins, a tactic that amounts to Kevin awkwardly proclaiming that he doesn’t think of himself as a D student. When the mysterious Collins deadpans him in return, Kevin decides his new teacher is being impossible and draconian; no matter that other students, including his pal Paul, seem to be getting by in the class just fine.

…

An embarrassed Kevin shields his math class struggles from his parents, taunts Paul’s successes, proudly refuses to sit in an after-school help group that Collins suggests to him, and does almost anything except hunker down and try to conquer those elusive mathematical concepts. He reaches a nadir when he hands in a blank exam and tells Collins, “You don’t have to grade it – it’s an F.” Finally, Kevin overcomes his pride and asks for help from both Collins and his father.

“Math Class” is a winning example of the show’s uncanny ability to present a story through the dual lenses of a grown-up’s wistfulness and a kid’s right-now sensibilities. It plays on notions of past – “Haha, remember when algebra class seemed like the biggest deal in the world?” – and the present – “Algebra class IS the biggest deal in the world!” – with all the lockstep harmony of a pianist’s hands.

…

Too many writers over the age of 21 seem as if they’ve been afflicted with adult-onset amnesia, forgetting everything they thought, said, or did in their childhood years except for the most lo-res tropes: teenagers are rude, self-centered, sex-crazed, and prone to inhuman fits of idiocy. Kevin Arnold was that rare TV creation that seemed constructed by people who actually remember, with fine-grain clarity, what it was like to be a kid.

In “Math Class,” nearly anyone can point to Mr. Collins and say that they knew that teacher - not a more realistic or grounded or not-as-exaggerated version of that teacher, but that very specific personality type as displayed on screen: a teacher who was neither a bully nor a bleeding heart, but had a dispassionate passion for both the material and the success of the students. As Mr. Collins, Steven Gilborn’s choices are key here: he imbues the character with as much charm, mystery, and fragility as an enigmatic Anthony Perkins performance.

…

“Math Class” nails not only the esoteric nature of an unbreakable teacher, but also the despair of a struggling student. Kevin’s Everyman status is what lends the story its humanity. He’s not a jock, nerd, genius, or dumbass, and he doesn’t have a learning disorder. There’s no Grand Archetypal Reason for his shortcomings – he’s just a kid who can’t seem to do well in one class.

Kevin’s panicked reveries are gems: in one sequence, he imagines his mother bombarding him with a word problem involving an ominous pitcher of lemonade, and in another, time slows to a glacial crawl when he sweats and frets during his exam, leading to him to perceive Collins as uttering a banal proclamation like, “Question 3 should read ‘5x,’ not ‘5,’” in baritone slo-mo. It was these first-person POV quirks that rounded out the show’s stellar brand of sympathetic comedy.

…

“Math Class” aired at the beginning of Season Three, and “Goodbye” premiered at the end of that same season. Serving as sequel and coda, it revisits Kevin’s math class travails and finds him getting a better hold of the material. He’s even getting C’s! He’s pushed to do better, however, when he’s irked that Paul’s getting praise from Collins and he isn’t. He again reaches out to Collins, and they have several after-school tutoring sessions. Though doubtful at first, Kevin begins to believe he’s actually capable of acing the end-of-year exam.

…

…

Mere days before the big test, Collins abruptly cancels the remainder of their tutoring sessions without explanation. Incensed, Kevin purposely sabotages his exam as a final “F you” to Collins’ seeming betrayal. Of course, he eventually feels bad about it, and when he returns to school the following Monday to apologize, he learns Collins has passed away due to deteriorating health. The school principal tells the grief-stricken Kevin that, in a final act of generosity, Collins discarded his sabotaged exam and left him a new one to re-take. As a satisfying callback to “Math Class,” when Kevin completes the exam, he tells the principal, “You don’t need to grade it – it’s an A.”

“Goodbye” begins with narration paying reverent homage to teachers and ends in the death of one, so the operative word “sentimental” is unavoidable here. What’s amazing about the episode, however, is how the writers (show creators Carol Black and Neal Marlens) are high-wire careful not to sentimentalize the actual relationship between Collins and Kevin. It takes Collins a whole year to seriously reach out to Kevin, and they don’t become best friends, nor are their tutoring sessions the stuff of Mr. Miyagi montages.

…

Spoilers… sorry.

…

The smart beauty of The Wonder Years is in how the viewpoints of the looking-back adult and the looking-now kid converge into something that approaches a bird’s-eye view of the experience portrayed. In the eyes of Kevin the Kid, Mr. Collins shapeshifts between villain, hero, and finally martyr. By seeing the story unfold before us with the perspective of Kevin the Adult, we see that Collins (or more vitally, his unsung real-world counterparts daily toiling away in classrooms) is much more than those mythological roles: like Kevin Arnold, and like us, he’s just somebody trying to get home.

