Sober Sunday Reflections on...Smart Shows That Got Dumber As Their Lead Characters Got Dumber

I had the good fortune recently of coming across 4 successive seasons of the Simpsons on DVD. The seasons span the late 90's--one of maybe two points in my life (a life about as old as the Simpsons has been on television) when I watched the show somewhat regularly.

In one of the episodes, the 138th episode special, Troy McClure (Springfield's swankiest leading male actor, voiced by the late, great Phil Hartman), pulling hosting duties for the episode, addresses a viewer's observation that as the seasons have progressed, Homer has gotten dumber. This then leads to a montage of Homer in each season--Homer's antics getting dumber in each subsequent clip.

I never made the connection until then, but seeing this clip helped me piece together the strong correlation between smart shows getting dumber and their iconic lead character's getting dumber.

Pictured: Me...most of the time.

You could say it's a chicken-and-an-egg thing: of course the lead character gets dumber because the show itself got dumber. Or, that this is just the entropic nature of sitcoms: the more seasons, the longer the run; the dumber it gets and the more it lags in quality (the number 1 reason we should follow the British model for television series, giving them limited runs before they turn into sad, retarded shadows of their former selves). Both of those explanations are probably right. But there's something to be said for the relationship between a show's lead character and the quality of the show--how you can gauge the quality of a show, in any isolated episode, by looking to the lead character. It's true for the Simpsons. As Homer got dumber, the show got dumber. And it's true for a number of other smart shows.

So, this is a list of those shows: smart shows that got dumber as their lead character got dumber....

Scrubs:

Like most shows I eventually fall in love with, I was late to the game with Scrubs. I had just gotten out of a bad relationship and where beer didn't work, Scrubs filled the sad-void with sad-tinged belly laughs.

I had heard about the show years before, all the way up to the point that I started watching it. My friends told me it was great--a smart blend of funny and sometimes gut-hitting drama. But I had my reservations. Mainly because I had seen Garden State and I thought it was ridiculous indie tripe (which most people now concede), so I wasn't on-board the Zach Braff train, and because the show's description didn't interest me: a show about hospital stuff.

"All aboard the Zach Braff Train! Next stop: FUN-ville!"

But then I caught a few episodes, at just the right time in my life (apparently), and lo and behold: my heart grew two sizes too big--quite a feat considering it had just been shattered by a no-good wurman.

I went back and watched the first four seasons, ordering the DVDs online, plus what I caught on television. And, at the time, way back in 2007, Scrubs was on, like, three different stations. So, at night, after a day of sitting around at home, intermittently sulking and watching Scrubs, I'd go to the bar and there it was to greet me: J.D. and his whimsical fresh-faced doctor face, playing on a muted television too small for a bar full of people too drunk to watch it.

Around the time I'd caught up on the series, I had sworn off drinking. Also: around that time, the show started sucking. (Note to Hollywood: cancel your shows around the time I start paying attention to them, because that is apparently when they start sucking). Maybe the booze had something to do with it: beer-goggles are like 3-D glasses for adults; they make everything shimmering and better. But I remember watching the new episodes (around season 5 or 6) and thinking: man, J.D.'s twinkle-in-his-eyes man-child schtick is getting...kind of annoying.

In the first few seasons, J.D. seemed like a balanced character--a real human being who sometimes acted like a child but it wasn't his defining characteristic. The flashbacks and daydreams were kept in check because the show had more going for it than...flashbacks and daydreams.

By the time the 5th or 6th season rolled around, he had devolved into an annoying caricature of himself. No longer were the daydreams cute, but kind of exhausting--in the same way too much of anything is exhausting.

The drama suffered as well. Whereas in the first few seasons, the drama seemed authentic and original--you could tell the writers were looking at real issues with a fresh set of writer-eyes (probably because, for some of them, this was their first sitcom), by the 6th season, it seemed like they were trying too hard, either to capture the poignancy of the drama in the first few seasons or the poignancy of good drama in general, so that what you got were ham-fisted Terrence Malick-ian musings on life and death--aiming for profound but coming up campy.

 "Don't you get it, Turk. We're all just little unicorns, missing our little uni-horns...."

I eventually stopped watching and haven't revisited the series since. Where I left off, J.D. had become a bumbling, idiot-version of himself, so I'm assuming by the time the show ended he went full-retard. What other explanation is there for why I haven't seen Zach Braff in anything recently?

