Wilfred 2-10: Honesty

The first season of Wilfred was substantially foused on Ryan's relationship with Jenna.  Not only is Jenna the impetus for the entire series, being the one who asks Ryan to look after Wilfred, but many first-season episodes were driven by Ryan's attempts to get close to Jenna or split her and Drew up.  In the second season, however, she's taken a bit of a backseat, to the point that it began to seem that every episode started with Wilfred explaining how Jenna was on vacation.  This was largely beneficial to the show, as Jenna doesn't really have that much comedic potential and the possible scenarios surrounding her were more or less exhausted in the first season.  But when she returns in "Honesty", not as a supporting character but a major one, it does feel as though Wilfred has returned to its roots.

This is actually the kind of episode that feels as though it should have been much earlier in the season, dealing with the fallout of the first season finale and not the barely-mentioned events of the second season thus far[1].  It relies heavily on knowledge of the cascading series of disasters that closed out the first season, which are a bit cloudy in even my memory.  On the other hand, this does fit into this season's overall arc of Ryan making amends and inching closer to becoming a normal human being.

The impetus of the plot is Jenna's attempt at regaining her journalistic credibility, but this quickly is transferred over to Ryan's own personal neuroses.  The genuine favour she asks of him would involve him talking with his father, one of Ryan's prevailing hang-ups, so of course that doesn't happen.  But Ryan's failure to overcome this fear for the girl he likes leads him into a guilt-driven attempt to fabricate a story, which naturally spirals into absurdity.

So far this is par for the course.  This is the basic comedic machine of the series: Jenna (sometimes replaced by Kristen or Amanda) incites Ryan to action, usually through guilt, and his errant attempts at making her happy are inflamed and made both absurd and disastrous by the intervention of Wilfred.  This is a very traditional sitcom structure, and its absurdism and dark comedy Wilfred is a very traditional comedy, right down to the moral of the week.  While you would never see a plotline involving the main character pretending to be a deranged cat murderer on, say, The Cosby Show, the underlying beats of the story -- for instance, the moment where Jenna thanks Ryan for his attempts to help but only aggravates his guilt for creating the problem -- are pretty similar.

That moral of the week is a little skewed here, however.  On the surface the story reinforces the preschool lesson about honesty being the best policy -- Ryan and Jenna finally come clean about their respective misdeeds, and it ultimately leads to a better relationship and less guilt.  What's more, this honesty also allows us as an audience to see the characters in a new way, in particular Jenna's admission that she was consciously manipulating Ryan throughout the first season.  This isn't really novel -- the hot girl who takes advantage of the weird guy with a crush on her is a well-worn one, probably driven by the tendency of screenwriters to be frustrated weird guys -- but it does suggest a sense of interiority that was absent from Jenna before.

But there's still a great deal of deceit that goes on and remains uncorrected at the end of the episode.  Jenna still has no idea that when Ryan looks at her dog he sees a foul-mouthed Australian in an animal suit.  If we look at illusion as a kind of metaphysical deceit, then Ryan still has no idea whether he can see Wilfred honestly, and Wilfred himself is a cauldron of deceit and tricks (as Ryan argues early in this episode, Wilfred lies to him all the time).  On a smaller scale, Jenna ends the episode without ever learning about Ryan's connection with the cat kidnappings or that Ryan never called his father.

So what's the take-away here?  Is the lesson that deception and illusion are wrong except for when they work out for the best, a la A Midsummer Night's Dream?  Is it just haphazard plotting undercutting the alleged larger message?  Neither explanation really satisfies me.

Rather, I think this reflects on Wilfred's idea of morality, which is probably most closely akin to Catholicism.  Honesty is not, in this episode, telling the absolute truth about everything.  Rather, honesty is about confession.  Ryan only can be honest by admitting that he is a sinner and asking for forgiveness.  Many other episodes of Wilfred follow the model of confession -- Ryan at first denies that he's doing anything wrong or suffering from any kind of sin (past episode titles: "Avoidance", "Anger", "Pride", "Fear"), and is healed by admitting his weakness in the episode's conclusion.