~ C.J. Arellano

—

About the Art: The magic of this episode is that it rekindles fond memories of that one particular teacher who was steadfast and serious. You had a feeling that teacher had your best interest at heart, despite the intense stares and apparent lack of humor. While watching the episode, I saw Mr. Collins as the guiding light for Kevin, unwavering, strong and steady, leading him to enlightenment and self improvement. ~ Aireen Arellano

THE DICK VAN DYKE SHOW – “Coast-to-Coast Big Mouth”

Sun, 12 Feb 2012 21:55:00 -0600

(art by Aireen Arellano / to view larger version, click here)

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SHOW: The Dick Van Dyke Show
EPISODE: “Coast-to-Coast Big Mouth”
FIRST AIRED: Sept. 15, 1965

Most enduring sitcoms stick in our collective consciousness because their central concepts play on some sort of universal yearning. The king and queen of social issue comedy, All in the Family and Roseanne, reigned due to their ability to cut through the pundit-speak bullcrap that permeated all spheres of class, race, and political party. On the extreme end of the kitsch factor, even the saccharin Technicolor nightmares that were The Brady Bunch and Full House were about families rebuilding themselves in the face of unexpected grief.

And then there’s The Dick Van Dyke Show, which despite its adult-oriented wit, exists in a kind of sitcom nether-universe. It’s half a workplace show and half a family show, but there’s very little struggle here. Rob and Laura Petrie love and respect each other and have a well-behaved son in a lovely little apartment. At Rob’s day job as a television writer for a popular show, his main task is to lob joke ideas back and forth with snappy co-workers Buddy and Sally. Even more than Leave It to Beaver or Father Knows Best, which “tackled” several at-the-time taboo issues like alcoholism, sex, and theft, The Dick Van Dyke Show was probably the most frictionless that sitcoms ever skewed.

It’s all too fitting, then, that “Coast-to-Coast Big Mouth,” one of the hallmark episodes of the show, revolves around the wild insecurities of Rob’s irascible boss Alan Brady. By pitting his vain-angry-schmuck act against the studied and earned perfection of the Petries, it spins the middle-class “nothing is wrong” fluff of The Dick Van Dyke Show into brilliant comedy.

Laura stumbles onto a game show with a slick and smarmy host who has a reputation for coaxing contestants into spilling embarrassing secrets. Rob, his co-workers, and his boss watch in suspense to see if Laura will say anything unfavorable against The Alan Brady Show or Alan Brady himself. She holds her own against the host’s probing questions… until the very end of the program, when she inadvertently reveals that Alan Brady is bald, apparently a long-standing burning question among the entertainment gossip rags.

…

Fearing for her husband’s job, Laura visits Alan’s office to deliver a profuse apology, one that the dyspeptic grump is less than willing to accept. The extended two-hander between them forms the bulk of the second act. As the embarrassed Laura, Mary Tyler Moore displays her knack for playing flustered with an exquisite yet grounded charm. It’s a sort of anti-poise, like Audrey Hepburn through a prism of nervous desperation.

Meanwhile, Carl Reiner calls and raises her deft comedic skill with the relentless gruff he infuses into his portrayal of Alan Brady. The Dick Van Dyke Show was originally supposed to be The Carl Reiner Show – the whole show is a loose adaptation of his life, after all. The network, however, didn’t want him in the lead role, so they cast Dick Van Dyke, though Reiner still held the title of executive producer and writer. In other words, Carl Reiner was found unfit to portray his own life. That he inserted himself into his own show to be the insecure, vanity-obsessed fly in the Petries’ ointment seems to be the ultimate self-deprecating joke on the idealized harmony of the Petries.

…

The spiky undercurrent of “I’m the punchline on my own damn show” runs through every bit of dialogue and sneery facial tic that Reiner brings to the character, and the extreme juxtaposition between her charm and his disdain comprises a large part of why the scene ranks among the most memorable of sitcom episodes. It’s not difficult to conjecture that this very scene might have formed the basis for the winning Mary Richards-Lou Grant dynamic that would emerge five years later.

As a footnote, watching the episode in 2012, it’s difficult to ignore the pre-feminist earmarks of the show. Of course, Laura and her pal Millie shiver with glee at the thought of winning such game show prizes as… a vacuum cleaner! More pressingly, the whole plot rests on how a housewife has screwed up and endangered the job of her household’s sole breadwinner. Much is made of what Laura’s “place” is, like when she concedes that it’s “not her place” to comment on Alan’s appearance, or when Rob runs in to rescue his wife from the clutches of his boss, saying “It’s a man’s place to take the blame and possibly get fired! I’m responsible for you!” It’s not so much that the show was aggressively sexist – certainly, the writers showed more respect for Laura Petrie than the “aren’t wives stupid?” plots too often written for the shrill and childish Lucy Ricardo.

…

But damn was she dutiful. The thing is, so was everyone else on this show. Most smart comedies by nature end up being comedies of manners, works of fiction designed to prod at and question social conventions. While The Dick Van Dyke Show traded in smart double entendres and scholarly humor that could rival the best punchlines from Some Like It Hot or His Girl Friday, in the end, it had nothing but reverence for the manners.