The Simpsons:

At the risk of offending the imaginary Simpsons obsessives reading this blog, I'm going to stray from saying anything too controversial or pretending to know the show's history intimately. Because, in my mind, there are no passing Simpsons fans (myself excluded). Whether you're one of those sad-sack Simpsons fans, who the Comic Book Guy is likely modeled after, with a wispy neck beard and a closet full of Simpsons t-shirts featuring Homer and something about "D'Oh!-nuts" or youre one of those closet Simpsons freaks, who understands all the obscure references, because you went to Harvard with various members of the writing staff, you are lumped into the same group of Simpsons fanatics.

And that's the brilliance of a show like the Simpsons (and probably why it's been on TV for as long as it has): that it can unite such seemingly disparate classes of people with top-notch humor, at all levels.

 Pictured: composite sketch of the average Simpsons fan

However, as the opening paragraph of this article points out and judging by the most recent seasons, the show has lost...something. I don't know that it's gotten dumber, but it has definitely lost its edge.

When I was a kid, the Simpsons was a divisive show, banned in some conservative households for being too offensive. Now, either because the Internet has desensitized us all or the zealous grandmas from my youth are too senile to speak out against anything, nobody cares about the Simpsons. And the quality of the show seems to have declined because of it.

It's hard to mark when exactly the Simpsons stopped being culturally relevant. It's humor has always been a tasty mix of low and high brow, but, as of late, it's gone the way of Saturday Night Live, becoming a sad apparition of the show it used to be.

 Ahh. The high-brow salad days of SNL....

So when exactly did the Simpsons get dumber? It's hard to say.

The show had long been produced by Greg Daniels, who also produced another show on this list, the Office, and, like the Office, it's show-carrying character has always been defined by his incompetence.

Homer and Michael Scott share a lot of the same qualities, from being overqualified for the jobs they hold: Michael Scott as regional manager of a paper firm and Homer Simpson as the third-in-charge at a nuclear power plant, to just being generally unaware of their own shortcomings or other people. Still, there's a point where a dumb character becomes too dumb for their own good, alienating viewers by crossing that threshold into Cute-Imitation-of-Themselves territory. This happened to Michael Scott and it happened to Homer--or so I'm led to believe from what Troy McClure says in the 138th episode special, who is apparently reading a complaint that the show got (back in '95) from a lot of fans who felt Homer's stupidty had crossed over from character trademark into annoying-as-hell.



the Office (U.S.):

Like Scrubs, the U.S. version of the Office is another good NBC sitcom gone bad. Also, like Scrubs, it is another show I came to late--again, after dismissing it for years in spite of friends telling me it was great.

It wasn't until a friend sat me down and made me watch it, from the hit-or-miss first season, that I came to love it. And love it I did.

Like Scrubs, I went back and bought the first 4 seasons. And by the time I caught up, Jim and Pam were together and everything went downhill.

First, with the Michael Scott Paper Company--a transparent attempt by the writer's to dig themselves out of the whole of creating a new storyline just as compelling as the Jim and Pam storyline. In the process of doing this, they made Michael Scott dumber. True, Michael Scott was always dumb. But there was a human-ness to his dumb-ness. Like J.D. in Scrubs. By the time Steve Carrell left the show, however, Michael Scott had become a slapstick, That's-what-she-said! spouting mutant mutation of himself.

I can't pinpoint the exact moment Michael Scott became too dumb to be enjoyable but I know it happened around the time I no longer cared about Jim and Pam--around the time that I, if we're being honest here, kind of started to find Jim and Pam annoying--the way they prattled about the Office, united in their union of smugness, becoming more and more condescending to the other characters--because...being in a relationship with someone you work with entitles you to treat everyone else like shit?

 I think it was around the time they got new haircuts and started giving a fuck about their general appearance that Jim and Pam became intolerable.

I don't know.

The moment that sticks out in my head is from one of Michael's last episodes. He's in the conference room, sitting on Holly's lap. I forget what happens, but the scene sticks out to me because, within the context of the series, something like that would never happen in the first few seasons. The fact that he's sitting on Holly's lap is pretty symbolic of how the writers started treating the characters by the time Michael left: they had become aren't-we-cute? charicatures of thier most one-dimensional traits in previous seasons, like little lap-sitting kids, saying the darndest things and almost resembling real human beings.

