When this column began, eight long Whitney-filled months ago, it did so with a simple goal: to test the hypothesis that the inherent personality traits of prisoners and guards are the chief cause of abusive behavior in prison. Er, no. That’s not right. It was to trace the evolution of both NBC’s hallowed Thursday-night comedy lineup and the shows that populated it. If anything, the only constant has been inconsistency: Six different sitcoms have aired all or part of their seasons on Thursdays. For much of the year, NBC head Bob Greenblatt seemed unsure what to do with network real estate that had slipped so precipitously from prime to subprime to foreclosed McMansion on the outskirts of Tampa. In the fall, he attempted to goose what had become an urbane and complementary night of single-camera comedy with the wet-willie snarkcasm of Whitney. When the few remaining viewers reacted as if Greenblatt had spiked their Sauvignon Blanc with Zima, he quickly plugged the hole with the more brand-friendly Up All Night and then, mercifully, threw out the baby and the bathwater. The final weeks of the season were a muddled mess, replete with double-dips and burn-offs of remaining episodes (not that anyone is counting, but I know at least one guy who hasn’t had a rerun-filled off night in almost three months), but Thursdays did end up where they probably should have begun, with the Core Four: Community, 30 Rock, The Office, and Parks and Recreation.
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Upfronts week is a propagandist’s dream, a nonstop cavalcade of lofty promises, shining stars, and room-temperature mock-maki. In lavish ballrooms extending from midtown Manhattan to the other side of midtown Manhattan, the broadcast networks trot out talent and psyche themselves up in an attempt to sell advertisers, and an increasingly attentive public, on their latest bill of goods (or at least mediocres). So why does it more often sound like they’re selling themselves too? “Why just watch when you can feel?” enthused emo ABC chief Paul Lee at the Alphabet’s shindig. It was a well-constructed bit of hokum that could be repurposed for nearly any of Lee’s rivals (CBS: “Why just watch when you can doze?"; The CW: “Why just watch when you can [SKRILLEX BASS DROP]?" NBC: “Why watch?”). ABC may be peddling a brand strategy that attempts to draw bright lassos of linkage between its tradition of heart-tugging Body Washes (you know: like soaps, but classier) and head-scratching array of newcomers, but the truth is that none of the networks have any real idea what they’re doing. In an atmosphere where an afterthought could redefine a company and a heavily hyped investment could cost everyone onstage their jobs, can those in charge really be blamed for playing it safe? Any of their new shows could fail, a very few could succeed. But anyone who tells you they know which is which before Labor Day is lying. On Tuesday, ABC led their clip package with the words, “When we share great stories, they touch our hearts and feed our souls.” Last year, the same people were touting the soul-nourishing properties of Work It. La plus ça change, la plus c’est la meme merde.
It’s upfronts season in New York City, when all the networks are spinning their new fall shows as fast as they can. To celebrate, Chris Ryan and I took a first pass at a bunch of them (1:10), separating the maybe-winners (Fox’s The Mindy Project, NBC’s Revolution) from the kinda-losers (NBC’s Next Caller, Fox’s on-the-nose-like-bifocals-titled The Mob Doctor). We also touched on NBC’s returning Thursday-night lineup and what to expect when you’re expecting The Office to be bad and Community to be buried on Friday nights. Some conversation about our Sunday-night anchors, Mad Men (15:40) and Game of Thrones (22:10), helped ease the pain. Then it was off to the multiplexes, where Chris gushed with excitement over Battleship (27:30) while I rolled my eyes at The Amazing Spider-Man (32:45). We finished up by defending the honor of rapper Freeway (37:50), our fellow Philadelphian, and unveiling the latest entry into our Double Down Summer Reading Club (43:45), Alan Furst, whose stylish, atmospheric World War II thrillers (including The Polish Officer and The World at Night) should be more than enough to erase any painful memories of wisecracking Naval petty officer Rihanna. Boom, indeed.