~ C.J. Arellano

—

About the Art: I loved the visual of Alan Brady gathering his wig mannequin heads on his desk as he told them, “Fellas, there she is; there’s the little lady that put you out of business!” I also fell in love with Mary Tyler Moore’s nervous, charming energy as she fearfully squeaked her apology to the seething and vain TV show host. I thought this imagery was a fun, eye-catching way to display the two personalities at the extreme ends of the spectrum. ~ Aireen Arellano

FRIENDS – “The One with Five Steaks and an Eggplant”

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 08:26:00 -0600

art by Aireen Arellano (to view larger image, click here)

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SHOW: Friends
EPISODE: “The One with Five Steaks and an Eggplant”
FIRST AIRED: Oct. 19, 1995

Friends fans are legion and vocal, eager to belt the words to “Smelly Cat” or see if they can still name the Chandler Bing misnomer on his TV Guide subscription. But for every fan, it seems there’s someone in the vicinity just as vocal in their distaste for the sitcom, and their criticisms are many: that the show is just a parade of pretty people with problems, that it’s a paean to white middle-class heternormative homogeneity, that it’s the zenith of joke-punchline-laugh-track-gooey-sentiment hamminess, or that the characters’ lavish lifestyles are too incongruous with their purported incomes to reach any kind of authenticity. A chef and a waitress live in that Greenwich Village apartment with that wardrobe and those haircuts?!

The creative team behind Friends must have thought they were just making an entertaining show about people with charisma and chemistry, but throughout the show’s ten-year run, the six main characters became inadvertent talking points for the responsibilities of the media when it comes to stoking or abating the audience’s predilections for lifestyle wish-fulfillment. Since it’s an episode that throws focus on the characters’ jobs and incomes, “The One with Five Steaks and an Eggplant” seems poised to address the rampant criticisms regarding the show’s most improbable displays of socioeconomic delusions.

……

…

The episode puts pressure on the financial disparity between the group’s haves – Monica (chef), Ross (paleontologist), and Chandler (upper-level data processor) – and have-nots – Joey (struggling actor), Phoebe (masseuse), and Rachael (waitress). With Monica’s recent promotion and Ross’s impending birthday celebration, the have-nots grow tiresome over having to fork over their meager wages for the sake of the group’s costly dining and leisure activities. When the have-nots are cornered into broaching the subject with the haves, an inevitably awkward tension ensues. It boils over into a conflict-of-the-classes, bickering and all, until Monica abruptly loses her job, effectively dissipating the wedge between the group.

…

“The One with Five Steaks and an Eggplant” was minted during the show’s golden era that spanned its first four seasons, when the show not only permeated every last pop culture magazine and talk show, but also enjoyed a creative high from which it never quite returned, even when it finally won a Best Comedy Emmy in 2002. The first four seasons eschewed a har-har joke-punchline formula that dominated the later seasons for a richer, more observational brand of humor that required a keen eye for finding comedy inside grounded human interaction.

For example, in “Five Steaks,” the have-nots bitterly riff on the haves’ constant use of the phrase “someplace nice” to describe dinner plans, and indeed the phrase is uttered minutes later by a blithe and newly promoted Monica. Elsewhere, Joey, Rachel, and Phoebe desperately try to find the cheapest items off a fancy restaurant menu, prompting Joey to scoff “What are these, famous chickens?!” and Rachel to sheepishly order nothing but a side salad that she intends to have on the side of “this glass of water.” Later, when the haves try to offer the have-nots some concert tickets (‘90s alert: they’re for Hootie and the Blowfish!) in a misguided gesture that comes off as condescending, Phoebe replies with a disingenuous “thank you” that could double as a spiteful sneeze: it’s a sharply perfect blend of disgust and embarrassment, the kind of feel-it-in-the-moment delivery that the six lead actors excelled at.

…

HOOTIE!!!

…

It was these kinds of moments – funny enough on paper, hilarious when skilled comedic performers imbued them with life – that made the show not just entertaining, but resonant. In fact, “Five Steaks” presents the six friends at their most human, since almost none of the laugh lines revolve around their Breakfast Club characteristics (the imbecile, the geek, the cynic, the control freak, the princess, the hippie).

…

Instead, the humor comes from the writers and actors genuinely exploring the characters, their relationships, and the resultant metaphysical vibrations (at the risk of using language that skews too Phoebe). Friends was at its best when it found material not only in the dialogue or storylines but also between and beyond them, to a point that some moments almost felt like mumblecore with a laugh track. Interpersonal authenticity was a key selling point on this show, and it’s cheesy but its true: this really was a six-pronged ten-year character study of a sweet and genuine kind.

…

But where Friends felt authentic on a character level, its surface was all slick and clean and expensive, which lies at the root of its foremost criticisms. Sure, “Five Steaks” addresses the characters’ economic situations and at least acknowledges that some of the characters could maybe-perhaps-possibly be moneyed enough to afford the well-off lifestyles on display. Beyond that, future episodes make various references to explain away the mystery of the grotesquely expensive-looking dream apartment: it’s eventually established that Monica illegally sublets the apartment from her deceased grandmother’s estate, and in the series finale, Chandler quips that “Thanks to rent control, [the apartment] was a friggin’ steal!”