The Catholicism comparison also highlights why guilt is such an important driving device.  (This might come off as a joke, but I don't really mean it that way.)  Wilfred is the human (er, canine) embodiment of guilt, the voice in the back of your head always suggesting that you aren't living your life according to the moral code that you believe in.  This would explain the sometimes contradictory nature of the show's "lessons" -- guilt can get you no matter what you do, and there can even be paradoxical guilt over the failure to embrace new-age morality about putting the past behind you and living life to its fullest, which Wilfred advocates in the episodes where he isn't hounding Ryan for past misdeeds.  So maybe Wilfred isn't the figure of unrivaled id that he's usually taken for, but a strange kind of conscience (a superego, to go all Freudian).  If this is true, it's a conscience that is, perhaps like real consciences, constantly unsatisfied.  But the series suggests that maybe this kind of thinking can lead to positive results after all.

In this episode, everything works out because of Ryan's one act of honesty.  Now knowing what she experienced, Jenna is able to use that experience to sell a potentially hokey "investigative report" on pot candy.  The deceit that Ryan formerly embodied is transferred to the inanimate stick of candy.  (Its deceitful, destructive high is carefully separated from and contrasted with the open, inhibition-lowering pot that Ryan and Wilfred smoke at the end of almost every episode.)  Jenna regains her job, Ryan regains her friendship, and things inch closer to, if not a happy ending, at least the basically stable first-season status quo.

But of course, there are Ryan's still-unrevealed deceits, his inability to confront his father, and his potential insanity.  Wilfred's central characters only progress through two steps forward and one step back.  But that is, the show suggests, enough.

Next week: "A Challenge From the Devil! Fudo, Be the Demon for Those You Love!!"

[1]This along with Jenna's general scarcity this season is enough to make me suspect that there were some scheduling issues with Fiona Gubelmann, although I have no idea what else she has going on.

Wilfred 1-10: Isolation

Wilfred is kind of bewildering until you realize it's a children's show for adults. And I mean that not in the Pixar way of "it's for kids, but there'll be an artsy first act and some double entendres for the grown-ups". Despite its often lewd humour, the plot of Wilfred goes something like this: an inexperienced young person encounters a talking animal that only he can see, and the animal teaches him life lessons while engaging in wacky misadventures. Seriously, I think that's also the plot of Blue's Clues. (Calvin and Hobbes too, while we're at it, although Hobbes doesn't teach too many life lessons.)

But there's also something warped about this structure, or at least its application to an adult protagonist. Children are supposed to have imaginary friends, but in adults it's considered a sign of psychosis, as was highlighted in the previous episode "Compassion". And Wilfred is kind of forced to cover its earnest morals with a thick layer of irony and soft humour, so as not to fully fall into that moralistic standpoint everyone learned to hate as a child. We all value (or know we're supposed to value) things like compassion and friendship, so instead of genuinely arguing for these Wilfred takes the structure of a morality lesson and twists it to the point where often the lesson is inverted or lost altogether. Although it claims the mantle much less vocally than something like Wonder Showzen, it is a deconstructive twist on children's television all the same.

"Isolation" begins, like all of its predecessors, with an epigraph. In a way the epigraph is like the "this week on" pre-credits segments on old TV shows, or the "tell 'em what you're gonna tell 'em" portion of a sermon. Here we get the lesson straight, without the machinations of plot and humour: everything that happens afterwards is a repetition or subversion of this message. I could copy out the quote here, but taking a screencap is marginally less effort and looks prettier, so here you go:

The Gortari quote is, with this (lack of) context, a bit ambiguous. Is isolation self-defeating because the real world always intrudes and shapes us? If so, it's hard to argue with. However, Ryan's isolation in the show is not forcibly interrupted by the outside world but is something he has to force himself to end, so it would seem that Wilfred is saying that isolation is possible, just bad -- something I have to take issue with. At the risk of sounding like a TV Troper here, everyone has different levels of desire for social contact, and condemning any of them is just needlessly judgemental. Of course, it's good to have bonds with other people, but that doesn't mean there's something wrong with you if you aren't at some sort of party every night. But in Wilfred, Ryan's friendlessness is portrayed as a sign of his broken spirit and failure to transition to adulthood, just as his unemployment and (to a lesser extent) pot habit is.

