L. A. Law 1-14: Prince Kuzak in a Can

I wanted to start this post off by saying something like "L. A. Law might be the strangest show to ever become a massive hit", but it occurs to me that that's not really true.  A lot of times the most popular TV shows are the ones that are quite unusual in a way that captures the public's interest -- think Twin Peaks or Glee.  (Well, that's probably the first time those two shows have been used in the same sentence before).  For L. A. Law, it took some of the strange and experimental aspects of Hill Street Blues -- the serialized storytelling and the use of out-of-place humour -- and brought them into the mainstream by attaching them to a sexy lawyer procedural.

What results is a show with wild clashes in tone, veering from dark socially-conscious drama to lighthearted farce to the 80s network equivalent of one of today's soft-porn cable dramas.  All of these elements are done fairly well on their own, although the comedy is very broad, but what's really strange is that they all feel like they rightfully exist in the same universe.  This episode's most serious plotline deals with ostensible lead Michael Kuzak (played by 80s artifact extraordinaire "Handsome" Harry Hamlin) dealing with the public suicide of another lawyer, a character whose mental breakdown was first played entirely for laughs.  The absurd and the serious exist in continuity with each other, and L. A. Law recognizes how they can frequently be two sides of the same coin.

Despite the jokey title[1], "Prince Kuzak in a Can" is one of the more all-around serious of L. A. Law episodes.  The story about the suicide of Sid Hershberg, the main serialized plot, is pretty unrelentingly bleak -- Michael attends his mostly empty funeral, and is entirely unable to put the death behind him, to the extend that he begins following Sid's path itself.  The most comedic part is an episodic plot with Victor representing a computer geek who falls head over heels for the office secretary, but even here his affections are treated as a serious matter and not an absurd joke. It does enable a brief reprisal of the show's sexual fixation, in which Arnie has a lengthy monologue about his first time that sounds like a piece of (competent) erotic fiction.  But the non-dramatic moments in this episode are still more subdued than usual.

This is because the plotline has started to tug at the just-established foundation beneath L. A. Law's narrative house of cards.  The show as a whole is a mess of contradictions, and I mean this in a good way -- it has an ambivalence to it that no amount of grandstanding by the characters is able to tease out.  The aesthetics of the series are no exception.  I talked a bit about 80s cheese last week, but this is a much more direct example of it: the garish colour palette, the jazzy score, and of course, the hair.

So, its visual style and general aesthetics are very much in line with 80s soaps like Dallas, and there's more than a bit of a soapish element to the plotting.  It is a show about the affairs of sexy rich people that  you can live vicariously through.  But at the same time L. A. Law makes no bones about the essentially vacuous nature of its protagonists' profession.  For every high-stakes trial involving big speeches there are at least three or four that are petty battles settled through bureaucratic gamesmanship.  Its lawyers don't usually fight for justice, or injustice for that matter: they are tools to more powerful forces.

This vacuousness and drudgery is what was established early on as the source of Sid's madness.  As a small-time lawyer representing prostitutes and hoodlums (possibly a public defender, although I can't quite remember now), he existed at the ugly bottom of the judicial system, where his clients were nothing more than dim pieces shuttled between the dual machines of crime and punishment.  This is visible in his first scene, where he yells at a repeat offender he's representing about not being able to come up with an alibi (a scene most likely inspired by ...And Justice for All).  The setting of his public suicide, where he pleads with the jury to consider his client as a human being beyond judgement, just further highlights that this is a man who is not insane by nature but completely destroyed by the meaninglessness of his profession.

In this episode, Michael starts following in his footsteps.  He takes on two of Sid's cases, both of which emphasize this kind of small-stakes futility.  In one, he represents the above-mentioned prostitute, who has already been arrested again before he finishes dealing with the first charge.  To some extent, the show demonizes criminals like her, who are generally portrayed as dim, mean-spirited and hopeless.  They aren't the monsters that you would see on something like Law and Order, but they are to an extent grotesques.  There is a condescension inherent in the series, which usually treats the life of the proletariat non-lawyers as only causes to be fought for, although it is at least fairly conscious of it.

This is further cemented by the other client, a hit-and-run driver who gets his grandmother to lie on the stand to provide him with an alibi.  This is, as the judge suggests to Michael, a fairly ordinary situation: witnesses lie, and it's the job of the prosecution to ferret it out, not the defense.  Michael doesn't even have conclusive proof that the witness is lying.  But it drives home not just the subjectivity of the legal system, which reduces truth to a rhetorical outcome, but the banality of evil -- or, to be more precise (because his client is not exactly Eichmann) the banality of crime.