…

Those quick-and-dirty explanations seem to be missing the point. The production design crew’s only concerns in constructing the main sets were visual pop, modernity, and space (those four giant cameras had to fit somewhere), not grounded neo-realism. Furthermore, on a week-to-week basis, the cast’s hairstyles and non-repeating wardrobe were calculated to stoke consumer demand so that any given episode had the unfortunate meta-function of being a Macy’s catalog with a plot.

In a nutshell, the critics have a point: Friends was an aesthetic fantasy. But while the cast, the living spaces, the clothing, and the hairstyles were pert and pretty, the show on a substantive level still worked. Friends was worth hacking through the twinkling aesthetic bull to get to the smart, witty, humane and genuine stuff underneath. Not even anti-materialistic Phoebe or discerning TV fanatic Chanandler Bong could object.

~ C.J. Arellano

—

About the Art: I wanted to play with textures in this week’s artwork. The sets of the show were perhaps a little flashier and untrue to what the actual living situation of a waitress, out-of-work actor, and masseuse would be, but the delightful plots as well as the authenticity and color of the individual characters could not be denied. As for the imagery, I wanted to convey the central conflict of the episode: the tension of the haves and have-nots. Who hasn’t been in an awkward check-splitting situation? ~ Aireen Arellano

MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE – "Illusion"

Sun, 29 Jan 2012 15:38:00 -0600

art by Aireen Arellano (to view larger version, click here)

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SHOW: Mission: Impossible
EPISODE: “Illusion”
FIRST AIRED: Apr. 13, 1969

The Tom Cruise Mission: Impossible movies get an undue bad rap from students of the 1960s TV show. Certainly, no points were won among longtime diehards when the makers of the first film disgraced the iconic Mr. Phelps in favor of a new out-of-nowhere entity, Ethan Hunt, and fans do have a legitimate gripe that the show was never about extended gunplay or CGI chase scenes.

But most of the movies, including the fantastic if goofily named Ghost Protocol, do retain two key aspects that have been entwined in the Mission: Impossible franchise since creator Bruce Geller lit the first fuse back in 1966: the sexy high-wire thrill of seeing a team of professionals act as a single villain-thwarting organism, and the disturbing implications of protagonists who merrily play geopolitical chess with no serious sense of accountability or consequence. Season Three’s “Illusion” (available on Netflix Instant) has both on display and in abundance.

The episode opens, as nearly all of them do, with IMF leader Jim Phelps receiving his mission from a mysterious voice on a self-destructing tape: this week’s task is to remove two evil candidates from contention for a chief-of-police job in an Eastern European country to make room for a third candidate who is “friendly to the West.”

…

Jim picks the show’s most iconic team: master-of-disguise Rollin, actress Cinnamon, gadgets whiz Barney, and strongman Willy. (Character names were not the show’s strong suit.) The two “bad” candidates, a fretful schmuck named Skarbeck and a sneery stoic named Lom, hang out regularly at a nightclub, as does the “good” candidate, a bland-o-tron named Trock, so the whole episode takes on a sultry cabaret theme.

…

Mission: Impossible was adored and derided during its heyday for requiring full and alert attention from the viewers to follow the noir-like puzzle-piece plots. Part of the joy in watching an episode often just comes from following along and watching the house of cards coalesce into finality. Thankfully, many of the episodes are tight enough to withstand deconstruction.

“Illusion” has its fair share of flowchart logic, but the spine of the plot is straightforward: the IMF aims to take advantage of Skarbeck’s mental and emotional instability by stoking the flames of his past. At the nightclub, Cinnamon and Rollin perform a clown-and-singer act all too redolent to that of Skarbeck’s old and long-dead girlfriend, whom many believe he had murdered after he discovered her infidelities.

…

The IMF recreates the scenario for Skarbeck’s benefit: Cinnamon begins a love affair with Skarbeck, and the IMF makes him believe she’s cheating on him with Lom. Skarbeck kills Lom in front of a roomful of witnesses, and the mission’s accomplished: the chief-of-police job is Trock’s for the taking.

Actors and audiences often complain about the lack of character development on these kinds of hour-long procedurals. Compared to Mission: Impossible, cop shows like Law & Order seem to have all the character introspection of a Dostoevsky novel. Through seven seasons of missions, we discovered almost nothing about Jim, Rollin, Cinnamon, and the gang.

…

The show, however, excelled in character development of a very literal sort: since the show’s format was con-job-of-the-week, the main cast not only played but explored a seemingly endless library of characters. In “Illusion,” three performers steal the show: Barbara Bain keeps Cinnamon’s cabaret singer cool and detached as the femme fatale with shifting alliances. Meanwhile, Martin Landau plays Rollin’s jester as a spirited puck on stage and a sympathetic sad sack of music-box melancholy offstage.

…

Most notable, however, is Fritz Weaver as Skarbeck. More often than not, Mission’s villains were merely off-the-shelf fodder, men in suits designed to stand there and let the IMF fool them. The show fired on all cylinders, though, when the villain hewed closer to a fully drawn human with choices and damning flaws.