Because I fell so hard for the Office, it took one more season before I finally gave up on it. The last episode I watched featured Dwight slipping on a patch of oil (I think) down in the warehouse, which would have been funny had the writers intended it to be a meta-jab at Bugs Bunny humor, but it was totally not intended to be taken that way. The pratfall was a serious attempt at funny. And because the brilliance of the Office in the first few seasons consisted of making fun of or exploring the inherent real-life drama in the mundane, it was at this point, comparing the goofball slapstick humor of later seasons to the brilliance of the first few seasons, that I decided the Office had changed for good, becoming irreperably retarded.

My guess is that Steve Carell left because he could sense not only that the show was headed nowhere, nosediving into the cornfield of retardedness alongside already crashed-and-burned later-seasons Scrubs, but because Carell's Michael Scott character was also starting to go the way of J.D.--becoming too dumb to be watchable. Had he stayed on, I wonder if there wouldn't have been some storyline featuring Michael Scott promoting a turd he found in the employee toilet to assistant to the regional manager, with the season culminating in a paternity test revealing that Stanley is the father of the turd.

 When Captain Michael Scott spots a shit-burg on the horizon, he gracefully bails, letting his minor character castmates fend for themselves in post-glory days sitcom hell.

Family Guy:

Yeah. Another Fox cartoon--one with a similarly annoying fanbase of catchphrase-quoters and obsessives. I've never been a devoted watcher of Family Guy, but I recognize that it is a smart show. Or...it was.

It's easy to dismiss Family Guy for being too transparently formulaic: the flashbacks, set-ups you can see a mile away ("That reminds me of the time..."), and the just-edgy enough for network television jabs at pop-culture and historical figures. And, sure, it is predictable. But it's also pretty funny. And, for the most part, pretty smart.

Before Family Guy, there really weren't any cartoons--or shows--like Family Guy. So, what Seth MacFarlane did, effectively, is create a new style of sitcom comedy.

We all recognize the formula now, and for some of us, its pinpoint-ability is what makes it so irritating, but we have to remember that, before Family Guy, that formula didn't exist. Seth MacFarlane created a new math for joke-telling in cartoons--and a new math for television comedy, in general--even if that math has become annoyingly trite because we're all so used to it now.

Like him or hate him--and his brand of comedy--history is filled with "geniuses"--and all these geniuses have the same thing in common: they secured their "genius" status by re-inventing the wheel. They didn't create something from nothing. They created something from a whole lot of something. And that's exactly what MacFarlane did, taking elements of the Simpsons, South Park, and whatever-that-French-word-is-for-something-that-can't-be-expressed, and turning it into a clear-cut formula, a MacFarlane brand, that works.

That said...have you seen the show lately?

My God.....

What happened?

Like the Simpsons the show features a doofus dad and, like the Simpsons (plus the other shows on this list), the show got dumber, the more irritatingly dumber its lead character, in this case, Peter Griffin, got. But...I don't know that "dumb" is necessarily the right word for it. Watching the show now is like watching some lazy version of what the show used to be, with all the cast of characters replaced by Stepford Wives automaton iterations of themselves.

It's almost like McFarlane quit trying after realizing his music dreams, releasing that album of big band-y songs not too long ago--like that was his strategy all along: be smart and funny enough to get the opportunity to record a snazzy Vegas record, then phone the show in.




Honorable Mentions: Eric from Boy Meets World 

I would have included this in the list proper, but, let's face it, no matter how much of a soft spot I have for the Wonder Years' little, dumber brother, Boy Meets World will never be recognized in any circle as "smart." 

But there's definitely something to be said for how Eric Matthews, the show's lead character's big brother, got dumber as the show progressed: from suave, cardboard cutout of a 90's teen with no personality to the pop-culture throw-up machine in later seasons. In one episode in particular, I remember Eric doing a bad Cartman impression. Also...the "duckies" thing.

