rock rock to the 30 rock, don't stop

So the wife and I just finished watching Season One of 30 Rock on DVD. We certainly liked what we had seen of the first two seasons, but somehow we never watched the show regularly. I think we'd seen maybe three complete episodes (including the amazing 2007 one with "who's crazier, me or Ann Curry?," Alec Baldwin role-playing all the parts in the Tracy Morgan intervention, and the "NBC page-off") and parts of four or five more, so we had a lot of new-to-us stuff on these DVDs.

And color us impressed. Season One was consistently funny, delivering rapid-fire, smart, quality laughs every episode. I'm really looking forward to guzzling the second season in what will likely be a couple of big, delicious gulps.

The funniness of 30 Rock raises this question, though: Why in the h-e-double-hockey-sticks was Saturday Night Live so desperately unfunny over the last few years? Tina Fey was SNL's head writer from 1999 through 2006, and many of her SNL co-conspirators play prominent roles on 30 Rock. Based on that alone, I'd expect 30 Rock to bite the big one, but instead, 30 Rock achieves an almost Arrested Development-like level of intelligent, densely-layered hilarity.

While I do think that SNL improved during Fey's final years on the show, that's like saying that Revenge of the Sith was an improvement on Attack of the Clones. SNL's been an unmitigated disaster since 1992-1993, the season after the last of the excellent Hartman / Carvey / Myers / Lovitz / Hooks / Miller cast flew the coop. Heck, I laugh more at Tracy Morgan in any two minutes he's on 30 Rock than I did during his whole SNL tenure.

So what's holding SNL back? Is it Lorne Michaels? Lingering Mary Gross syndrome? What?

get on the dancefloor, it's a timeslot hit

So a few days ago, we were watching our usual dose of Seinfeld reruns, and one of them was the one where Jerry goes onstage before hopelessly unfunny rival comic Kenny Bania, and Bania's act unexpectedly generates a bunch of laughs. When Jerry figures out that Bania's doing well because Jerry has already got the audience laughing, he calls Bania a "timeslot hit."

That got me to wonderin' if future generations will get this joke. I mean, in and of itself the plotline is funny. But the real deliciousness of Jerry's line comes from knowing the meta joke: it's a reference to NBC's practice on its "Must-See Thursdays" of airing sitcoms more lame than Bania's act in the 8:30 PM and 9:30 PM eastern/pacific slots, i.e., in the gaps between huge ratings hits Friends (8 PM), Seinfeld (9 PM) and E.R. (10 PM). No matter how insipid or atrocious or savaged by critics these shows were, they'd always be in the Nielsen top 10 because enough people wouldn't bother to change the channel between shows. Veronica's Closet, The Single Guy, Madman of the People, Union Square... need I go on for anyone who lived through this era?

In the world's best-ever Rolling Stone interview, NewsRadio creator Paul Simms dubbed NBC's approach to Thursday nights "the shit sandwich." I can't find the full text of the interview on the Internet anymore, but I can quote my own quoting of it from this Fegmaniax post of mine from days of yore:

Simms on NBC's "Must See Thursday":
"People are starting to realize Thursday night is
like a big double-decker shit sandwich with three
good pieces of bread, and in between..."

Q: If "NewsRadio" doesn't last, would you turn
your back on sitcoms?
"Yeah, this is the best I can do. Pretend
you're God and you say, 'If you do a show
about a single father who's dating a lot
and has two teenage sons, and it doesn't
have to be funny, and it'll be a huge hit.'
I'd say, 'Fuck you, God.'"

It's all of this that went into Jerry's joke, which made me guffaw when the episode first aired, when I watched it last week, and probably will for years to come. But as NBC's "Must-See Thursday" recedes into the dustbin that's already home to CBS' '70s Monday night comedy juggernaut, the true resonance of the "timeslot hit" line is likely to be as lost on the young'uns as the archness of Alexander Pope is to me. Annotation is no substitute for living memory.

jay tarseses throughout the decades, pt. 3: the 2000s

Prior Installments
pt. 1: the 1980s
pt. 2: the 1990s

The Jay Tarses of the 2000s
Judd Apatow. First came Freaks and Geeks, which I really, really wanted to like. It looked smart and funny. It was set in 1980, right in my cultural and musical wheelhouse. And the titular Geeks were 7th graders, as was the real-life me in 1980! And it had SCTV's Joe Flaherty in it! I thought, "at last, a show for me! a show that speaks to me!"