Skarbeck is one of the more compelling Mission antagonists. Fritz Weaver brings to vivid life all the dark neuroses and that Jim proudly announces his team will be exploiting: his sexual insecurities, sweat-drenched paranoia, hair-trigger instabilities, and even some latent misogyny. The show may have primarily been a showcase of spies with gadgets, but the show transcended its fluffy forebears like James Bond when it made the IMF press, almost maliciously, on such thick webs of psychology like Skarbeck’s.

…

“Illusion” exemplifies the stylized cinematography and production design that made the show such a visual standout during its time. With its lavish look, evocative chiaroscuro, and clockwork execution, it was one of the first hour-long TV dramas that garnered the now-cliché praise of feeling “just like a movie every week.” But the episode is also a telling example of the problematic implications inherent in Mission’s foundation.

The show used the Cold War backdrop as justification for the IMF’s dubious moral compass. Since we’re meant to infer that “Illusion” takes place in a Communist Bloc country, then we’re not supposed to ask questions when the IMF manipulates one man into killing another under false pretenses. We’re not even supposed to ask questions when IMF outsider Trock (in a rare Mission plot point) actively helps the team to achieve their goal.

…

This was the way of Mission, for better or worse. Bruce Geller and his team of writers endlessly presented the team as intrepid American heroes who traversed deep behind the Iron Curtain to cure one more country of the evils of communism and fascism. American interventionism, needless to say, is a very real issue with grave consequences. For Mission to take such an easy, broadly shaped stance on it all (namely, that America always knows best and is beyond the grasp of international law) was troublesome.

…

The IMF’s stunning lack of accountability didn’t go unnoticed by viewers when it originally aired: even when the show was a hit, it did generate criticisms from viewers for playing fast and loose with concepts like morality or international diplomacy. Instead of taking the opportunity to explore these criticisms by building them into the storytelling of future episodes, the writers instead retreated altogether. The last three seasons found the IMF staying in America to fight stereotypical crime bosses, thus avoiding the tricky subject matter altogether. In essence, it became just another cop show.

…

So “Illusion” ends with Skarbeck and Lom out of the equation (Lom very much out of the equation), and Trock in the position to take the job. Our heroes, with nothing more left to say or do, board their car and drive away with no indication of what this means for the fate of the fictional Eastern European country. The shot of the IMF getaway vehicle zooming away to the next mission was a frequent end-of-episode punctuation, and it is emblematic of Mission’s nonexistent view on the long-term consequences of overseas meddling. As Rollin’s court jester proclaims in the cabaret act, “Who knows what tomorrow will bring?” Soon after, he answers what would surely be the IMF’s response: “Who cares? Who cares? Who cares? Who cares?”

~ C.J. Arellano

—

About the Art: While (re)watching the episode, I was spellbound by the visually captivating play of light and shadow during Rollin’s sprightly cabaret performance under the lone spotlight. At the beginning of the episode, Rollin, wearing a playful-yet-eerie red jester mask, asks his audience, “Who knows what tomorrow will bring?” After a pause, he takes a shot of vodka, then emphatically sighs, “Who cares?” Seeing this playfully foreboding scene delighted and unsettled me. I knew right away I wanted to use this image in this week’s artwork. The image conjured up inspiration from iconic designer, Saul Bass, which you’ll see in the flat, bold shapes of the artwork. Later, when C.J. and I discussed the episode, we noted how disturbed we both were when the mission called for the eradication of two out of three individuals because the third was merely “friendly to the West.” I thought it essential to make a connection between the text in the artwork and the statement of American interventionism in the Mission series by adding stars and stripes to the background. Now, Rollin’s question forces us to ask the same. ~ Aireen Arellano

I LOVE LUCY - "Lucy Does a TV Commercial"

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 12:45:00 -0600

art by Aireen Arellano (to view the larger version, click here)

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SHOW: I Love Lucy
EPISODE: “Lucy Does a TV Commercial”
FIRST AIRED: May 05, 1952

You can find Lucy’s reeling, disgusted face, presiding over spoon and bottle, on T-shirts, magnets, lunchboxes, posters, postcards, and keychains. You can even buy Vitameatavegamin bottles filled with little heart-shaped candy. To swaths of fans, casual or diehard, this is the episode that defines I Love Lucy. For those who just know the show as a bullet in a pop-culture history encyclopedia, this is the only episode of “I Love Lucy.”

Truth be told, the episode’s classic status has more to do with the one memorable sequence than as a complete A-to-B arc. “Lucy Does a TV Commercial” is sketch comedy gold, functioning not only as another display of Lucille Ball’s mad brilliance but also as sly “bite the hand that feeds you” satire. Taken as a whole, though, the story falls flat.

The episode opens with Ricky in need of a spokeswoman for the commercial break of the television special he’s emceeing. Lucy overhears and pleads for the job. Ricky says no, so in one of her oddest gambits to prove her talent, she climbs into the Ricardos’ TV set to prove she looks good on the small screen.