I only had to scroll down two comments to find a fellow BMW fan who agrees with me:

Soft Sci-Fi Wednesday -- Nork Goes to Church

Nork left HOPE© early the next day. His vacation was one day away and he was antsy. There was a careful mix of anger and awe in him as he drove away from work and watched the early afternoon hurl flames toward the city behind him. He saw the buildings catch almost all at once, watery and invincible though they seemed in the cloud light before noon. They conducted the sun like hot cathodes. All their glass made them appear molten, and in league with some thoughtless urge for destruction. They gave him words without mercy as he drove, channeling into him a thousand different tongues. He let himself believe in the moment of genius, as if it were another rare moment of "being in relation to the world". But he knew he would never remember the sentences that temporarily lit his brain. They would fade like embers in the hours to come, and become something old and uninteresting.

An emptiness embraced the city and its towers, deepening their outline. The surrounding vacuum of wilderness was an empty foundation, a flat baseline signal for the city’s jagged pulse that spiked out of the blown static of the Midwest swale. 

Noise. 

Noise was the ubiquitous feature of the city. Noise and a deeply pitched note oscillating inside of it. The sound hovered over the streets, humming like a half-angel charged with toppling every wall, and splintering each pane of icy glass. The note vibrated in Nork’s skull. Was it music? It was at least in its most basic form a consistent system of movement with no discernible melody, and so what it spoke it did not speak plainly. It may as well have been silent like boulders wedged between mountains, or the depth of ice at Earth’s poles. He felt it like low strings in his finger bones, and his mind brought images of meteors whistling through clouds, and wind stripping trees. Mammoths collapsing. The sound was old and prior to man, like groans from a weird fish fighting back to a deep place to be left alone.

 

The sound and his thoughts confirmed every glimpse he ever had into what he usually described as an invincible "brightness" inside him, showing him that "End" he sourly wanted. 

"End." The word was like flint over his gunpowder spine. He would never lose that response. A goose bump for each notion of total obliteration, bringing his life back, bringing everything back into focus.

As he eliminated distance between him and the city melting behind him under showers of light, memory harpooned him from both sides. Every beam of it carried volumes of information; salient details from being raised in the south boroughs. Uninhibited moments of honesty, mundane and painful, arranged in clean glass looking jars. They seemed capable now of leading him on some eroded but confident path from his own blazing peculiarity to the universal place he desperately sought. For a split second, he was convinced some grand new thing was heading his way. Some sweeping conclusion born from within this isolated moment showed him that all life looked expressible, and felt miles away from the private beach of tongue-tied significance he'd been hiding on for so long.

 *** 

For reasons unknown to him, Nork veered off the highway and drove to a chapel that was located near his old train route to work. His eyes were always drawn to it like all large tomb-like things that capture the darker verges of the imagination. It was probably because the building was so old. It was still old 100 years ago, when the city was much farther away, and the distance from the heart of the sprawl still afforded a buffer zone that kept the city invisible except for its glow.

The church’s structure was hulking and monolithic, as if carved out of a single stone. To Nork it represented obsolescence, but also a craving for old things. A marveling at how they persist in spite of the breaking down of everything around them. How did that resistance happen except by some spectacular power? He thought about the brain when he saw the place. To him, the church looked like the first crude mound of reptilian neurons. A monument to man’s first limbic clusters, still firing with first desires, visions of spirits, demons, and dreams of immortality. The god organ. Still our foundation. Nork wanted it to be alive inside him somewhere, buried as it may be beneath a bloated and domineering cortex.

The church was seated on a rise that provided a view of the open space before the city started toward the northern horizon. He climbed the rock steps and wandered around the side of the building where an unkempt grotto overgrew and kept the place looking its age. There were graves there. The oldest cemetery stones had been buried in earth and now resembled ancient burial mounds. The grass on the mounds was new, and Nork figured the soil had been deposited recently during the last major dustbowl that rearranged the Midwest countryside. These were post-world graves, he thought, drowning in a landscape of change. But some of the newer stones were still visible. Nork was glad people were still buried in the ground and commemorated with stone. He believed with certainty that the practice of proper burials would be one of the last things to leave from the human being. When that is gone that will be the sign, he guessed, that it was all over.