Instead, I couldn't stand it. The music they got right, I'll give them that. But the clothes and hair, aside from Linda Cardellini's character wearing her dad's army jacket, seemed way off for 1980. Worse, the show was clearly written not only from the sole perspective of the geeks, but with no understanding of the other half of the titular equation.

Initially the "freaks" - a gang of pot-smoking high school teens whom Cardellini's character befriended - were depicted as menacing, and engaged in behaviors such as mailbox destruction that I much more closely associate with jocks, not potheads. To me, this demonstrated that the show's creators and writers had no actual experience with "freaks," who would have been the least likely kids in school to beat up the geeks or engage in bullying and violence. In fact, the "freaks" I knew usually had a genial live-and-let-live attitude, and bullying would have gotten in the way of more rewarding pursuits like getting stoned in the boys' room while listening to 8-tracks of AC/DC. (Also, Flaherty's over-the-top performance made it seem like he was acting in an entirely different show, but I digress.)

As Freaks and Geeks' lone season progressed, the writers transitioned the "freaks" from menacing goons to lovable lummoxes. But this showed just as little insight into the "freaks" as depicting them as thugs did, plus it reeked reeked of rote series-writing methodology (hey, let's make the bad guys turn out to be the good guys!). Many of the pot-obsessed folks I knew growing up were actually bright, funny people who weren't sufficiently challenged in school - they were often Mitch Hedbergs, not idiots. Apatow needed to spend less time in junior high cowering in the lunchroom and more time actually getting to know these folks. And if you want to see high school life in the '70s and '80s rendered in loving accuracy, rent Dazed and Confused; Freaks and Geeks misses on all counts.

But Freaks and Geeks found a loyal audience among critics, whom, one assumes, empathized with the show's "geeks" to such a degree that they failed to notice the program's many faults and chronic unfunnyness. Apatow followed it with another canceled-in-its-first-season TV show, Undeclared, which failed to connect either with me or with audiences, though it too had reams of favorable press.

But we shouldn't cry for Apatow too much: he's become the reigning mogul of movie comedy. The 40-Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up did major box office as well as garnering Apatow's usual critical raves. Throw in protégé Seth Rogen (Superbad, Pineapple Express), whose movies Apatow usually produces, plus a host of recent Will Ferrell comedies that Apatow has written and/or produced, and Apatow Inc. has become an unstoppable comedy factory.

But I'm still not laughing at his stuff. I haven't seen every movie that I just named above, but what I have seen doesn't strike me as either that smart or that funny.

Honorable Mentions

• David E. Kelley, who isn't a Jay Tarses, but more of a category unto himself. He ruined the latter seasons of L.A. Law, and his subsequent series crimes are legion.
• Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick. thirtysomething alone should earn them a special place in hell. However, since I actually liked My So-Called Life and the first season of Once and Again, they're disqualified from Tarsesdom. Lately, they were up to their old freighted-with-unearned-meaning tricks with web series Quarterlife.
• Amy Sherman (I think she's dropped the "-Palladino"): I tried really hard to love Gilmore Girls. After investing nearly two seasons' worth of watching - I thought it was a lost cause after the first three episodes, but since several of my friends were avid fans and their recommendation meant a lot to me, I kept on trying - I would have even settled for just liking it. But I hated it, from its pretentious dialogue to the cardboard-cutout Stars Hollow greek chorus (if only Sherman had been a little smarter, she could have had major allegory action going on). Right now, Sherman's a leading contender for Jay Tarses of the 2010s. Keep an eye on this one, she's going places! Not places I want to visit, but places!

jay tarseses throughout the decades, pt. 2: the 1990s

read "pt. 1: the 1980s"

The Jay Tarses of the 1990s
Aaron Sorkin. From the godawful script of A Few Good Men (I guess between Nicholson's rendition of the "you can't handle the truth!" speech, which is constantly replayed on TV as a "classic scene," and Pacino finally winning the Oscar for Scent of a Woman, the moral of the story is that scenery chewing pays!), to his self-righteous White House posturing (The American President and TV's The West Wing), Sorkin continually sounds clever, while not actually being so. A specialist in the category of "dialogue no actual human would ever say," Sorkin's barrage of verbiage and many wise casting choices have beguiled critics, who really ought to be able to discern how second-rate and hollow his material actually is.