…

This is one of those era-specific bits that only could have existed in the time in which it was conceived. Any analogous scenario today would have involved Lucy making an ass of herself in front of a borrowed camcorder and trying to pass the resultant home video off as a legitimate commercial, but no kind of modernity would have been nearly as funny as seeing Lucy shove herself inside a home appliance and consider it rational behavior. Certainly, it’s hard to beat the delirious absurdity of Lucy dropping the cigarette pack and reaching out of the TV to retrieve it.

…

Ricky is unmoved, but nonetheless, thanks to an intercepted phone message, Lucy worms her way into the job as the spokeswoman for a health tonic, immortally named Vitameatavegamin, a four-pronged portmanteau of its disgusting key ingredients. Lucy arrives on set for rehearsal, unaware that the drink also contains a 23% alcohol quotient.

She rattles off her dutifully memorized monologue with pep and professionalism, impressing the director. It’s only when she takes a spoonful of the stuff that the professionalism ends and the comedy begins.

…

Lucy’s first reaction to the taste is probably the highlight of the entire half hour. Her peppy face melts into a sick frown, as if she just threw back a shot of sewage milkshake. She punctuates it with a shiver that indicates the liquid slithering like bitter cement down her throat. The director makes her do it again and again, and with each rehearsal take, Lucille Ball adds just one more hiccup and mismatched syllable. The joy in the comedic sequence, the reason for its timelessness, is that it’s not an assault of quips and pratfalls. It’s the slowest of builds. By the end, she’s turned the Vitameatavegamin table into a pub counter, setting the spoon on the table and pouring the liquid into it with all the delicacy of Jackson Pollock. She’s not just a drunk version of Lucy. Her mannerisms seem to indicate that she’s morphed into an entirely different character: Lucy’s drunk uncle, maybe?

…

Storytellers in any medium love to talk about stakes. Stakes, stakes, stakes, stakes, stakes. You could mistake a writers’ table for a butcher shop. The curious thing about this episode, though, is that the writers chose to stage the main sequence during the rehearsal of Ricky’s show, not the actual broadcast, when of course a lot more would be at stake as Lucy would be a drunken mess on live television.

It’s a smart move, though. By setting it at the rehearsal, they’ve granted the audience a scenario in which Lucy repeats the monologue over and over again, getting drunker and drunker in the process. The writers have essentially traded in higher stakes for a practically endless negative feedback loop of comedy.

Also notable about the classic sequence is how it functions more as a satire on advertising than it does as another testament to how daffy Lucy is. If the original girl had shown up to the audition, she too would have ended up stumbling through the studio proudly waving her three sheets. In a writer’s mind, at least, who’s “to blame” usually turns out to be the dramatic impetus for the whole story. In this case, it’s not Lucy. It’s the product-makers.

When “I Love Lucy” aired, commercial spots like these were common: instead of a 30-second segment with flashy visuals, ad breaks often just consisted of a pretty spokesperson talking to camera about product features through a mannequin-like smile, and they were often for snake-oily products like Vitameatavegamin. Since of course those advertisers were footing the bill for “I Love Lucy,” it was a bold move on Desilu’s part to produce an episode in which the biggest idiot on display isn’t Lucy, but the product of the week. The original broadcast of this episode more than likely cut from Lucy drooling over the Vitameatavegamin table to a spokesperson holding up a can of Fluffo Shortening (one of the show’s original sponsors).

…

So with the timeless comedic sequence and sharp satire, what’s missing from “Lucy Does a TV Commercial”? There’s not much in the way of narrative elegance here. After Lucy’s inebriated rehearsal, there’s a built-in suspenseful anticipation of what kind of havoc she’ll wreak on Ricky’s show and what the consequences of that inevitable disaster will be. Alas, the writers are all out of steam at this point – Lucy stumbles on stage during Ricky’s broadcast, he frantically scoops her up, and the episode is done.

…

This is one of those episodes that just ends with no real resolution or final dramatic punch to wrap up the story. The writers of “I Love Lucy” were indeed capable of constructing crackerjack plots with satisfying and often surprising endings, and when they did, they rewarded their audience with insight, however broad, into the characters or marriage or friendship or whatever sitcom-universal topic they happened to be riffing on that week.

It seems like a nitpicky quibble, but leaving the narrative of “Lucy Does a TV Commercial” dangling like a frayed wire makes the whole episode feeling like empty calories. But ultimately, who cares? It’s so tasty, too!

~ C.J. Arellano

—

About the Art: As C.J. noted, this episode is all about that hilariously disgusted look on Lucy’s face. My hope is that anyone who looks at this artwork feels a little sick themselves. I used the putrid yellow/green color of the liquid, bold fuchsia color of the background, and frantic nature of the lines as your tickets to Barf Town. I also wanted to convey humor by playing up the dissonance of the blatant grossness and the happy declaration in the speech bubble. ~ Aireen Arellano

I LOVE LUCY - "The Diet"

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 12:44:00 -0600

art by Aireen Arellano (to view larger version, click here)

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SHOW: I Love Lucy
EPISODE: “The Diet”
FIRST AIRED: Oct. 29, 1951

In “The Diet,” Lucy plunges into a crash diet to wriggle herself into a size 12 dress and into Ricky’s show. It’s no Vitameatavegamin or chocolate factory escapade, but this early episode conflates the most well-worn atoms that floated in the I Love Lucy writers’ brains: Lucy’s infantile desperation to get in the act, the audacious if not admirable extremes to which our heroine resorts to achieve her improbable goal, potent sight gags, a hammy nightclub toe-tapping number at episode’s end, and a common adult issue of the week – in this case, weight consciousness – so “relatable” in that broad sitcom sense that the episode could double as a magazine article. Only the fourth episode produced, “The Diet” is like Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, presenting the show’s most vital components in one finely drawn half-hour.