He returned to the entrance and walked through two huge red oak doors. Real wood, Nork noticed as he pushed them with both palms. Nork found a seat in the back of the sanctuary near an ancient fiberglass pipe organ with yellow stained keys that looked like fossilized teeth. The sound it croaked was prehistoric and beautiful, like a long extinct animal come to life to lament eons of lost time. The pews were surprisingly packed. Nork wondered where everyone came from. Where was this barren countryside hiding all these people? The service began with a liturgy that was typical of the new generation of omni-denominational theology. Like all things human in the post-world, everything was borrowed and blended until satisfactorily unrecognizable. Nork heard from someone that communion was often taken at these churches by soaking a rag or sponge in a bowl of vinegar wine and passing it around for congregants to suckle from.

The service continued with musical litanies and group prayers. When it came time for communion, the ushers approached the altar and fetched long poles from behind the pulpit. They affixed vinegar rags to the ends of the poles and swept them up and down the aisles of the sanctuary in front of the congregation’s trembling lips. People leaned forward, eagerly slurping the sour liquid into their mouths. Some of it dribbled down their necks, beaded up in their beards. Some of the more impassioned elderly women darkened their blouses with the fluid they could not hold behind their slack jaws. Nork just watched. During this moment of ‘feeding,’ the minister guided his audience through meditative visions of the suffering of Christ. Each syllable moved the crowd. People shivered and moaned as if something neglected inside them was finally allowed to eat. Nork became afraid of the world that was created here. It was a stage of ritual he had never seen, and was too terrified to admit that he envied. He watched the people more intensely than anything else in his entire life, as if looking hard enough would let him access their ecstasy. To feel the scorching of such uninhibited belief. By the end of the rite, Nork felt he had witnessed something truly extraordinary. Something world-changing. This church, this theater of emotion was a place people could still go to touch the face of god. Through art, through storytelling people were carried to heights of abandon, egos liquefied into the great ocean of supernatural terror. Nork had grown to believe these sensations had all but died off the face of the earth. Only rumors of these “passion churches” remained in the dead ironic city. And here it was: man’s unrestrained exaltation alive and thriving.

After the service, he walked out of the chapel, away from the chatter and sounds of catharsis. The night seemed so close to him he could feel it breathe. The sky was a low ceiling he could almost press with his hand and turn his palm black with soot. It seemed like he knew what he was going to do long before the decision entered his mind. That’s the way it was for Nork during many of his drug cravings. He still had 3 pills left, wrapped in aluminum foil inside his glove box. It was to be a legendary dose. “Why not?” he asked each pill as they burrowed into his stomach where they would stage for an unprecedented assault on his mind.

***

Nork had trouble identifying the precise moment he came to. The instant was smashed somewhere between the diminished snapshots of his slow re-sharpening awareness. His eyes shook away a blur, and he heard bells. He was leaning against the steel of a canal. The air was burnt and sea rotten. Smell, he noted, was the first grip on reality to return after a hard night of the fickle drug Shade. The parapet he reclined against was covered in aquatic crust. The colors of his surroundings were oceanic and severe, like the world was bleeding blue through a cracked calcium shell.

Fisherman bound a boat beneath his dangling feet. They walked imperfectly between docks, their experience a heavy shadow that followed them, sometimes getting in their way. Nork wondered whether they handled each night's catch like the last slivers of earth, escorting white wedges ashore like the divvied corpse of Christ that they found floating at sea. One of them smelled his hands. 

"There are still fisherman?" Nork asked the ripe wind in his nose, deferring to its expertise. His senses did all of his thinking, and so it was that a person without Shade over their eyes that morning would have seen no one at all on the docks. Not one fisherman.

Breakfast Tales Vol. 1:1

BULLSHIT MTN., WHATEVS

It took us five days to trek up the side of the mountain. In that time, I got to know our tour guide--a rough-looking gentleman--goes by the name "Carl." He's what they call a Sherpa--real "native"-looking fellow. Like someone you'd see in one of those picture essays about emaciated third-world villagers done up by some fresh-faced, do-gooder right out of college, with a double major in photography and whatever else it is that entitles you to capture the "reality" of third world countries.

This guy Carl turns to me about halfway up this goddam behemoth of a mountain and he says: "USA Man, I do not wish to continue. But I do for you. And for your country. I wish to show you what you can not see in a place of big cars and lots of monies. I wish to humble you, USA Man." He says this in broken English with no hint of irony or condescension. "Other USA Man come and they say: My God, it is beautiful--this mountain. Like they've never seen mountain before."

"Oh?" I say, not understanding what this poor fellow, dressed in rags, is getting at--if anything at all.

