Saturday Night Live 1-16: Anthony Perkins

By this point in its first season Saturday Night Live (at this point still called Saturday Night or NBC's Saturday Night) had become a phenomenon.  It drew attention, like MAD Magazine did in the 1950s, at least in part for being the only game in town for idiosyncrasy and subversiveness.  This was the era before cable, when everything on television was focus-grouped to death and aimed at a mass audience -- so to see something so obviously low-budget, with an offbeat sense of humour and an almost personal edge, in an inhospitable timeslot.  It was maybe the first show to cultivate the kind of insider atmosphere that contemporary favourites like It's Always Sunny or Community rely on.  Gags continued from week to week, and others were based on the show's established formula -- if you were just tuning in for the first time, a line like "Good evening, I'm not" makes no sense, but if you're familiar with the show it's a hilarious show on Chevy Chase's usual Weekend Update intro.

But at this point the show was expanding beyond its low-budget cult audience, and already transforming into the starmaking institution we know it as today.  The Not Ready For Primetime Players, who originally seemed to just be time-fillers in between guests, were now becoming stars in their own right.  This extends to the opening credits: whereas earlier the actors' names just flashed quickly on screen, now everyone gets their own chryon and their name announced, each one given the same billing as the guests.


At this point a show as knowing and audience-focused as the early Saturday Night Live was had to address this newfound fame.  The opening segment, in which an extended skit ends in Chevy Chase taking a scary fall and then welcoming everybody to the show, increasingly becomes metafictional, with the "out of character" actors talking about the upcoming fall.  In the opening segment this week we have Chase addressing allegations that the show relies on a lot of filler to fill out its 90-minute timeframe (a fair complaint), and doing so in as longwinded a manner as possible.

This is actually a pretty subtle joke, at least by 70s-television-standards.  Nothing Chase says seems like deliberate filler, so it takes a little while to notice his longwindedness -- but once it does, it's much more funny than the simple irony of the joke would suggest.  And then Chase does the fall in mid-speech, which is as usual a masterpiece of physical comedy.  This is what made SNL a show that could appeal to a mass audience as well as a cult one -- and perhaps what made it so easy to transition into a show targeting the mainstream -- it would talk circles around the obvious cheap laugh, make it a source of meta-humour, but in the end give you the cheap laugh, in this case a low-comedy pratfall, anyway.

I'm not going to go through the show segment-by-segment like I did for Jimmy Fallon last week, mainly because I'm not insane.  Instead, I want to talk about the main categories the segments break down into.  The first one, which can be pretty safely filed away in a corner, is the musical guest.  Although it quickly became more or less a sketch comedy show, Saturday Night Live was originally conceived as a kind of variety show, and the musical segments would be a key part of this -- witness the second episode, which was mostly devoted to a Simon & Garfunkel reunion.  However, they seem out of place in this version of the show, the kind of filler that Chevy Chase jokingly admitted to in the opening.

Despite this, they've remained an essential part of SNL's makeup, and are even more often than not what generates buzz for the usually bland modern edition (e.g. Lana Del Rey's panned performance from a couple weeks ago).  A part of this is just its convenience as a venue to launch or promote music, but in a way it also appeals to the zeitgeist-embodying (or zeitgeist-forming) nature of the show.  Going through these older episodes involves a tour of the B-list musical stars of 1976, some hidden gems (Janis Ian!) others justly forgotten (this week's guest, Betty Carter, more or less falls into this category.)  For better or for worse, the musical guests of Saturday Night Live are great at preserving the pop-cultural detritus of a previous year in amber.

The celebrity hosts are a similar part of this zeitgeist, although they seem more scattershot on this first season, composing of everything from comic greats (George Carlin and Richard Pryor have both stopped by at this point) to out-of-work actors.  Every host seems to treat the show a bit differently: some treat it as just another performance, others as a chance to goof off out-of-character.  In both cases tonight's host, Anthony Perkins, falls into the latter category.  Perkins is of course famous for portraying Norman Bates in Psycho, but that was 16 years prior to this episode, so at this point he's in permanent "Whatever happened to..." category.

Perkins' presence is mainly an excuse for the show to do a bunch of Psycho jokes, although he does have a funny opening monologue -- a boring thank-you speech where he periodically does something weird, like peel off a bandage mid-speech or eat a fly.  This is another instance of the show insisting on patience from its audience, making them wait a long time for a fairly subdued joke, like the creepy happiness Perkins expresses at feeling the bandage pull his hairs out.