Before DVRs, part of the charm of Saturday Night Live was that it created a sort of community of viewers — granted, the kind of community who didn’t have anywhere to be on a Saturday evening, so not necessarily a club you wanted to join four times a month. Its jokes became like prehistoric viral culture, a consolation prize to rehashing the best moments of the weekend’s rager. It gave you something to talk about at brunch (brunch sucks; I’m saying “brunch” hypothetically) at the dining hall if you’d been stuck inside all weekend writing a term paper and had missed the physical experience of the club, the bar, the house party. Its relevance has always been at least partially related to the repetition of catchphrases, pratfalls, and goof-ups, within the show (legions of “What Up With That”s, “MacGruber”s, “Church Lady”s) and without (the far-reaching effects of “More Cowbell” made it leap from the mirror like Bloody Mary; “More Cowbell” essentially slimed out of our televisions and entered society in 3-D). Ever since Saturday Night Live has been available for consumption as Sunday Morning Hangover or Wednesday Afternoon Lunch Break, and perhaps even more so since the introduction of the digital short in 2005 (Lettuce), it’s become somehow more satisfying to revisit, even as it so often revisits itself. That’s why this weekend’s episode with host Will Ferrell, and a self-fellating celebration of the 100th digital short, was so good.
The upfronts — that strange, delirious time of the year when the major networks unleash their upcoming schedules — has been upon us since last week, and has churned out no shortage of interesting tidbits. Check back later in the week, when Andy Greenwald will be dropping knowledge over the entire annual TV-nerd-info treasure trove. For now, here’s a quick look at some of the stuff that popped off over the weekend.
What Is Going On in Greendale?
NBC already announced that Community will return for a fourth season (albeit a shortened one, at 13 episodes), which was a great relief to its millions (er, hundreds of thousands?) of fanatical viewers. And then NBC promptly crapped all over the goodwill it had just generated. Not only will Community be buried on Friday nights, its showrunner and creator Dan Harmon may not return.
Every week in this space, Grantland pop culture correspondent Andy Greenwald will run down the happenings and mishappenings in NBC’s Thursday comedy night done mostly right. (Note: the order reflects newsworthiness, not quality. Although occasionally the two just might overlap.)
1. The Office
Last night, Andy Bernard debased himself to an absurd degree, begging for a temp gig unflushing the toilets, gargling with bourbon, and lapping up spilled soup from his sleeve. It was all part of an elaborate ruse, of course: Underneath the soiled sanitation onesie was a slick black suit. What Andy wanted was a dramatic moment, a big reveal that would take him from, in his words, “zero to hero” and leave everyone laughing – both at his clever trick and at themselves for ever doubting him in the first place. New York Magazine critic Matt Zoller Seitz has mused that much of this near-catastrophic eighth season of The Office has been meta-storytelling the likes of which we’ve never seen on an NBC Thursday night. (In fairness to Seitz, he wrote the piece before seeing last night’s Community, in which the study group was convinced the past three seasons had been a shared hallucination because their actual adventures were far too crazy to be real. The only thing that could top that would be if Marshall McLuhan suddenly tapped me on the shoulder and said, “You know nothing about how to joke about me in your work.” And he’s got a point: We’ve had 24 episodes about a power vacuum from a show with a serious power vacuum. Last night’s season — not series — finale took it a step further. Andy’s grubby quick-change act was a clumsy metaphor for NBC itself.
Well, technically what happened here is that Community was given a fourth-season pickup from NBC. But since it's Community we're talking about — a show that feels like it's been staving off death (while making meta jokes about it) since it premiered — framing it as a survivalist kind of thing seems to make sense. But yes, feel free to be positive and happy here: NBC's odd creature of a sitcom will return next year, albeit for a shortened 13-episode run.