"Yes, USA Man," he says. "They come and you can see--in how they see mountain--something change. There is light in their eyes. For the first time, they see."

At this point, I am famished. I haven't had an honest-to-God decent meal in weeks. I've survived solely on plants. Rabbit food, basically. I turn to Carl and I say, "And what does that mean, exactly? "'For the first time, they see'?" I am a bit testy when I say this, but I give Carl the benefit of the doubt, figuring maybe his crudeness can be attributed to rusty English and/or the very obvious culture barrier.

"Oh, USA Man," he says, practically apologizing. "I do not wish to offend. It is just that--I can tell you're upset. I can read people like that. Like I can read other USA Man and see the light in their eyes for the first time."

"You're out of your gourd," I tell Carl and I try to explain this whole "light-for-the-first-time" nonsense to him by way of analogy. "You ever stop to think, Carl," I say, "that maybe these other 'USA Man' are so mesmerized by the mountain because they're in a new country, experiencing this mountain for the first time? Don't be such a mystic about it," I say to him, tilting my neck back and draining the few remaining drops of sun-warm water onto my tongue, where it is absorbed before it reaches my throat. "I know, being one of these Sherpa characters it's your job to say weird shit, but let's face the facts, here. You go to America and you see the big, shiny cars and the "lots of monies" and the skimpy-skirted bimbos and the rest of it and you're going to look pretty goddam lit up, too, my friend."

Carl looks at me, his eyes wide and not comprehending. He turns away, scans the scene he's seen one million times before--his eyes squinted, trying to keep out the sun and the flies. "USA Man, I have no idea what you say."

"Forget it," I say, and pick up my pack, ready to hit the trail again.

 

 ***

It was maybe an hour after the sun set when our guide--Carl's rich, white, non-native employer--took us to a ledge overlooking a vast albeit limited range of the dusty earth below. The moon smiled arrogantly over everything, turning the once sharp-edged trees into non-threatening black-blobbed versions of themselves. This is where we set up camp.

The other men unfurled their expensive department store tents. They blew up their air mattresses and took their final piss of the night before settling down inside their tents.

My tent was about as basic and shoddy as a tent could be. It was something I found in the attic above the garage. I don't remember buying it, so my guess is that I inadvertently inherited it when the wife left for good.

A lot of the men had tents that came with an extra padded layer they could lay down underneath the tent to avoid sleeping on rocky or uneven surfaces. My tent didn't have this extra layer. The bottom of my tent was just as thin as any of the sides. So laying down on especially jagged surfaces--as was the case that night--felt like laying down on an ancient, dried-up sheet of dinosaur vomit with only a windbreaker-thin division between your back and the clumps of earth and rock made sharp by millions of years of wind and erosion.

Since comfort was out of the question, I lay awake most of the night, plotting out what I could see in front of me onto a map in my head. I started from the very specific. Specific trees. First: the ones obstructed by shadows and night. Then: the lighter ones. I did this with every visible and non-visible patch of darkness I could see, until I made the map so crude a fancy-pants art critic would think I was some kind of Rothko genius, able to oversimplify the world--or at least the supposedly inspired (from what they rave about in those damned travel brochures) world in front of me that night--into strangely-shaped blocks of black and white.

The exercise kept me up most of the night, even when I was able to convince myself that it was helping me fall asleep. The rest of my group--all dorky dads from nowhere-ville suburbs State-side--slept soundly, muttering under their moustaches dream nonsense. I looked over at one guy--this guy had the kind of face that drives you to anger for no intelligent reason. He was laying on his back, with his arms folded under his head. The flap of his tent was open, rustled gently by the midnight breeze of the mountain. I could tell that he did this intentionally--and I had more than a sneaking suspicion he did this so, later, he could tell his boy-scout son all about how he fell asleep watching the stars and how the stars looked different at such a height--like you could almost reach out and touch them. Give me a break, I thought. I wanted to gag.

When I couldn't take it any longer--thinking about all the horseshit this guy would tell the wife and kid back home--I got up and relieved myself in his canteen. Just a splash, though. I didn't want him to know that he was drinking pee. It was enough for me to see his face quirked up the next morning, trying to detect the strange and bitter hint of something in his water. "Tastes off," he'd say. "The water around here sure ain't like it is in the States." The whole group would then laugh and cackle horrendously, like it was some kind of terribly funny inside joke: the superiority of American water vs. the water in this third-world shithole. Meanwhile, Carl and I would exchange the same blank-faced stare--because, despite coming from different regions of the world, we both know when a joke is not funny.