As the episode starts, Lucy proudly declares her weight to her husband and friends, and weighs herself in front of them to prove it. (There is a reason nobody does this in real life.) The results are shocking only to her:

…

Lucy: “I walked into this room weighing 110! I now weigh 132! That’s 22 pounds in 10 minutes!”

…

As luck would have it (or as first acts go), Ricky receives a phone call from his nightclub: the girl in his act dropped out, and they need to find a last-minute replacement who fits the dress. Needless to say, Lucy jumps at the chance. Also needless to say, Ricky doesn’t.

He does let her audition, though, and the scene in which Lucy flounders among the prettier tryouts serves as an exemplary display of Lucille Ball’s golden comedic intuition. In an effort to blend in with the icy doll-waist vixens that surround her, Lucy shimmies her pant-legs up and shirt-shoulders down. When Ricky instructs them to dance, the girls step in time, sporting the blank smiles of spokeswomen. Meanwhile, Lucy flails like a four-year-old doing the Charleston in the living room. It’s a great bit of physical comedy for the timeless reason that there’s nothing funnier - or sexier – than a performer choosing goofy over sexy.

…

Beyond the laughter, the scene has resonance. Whether you’re a daffy housewife in 1951 or a body conscious teenager in 2012, whose heart hasn’t sunk after gloriously failing to live up to standards of skill or appearance? Despite these humiliations (not to mention the particular nausea of having to compete to impress your spouse), Lucy seems to have nothing on her brain but “Gee, this audition is kind of fun!” It’s dramatic universality by way of sitcom slapstick.

Lucy coaxes an agreement from Ricky that if she can fit into the size 12 dress (today’s size 4), she can do the show. She goes on a crash diet and exercise regimen to lose five pounds in three days. After running, jump-roping, and celery-eating herself into a near puddle, she finally resorts to a “human pressure cooker” that amounts to her sweating and steaming the rest of her weight off. Disturbingly, it works. (A “Don’t try this at home, kids!” subtitle would have fit here.)

…

She sneaks into Ricky’s nightclub act, and although he looks like he wants to vomit when he first sees her onstage, soon even he’s won over by her performance. The resulting “Cuban Pete/Sally Sweet” number is a thrill to watch. It’s one of the few times when Lucy’s showbiz aspirations result in a straightforward victory. Moreover, the scene showcases one of the sitcom’s most durable secret weapons: Desi Arnaz. To say he was one of comedy’s finest straight men is understating it. When Lucy, sauntering across the stage as her wonderfully blasé Sally Sweet, thrusts her hips at Ricky’s Cuban Pete and seemingly causes his hat to fly off with the punctuation of a bass drum hit, it’s a winning example of Lucy and Desi’s unmatchable comedic rapport.

…

The episode ends with Lucy collapsing backstage due to malnutrition (womp womp). Of course, having her stay in Ricky’s act would be a violation of the show’s DNA. Throughout nine seasons, Lucy continues her campaign to scratch and claw her way onto the stage alongside her husband. It was the sitcom’s subversive central irony bubbling under the seemingly sexist “idiot housewife/annoyed husband” conceit: in a show about a woman vying for validation, admiration, and a life beyond the pre-feminist shackles of domestic life, the audience was already giving it to her in spades.

One more thing:

THIS IS THE TACKIEST DRESS WE HAVE SEEN IN OUR LIVES.

~ C.J. Arellano

—

About the Art: What better way to launch our site about classic TV reruns than with a nod to retro master Roy Lichtenstein? The background comprised of red-headed whales is a response to the ridiculous “I’m so fat” statement from svelte Lucy. It’s a little rib to girls who make such a declaration among friends, hoping to receive a shower of reassurances to the contrary. ~ Aireen Arellano

I LOVE LUCY - "Lucy Does the Tango"

Mon, 23 Jan 2012 12:44:00 -0600

art by Aireen Arellano (to view larger version, click here)

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SHOW: I Love Lucy
EPISODE: “Lucy Does the Tango”
FIRST AIRED: Mar. 11, 1957

By the sixth season of I Love Lucy, the creators moved Lucy and the gang from Manhattan to the Connecticut countryside, ostensibly to unpack new opportunities for comedy and storytelling. The change certainly underscored the show’s function as a spry comedy of manners, as Lucy now had to battle the rigid etiquette and refined neighborly protocol of upstate New England. Something, however, was lost in translation: much of the country episodes don’t have the same vitality as the New York seasons. Whether it was due to creative fatigue, Lucy and Desi’s increasingly strained personal and professional lives, or just the fact that country-based slapstick makes the show feel just a little too broad and square (not even I Love Lucy could mine suspense from a tulip contest), the show had lost a little of its luster in the relocation.