Of course, it's still not particularly highbrow, but I can't help but think that today Perkins would be jumping on a couch and laughing maniacally by the end of the sketch.  He performs in several of the show's sketches, and while he's not a great comedian, he does seem to be having fun -- and that's infectious.  The genuine joy of performance is something that commercial TV rarely captures, and that may be part of what made Saturday Night Live such a hit.  While he may not be the most memorable host, Perkins fulfilled the roll of the guest host, which is giving each episode a sense of individual identity and specialness -- something that's quite important, given how repetitive the comedy sketches can be.

Far from hurting the show, this repetition is a source of its humour.  Once again displaying remarkable patience, Saturday Night Live is content to make the same joke several weeks in a row, until they vary it to hilarious effect -- or just keep repeating it, making it funnier each time, such as news anchor Chevy Chase announcing every week that Francisco Franco is still dead.  (Most of these recurring or repeating jokes occur in the context of Weekend Update.)  Of course, not every instance of this works -- the repeated fake ads, or the formula of the Muppet segments[1] come to mind -- but it's still a remarkable formal innovation, one that hasn't really been taken up and developed further over the years.

Of course, the comedy is what everyone came for.  What's notable more than anything is the variety of humour on an average episode of the show: there are political jokes, broad gags like movie parodies and physical humour, risque sexual jokes (a sketch about Gilda Radner hiring a dominatrix to clean her house), home-movie strangeness, and stupid puns.  And yet somehow, it all has a distinct voice behind it, one that's just a little weird but not too weird that it isn't approachable, and that utterly refuses to take itself seriously.

It's possible to see in the early Saturday Night Live the roots of all of today's cutting-edge comedy -- Weekend Update has transformed into The Daily Show, the more bizarre segments into Tim and Eric, the hyperactive pop-culture jokes into Community, and so on and so forth.  And it accomplishes all of this without any radical formal innovation or even exceptionally great jokes.  Instead it introduced a new aesthetic -- cheap, personal, and weird -- that has proved an enormously fruitful one.  It's sort of insane how much modern comedy owes to a half-hearted attempt to program Saturday nights in the 1970s.

Next Week: "I'll get some overalls and some earthworms."

[1] Oh yeah, there were Muppets on here too.  Jim Henson created grotesque adult-oriented Muppets for the first season of the show, but they didn't really catch on, and were quickly axed.  The Muppet segments weren't terrible, but they were kind of sitcommy, and didn't really jive with the weirdness going on around them (and for the Muppets, that's saying something.)  This is reflected metafictionally in this episode, as the Muppets go around campaigning for airtime and other roles, and finally seem to get it... only for the credits to roll.  At this point Saturday Night Live was on such a roll that it could even make lemonade out of its failures.

Late Night with Jimmy Fallon 1/30/12: "Glenn Close, Emmy Rossum"

Jimmy Fallon raises the interesting question of how funny a late night talk show host has to be.  The late-night format has long settled into a format of half comedy, half celebrity adulation/promotion, and Fallon is undeniably talented at the latter part.  He has a kind of energy and clueless enthusiasm that makes you think that every night is going to be a great show, and that he's genuinely excited to be doing another interview with the Shameless people or some guy from Jersey Shore.  The value of hype men to society is very questionable, but it is a kind of skill, and Fallon has it.

As for the comedy... well, it's acceptable and inoffensive, and that's kind of the problem.  The late-night joke format is as ossified as the format of the shows itself.  The host describes a current event, makes a decent but kind of obvious joke about it, sometimes the sidekick adds in a comment, and then it's onto the next topic.  (Some of Fallon's desk segments, like "Pros and Cons", follow a similar format.)  The main issue is that the set-up to joke ratio is way out of skew (at least for the level of reward the jokes give), and the kind of ADD flitting from one news topic to another without any semblance of transitions.  It's not that all of the jokes are bad, but at the same time it feels as though this part of the show only exists because a late-night show has to have it.  The set is even dressed up to have an almost archaic, Vaudevillian look.

But of course, a late night show is designed to be conventional and inoffensive, the kind of wind-down fare you can watch before bed (or possibly fall asleep to) without having to think about.  There's nothing wrong with that function, and in some ways it's comforting to think about the continuity of comedians doing essentially the same show all the way back to the 1960s.  I'm not sure how many people watch TV this way anymore, but most nights on a network are structured in a distinct arc, starting off with some easy-to-digest comedy, moving into a (theoretically) more involving drama, and finishing off with news and a late-night show to wind down.  It's a full emotional experience you can get without leaving your couch all night.  And Late Night with Jimmy Fallon perhaps deserves to be judged in this context: I've found I enjoy it a lot more the later in the day I watch it [1].  I watched this episode at 2 AM and loved it.

