All happy families are situation comedies. All unhappy families are situation comedies, too.
This is the wisdom of television, I have been impressed with this wisdom for about three, four years – which is when we started ending our nights with Adam by watching a television series. One series at a time. We started with the Office, the American version, and we have worked our way through Schitt’s Creek, Brooklyn 99, Fresh off the Boat, and Blackish. Each time we have completed the entire cycle – partly because Adam is, as he puts it, a completist.
I’ve been perfectly happy with our choices, even if we all have various complaints about this or that show, gag, character, etc.
But our last choice threw me: Scrubs. Right away the music made me grit my teeth – the bastard children of alternate radio’s obsession with the Hooty and the Blowfish sound, the bane of the nineties. But more, I was thrown by the racism and the sexism. The racism was pretty much in your face – it was white liberal racism, jokey and nervous. And the sexism was on all levels.
The show has a voice over by the chief protagonist. These shows tend to a form that combines skit and parable – the narrator ends the show, almost always, with some moralizing reflections. I find that format uncomfortable. Blackish, another show we saw, also took this form. The problem with the protagonist drawing the moral for the viewer is that the viewer has to trust the protagonist. If the protagonist is creepy, however – as was the father in Blackish and the doctor in Scrubs – the moralizing ending seems more self-congratulation and rationalizing than clever and witty.
Work comedy series, from what I have seen, impose the family image on the work environment, while family comedies often bring work into the family. In Scrubs, the hospital becomes both a hunting ground of romance and a “friends” network. The romance introduces an incestuous element into the family metaphor. The comedy of transgression is, of course, something comedians are enormously proud of, as if they all came out of Lenny Bruce’s thigh. Transgressive comedy coming from highly paid white dudes in America, however, is going to be … well, what highly paid white dudes in America conventionally think. It is convention in the offensive mode.
That is written all over the character development in this show. The characters are unrelievedly creepy. This began to puzzle me. Usually, these shows go through my mind like water through a sieve. A few laughs, Adam is entertained, then brushing of teeth, reading, lights out. But Scrubs seemed extraordinarily strange. Though, like the Office, it was about saying the unsaid, unlike the Office, which used formal devices to distance us from the characters, this show used devices to get us to identify with characters who were, well, creepy. In one typical show, a surgeon makes a sexist joke, operating on a teen, and slips up, thus somehow destroying the hand mobility of said teen, who is on a scholarship to Julliard. The show ends on the moralizing note, with the surgeon telling the teen that it was his fault there was the little blip in surgery – but not of course that he was telling a joke when he made his bad move. And the viewer is given a little morality about the surgeon taking responsibility.
I was like, What?
So we decided to switch to another show, although Adam still wants to watch the season through of Scrubs. And I looked up stuff about Scrubs to see if my reactions were shared. Which is how I stumbled on the story of the man who wrote Scrubs episodes and got fired for obscure reasons: Eric Weinberg. A man who went from sitcom writers room to sitcom writers room, while “allegedly” raping eighteen women. The story in Hollywood Reporter is fascinating and very depressing – a sort of look into how the sausage (joke) is made. The cultural products of America go crazy – cause they are made in just this way.
An excerpt:
Weinberg’s longevity raises questions about what kind of behavior was accepted not only by his agency but in certain writers rooms. Though it was a different time, legislation barring sexual harassment — including conduct that creates a hostile work environment — had long been on the books. The definition of harassment in a writers room, however, has never been clear. Entertainment is a creative business, and it is accepted that writers must have the freedom to express raunchy or off-color ideas — a principle reinforced by the dismissal of a 2004 sexual-harassment lawsuit filed by an assistant in the Friends writers room. Several women who worked with Weinberg after that decision say they believe that the ruling emboldened men who were inclined to harass women.
However murky the definition of harassment, Weinberg’s conduct was enough to get him fired from Scrubs more than a decade before reporting on Harvey Weinstein launched the #MeToo movement. When news broke of Weinberg’s arrest, many former colleagues expressed horror, but not surprise. One female writer says that of all the men she’s worked with, “he was the shittiest and he was the most brazen. When I found out, I was disgusted, and it explained so much.”
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