Still, “Lucy Does the Tango” is the best of the country set. This is the episode in which Lucy stuffs a bunch of eggs down her shirt, only to find herself doing the tango with Ricky. So absurd, unlikely, and comically sublime is the situation that it must have been the episode on everyone’s mind when the first person pitched the idea, “Hey, let’s move them all to the country!”

In fact, the first act of the episode is nothing but a series of causes and effects designed with a jeweler’s shaky-hand precision to get Lucy into that extremely specific situation. Underneath the plot mechanics, you can just hear all the fevered debate around the writers’ table about what’s the cleanest, most logical way to make Lucy do what they want her to do. It’s not the most elegant bit of writing, but for sheer comedic payoff, it’s worth it.

The foursome are having trouble with their fledgling egg business, as Fred’s discovery of his miscalculations reveal that their baby chick investments won’t be producing saleable eggs for another six months. Fred and Ricky blame each other for rising costs, so Lucy and Ethel come up with a useless idea that sounds like a great solution to only them: they scheme to plant store-bought eggs in the chickens’ nests in order to allay Fred and Ricky’s negative attitudes toward the business and each other.

…

They need to find a way to smuggle the store-bought eggs into the barn without alerting the boys, so Lucy and Ethel delicately hide them beneath their clothing. Of course at that moment, Ricky wants to practice a tango he and Lucy are performing for a PTA benefit (how a tango passes for school-benefit entertainment goes unexplained).

…

Instead of running away or feigning illness or doing something anything, Lucy submits to the tango. Props must be given to the costume department here: Lucy’s lumberjack shirt has just enough give to make room for the eggs and just enough drape to make Ricky’s obliviousness believable.

The couple tangos for a sick and suspenseful two minutes, and Ethel watches in silent helplessness. The inevitable occurs: the tango culminates with Ricky dramatically spinning Lucy until she unwinds like a top and finally smacks right into him with a thud heard ‘round the world, all those eggs underneath her shirt smashing into yolk and shell between a grossed out Lucy and a horrified Ricky.

The sequence has its fair share of “Lucy” lore. It still holds the record for longest recorded laugh in sitcom history, and it seems as if that record will hold for the foreseeable future, what with the four-camera studio sitcom a dying animal, and current studio sitcoms no longer letting the laughs play out but truncating them in post-production.

Furthermore, a behind-the-scenes anecdote relates that Lucille Ball insisted she use fake eggs for rehearsal and only real eggs for the broadcast. The verisimilitude is by and large the keystone of this whole sequence: Lucy and Desi know it’s coming, but by saving the sensory surprise for themselves until the crucial moment, their genuine reactions are a thing to behold.

In comedy, actions are funny, but reactions are funnier, and Desi Arnaz gets the gold star here for best reaction maybe of the whole series. His bug-eyes, wide and wild as fires, convey all the imploring horror compressed into the insanity of the moment.

…

With the major comedic sequence out of the way, the second act plays out a little more organically than the first. The Mertzes and Ricardos all but give up on their joint venture and prepare to sell the chickens. Once the chickens mysteriously disappear from the barn and show up in odd places like drawers and closets, the two couples turn on each other, accusing each other of hoarding the chickens to collect on the profit. The four bicker at shrill levels until it’s revealed that Little Ricky and his pal Bruce have hidden the chickens to prevent their departure. Of course, it’s a happy ending all around when the chickens finally begin to lay eggs.

…

Thus, the episode morphs from killer comedic sequence to another “never do business with friends” outing. It’s a decent enough story, though nowhere near as funny as the Ricardos and Merztes’ previous attempts to turn a profit on their friendship.

With its slapstick and sight gags built around the classic comedy tools known as eggs and chickens, “Lucy Does the Tango” is a handsome payoff for the country relocation. But this is the peak: future country-specific escapades involve mild fodder like building a barbecue, dedicating a statue, and purchasing a power lawn mower. Again, it’s hard to say whether the writers and actors were just tired at this point or the sleepy country setting just doesn’t mesh well with the show’s zippy vaudevillian brand of comedy, but aside from the occasionally bright one-liner, middle-class send-up, or celebrity guest appearance (Tallulah is just around the corner), the rest of the Ricardos’ stay in the country lays an egg.

~ C.J. Arellano

—

About the Art: While discussing the episode, C.J. and I determined that the star of that moment was truly Desi Arnaz. Since we can only possibly imagine what having 5 dozen eggs crushed against the belly feels like, Desi’s expression of horror certainly helps us get there. I took a photo collage approach with a mix of vector for interest. I decided to use Desi’s face instead of illustrating it - that’s how effective his expression is: it needs no caricaturing. I used color to describe the moment of impact: the eggy bright yellow and orange colors are punched up with crunches of hot pink. I also wanted to give a nod to the absurdity of the situation by the playful placement of the chicken. (Splats and splotches by Designbum.com) ~ Aireen Arellano