***

The next morning, I woke after maybe fifteen minutes of the heaviest sleep in my life--which made the waking up part all the more terrible. I walked out of my tent and was immediately greeted by the sight of all these dads, standing around telling terrible jokes and frying up a high-protein breakfast of eggs, beans and bacon. Even the way they cooked annoyed me. They cooked like dads. Not like men. There was no disorder to it. No fuck-it-I'm-a-bachelor mess and carelessness to it. Everything was arranged neatly. Strips of pink bacon laid out in neat lines. Eggs scrambled just right. And nothing over-cooked or burnt. These men were men made tame. And you could see it in the lack of savageness in their cooking. The fact that they ate breakfast at breakfast time--that breakfast was even a concept to them--a rule they followed regimentally vs. eating when they felt like it.

One of the dads told me to "grab a plate. This bacon ain't gonna eat itself."

"You'd be surprised what bacon will do," I said, not looking at the guy.

As I was walking over to Carl, I passed Dave--whose canteen I had pissed in the night before. He took little, rat-like sips from the canteen, swishing it around in the front part of his mouth. But he did not make a funny face or comment on the piss-tinged water, which was disappointing. He must not have detected the piss.

Carl was standing under a tree, looking on with something resembling disapproval or the look of someone studying a lesser species and making notes in his head. As I approached him, his blue eyes--the color of alien crystals in cheap sci-fi movies--looked right through me. I could feel him maternally wagging his finger at my uncaring conscience.

"I saw what you did last night, USA Man. I saw what you did when you believed everyone was sleeping but you."

"Oh?" I replied, lighting a thin cigar.

"You made water in the canteen of Dave."

I laughed. "'Made water'?" I said. "I pissed in the goddam canteen of Dave, is what I did."

"Yes," Carl said, not finding this nearly as comical as I did. "You made piss."

Carl stared off into the sun, cracking like an egg over the landscape. His arms were folded, like a disapproving girlfriend and his head was turned away from me. "Come on, Carl," I said. "Lighten up. It was a prank. A practical joke. Don't tell me you don't have practical jokes over here."

After some time, Carl unfolded his arms and looked at me dead in the eyes. "Yes. It is joke. But you're the only one laughing. These other men make joke and we don't laugh. But they do. They laugh together. That is joke."

"Dammit, Carl. I have had about enough of your Zen mystic bullshit. You want to try to say something profound, say it. Tell me something, do you dream in riddles, too?"

Carl walked away, practically huffing. He's a child like that. "He'll get over it," I thought. "And if he doesn't--fuck him. What do I need the tenuous society of a third-world Sherpa for? I'll be leaving here next week. I'll probably never see him again."

***

Except for a thin streak of fog that looked like pulled cotton shreds floating above the rocky peak, we could see pretty clearly that our goal was within reach. By noon, probably--maybe a little after--we'd reach the top of the mountain.

All the dads would stand around slugging each others' arms and smirking with pride. They'd share their smirks with each other, then smirk quietly to themselves, looking down and out and in all directions, beyond the vast emptiness in front of them, trying to think very profound thoughts--like at a museum, looking at a painting they don't understand, waiting for that a-ha! moment to hit--as if summitting a great peak entitled them to it--as if climbing a mountain entitles you to thoughts that others can't think because they haven't also climbed the mountain.

I stopped for a second to catch my breath. Carl stopped with me. "Well, Carl," I said, pulling a Ziploc bag of edamame out of my backpack and munching vigorously, "this is it. Won't be long and this will all be over. We'll get to the top and then it's back down from whence we came." Carl, once again, flashed me his trademark death-stare.

"USA Man," he said. "I do not know why you come on this trip. All you do is make fun."

"I'm not making fun," I said. A chewed-up glob of edamame flew from my mouth and landed just short of Carl's calloused foot. We both looked down at it. "Sorry," I said.

***

By the time we reached the top, I had experienced a resurgence of energy. No sense of accomplishment. Just a general rush of adrenaline--the final push that came with knowing it would all be over soon and that our trek back down was faster than the trek up.