Look: Peyton Manning killed it on SNL in 2007, especially with the United Way sketch, during which he slammed kids with footballs and punished one little boy by sentencing him to 20 minutes in a Port-O-Let. I wouldn’t have wanted to follow that act, and neither, for some time, did Eli Manning. Professional sports and sketch comedy are kind of like olives and alcohol: Sometimes you get a dry martini; other times you get a salty, piquant kumquat margarita with horrible flotillas of blue cheese. The brothers Manning have represented themselves well across the comedy spectrum — remember the Simpsons episode “O Brother, Where Bart Thou?”? — and I’m sure basically anyone else who works for ESPN can come up with some kind of sports analogy for three people batting a thousand or the odds of a genetic pool having the dual characteristics of funny and sporty. Maybe that can be edited in. I can only come up with “it’s unlikely.” Considering those odds, Eli Manning did a great job of soldiering through this past weekend’s only-pretty-solid episode of SNL. Peyton may have an edge in the comedy hosting game, but Eli still has double the Super Bowl championships.
Every week in this space, Grantland pop culture correspondent Andy Greenwald will run down the happenings and mishappenings in NBC’s Thursday comedy night done mostly right. (Note: The order reflects newsworthiness, not quality. Although occasionally the two just might overlap.)
1. Community
Could there be a more perfect metaphor for Community’s relentless, occasionally foolhardy individuality than the sight of Greendale students looting and pillaging the Subway franchise that arrived to save them? The well-buffed corporate façade is an on-screen reminder that, going by the ratings, Greendale’s popularity with the greater American viewing public is on the level of olives and onions. This clearly galls creator Dan Harmon. It’s a lame and visible tax levied on him for his intransigent strangeness. And so of course the staid sandwichery would bear the brunt of three years' worth of underdog frustration, its sneeze guards shattered under scrawny undergraduate fists, its turkey sandwiches ruined by the rogue actions of a study group going H.A.M.
Taking a cue from Sasha Baron Cohen’s The Dictator, NBC is reportedly considering whether to fire its own starter’s pistol on the 2012-13 television season. By launching their early pilot pickup Go On (starring Matthew Perry as an “irreverent yet charming” sportscaster — as if there were any other kind!) and the second season of it’s-a-hit-if-you-squint Grimm in August, the Peacock hopes to get the drop on its better-rated rivals. (UPDATE: And now comes word they might be throwing two more sitcoms in the mix, Anne Heche's Save Me and Ryan Murphy's The New Normal.)
Every week in this space Grantland pop culture correspondent Andy Greenwald will run down the happenings and mishappenings in NBC’s Thursday comedy night done mostly right. (Note: The order reflects newsworthiness, not quality. Although occasionally the two just might overlap.)
1. Parks and Recreation
Celebrities are usually the first to know when the party’s over. Call it an eighth sense in their tiny, perfectly formed brains — located just to the left of sight and slightly below cocaine tolerance and Thetan susceptibility — but as soon as a former hotspot begins to cool, the boldface names scatter in the wind like Trick Daddy. And yet, to tune into NBC last night was to see an abundance of riches (and the downright rich — Paul McCartney alone could write off Jack Donaghy’s Kouchtown debacle as vegan grocery expenses). Despite the thousands (and thousands, and thousands) of Thetan-addled words scribbled in this column since last fall about the Peacock’s cratering fortunes, it was striking to see just how starry Thursday nights on NBC still can be. And I wasn’t just gawking at the Who’s Who of Lorne Michaels’s Rolodex that showed up for a truly breathtaking live edition of 30 Rock. Seeing the night’s Core Four sitcoms back together made me appreciate just how stacked these ensembles are, chock-full of movie stars, Oscar winners, sneaky geniuses, and legendary assholes. NBC’s must see-or-be-seen Thursday may be facing foreclosure, but the talent appears willing to rage all night long.
Every week in this space, Grantland pop culture correspondent Andy Greenwald will run down the happenings and mishappenings in NBC’s Thursday comedy night done mostly right. (Note: The order reflects newsworthiness, not quality. Although occasionally the two just might overlap.)