What works here is that "Isolation" is drawing on the inherent smallness of TV social circles. I recently watched through Undeclared and it's hard not to notice that, in contrast to the sprawling social circles of real-life college kids, these ones just hang out with the same five other people all the time. This is a product of limited cast budget and limited time for character development, but unless we imagine that these characters have plenty of other friends and acquaintances off-screen it's unrealistic, a difficulty inherent in the medium of not just television but fiction in general. This is doubly true for Wilfred, which has just 3-4 regular cast members (Fiona Gubelman and Dorian Brown seem to trade off cast member status, and as I'll mention later play basically the same role.) We only see Ryan interacting with Wilfred and humans that are required for the plot -- the question of "doesn't this guy have any friends?" kind of inevitably comes up.

I should also note that, much as the plots frequently undercut the expressed moral of the episode, this opening sequence throws the truth of the quotes it's espousing into question. The music is a kind of soft saccharine lilting, calling to mind childishness and naivete. The quote is typed in a typewriter-ish font (Courier New?) that calls to mind bookish officiality, and is directly contrasted with the more jagged font that the series title appears in. The quote is what we're supposed to learn, but Wilfred (both the series and the character) are something else, and have a wild nature that cannot be fully contained by the officiousness of prescribed morals.

Anyway, now that I've spent four paragraphs on the ten-second title card, let's move into the actual episode. Ryan wakes up abruptly in his basement, bong in hands, as though he's just awakened from a nightmare, although the audience is not privy to what this dream is. Ryan is woken up from his stupor both literally and figuratively by Jenna and her attempt to coax him out of his house. Ryan's retreat into solitude is not a part of "Isolation", which deals mainly with his attempt to escape said solitude, but it has been a part of the previous nine episodes: every episode ends with Ryan in the same basement he wakes up in at the start of "Isolation", doing the now-obligatory credits gags while smoking up with Wilfred. This has become as comfortable a setting for the audience as it has for Ryan. However, immediately "Isolation" hits us with the idea that this is actually a sad state to be in: the visual contrast is immediately established between Jenna's outside world, with its bright colours and sunshine, and the dingy interior world of Ryan. This is also reflected in the bodies of the two: Jenna's is model-perfect, while Ryan's is stained and dingy.




The plot of the episode quickly unfolds from there: the neighbourhood is having a block party, and Jenna and Wilfred implore Ryan to come in order to reconnect with other people. Ryan seems to live in a world of neighbourhood togetherness and community that harkens back to a lost golden age, with everyone else in the neighbourhood knowing each other and coming together for events. The directorial and cinematographical world of Wilfred is one straight out of a 50s real estate ad, although it's been in the background until now. Everything feels a little artificial, a little plastic, a little off-kilter. Ryan's descent into insanity may be justified by him being the last normal man in an abnormal world, where everyone is either grotesquely flawed (as antagonists in previous episodes have been) or Ken-and-Barbie perfect. With only two episode directors in the eleven episodes it's aired so far, it's obvious that Wilfred is a show that lays claim to a strong directorial voice, and the weird, almost cartoonish world of extremes it lives in is a big part of that voice.

The epitome of this is Jenna herself, a little angel who seems dedicated to bringing Ryan up into maturity. Like the other female lead, Ryan's sister Kristen, she has no interiority or character arc other than her relationship with Ryan. Jenna and Kristen seem to play the roles of good cop and bad cop -- Jenna gently nurtures Ryan and encourages him towards maturity with the carrot of her love, while Kristen is the nag who berates him for his failure to join the adult world. These are basically the two sides of the mother figure -- the sweet woman who loves you unconditionally, and the monster who is constantly demanding things of you, now neatly divided into two seperate women. The conflation of the roles of mother and lover, where the girlfriend is supposed to elevate her boyfriend and make him into an adult, has only become popular recently but is already noxiously familiar. We can probably blame a lot of that on Judd Apatow and company, but the elevation of masculine immaturity to an ideal comes from many angles. Wilfred at least views this immaturity as a problem -- there are really few points where we're supposed to think Ryan is cool, unlike your average Seth Rogen character -- but women are once again the solution to this problem instead of people in and of themselves.