The second segment is probably the most "pure" comedy segment, in that it's more devoted to getting laughs than fitting into late-night conventions, and it's easily the funniest part of the show.  In what's apparently some kind of recurring segment, Fallon presents viewers with a "do not read" list, presenting the goofiest titles the writers could find on Amazon.  This segment is a great fit for Fallon because it doesn't really require him to be funny, which he has trouble doing consistently -- the books, a product of the naturally absurd world of self-publishing, do the work for him.

This is followed by another recurring segment, "Battle of the Instant Bands", in which thrown-together audience members with musical talent have to come up with a song in a short amount of time.  (Normally I would wonder about the odds of getting two bands' worth of musicians in the studio audience, but then again, this is New York.)  Of course, the actual interesting part of this process -- the chaotic attempts to come up with a song and gel as some sort of group -- is not televised.  Instead, all we get is the final, remarkably polished performance.

This probably says something about the show: any moments that aren't a pure performance are excised.  Jimmy Fallon, and the larger tradition he belongs to, exists in a world where everyone is made-up and beautiful and everything is the finished product, with no indication of process or progress.  Everything is already great.  Even the audience members seem a little larger than life, apparently being sent from Hipster Central Casting.  I would almost say that it was fixed but, again, this is New York.

Oh, and the worse band wins because they have a cute girl and pandered, based on an audience applause-o-meter.  It reminds me of the one time I went to the Apollo Theatre, and this is another moment where the vaudeville routes of the show poke through.  This isn't really a self-reflexive version of the late night show a la Ferguson or early Letterman.  Rather, it's very conscious of the tradition it belongs to, and respectfully submits itself as a follower of tradition instead of mocking or questioning it as other shows do.  In some ways this makes Jimmy Fallon frustratingly conservative, unwilling to ditch late-night staples that don't really work well here [2].  But at the very least it has a deep knowledge of its forebearers and has learned from them, which we can possibly attribute to showbiz veteran and producer Lorne Michaels.

After this we get into the interview segments. The interview is in many ways the main draw of the show: it's what they announce at the top of the hour, and what usually takes up the most airtime (although this episode is more heavily waited towards host segments). It's worth noting, however, that this is a distinctly neutered version the interview as a form. It's more of a friendly chat with a minor celebrity, which segues into an advertisement for whatever the celebrity is currently involved in. So when Fallon sits down with Glenn Close, it's more or less a given that he's not going to ask her much about her craft as an actor, or roles she's done less recently, and that nobody will mention the rocky critical reception of her pet project Albert Nobbs. This is not so much a criticism as an observation that the performative aesthetic extends here: on late night, everyone is awesome, and no one ever makes a bad film.

These interviews are then a service mainly to the subject and not the audience. (The subjects of the interview aren't even described as such – the official terminology is “guest”.) But the audience, at least the ideal audience imagined by the genre – which is not too different from the ideal audience of the National Enquirer – does get something from this, which explains the format's enduring popularity. There's the idea that this is the celebrity in their natural form, not performing in one role or the other or having to justify themselves as they would in a harsher interview. Instead, the illusion is that the host, and by extension the audience, is just hanging out with this famous person – cracking jokes, playing games, talking about trivial things. Much like many sitcoms, it's a fantasy of friendship, although more of an impossible dream than, say, Friends.

Of course, on the talk show circuit the guests are playing a role no less than they are in their films: it's ultimately a performative space. But Glenn Close is playing the character Glenn Close[3], as opposed to the character of Albert Nobbs or Monica Rawlings or whatever, and that character is designed to be fun to (virtually) hang out with. So there's a pleasure for the audience even if they're aware that the interview is a disguised advertisement.

For the night's biggest guest Fallon usually takes a second segment to play a game with them, which usually seems to be some variant of charades. This is usually more entertaining than another five minutes of interview would be, and it furthers the goal of putting these celebrities in a seemingly casual hang-out setting. In this episode's variant, Glenn Close and her makeup-artist husband work magic on Jimmy's face. This is actually quite a well set-up gag: we're lead to expect an Albert Nobbs-level transformation, and then the chair turns around to reveal... Jimmy Fallon with a bunch of pieces of tape stuck to his face. It's a good joke, riffing off the silliness of the transformation trope, so good that they do it again with Glenn Close to diminishing returns (although it's technically better executed the second time around.)