At the same time, Michael's refusal to proceed, and subsequent jailing for contempt of court, restores the meaning to the courtroom.  It becomes a trial not of his client but of him himself, and of individual righteousness against systemic malaise.  Of course, this is solipsistic in the extreme, and the series never lets us believe that Michael has accomplished something.  Instead, this echoes Sid's first appearance.  Righteousness -- a belief in what you learned about the legal system in high school civics -- is, in L. A. Law, a form of madness.  And this is another contradiction.  The show has a distinct lack of irony, and bears down with all of the raw, embarrassing emotion of its era, but for all that it has an essentially cynical heart.

There's also a kind of Shakesperian element to the drama, in form if not in quality.  There are plenty of monologues that start out as ruminations on plot events but quickly turn to more philosophical matters, with Sidney's death scene being one of the best examples.  Michael's stand in this episode, as well as Arnie's monologue about his first time, are similar -- dramatic gestures that undercut themselves at the same moment they commit entirely to the drama.  Or maybe it's just that the American court system lends itself to such performances, and is a kind of theatre in itself.

It's also important to note that L. A. Law was possibly the first truly popular serialized show in America.  Of course, once again the ground was paved by Hill Street Blues and a couple other predecessors, but this brought it into the mainstream in a new way.  And this doesn't mean series-long storylines as is commonplace today, but stories that stretch across two or three episodes and are done, which is in some way a less committed version of serial storytelling but is in another way a more natural version of it: each storyline takes however long it takes.  Sometimes these stories seem less like whole-formed stories and more like a kind of bizarre association, with each spinning off a minor detail into a new story.  (For instance, the next episode deals only briefly with Michael's problems, but has a storyline with the judge who throws him in jail in this episode.)

I hate to use a "land of contrasts" conclusion, but L. A. Law lends itself very well to that.  It is simultaneously conventional and experimental, serious and silly, high camp and high art.  All of these elements together make it a bit of a mess, but they also may be what made it popular: there was something for everyone, even snot-nosed amateur critics writing  two and a half decades after the fact.

Next week: "Sing, RahXephon.  In order for everything to become one again."

[1]Looking at the episode titles reveals how lightly the show's staff took even its most serious plots.  I mean, the episode before this, where Sid commits suicide, is named "Sidney the Dead-Nosed Reindeer".  No matter how dramatic (or melodramatic) L. A. Law got, there was always a winking feel to it.

Star Trek 1-18: Arena

In order to get Star Trek on the air, Gene Roddenberry says that he had to sell it as a Western, a "Wagon Train to the stars", and that certainly does show up in some episodes ("Mudd's Women", "The Conscience of the King")[1].  However, I would venture to say that it's really more of a horror series than anything else -- the horror hiding inside a sci-fi shell, which in itself hid inside a Western shell.  The world of the original Star Trek is one filled with supernatural beings, many of whom can bear the image of your best friend, and many of whom are completely beyond human comprehension.  These beings, almost to a man, are out to kill you.

The setting is in space, but the show rarely tells genuinely science fictional stories, proceeding from a "what-if" question about our future.  Star Trek takes place on the outskirts of civilized space, so we don't get much of a picture of what this future society looks like.  Instead, we have the cold darkness of space, a space you apparently can't go two feet in without running into some Lovecraftian god beyond your comprehension.  Two of the three episodes directly before "Arena" ("Shore Leave" and "The Squire of Gothos") dealt with beings who were or at least seemed all-powerful, although those two took a more humorous tack.

"Arena" is an action episode though, and not a humour episode, or one of the more overt horror or science-fictional episodes.  From the start we're immersed into fighting, a shootout on a ruined Federation outpost, which leads to a warp-speed chase, until the Enterprise and its mysterious enemy run into the home of a race of god-like beings, who chide them for being more violently and promptly force Kirk and the enemy captain to fight mano y mano.  The end of the episode makes a plea for mercy and understanding, but structurally this a story told entirely through violence, and very aestheticized violence at that.

