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.