After this there's an interview with Emmy Rossum, which sort of shows the pitfalls of this kind of interview.  Once again, we have the compulsive friendliness, which turns the short interview into mostly Rossum talking about her flight.  You could overhear the exact same conversation on the bus, and with lesser celebrities the hanging-out factor is a lot less appealing.  No one is going to say "Holy shit, it's like I'm actually chilling out with Emmy freaking Rossum."  This segment is over with in a blink, and other than Rossum's beauty there's not much to interest one in her or in the show she's there to promote, Shameless.  It's inoffensive, but on the other hand the segment is a waste of five minutes or however long it lasts.


The show closes out with a musical performance from Nada Surf.  If there's one thing that could be said to distinguish Fallon from his late-night competitors, it's the emphasis on music, which can be seen in both the house band (The Roots!) and his frequent musical guests who are actually the kind of hip up-and-coming artists that both (a)could genuinely use the exposure and (b)help give some cred to the show, which in most other ways is rather square and credulous.  Musical performance is always a little visually uninteresting, but not more so than an interview.  I do have to wonder, though, what's up with the guys in the crowd behind the band.  Did they watch the whole show from there?  Did they get special stare-at-our-musical-guests'-backs tickets?

(Unfortunately I couldn't find a good screencap of these strange individuals.)

All in all a perfectly harmless and mostly entertaining hour of television.  Nothing overstays its welcome, and one is never bored or forced to think.  But is it okay for art -- and we have to consider television to be art -- to be harmless?

That's a loaded question, of course -- Late Night with Jimmy Fallon shares little more than a medium with something like Breaking Bad, and asking it to be revelatory is like holding your morning newspaper to the standards of a literary novel.  The function these shows exist to serve -- a kind of mental cleansing before bed -- is perhaps an important one, even if it's the opposite of intellectual stimulation.  Of course, a lot of stuff can get slipped by you when you're not thinking, so it's important to consider the content of these shows even when they present themselves as trivial.  A critic has to walk a fine line between taking a show on its own terms and dragging it out of the way it wants to be defined.  So I think it's possible to define Fallon as both a fun hang-out show and a vapid cog in the great machine celebrity industry -- and it would be possible to excise either without destroying the show, and the genre it belongs to, completely.

Next week: "Live, from New York... it's Saturday Night!"

[1]Of course, this might be what makes late night shows such an effective advertisement for movies, TV, and other media properties -- they get you when your critical faculties are shutting off.

[2]The show would be much better, for instance, if they ditched the opening monologue and replaced it with perhaps another musical performance.  Hey, maybe The Roots could play a full song once.  That would be cool.

[3]In other words, the interview is about as real as those interviews you see at the start of porn films where the girl talks about how excited she is to do double anal. Er, or so I've heard.

Another 2: Blueprint

The episode titles of horror anime series Another have thus far suggested a drawing in process: "Rough sketch", "Blueprint", "Bonework".  It seems to say a lot about the series's idea of its early episodes, which are just groundwork being laid for what will presumably be the horrific events to follow.  As such, it's hard to really write about "Blueprint", because quite frankly nothing happens in it.  Our protagonist sees Mei, mysterious eyepatch girl, a few more times and has some cryptic conversations with her.  He has some dull conversations with his other classmates, and we get further evidence that they're hiding something from him.  He follows Mei to a creepy doll shop, and she offers to show him what's under her eyepatch, which is presumably not an empty eye socket.  Then, just as it looks like something's about to happen, the episode ends.

Perhaps the horror genre is difficult to plug into a serialized television narrative.  The arc of a horror film, in which slight cracks in a mundane normalcy eventually grow to threaten everyone within, doesn't fit in with the repeating threats that fit a serialized format.  For example, in The Exorcist almost the entire first half of the film is mostly mundane domestic drama with only a few hints that something beyond the rational is happening.  Imagine if you chopped that film up into half-hour segments and aired it as a TV miniseries.  Wouldn't those first couple of episodes be awful television?

Similarly, most TV horror shows[1] spend about half their runtime as rather dull affairs, with only gradual signs of the oncoming terror.  The philosophy of this blog is that an individual TV episode has to stand up as a piece of work on its own, in addition to how it fits into the series' larger narrative -- and from this perspective, most horror shows fail the task.  (David Simon and a lot of other people would disagree with this, but I think it's the only tenable position given the format and how it's delivered.)  Of course, some shows manage it -- Shiki was pretty good on the whole, although the first half still dragged a bit -- but it's a problem that most don't really deal with.

