When I became the Tribune’s television critic in 1995, my parents decided that it meant my childhood had not been wasted after all.
It seems to surprise many people when I suggest that my adulthood is not being wasted by staring at a TV screen either.
But television, although more vast than ever, is too complex, too astonishing and too potent to be dismissed as merely a wasteland.
And despite the look that flashes across many faces when people learn how I make my living, it is entirely possible to find fascination in TV while remaining at least several rungs on the evolutionary ladder above sock puppet.
Ubiquitous and unceasing, television is the crossroads of the culture. My job gives me license to stand in that intersection and attempt to adorn the passing traffic with bumper stickers, warning tags, graffiti, manifestos and more –all manner of descriptive and hopefully apt interpretations of the small-screen bustle that define and reflect a society in frantic motion.
The job does not, however, give me an exclusive spot in the cultural crossroads. Unlike, say, the restaurant critic, who spends more time eating out than all but the stoveless, I watch a whole lot of TV, but my tally of up to 25 hours a week is certainly smaller than that of even some of the employed people who read what I write.
For unlike every other art form reviewed in this series, television comes into homes almost unbidden. Movies, theater and concerts require tickets and parking, CDs at least a credit card, dance a wife who drags you along.
So being a newspaper TV critic in America is like being at a conference of TV critics all the time. If I write about “Star Trek: Voyager” or even “Murphy Brown” it is a safe bet that there are people out there who know more about that series than I do and can point out, generally in a long e-mail using the word “moron,” the one episode from several seasons back that disproves the argument I was making.
But that is one of the joys of the job, almost as fun as being able to say, whenever my eyes meet a glowing TV screen, that I am working. People relate to TV criticism and provide the kind of feedback that lets you know newspapers are not dead yet, despite television. And my job is to keep the focus on the whole: to relate “Star Trek: Voyager” to other science fiction series on TV to the end of the millennium and, if I’m feeling frisky, to Nostradamus.
There is a lot of relating to be done. Covering television at century’s end, some five decades into the medium’s existence, is like trying to keep your arms around a hot-air balloon as it inflates. Your wingspan doesn’t change, but the orb beneath you keeps getting bigger: more newsmagazines, more networks, more cable channels, more controversies, more dreck and more genius, and, day after day, more and more hot air.
So you have to be catholic in your interests but inquisitional in your selectivity as you contemplate the average of six videocassettes of upcoming programming that arrive each day.
TV is the most egalitarian of mediums; its target audience is just about everyone. So I have fought very hard to keep from developing a permanent sneer, to stay open to what is genuinely good, to not forget that mindless entertainment is sometimes all we ask of our TV sets. And the biggest surprise to me, who entered the job mouthing the same “vast wasteland” platitudes as everyone else, has been discovering how much good television there actually is to be discovered.
To mix things up for readers and me, I veer away from straight reviewing when the occasion presents itself. A humor piece that makes its points about television between the lines can impress its ideas on an audience more firmly than a straightforward argument.
I also try to stay away from the star interviews that occupy many TV critics because the ratio of interesting quotes to blatantly promotional ones is usually tiny, and a critic’s job is not to help sell a piece of work but to evaluate it. Plus, if you don’t care about ever “landing” an interview with Brooke Shields and whether she might actually be a nice person, as I don’t, you not only don’t have to fret over which adverb best describes the way she picked at her arugula during the interview, you are also more free to state what a stinker you think “Suddenly Susan” is.
The biggest part of the job is reviewing prime-time fare from the major networks. That is, after all, the most popular stuff on television and that is what people think of when they consider the medium as an art form: the half-hour sitcom and the hourlong dramatic series.
Between a short column every day and a longer one three times a week, I try to weigh in with at least a mini-review on every new prime-time network series and most of the ones on cable, and to revisit them when events warrant. I also aim to catch the biggest of the made-for-TV movies and mini-series, but certainly not all of them, believing that my time is better spent on the things that air more than once.
But a TV critic who only wrote about prime time would be like a classical music critic who limited his opinions to the performance of the woodwinds. So much of what is intriguing about television now happens away from the networks.