We start in on the fighting almost immediately, beaming down to an alien planet that is being, to use the scientific terminology, having the shit bombed out of it.  Full-scale war is at this point unknown to the peaceful, near-utopian world of Star Trek -- but the Enterprise exists on the fringes of that utopia, the unexplored frontier that fuels the Western genre Roddenberry claimed to channel.  So we have full-scale warfare -- but it's a rather odd depiction of that warfare.  Six Enterprise members beam down into some kind of central pavilion, where they are then continuously bombed from afar.  The previously unseen and unnamed security officers die, of course (these are the infamous "redshirts", although their shirt colour is actually much more varied than I had been lead to beleive).  The regulars then run around the open area dodging remarkably inaccurate bombs.  Kirk even evades some by his patented Shatnerian acrobatics, and then takes them out with a powerful grenade that looks like a blue eggshell.

From a realist perspective, this scene is ridiculous.  The idea that the main characters (and only them) can survive industrial warfare by tucking and rolling is silly, and turns a mass battle into something that can be solved by individual heroism.  But Star Trek isn't trying to be realistic SF (and no, that's not a contradiction).  Instead it's more of a mythic, fantastical storyline, where Kirk is a larger-than-life hero that's both in charge of the ship and does all of the exciting adventuring.  It's also interesting to note the futuristic weaponry, which looks cute but causes a massive explosion.  Like most of the technology in Star Trek, it's not really important to the plot, and exists without much comment from our characters.  Obviously weapons technology has developed considerably in 200 years, but it's still a shock when we see the massive explosion the grenade generates.  But it's just a shock, and it passes.

It's worth also noting the landscape in the screenshot above.  Star Trek is a world of bright primary colours -- the three uniforms we see Starfleet officers in are red, blue and yellow -- and landscapes that have an almost radioactive glow.  This can be seen in the bright yellowish-brown backdrop, with a clear blue sky, where the initial battle takes place.  We also get a version of that same background later in the episode, on the "arena" planet, although this one has enough mountainous scrub brush that it looks almost Leone-esque.
























Obviously the technical limitations of the era were a large part of this look.  But I think it also reinforces the almost mythic qualities of the story.  Even in space, there's very little darkness in Star Trek.  It's not a coincidence that both of this episode's battles take place in sets that look plopped right out of a Western.

The chase scene that follows is a more genuine attempt to adapt the rhythm of another genre to science fiction, and it doesn't quite work -- we're stuck in the stationary Enterprise no matter how fast everyone says they're going.  When Kirk takes the ship up to Warp 8, we get a rough idea that it's dangerous from the rest of the crew's reaction, but the lack of worldbuilding stops this from being much more than technobabble -- the show never tells us exactly what's significant about Warp 8.  The scene is like something out of a radio play, where we hear the action being tersely described instead of seeing it, and that's not good for a series that relies on visual novelty as much as Star Trek does.

The aliens this week are actually a great example of that visual spectacle.  As much as science fiction claims to be a literature of ideas, it makes more profit as a vehicle for outlandish thrills, from the trashy covers of pulp magazines to the massive success of Star Wars.  The Gorn is an attempt at such an appeal, and a departure from the usual human-with-weird-ears-and-forehead approach to aliens.  Instead it's the guy-in-a-suit approach reminiscent of kaiju movies.

This is the carnival-esque novelty appeal (something similar to Gunning's "cinema of attractions") that you find often in early TV.  In other words, "our show might not have the best writing, but it's the only one with a giant lizard man".  "Arena" even acknowledges this by having the other characters watch this fight on the big screen from the bridge of the Starship, shot exactly as we see it -- even in the show's world this fight is a spectacle.  The Metron, the all-powerful beings du jour, represent the other side of Star Trek, the wannabe-cerebral side side prone to morality plays.  They even look angelic (and extremely effeminate), evoking all sorts of age-old theological questions about why God allows war.  (It's apparently to punish us for being violent, at least according to Star Trek.)

This side of the story doesn't really bear too much scrutiny.  The Metron are an alien species that views humans as barbaric and violent, a fairly familiar sci-fi trope, but their solution to intruders is to make them fight to the death and wipe out the loser, which doesn't exactly seem like something a peaceful society would do.  Also, while Kirk eventually chooses mercy, he does so only after blasting the Gorn with a cannon that could have killed it.  It's easy to be peaceful when you have the other guy on the end of your phaser.