Of course, what you do have in these episodes is atmosphere.  The banal conversations with classmates and focus on routine and regularity recall nothing so much as the high school slice-of-life anime, a strangely popular genre that has no real analogue in American TV [2].  I don't want to call it an uniquely Japanese genre, because that calls to mind all kinds of quasi-racist stereotypes, but the focus on atmosphere and setting almost to the exclusion of plot is something that I've only encountered in Japanese media.  Of course, the cynical explanation for this genre's popularity is that it usually involves hordes of cute teenage girls, sometimes revolving around a nondescript male love interest.  Another falls into this category as well, admittedly, and is produced by P. A. Works, notorious creators of cute-girl fluff like last year's Hanasaku Iroha.

But I think there's something more than that at work here.  The slice of life genre fundamentally is about imagining a kind of utopian space that can be inhabited not just during moments of extraordinary passion but in mundane, day-to-day existence.  This space is constructed in such a way that the viewer feels he is visiting it simply by watching.  I don't want to discount the pleasures such a space can bring, or the skill that goes into crafting it.  Steins;gate spent much of its first half building such a space, in its community of outcasts, and I found that quite effective.

The horror in Another, then, is not one that stems from underlying social cracks.  Instead, it's a threat to the idyllic society of the high school -- a society that has its deep secrets, but is basically cohesive as long as nobody starts poking around.  Another wants to present a slice of life world that horror threatens, much in the same way that Twin Peaks presents a small-town sitcom world where murders start breaking out.  But it doesn't go about developing this world well -- we get the mundanity, but none of the charm that would make us care about this small town.  The characters are all ciphers with vague personalities.  Other than hairstyle, it's hard to tell them apart.

I want to go beyond judging quality, as I find that conversation mostly boring.  Another is mediocre.  Most television is mediocre, and there's not much interesting about mediocrity.  There are, however, some interesting things that Another brings to the table, and they emerge not from the fairly unimaginative minds of its creators[3] but from the unintentional conflict between genre and medium.

Take the motif of dolls.  This is a reoccurring image in Another, so much so that during the first episode there were rapid, extradiegetic cuts away from the show's story to still images of dolls.  The final scene of "Blueprint", and its most interesting, takes place in a doll shop.  Of course, dolls have long been associated with horror.  Freud argued that they were a prime example of the uncanny  because they resembled humans but at the same time weren't quite human, mixing the lifelike and the artificial in a way our minds can't quite deal with.  And the dolls in Another are especially creepy, or at least they're supposed to be.  We even go into the basement, to see the more-uncanny spare parts of dolls in progress.

Another specifically calls attention to this uncanny aspect of dolls.  We run into a doll that looks eerily like Mei, a fact that she remarks on.  The horror comes, or is supposed to come, from the breaking down of the barrier between living and non-living.  And to a certain degree this scene is effective at being creepy, probably the most successful the series has been at being creepy so far, although that may be through the blunt-force application of darkness and eerie music more than anything else.

However, this use of the uncanny seems to conflict with the anime medium.  Like dolls, anime characters are human but not human, with proportions and features just slightly out of whack -- and yet we're asked to identify with them as full, canny, nonhorrific humans.  And I'm okay with that, although it does present a barrier that stops some people from getting into anime.  But because we're already being asked to identify with a simulacrum, it staves off the uncanny feeling of the dolls, which are filtered through another layer of artificiality (animation).  Really, the dolls aren't any less lifelike or more uncanny than the characters.  This is a great example of why tropes can't simply be ported between media.

My goal here is certainly not to limit the types of story we can tell in a certain medium.  Like I said, there have been effective horror TV shows, and horror anime.  But artistic creators have to take into account the form they're working with, and be aware of its central features -- and when it doesn't, you end up with a story that doesn't have anything obviously wrong with it, but just feels undeniably weak and distant.  And that's Another.

Next week: "They put the word 'Desire' on the side, just so you know what emotion to feel when you're reading it."

[1]I'm basing this mostly off anime, as there's not much in the way of American horror TV outside of anthology series like The Twilight Zone, which don't need to worry about the serialization problem.  And then there's American Horror Story, which takes the opposite tack of ignoring the horror formula completely and just throwing everything at the screen as quick as possible.

[2]In American TV, high school is the most dramatic, important, over-the-top time of your life, whereas in anime (with some exceptions) it's the most peaceful, harmonious and happy time of your life.

[3]Yeah, I know, death of the author, yada yada.  I guess what I'm trying to say is that the interesting bits come more from the show's existence and less from its aesthetic quality.