1.30 Rock
After an entire season of dithering and delay, NBC finally put its best lineup on the field last night. The quick Community batted leadoff with comeback player of the year 30 Rock and a fresh-off-the-DL Parks and Recreation providing protection for aging slugger The Office. It’s NBC’s very own version of the “Core Four” and, on paper, it’s a squad you can win some ballgames with, if not some key ratings demos. With only a month remaining, network manager Bob Greenblatt wisely quit overmanaging and gave up on his various experiments — shoehorning in all-offensive, no (g)love newcomers like Whitney; wasting precious playing time on overmatched rookie Up All Night — and decided to let it ride with the horses that brung him. (Brung him to last place, that is. This was the same schedule that didn’t exactly set the world on fire last spring, either.)
Every week in this space Grantland pop culture correspondent Andy Greenwald will run down the happenings and mishappenings in NBC’s Thursday comedy night done mostly right. (Note: The order reflects newsworthiness, not quality. Although occasionally the two just might overlap.)
1. The Office
How do you know when the spark is gone? For a romantic naif like Andy Bernard it’s pretty simple: You fall in love with someone else, drive to Tallahassee, share a few laughs, a couple sandwiches, and then crash a bachelorette party to tell your soon-to-be-ex the great/terrible news. But with a sitcom, it’s rarely that clear cut.
The Office has been a mess all season, but the last run of new episodes before a not-particularly-earned spring break were at least an interesting mess. The banishment of half the cast to the Florida panhandle enlivened the writers' room like nothing since the Michael Scott Paper Company, creating an arc that, while manic and bizarre, at least demonstrated the 8-year-old (that’s 150 in sitcom years) still had some fight left in it. The hot Southern sun brought out a strange sort of crazy in familiar characters — Stanley the rum head, Dwight the sympathetic psychopath — and there was a palpable charge that resulted from pushing such a well-established franchise to the bleeding edge of plausibility. It wasn’t good, necessarily. But it was something. After a stuttering, frustrating start to the season, it seemed possible that The Office had somehow survived the loss of its head.
Who knew Sofia Vergara would be such a great SNL host? Did you? Maybe you did — maybe you watch more Modern Family than I do, maybe you’ve got a lot invested in her because of an appreciation for her breasts or very interesting backstory (appearing in Madea Goes to Jail, battling thyroid cancer, an older brother kidnapped and killed), maybe you developed a crush on her when she was nominated for an Emmy, I don’t know. I knew Sofia Vergara played Ed O’Neill’s hot wife on Modern Family, and that she was in a Pepsi ad that ran itself into the ground all winter, and that she had a fun accent and that was it. Hosts without steamer trunks of tabloid baggage or who lack the ability to cause the irrationally strong celebrity-face-rejection response tend to be the best ones — like when Bryan Cranston hosted in 2010 and sang through an opening monologue about how most people didn’t know who he was. Sofia Vergara seemed charming enough on Modern Family, and is certainly beautiful, but there was comparatively little riding on whether or not she was good at hosting Saturday Night Live — she wasn’t hunting for redemption, she was just doing publicity for The Three Stooges and probably hoping to be intelligible (she was). And so, instead of freezing up or letting her pupils crawl from left to right across a big piece of white cardboard with lines on it, she picked her cuticles a little, but then just seemed to set about having a good time.
Every week in this space Grantland pop culture correspondent Andy Greenwald will run down the happenings and mishappenings in NBC’s Thursday comedy night done mostly right. (Note: the order reflects newsworthiness, not quality. Although occasionally the two just might overlap.)
1. Community
These past few weeks, as NBC has mixed and matched reruns and overstocked new episodes like an addict’s final pass through the medicine cabinet before rehab, one thing has become abundantly clear: Thursday nights, like sailboats and pirate business cards, need an anchor. In this case, an anchor would be a steady, passably popular show, most likely in the 9 p.m. slot. A show with universal appeal, tangible warmth, and a forward-moving plot. A dependable, viewer-attracting sun for the more out-there sitcoms in the network solar system to orbit, a different rhythm to diversify the night. The Office served this function reliably for years and, it must be said, even the diluted version we’ve had this year would have sufficed last night, when the extremes of the remaining shows, both good and ill, were on full display. (Parks and Recreation, of course, is an ideal candidate for the job but it’s on hiatus for another two weeks and lags behind Dunder Mifflin in viewership by a factor of the population of Dubai.)