This is really quite typical of the Golden Age sci-fi that Star Trek takes its cues from, which often tried to convey rather staid allegorical Lessons (by the time Trek aired there was already a backlash against this in the New Wave movement of SF).  There's an uncomfortable enjambment of didactic, Asimovian science fiction and the raw dumb joy of the pulps here.  And on a further level, there are all the other genres thrown in the stew of Star Trek, at least a few of which I've tried to get to above -- horror, epic, Western.  This is probably why Star Trek was such a cult phenomenon -- the mass audience didn't know how to respond to a show so far outside of the genre templates (even fans of more pure SF shows like The Twilight Zone), but for those who enjoyed the weird alchemy, it was the best thing on television.

While it's easy to pick at the flaws in "Arena" from a distance of forty-plus years, it doesn't change how striking an episode it is.  We don't get a chance to breathe -- like I said about Bob Newhart last week[2], the whole episode is of one cloth, without a B-plot in sight.  Contemporary shows have a comfortable rhythm that usually requires us not to spend too much time in one place or on one subject, making it all the more striking when there is an extended scene (e. g. the long confrontation scene in Mad Men's "The Gypsy and the Hobo").  We can see the alternative in this episode, which is essentially a 50-minute action sequence.  It's unrelenting, it sometimes drags, and it's sometimes uncomfortable, but you nevertheless can't take your eyes from it.

This is what created a cult following that's still talked about (usually jokingly) today.  Star Trek is a show that's easy to mock but impossible to forget.  In this episode Kirk defeats the more physically powerful Gorn by using his chemistry knowledge to construct a cannon.  Science triumphs over brute force -- and strangely enough, the square-jawed conventional leading man Captain Kirk becomes a symbol for the triumphant nerd, the weak but smart triumphing over the big brute.  History was being made, where no man had gone before but many would go after.

Next week: "I love you.  I love being heterosexual with you.  But if for some reason you're not feeling it, just let me know, so I can find another woman to be heterosexual with.  Because I have needs."

[1]This would make Firefly a lot less of an original fusion than it's often described as, although Whedon uses the "space Western" concept a lot more literally.

[2]I'm tempted to say that this unity of plot is characteristic of older TV shows, but I really haven't watched enough to speak definitively.

The Bob Newhart Show 1-17: The Man with the Golden Wrist

Misanthropy is a fine line.  Everybody likes the witty cynic, the one who hates the world in pithy one-liners (as evidence, consider House, which is on like its eighth season or something).  But there's a difference between hating people and acting hatefully towards people.  Or maybe that difference is just panache -- it's the difference between the lovable rogue and the teenager with the gothy T-shirt sneering at you.  Maybe only handsome, clever people are allowe the luxury of being antisocial.  But I think there's a question of technique as well.

This is a line that The Bob Newhart Show has to walk without really letting on that it's doing it.  Newhart is an atypical sitcom protagonist, at least by the standards of his era -- he's quiet, introverted, reasonable, and a good deal older than the rest of the cast (with the exception of Bill Daily, who still looks younger).  Even his acting technique is dramatically different, much more naturalistic than the cartoony, almost hammy approach the others take[1].  He's a man at odds with the world around him, and he acts like one actually would -- surly, good-natured but only to a point, and getting pretty tired of dealing with all these people.  This isn't the cartoonish misanthropy you see in your Houses and Dr. Coxes.  It's more of a real world-weariness.

This dynamic can be used very well to act against the sitcom's social norms, as in the previous episode I looked at.  But at times it can also come to make Bob seem simply mean-spirited.  Sometimes it becomes difficult not to identify with the brightly-coloured world he lives in, cartoony or not, and wonder why he can't just sit back and enjoy it.  "The Man with the Golden Arm" is one of those episodes where he just seems like a grump rejecting the kindness of everyone around him.  Unsympathetic protagonists can certainly work (which is why It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia is one of my favourite shows) but Bob's unlikeability makes the episode hard to sit through -- the format isn't suited for it, and while I hate talking about intentionality, it's hard to imagine that the writers were consciously making their star unbearable.

The plot of the episode revolves around Bob's birthday, and in particular the watch Emily gets him as a present.  Bob likes the gift, but is aghast when he discovers how much it costs.  It's the type of mundane, eveyday plot the series uses to counterbalance its extreme personalities.  It would be easy to go all-out with the watch -- make it absurdly expensive and equipped with futuristic doo-dads -- but it remains a mundane problem.  Later in "The Man with the Golden Arm" we find out that the watch is $1300, which was certainly a lot of money, allegedly a third or so of Emily's salary as a substitute teacher, but not so much as to seem completely unrealistic.  (When was the last time you saw someone's salary stated in exact numbers on TV?  And someone who wasn't ludicrously rich?)