Daria 1-07: The Lab Brat

Probably the most surprising thing about Daria's first season for me is how well the series uses its generic jock and cheerleader caricatures, Kevin and Britney.  On any other show, they would be plodding stock jokes and the objects of social satire.  But there's a kind of joy and innocence in the way in which they guilelessly inhabit their roles that makes them fun to watch -- and it doesn't hurt that Daria lets them surprise us from time to time.  None of the shows' characters are more than two-dimensional, especially not the titular snarker, but somehow they all manage to be endearing in their own way.

Mostly this is because the object of satire in Daria isn't the characters themselves, but the social situations they find themselves in -- everything from teenage rites of passage (trips to the mall and college tours) to social phenomena (fashion and self-esteem fanaticism) which are unfortunate and mockable events larger than any of the generally pitiable people within them, no matter how dumb or uncool said people may be[1].  "The Lab Brat", however, is perhaps the first episode that doesn't have an overt target of satire.  The science project is a pretty stock plot for teen shows, but it's not really the focus here.  Instead, "The Lab Brat" looks at adolescent relationship drama through the idea of psychological conditioning.

The idea, not an especially new or revelatory one but still fairly true, is that teenagers are in everything motivated by the quest for love/sex.  This isn't always a pure carnal desire, and in fact thus far Daria is pretty asexual (both the show and the character).  Instead, it's more about status and self-image -- witness Quinn's glee in having multiple boys wait on her, or how Chuck doesn't really know what to do with Britney once he has her under his power.  The motivation is less having a significant other than being the type (or calibre) of person who has one.  This is a pretty accurate representation of high school.

"The Lab Brat" introduces a second desire for our characters, that of getting the school project done with as little effort as possible.  This gives privilege to previously undesirable characters like Daria and Chuck, the "brains" who can be relied upon to do the entire project.  They react to this newfound power in opposite ways: Chuck lords it over Britney, using it to achieve the primary sexual motivation that gives him so little power under normal circumstances, whereas Daria more or less ignores it, not really caring about anything enough to leverage her power towards it.

In the world of the lab rat, the story would end here.  The experiment that Daria and her classmates are asked to conduct are all about singular desire and how to alter it.  But in a social environment, we aren't the only one running towards the cheese.  We also have to deal with the desires of others, the desires we project onto others, and our ability to achieve that desire.  So Britney assumes that Daria is exploiting Kevin in the same way that Chuck is exploiting her, because she assumes that any woman would desire him -- and while she's wrong in this instance, the threat is real, in the form of the ever-predatory Quinn.  As for Kevin, his simplistic desires -- basically a constant stream of football -- are what allow  him to be so easily controlled by the women around him.

All of this culminates in a collision of interests that ends up basically ruining the plans of all the characters involved, or at the very least returning things to the status quo.  If there's a moral to be had -- and Daria is too ironic to really have a didactic moral -- it's how the simplistic idea of conditioning, which assumes that everyone follows their own desires without any thought of others both can't and shouldn't apply to the world we live in.  It's a weirdly complex idea for a MTV cartoon to get across.

The above descriptions make this sound like a philosophy lecture, but it actually plays out as a broad farce.  All of the characters are essentially coddled upper-middle-class American teens, and as such we don't need to take seriously either their desires or their punishment -- the worst fate that can befall anyone in this story is a lost boyfriend or a failing grade.  So the mutual doom we see in the last scene is not a tragic ending but a comedic comeuppance.  All of this is in addition to the usual tropes of bedroom farce -- the ridiculous suspicions and more ridiculous acts of vengeance.

Coupled with this, we can observe the characters from afar, like we do with lab rats, because they aren't entirely human.  This isn't simply because it's an animated show, although the animation -- especially the simple line-based character designs -- do limit our abilities to identify with them as fellow humans.  (Then again, it's leagues more photorealistic than your average Adult Swim show).  It's more that the characters are two-dimensional in personality as well as appearance.  They always wear the same outfits, always have the same attitude, and always essentially the same relations with each other.  We don't have to use our knowledge of episodic structure to know that no long-term harm will come to these characters.  We know, almost instinctively from watching them, that they cannot change without remaining the same character in anything but name.  If Kevin takes off his sports jersey, how will we know who he is?


Usually saying a series has shallow characters would be a criticism, but Daria uses these two-dimensional types well.  Because we immediately understand them, we can focus immediately on the situation they're in instead of learning who these people are.  It's not a conventional approach to storytelling, but it more or less works.  When Daria fails, it's because of the relative tameness of its satire, not because of the characters.  With that said, I have to wonder if these cut-outs will remain appealing over five seasons, or whether the show will have to become a more standard character-based comedy.