The only Sorkin creation I could stomach longer than five minutes was the first season of Sports Night. But in retrospect, I think that had more to do with an extraordinarily gifted cast - Josh Charles, Peter Krause, Josh Malina, and especially Felicity Huffman - transcending the torrent of words, and less to do with Sorkin's words themselves. Quality control on the second season fell off dramatically (Dan's sudden Jewishness being the most egregious "wtf?" example), so I went right back to hating Sorkin again.

Like Sports Night, The West Wing also featured a pretty darn talented cast, and I'll always be grateful that the show gave veteran character actor John Spencer his long-overdue day in the sun. But here we not only got the Dialogue No Actual Human Would Ever Say, but it came in deadly combination with Heavy-Handed Moral Posturing (see also Sorkin's script for A Few Good Men). I'm not against tackling tough moral issues on TV; heck, favorites like Homicide and the new Battlestar Galactica sometimes cover six such dilemmas before the opening titles. But Sorkin doesn't seem to know how to do such things subtly and naturally like the aforementioned shows did; instead, every "important" plot might as well have a flashing red light attached, screaming at the audience "IMPORTANT! HEY, OVER HERE! WE'RE DEALING WITH REAL ISSUES HERE! HEY!" Sheesh, it makes me tired just thinking about watching that show. No wonder that I watched the sublimely silly Drew Carey Show instead.

While The West Wing straddles the 1990s and 2000s, I'm not going to let a technicality like that deprive Mr. Sorkin of this much-deserved honor. So Aaron Sorkin, congratulations! You are the Jay Tarses of the 1990s! Don't spend that Arby's gift certificate on something I wouldn't!

Tomorrow: we reveal the Jay Tarses of the 2000s! Plus honorable mentions!

jay tarseses throughout the decades, pt. 1: the 1980s

Most of the time, I enjoy "critically acclaimed" television shows. Hill Street Blues is still my all-time favorite show, and it pretty much defined "critically acclaimed," particularly during its early years when it struggled mightily in the ratings but took home a boatload of Emmys. And I have loved oodles of other programs that swept critics off their feet: The Sopranos, Deadwood, The Office (British and US versions), Twin Peaks, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Battlestar Galactica (the current-day one, not the original) are just a few examples where I think the hosannas are well deserved.

But there are shows that never click with me, no matter how much good press they get. One of the first "critically acclaimed" shows I remember not liking at all was Buffalo Bill, which starred Dabney Coleman as a crass, mean-spirited local talk show host. Its low ratings were often blamed on the deliberate unlikability of the main character.

For me personally, liking or relating to the characters isn't a prerequisite for enjoying a movie or TV show, so that wasn't a problem. I think Dabney Coleman is a fine comic actor, and his presence made me want to keep giving the show a chance. Heck, it even had Geena Davis in a supporting role, and I was harboring a major crush on her at the time (a crush that came to an end when she went into Streep/Close "I'm a serious wonderful actress so worship me, peons" mode sometime after Thelma and Louise). I should have liked this show!

But I didn't. The sticking point for me was that it just wasn't funny or smart enough. Yeah, it was smarter than your average sitcom, but not as smart as it thought it was being. As far as comedies about unlikable characters go, the equally short-lived Cheers spinoff, The Tortellis, made me laugh hysterically (Dan Hedaya has to be one of the greatest unsung character actors ever), and had all the smarts and moxie that Buffalo Bill never mustered.

Jay Tarses was the creator and executive producer of Buffalo Bill. Despite his pedigree as a writer for The Bob Newhart Show, a show that I love, I just didn't like the shows he came up with on his own. Tarses went on to create The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, which was part of the great "dramedy" boom of the mid-'8os (Doogie Howser, Hooperman, my beloved Frank's Place, etc.). Molly Dodd was another show that critics ate up with a spoon, but, like Tarses' previous venture, it left me both unamused and bored.

Since then, it seems to me that to every generation of television, a Jay Tarses is born. Every decade has its signature creator of multiple shows that find favor with critics, yet whose creations aren't as funny or smart as their perpetrators think they are being, nor are they as funny or smart as they are made out to be in the press.

For your reading pleasure, I have selected a Jay Tarses for each of the last three decades. This weekend, I will discuss each of them in their own individual blog post. Today, it's the Jay Tarses of the 1980s, and the winner, please (cue drum roll)...

The Jay Tarses of the 1980s
Jay Tarses. (See above.)

Stay tuned tomorrow, when I reveal the identity of the Jay Tarses of the 1990s!