It's perhaps the mundanity of the event that makes Bob's sourness stick out to me.  In the first place, modern gift etiquette frowns on even knowing, much less trying to learn, how expensive a gift you received is[2].  On top of that, it's established early on that the watch isn't returnable -- it's custom-engraved -- so no matter how much Bob makes Emily regret it, the couple isn't going to get their money back.  When Bob keeps going on about how he doesn't need a fancy watch, it seems less like the typical sitcom lead affronted by the irrational world around him and more an asshole chewing someone out for the gift they got him.  Maybe this is simply a gap in cultural mores, but the show's writers are usually deftly able to strike a balance between kindness and sarcasm, so the failure here seems odd.

This prickliness extends to his interactions with the rest of the cast.  Bob is established early in the episode as one of those guys who doesn't want you to acknowledge his birthday, much less make a big deal out of it.  As a "it's-just-Tuesday" type myself, I can relate.  Still, there's a kind of inverted narcissism in the way he goes about it, informing everyone that they know it's his birthday but they shouldn't do anything.  The other characters point this out, so to some degrees it's intentional, but it does make Bob a more obviously flawed protagonist than he's been in the past.  Later in the episode, at a surprise party, he comes off as an utter grouch, attacking everyone around him for the effort they've put into being kind to him, or at least trying to be.

(The one thing I like (perhaps even love) about this scene is how Howard keeps explaining on gag gifts to his date, usually working Bob's profession in for no reason.  "You see, psychologists are not supposed to be afraid of the dark, and a nightlight, that's very funny.")

That this episode works at all is a credit to the talent of the actors involved.  The party guests do their best lame-uncle acts, and it succeeds at conjuring up one of those nightmarish social gatherings that you're obligated to attend but don't enjoy in any way, suffering through the lame jokes of people like Jerry.  This is, of course, old-school talent that's very broad and straightforward, and that can seem hackish next to the seemingly more sophisticated comedy on television today.  (Once again, this may  just be a difference in era, or the fact that dynamite punchlines in the 70s seem tired now.)  But there is an art to that, and that art can be seen in how the cast alchemizes a misjudged script into a fairly acceptable episode.

Even here, however, "The Man with the Golden Wrist" descends a bit too far into cruelty.  Characters like Jerry are meant to be buffoons, but they're buffoons we find funny and want to spend time around.  If we start viewing his jokes and gaffes as unfunny and tiresome -- as Bob does in this
 episode -- then The Bob Newhart Show ceases to be enjoyable.  Sitcoms can be uncomfortabe (contemporary "cringe comedy" being the best example), but at the very least they have to be entertaining.  Peter Bonerz (tee hee hee) does a great job portraying a guy Bob wouldn't want to be around, but in doing so he creates a character that we as viewers don't really want to be around.

So, in the end, Emily agrees to exchange the watch (although the issue of the inscription is seemingly dropped), martial harmony is restored to the Hartley household, and there's a brief allusion to sex and a lot of hooting from the studio audience -- the classic sitcom ending.  The threat to the family unit, even a family unit of two as in Bob Newhart, is resolved, and this reconnection is represented through physical contact both on-screen and off-screen (or so it is implied).  But all of this feels a bit hollow, because the conflict, instead of being a genuine threat to the family unit, is just kind of pointless.

(Throughout this scene I'm distracted by the raw shininess of Emily's shirt.  Man, 70s fashion was the best.)

Part of what made this hard for me as a viewer is that this storyline takes up the entirety of the episode.  Contemporary comedies will frequently seperate the cast into two or three storylines that have nothing to do with each other, just so that everyone gets their time to shine.  This can lead to episodes seeming crowded and rushed, but this episode makes clear why it became standard -- twenty-four straight minutes of the same story starts to feel oppressive, especially when it's a story that is pretty thin to begin with.  I certainly wouldn't mind if a couple of Bob and Emily's arguments had been cut in favour of Howard and his date doing something wacky.

This leads me once again to the feeling that my objections may stem from generation gap moreso than from actual merit.  But I've enjoyed most of the other episodes of the show I've watched, albeit not in the same way as I would enjoy Community and It's Always Sunny.  Besides which, I don't think (or perhaps I just hope) the unavoidable fact that I have a 2012 perspective on a 1973 show means that my perspective is flawed.  In fact, I would go so far as to argue that it isn't any less legitimate than the 1973 perspective.  In the end, there's no such thing as objective taste that you can set aside from the critical biases of the culture we grow up in, and that's what makes criticism a worthwhile endeavour.  In other words, my distaste for the episode may say more about me than it does about the episode itself, but even so I think it's worth saying.