"The Lab Brat" was written by series co-creator Glenn Eichler, who seems to have a better idea of what the show wants to do than most of the writers have thus far.  He also knows how to mix the right level of absurdity into satire to make its strong message palatable, as evidenced by his later work on The Colbert Report.  This episode is, however, probably the least openly satiric of the series' run thus far -- instead of a declared target like college or the fashion industry, we have what initially seems like a sitcommy plot based on character interaction that gradually turns into a satire on teen desire.

Of course, in the end no one learns their lesson.  Kevin's ignorance of the drama unfolding around him is rewarded by Britney continuing to cater to his every whim, and Britney never shakes (or wants to shake) her dependence on him.  Daria and Jane only add more fuel to their misanthropic fire.  Some characters are punished by their raging science teacher, but the punishment seems to have no danger of getting them to change their ways.

In its own way, this is more realistic than the traditional method of character development.  We don't necessarily learn from our mistakes -- if we did, we'd make a lot more mistakes.  It requires careful self-reflection and consideration, of which none of our teenage narcissists - Daria included - are really capable of.  This episode reflects that, being simple on the surface but, under further examination, actually having something quite interesting to say.

Next Week: "Shall I show you what's under this eyepatch?"

[1]I'm still making my way through the first season, so take this and any other generalities to apply only to what I've seen so far.

Suburgatory 1-11: Out in the 'Burbs

Okay, let's get the weird incest thing out of the way first.  The first and only thing most people want to talk about with Suburgatory is the relationship between the central father/daughter couple which, because of a mixture of Dawson's Casting and the generally even, banter-filled relationship between the two, has been seen as perhaps more romantic than filial.  In truth, there's not a lot of basis for this, and I think Jane Levy and Jeremy Sisto actually do a good precocious-teenager/understanding-dad[1] relationship, and it's only made awkward by the too-small age gap and a few weird scenes (e.g. the two of them dancing in the Sweet Sixteen episode).  The father/daughter relationship in Veronica Mars was pretty similar, and nobody made much in the way of jokes, mainly because Enrico Colatani looks like he could actually have a teenage daughter.  But it's a fun oppositional reading to take, and once you hear the theory it's hard to stop noticing possibly-incestuous shit in the show.

At this point, though, it's hard not to feel that the writers aren't having some fun here.  This episode opens with a fairly gratuitous Jane Levy shower scene, which leads to the water being cut off, and both father and daughter going to answer the door in their towels.  Later, closeted guidance counsellor Mr. Wolf mentions bidding on a Perfect Strangers box set online, with the comment "You know, I don't think those two were really cousins."  The obvious context of the joke is his own unacknowledged homosexuality, but I can't help but think of it as a subtle nod to the improbability of Levy really being Sisto's daughter.

All of this ties in with the generally unreal feeling of Suburgatory.  The setting looks like a colourful theme park, the women look like Barbie dolls, and the characters all seem to be cliches exaggerated so much that it becomes vaguely surreal.  It would be easy to take this as a failing of the show, and from a conventional viewpoint it is, with the satire often being broad and unoriginal.  On paper it's a standard, not-particularly-great family sitcom, but there's a kind of ungraspable strangeness lurking below the surface.

Perhaps the strangeness has something to do with the swerve that seems to occur more and more in Suburgatory, where the show will intentionally invoke a standard sitcom plot and then veer off into something different altogether, or have everyone seem confused as to what page they're on.  In this episode Tessa seems to believe she's in one of those overly-earnest coming out episodes (as does Mr. Wolf at the end), when the boy in question is interested in the school jocks not for their good looks but because he's an undercover officer investigating for steroids.

The entire premise is ludicrous, of course, and involves that sitcom thing where people talk just vague enough to misunderstand each other.  But it's still a distinctly unusual plot, particularly in how nobody addresses or notices the absurdity of the (married) steroid-hunting undercover agent.  It also invokes two after school special topics -- gay acceptance and drugs -- and shrugs them off without much attention.  Only Tessa, determined to be the cool accepting city girl, gets drawn into the coming-out narrative, and the show more or less mocks her for it.  As it turns out, Chatswin may be superficial, but it's not bigoted -- if only perhaps because bigotry would involve taking an interest in other people.