So by definition there is an element of self-indulgence in writing about TV. Because there is so much of it, after you get past the things you have to or ought to write about, you inevitably pick the ones that interest you, such as a Barbie documentary or the nightly funhouse-mirror image of the city presented by local TV news.
In a medium too often afflicted by an assembly-line sameness, I have come to prize originality above all else, preferring the fascinating flop to the dull professionalism of much prime-time fare. Many people in Hollywood can and do make average, unambitious series such as “Caroline in the City,” but a show like “EZ Streets,” a complex and sometimes dauntingly murky CBS cop drama of two seasons back, takes real vision.
A TV critic is in part a consumer guide, yes, but with television being free it is not so much about spending money–even cable TV, despite its aggressive price hikes, remains as cheap as a soap-opera vamp–as spending time.
And most people I know are already trying to watch less television anyway. They hear about an interesting new series and often go out of their way not to watch it, so as not to get hooked. Only when one habit–say, “Seinfeld”–ends, do many go looking for another–like “Ally McBeal,” an example of a fascinating non-flop.
So I consider it my duty to keep them informed about things they lack the time and inclination to see themselves, so they can at least fake it at cocktail parties.
But more important is my duty to provide an engaging piece of writing for all the smart people who have not let television elbow newspapers out of their homes.
It is nice when I hear someone has enjoyed a program they wouldn’t have thought to watch because of my recommendation. It’s even nicer when someone sniffs and says, “I never watch television, but I enjoy your columns,” because that means I’m reaching the TV disdainers too.
GETTING `MAD’
Television Critic Steve Johnson’s guide to evaluating a sitcom
Short of a new Tony Danza series, I’ve learned to dread little more in my three years as TV critic than when a pleasant and sensible person buttonholes me at a party to start telling me about his favorite show.
It’s not that I’m not interested in other people’s opinions about television; I genuinely am, especially if those people are not publicists working on behalf of television. It’s that there is often this awkward moment where I have to decide whether to tell him that I disagree with his assessment of, say, “Home Improvement” as the smartest comedy on television.
I’ve discovered it’s better, at least in the context of a casual conversation, for a critic to just listen.
If you were to buttonhole me, however, and tell me that “Mad About You” is one of the vertebrae in the backbone of television, I’d be pleased to tell you I agree.
A prime-time sitcom with six seasons under its belt, it is reliably smart and competent and occasionally better than that, and it has strong, likable actors in the lead roles who’ve come to know their characters completely. The chronicle of a young, married, loving couple may not be what is most exciting about TV (it often fails the ensemble test), but it is the kind of yeoman laborer that keeps the wheel spinning.
FRESHNESS COUNTS
Ask yourself whether you have seen this show before, only with different actors and a different title, a la the “Friends” clones of several seasons back. Does the show ever take chances, as “ER” did with its live episode? Or does it merely hew to a formula?
The lead characters of “Mad About You” are already somewhat surprising on television, because they are neither divorced nor bickering. Instead of the usual stasis, they have evolved through the series’ life, too, nearly breaking up one season, then summoning the courage to have a child.
And the show has tried to take chances along with them. This past season, the writers constructed an episode with no commercial breaks and only one take. It was a conversation Paul and Jamie Buchman had while trying to be strong enough to let their infant daughter cry herself to sleep for the first time.
When looking at a TV show, always check the freshness date.
KNOW ITS PLACE
No TV show, not even that one where the contestant got in a tube and tried to grab blowing money, happens in a vacuum. It arises out of a culture and sometimes, if it is very lucky or very good or both, it can even shape that culture a little bit. Always keep in mind the question of where it fits on the landscape. What does it say about us, about television, about the kind of addlepated mouth breathers network types often take us for?
“Mad About You” hasn’t initiated any buzzwords, a la “Seinfeld,” nor has it stirred controversy a la “Ellen.” But when you assess a show like “Mad About You,” you have to give it credit for crafting a believable, and sometimes illuminating, snapshot of a kind of lifestyle that is vexing more and more grandparents-in-waiting: successful couples who get married late and, choosing to live and play in the big city for a time, have kids even later.