Next Week: "You will not be destroyed.  It would not be... civilized."

[1]This isn't meant as a slight against the rest of the cast -- sometimes you need hammy.

[2]The Office did a similar joke, where Michael got an iPod for the office's $15-maxium Secret Santa, so it's not a completely foreign idea for contemporary times.  It's worth noting, however, that on The Office the inappropriate value of the gift was immediately apparent, whereas Bob actively investigates the watch's true cost, and that in The Office it was a much smaller element of the plot.

The Bob Newhart Show 1-11: I Want To Be Alone

A few days ago I started reading Alone Together by Sherry Turkle.  Turkle's argument, or at least part of it, is that at the same time social interaction becomes ubiquitous because of all the Facebooks and Twitters and what have you, we ironically begin to live in a world where we are isolated from each other and only communicate through our machines.  In this world both togetherness and solitude both fall to the wayside, and what emerges is a kind of social half-life where we are constantly, well, alone together.

I mention this because this is the type of society that creeps up on you unobtrusively until you realize how different things use to be.  And that was exactly my experience watching this episode of The Bob Newhart Show, a sitcom from 1972, back in the day when The <star's name here> show meant something other than a late-night talk show.  The plot concerns Bob's increasing social exhaustion and his desire to be alone.  This is certainly a feeling I've had before, being a natural introvert, but still it shocked me to see this narrative on screen -- you would never see it on a contemporary sitcom.  The young-professionals sitcom still exists, of course (the most notable examples are Friends and How I Met Your Mother, which are good points of comparison) but its characters live in a regime of constant youthful activities, the neverending sociality of the college campus.  These characters are never alone[1], and if anything their worries are about not getting out enough or being cool enough.

So for a sitcom like Bob Newhart -- a mainstream comedy in the age of monoculture, where there were three channels all trying to offend you the least -- to dedicate an episode to a desire for solitude is remarkable and to me a bit alien.  I mean, Bob doesn't even have a particularly busy social life.  He talks to his coworkers during the day, goes home to his wife, and sometimes has a dinner party.  It's not like he's out at the club every night like I assume the cool youths are today[2].

Still, it's not like this is out of character for him either.  Robert Hartley (the why-bother pseudonym for Newhart's character) has always stood a bit apart from the more gleeful and open members of the cast.  Newhart's performance is a big part of it -- instead of delivering the punchlines with a big smile and a hammy voice, he does it quietly and with a rather resigned look on his face.  More often than not he seems like the last sane man on Earth, and one can imagine how that would create a need to be alone.

Of course, the people in this episode do misconstrue Bob's desire for solitude -- not as strangeness, but as a rift between him and his wife Emily, even as (when he checks into a hotel for a weekend) an affair.  But there's no genuine frission here -- Emily supports Bob's desires, and is remarkably unsuspicious.  If Bob and Emily are suggested to have an ideal relationship, then it's a relationship that's fueled by mutual trust and a recognition that even the closest bond can sometimes use time apart.  (It's also worth noting that its a relationship whose major trait seems to be Emily supporting Bob's desires and needs.)  The only difficulty is that the supporting cast -- all flawed and clueless in some kind of way -- don't understand this kind of relationship.

This ties into another part of the show that seems foreign from a modern perspective, which is just how much these people like each other.  MTM Productions, the studio behind Bob Newhart (named for its most famous show, Mary Tyler Moore), didn't really do unlikeable characters -- even the dimwitted Howard and Carol are portrayed as basically good-natured, and all of the characters seem to genuinely like each other.  Even on relatively warm-hearted shows like The Office today, you get a lot more sniping and bickering than you would here.  In part this can make Bob Newhart kind of dull -- everything's so hunky-dory that it's hard to hold any real interest in the plot, because there's no possibility that any threat to these characters' relationship would really come to anything.

To understand why this is requires an understanding of the sitcom genre, especially the warm version of it that MTM specialized in.  As I've mentioned before, the sitcom essentially invites us into its home, encourages us to identify with its characters.  Sitcom characters are the friends we wish we had, the ones that are always funny and never dull or annoying.  They are meant to be basically like us, ordinary people, except ones that we can have a good time with without any commitments or consequences.  To sensationalize a bit, the sitcom is to friendship as porn is to love.