Still, if Wilfred has yet to really complicate its matronly ladies, it quickly complicates the idea of suburban community established in the early parts of this episode.  After all of the cars on the block except his are broken into, the community begins ostracizing Ryan, accusing him of being the thief.  Community, "Isolation" suggests, is made up as much by who's left out as who's included.  There's a dark side to all the neighbourly togetherness -- after all, a friendly village is one scapegoat away from a lynch mob, and the scorn of those around you requires no definite evidence to provoke.  The outsider is an automatic target, as the moral community quickly gives way to community equaling morality.  At the end of the episode the robberies are blamed on a homeless man and Ryan is accepted into the community -- but we as an audience can't quite accept this as a happy ending.  For one thing, the community we see him so happily embracing is the same one that was one step short of a lynch mob earlier in the episode.



Moreover, we're not really sure who was responsible for the break-ins in the first place.  It's suggested that it was Wilfred, attempting to frame Ryan and then later a child who was bothering him, but what does that really mean?  If we accept the obvious realistic interpretation of the series' premise -- that Wilfred is a hallucination Ryan is having to cope with his disappointing life -- then that means it had to be Ryan who did it after all, in some kind of fugue state.  The story then becomes one of a community choosing to blame the destitute as a scapegoat, ignoring the increasingly unstable psychotic within their midst.  The other option is that Wilfred is in some way real, and the series is essentially an instance of magic realism.  This raises more questions then it answers, however.  Or it could have really been the homeless guy all along, and Ryan's subconsciousness is just looking for a way to blame himself.  We never leave Ryan's perspective since we never see Wilfred as just a dog, so the question of what "really" happened is insoluable.  Although the episode has a textbook resolution, in the end it just leaves things murkier.  (The next episode of the series, "Doubt", takes this effect and runs with it.)

All of this is a part of Wilfred's increasing exploration of its own premise.  The first several episodes were content to run standard plotlines with the weirdness factors -- a guy in a dog suit, the Stepford-ness of the world -- taken for granted.  The weirdness was presented as though ti were perfectly natural, making it even more weird.  A lot of the jokes in the show are based off the sudden reappearance of the premise -- Wilfred looks like a human, and we slip into treating him as a human character, but suddenly he'll do something incredibly canine, rendered absurd by his human appearance and our ability to hear a superficially human thought pattern.  The plots of the episodes have caught up to the jokes in exploiting the show's premise -- the last episode raised the question of Ryan's insanity, "Isolation" questions the reality the show presents, and "Doubt" builds on what's come before while adding another layer of weirdness to everything.

At some point, usually towards the end of its first season, a show has to look back on its elevator-pitch premise and decide whether it still wants to be that show anymore.  Lots of good shows have tried to move away from their flashier ideas and into the kind of quiet workmanship that doesn't attract a bunch of fans but keeps them there (the examples that immediately spring to mind are Six Feet Under and Rubicon, and allegedly Cougartown does this too).  On the other hand, you can double down on your original idea, really taking it apart and seeing all the ramifications of it.  Wilfred seems to have opted for the latter, and is doing it more or less fluently, although it's still too early to tell how everything is going to turn out.  Right now Wilfred is just in the "okay" block of television, something I smile at but don't often laugh, a show I watch every week but don't spend much time thinking about outside of it.  This isn't neccesarily a bad place to be: most TV shows fall below that bar.  But it's not a place you can linger for long, and Wilfred might be finally making its grasp for greatness.

Next Week: No. 6 and the banality of dystopia.