In the manner of a good standup comic, which star and co-executive producer Paul Reiser has been, it illuminates quotidian issues and quirks with both subtlety and real insight: the surfacing of an old and vindictive boyfriend, jealousy that the dog likes his walker better than you, embarrassment at even needing a dog walker.
THE WRITE STUFF
Direction and pacing are important in television, of course, but the writer is king because it is so hard to hide a bad story on the small screen. With comedy writing, you listen for a fresh turn of phrase, a new way of looking at a familiar situation or jokes about topics you haven’t heard jokes about before. If, for instance, a show in 1998 includes a bit about how hard it is to find an apartment in New York, it had better be one of the best find-a-New-York-apartment jokes ever. Otherwise, red flags should shoot up: If these writers don’t recognize how tired that concept is, then it is a safe bet you needn’t stick around for the lesson everybody learns in Act 3.
Also, do the jokes pass the bunkum test? That is, are they in the script merely because they are funny or do they also fit the situation and character? And are there enough of them? Many shows reveal their lack of inspiration by presenting punch lines at a snail’s pace. On great series like “The Simpsons” and “Seinfeld,” a viewer comes to feel the creators have too many ideas for their allotted time.
“Mad About You,” with more emphasis on plot and character development than most sitcoms, is less dense than a “Seinfeld,” but it has very few New York apartment jokes.
THE ENSEMBLE
A weekly sitcom presents a cast of characters and asks you to invite them into your home. The quality of the ensemble is a function of both acting and story, but the core question is: Are the people worth spending time with? Do its characters, in words and action, feel real? Do you hear a line and realize it would have been funnier, or more poignant, if said a different way?
Listen for the brief pauses Reiser and costar Helen Hunt take before delivering a laugh line, building tension and suggesting their brains are working to come up with the line. And listen for the variances in the rhythm of their speech that give words the quality of being said for the first time, emotions the quality of being genuinely felt.
The danger of so bright a spotlight on lead characters is that the others can become shadows. And “Mad About You” fails the ensemble test when it moves beyond the central couple. When occasional visitors such as Paul’s cousin Ira appear, their stories fail to engage, and the show’s corps of guest stars from TV’s golden age feels like stunt casting of the worst kind, done as homage or to garner publicity rather than to advance the story.
Like an engine, a sitcom ensemble must function on all cylinders; think of “Cheers” in its heyday. “Mad About You” moves mostly forward, but it lurches at times, and that is what keeps me from placing it in the very first tier of television comedy.
BIOGRAPHY
Born: Aug. 21, 1963, in Chicago.
Raised: Derry, N.H.
Education: Brown University, bachelor of arts in English and American literature.
Professional history (all at Mother Tribune): Reporting intern, 1986-87; north suburban reporter, 1987-88; Tempo staff writer, 1988-91; Metro staff writer, 1991-94; TV critic, 1995-present.
Influences: Tom Shales, Pauline Kael, Calvin Trillin, James Wolcott, Russell Baker, Bernie Lincicome, NBC-era David Letterman.
Viewing habits: “The Simpsons,” “Homicide: Life on the Street,” “NewsRadio,” “SportsCenter,” “Law & Order,” “The American Experience,” “Everybody Loves Raymond.”
Viewing habits of yore: “Larry Sanders,” “Mary Tyler Moore,” “Bob Newhart,” “Carol Burnett,” “Hill Street Blues,” “Cheers,” “St. Elsewhere,” and, I confess, “thirtysomething.”
Size, age of principal home TV set: 20 meager inches, 12 stinkin’ years.
Two words that best describe chances of getting new set anytime soon: Slim, none.
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We welcome your comments or questions. Write Arts & Entertainment, Chicago Tribune, 435 N. Michigan, Chicago IL 60611. Or e-mail to ctc-arts@tribune.com
On the Internet: For an audio interview of Steve Johnson, archives of his reviews and a message board, visit chicagotribune.com/go/critics
On CLTV: For interviews of the critics, watch “Around Chicagoland”
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