There's also the manic stalkerishness of Lisa, the obligatory best friend character who has actually turned into one of my favourites.  She's weird in a real life way, that slightly off-putting air (instead of a mass of quirks, which is how TV usually does weird) that you see in the girl who sits alone at the lunch table.  She's also one of the few regulars who looks like she could actually be in high school, which helps.  In this episode she becomes fixated on the newcomer and promptly tries to appeal to the newcomer in many of her strange ways, from dressing up as a male jock to telling him that she's never been to his home city of Chicago but she's seen the musical.  What's notable here is the lack of reaction from Tessa, the undercover guy, or really anyone.  Lisa is never rejected and never learns her lesson -- she's just an odd element out in the plot's orbit.

I don't want to overstate the case here.  There are a lot of times when Suburgatory is comfortable staying in standard sitcom plots without changing it up much at all.  The show is still charming, but it's nothing revolutionary, and only moderately well-executed.  The plotline between George and Dallas episode isn't exactly a stock plot, building as it does off of a serialized storyline from previous episodes, but it does rely on a lot of misinterpreted double-entendres that wouldn't be out of place on Three's Company.

The basic recurring joke is that George thinks Dallas is making overt sexual advances at him through thinly-veiled double entendres, but the ditzy Dallas actually means just what she literally says.  Cheryl Hines is given a pretty thankless job here as one of the above-mentioned Barbie dolls, but one who's supposed to be at least somewhat endearing.  At the same time, there's an issue with the possibility of a Dallas/George relationship, which is that it's the equivalent of a real person dating a cartoon.  If Dallas is really dumb enough that she doesn't see the possible double meaning in asking George to squeeze her melons, while George is more or less a normal person, then it seems like any relationship between them would be so unequal that he would be taking advantage of her.

Certainly the suburban housewife culture deserves satire (especially as it's being glamourized in all of those Real Housewives series) but Dallas is a very problematic way to go about it.  Her overt sexuality and naivete are a joke, as over-the-top as everything else in the series, but even if it's done for the purposes of humour there's still the overt text of a hot chick seducing a guy, and that surface level doesn't go away simply because it's played for laughs.  As Community has discovered, an ironic mud wrestling match is still a mud wrestling match.

There's also a kind of tomboy misogyny in the way Suburgatory separates the sympathetic, intelligent girls in Tessa and Lisa from people like Dallas and Dalia.  Of course, the men of suburbia are mocked as well, but even superficial characters like Alan Tudyk's Noah[2] have at least a certain amount of cunning, whereas Dallas and Dalia are completely braindead.  The performances add more depth and nuance to these characters than the writing does, but it's still rather problematic.

"Out in the 'Burbs" is written by series newcomer Elliot Hegarty, who I know absolutely nothing about, and directed by Bob Kushell, who previously directed what was probably the series' best episode in "The Barbecue".  Comedy writing credits are always fairly arbitrary, but this does feel like a different kind of writing than most Suburgatory episodes, being less satirical and more broadly comedic.  All of the characters are mocked (even Tessa in her desire to live up to her own self-image), but for once it doesn't feel like they're meant to stand in for broad swathes of people.  It's a shift to a more character-driven, idiosyncratic kind of comedy, which I think frankly works better for this show.

As for Kushell, he mainly sticks to the show's day-glo aesthetic and conventional directing technique, but there are some decidedly odd shots in here.  For instance, one scene begins with George's head seemingly having been replaced by a melon (due to strange camera perspective) with Dallas whispering "squeeze it".  The Lynchian tableau doesn't last long, and is quickly assimilated back into a fairly standard scene, but that oddness is still there, creeping in at the corners.

(The giant "MELONS" sign really adds to the absurdity here.)

A lot of shows spend their first seasons trying to figure out what they'll eventually become, and Suburgatory falls into this category.  There are a lot of different shows it could become: a gentle family hang-out show, a sharp social satire, a character-based single-camera serial comedy of the kind that's so popular now, or something decidedly stranger.  All of these could be good shows in their own right, although some of them -- particularly the satire -- would require stronger execution than Emily Kapnek and crew have previously showed.  But right now I'm enjoying the show in its inchoate form, with all its goals and half-realized desires pushing against each other.  And maybe its this struggle between several different visions and possibilities that leads to that intoxicating, unplaceable weirdness.

Next week: "If you were really good, you'd get the mouse to stay off both paths.  You know, like dada.  Everything is pointless."

[1]Sisto might actually be my favourite TV dad in recent memory.  The guy is just so slick.

[2]Tudyk is predictably great in this role, but it's probably a bad sign that I had to look up his character's name on Wikipedia.

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.