Still, this expectations that sitcom characters are basically like us can make them valuable time capsules -- they embody who we think we are.  For Bob Newhart, the ideal is that of the young urban professional, the childless youth who still has his head on the right track.  Of course, Bob Newhart is not particularly young and not particularly cool.  In fact you could say that the show, premiering in 1972, is in some ways a conservative vision of the younger generation -- witty and indepdenent, but not really challenging the system or involved in social movements.  Bob and Emily don't have children, but aspire to in the future, and other than that they have a very traditional marraige.  The single characters all aspire to the ideal of relationships they present -- for instance, the previous episode is about Jerry getting engaged.

These young characters are also very carefully situated in an urban environment -- in this case, Chicago, a setting the show mentions frequently.  This is not simply Everytown, USA: it's a specific hip city, a place you wish you could be (unless you live in New York).  The opening credits, which show Bob travelling home through an urban environment, specifically foreground this setting, much as The Sopranos' drive-home credits would foreground suburbia decades later.  It's also worth noting that Emily is distinctly not out in this urban environment, but is in the home, the very image of domesticity.

(As an aside, Lorenzo Music is a fantastic freaking name.)

The characters' professions also play an interesting role.  Our main cast consists of a psychologist, a teacher, a pilot, a dentist and a receptionist[3].  These are, for the most part, all important what-do-you-want-to-be-when-you-grow-up type of jobs.  (Although only the weird kids answered "dentist", and the troubled ones "psychologist".)  They're professions that one aspires to, that assure a kind of middle class stability.  Nobody in this show is working in a gas station.  The show doesn't spend much time on the characters' jobs [4] -- in fact, they almost seem tokenary, a random descriptor like names or hair colour, key to establishing identity but not something you really dwell on.  There's an earlier episode where they all do career day, and at times these careers can almost seem like Halloween costumes -- witness Howard's constant pilot suit.  This is awfully familiar to the ways careers are described and deployed in shows like Friends and How I Met Your Mother.

For what it's worth, however, we do see some more of the characters' careers in this episode.  Towards the beginning we see Bob with a patient, a neurotic guy worried about his toupee.  All of Bob's patients so far have had to deal with comedically trivial problems, and while in part this is a simple effect of the genre it's also interesting to note how psychology is neutered to make it sympathetic to a mass audience.  Bob seems to deal with just the niggling little problems that annoy you but which you're ultimately able to accept about yourself -- for instance, the first episode of the series deals with a therapy group for fear of flying.  To venture into dealing with deeper issues and disorders would lead to a world outside of the technicolour cheer of The Bob Newhart Show.  This is not, after all, In Treatment.

We also get a glimpse of Emily here in professional mode, in a rather awkward school meeting scene.  Freed from her wifely role, she actually has a chance to engage in school decisions -- in this case about teaching sex ed to younger children.  It's a rather abrupt political topic to bring up for a show that usually tries to be apolitical, and the circular, almost joke-free dialogue shows the writers' discomfort.  But it's an interesting scene because it gives us an idea of who Emily might be when she's not in her usual role of understanding wife -- her identity removed from her relationship with others.  For her, solitude is not what she needed, but independence is.


All of which leads to a rather uncomfortable question: if this short separation is so good for Bob and Emily, might it not be a permanent good idea?  It's a rare sitcom acknowledgement that there are downsides to marraige, which go beyond the usual "please, take my wife" jokes.  Marraige is, after all, a state of never being alone and never being fully independent -- and that can be damaging.  In its own subdued, moderate way, "I Want To Be Alone" calls into question the ideology of compulsive sociality Turkle finds so disturbing, in part intentionally and in part just as an artifact of a different time.

Next Week: Plot twists abound on Homeland.

[1]Of course, this is in large part due to how central dialogue is to the entire sitcom enterprise -- you can't exactly have dialogue with just one person.  But I wonder if this simple formal fact has contributed a lot to the devaluing of solitude and introversion.

[2]If I sound like a bitter loner during this entry it's because, well, I am one.

[3]Okay, Carol the receptionist doesn't quite fit into this argument, but at the very least it's a white-collar job.

[4]I understand that later episodes delve a lot more into Bob's practice, but I haven't reached that point in my viewing yet.