I was ready to go back down, recharged by the thought that that was the only thing left to do before I could get back to my car and back to the airport where I could fly back home, call Steve and tell him all about how much this trip, which he recommended to me, did absolutely nothing for me--how it didn't bring me clarity or make feel any more connected to nature than I already didn't feel before.

Carl must have sensed my inappropriate eagerness to get back down, because on top of the mountain, while everyone else was doing exactly as I predicted--standing around and high-fiving each other and staring contemplatively in front of them, waiting for the profound thoughts to hit--Carl came over to me and said: "Why do you smile, USA Man?" He said this accusingly, like you'd ask someone the same question at a funeral.

"To tell you the truth, Carl. I'm just ready to get back home."

"'Back home'?" Carl said, disgusted. "You climb mountain. This is time to think."

"Think?" I asked. "About what? I can think at any elevation."

"Not true. Up here, you think deep as mountain is high," Carl said.

"You're right. There's less oxygen up here, which is probably why so many people believe their hackneyed thoughts on life are so brilliant at this height."

Carl started to walk away. I felt bad, like not being impressed--with myself and/or the mountain--had somehow hurt him. Maybe it was the gentle gusts of spring-like wind, the world seen from the height of a skyscraper, the fact that I could almost make out my car in the general area of the lodge parking lot below. Something made me feel bad. Something made me not want to disappoint or offend Carl, who, up until now, had banked on me changing my tune once I'd reached the top of this mountain. He acted like a kid--a kid who spends all day drawing a picture that he's sure will bowl you over, but when you see it, it's still a kid's picture.

"Look, Carl," I said. "This is great. You've been a wonderful guide and a good friend. I just don't feel any sense of accomplishment. I'm supposed to, but I don't. If this was Everest, I might feel like I really did something--but this mountain doesn't even rank as one of the highest. Not by a long shot."

"You think this is little potatoes, USA Man. But this is my home and it is big potatoes to me."

"I know, Carl. I'm sorry. This is great. Thanks."  Carl looked down at the ground, wounded. He then raised his head and stared off pensively. I didn't know what to say, so I too looked off, trying to think of something.

***

Two days later, when we got back down, everyone made a big deal to exchange numbers and handshakes. It's funny how these guys, even out of the office, whether through training or having worked in an office environment for so long they don't know what else to do, rigidly maintain a sense of corporate etiquette. "Call me State-side," I heard. "Hey, don't be a stranger, Jim."

I stood at the fringes of this strange rain-dance of smiling moustaches and meaty dad-hands firmly shaking other meaty dad-hands. Having gathered all my stuff together--my bag and tent laying at my feet--all I had to do now was wait for these bozos to stop their pow-wow and get on the bus that would then take us to the lodge, where I could finally check out, get in my car and leave this place forever: a memory, neither good nor bad, in a long series of neither good nor bad memories obstructing the scrapbook-pipeline in my mind.

Sober Sunday Reflections on...the Lillard

I remember going to the mall every Friday night when I was in middle school to meet up with some friends at the small three-screen movie theater by the food court. Every week: we’d see the newest movie shamelessly pushed at kids our age. These movies came in two types: the Pygmalion teen rom-com, in which one of the two main characters changes in some supposedly significant way to become date-able to the other main character (She’s All That, Drive Me Crazy, Cruel Intentions, Ten Things I Hate About You, et. al.) and the teen slasher flick (the I Know What You Did Last Summer movies, the Scream movies, Valentine—and the others I’m not thinking of at the moment).

While these movies may seem ostensibly different, there was a lot of crossover between them—not just in the fact that they borrowed the same crop of actors (Freddie Prinze, Jr. is in I Know What You Did Last Summer and She’s All That; Ryan Phillipe is in I Know What You Did Last Summer and Cruel Intentions; Matthew Lillard is in Scream and She’s All That, etc. etc.), but also in one very particular unifying trait, that heretofore (first and last time I’ll probably ever use that word) has not been addressed: most of the movies (if not all of them) feature a character I like to call: the Lillard. 

 Pictured: THE Lillard

 The Lillard, named after Matthew, is a quirky white guy who serves as the puckish comic relief to the often saccharine, melodramatic or gory-but-not-really plots of these movies. He’s like Shaggy—he has no business hanging around all these super-cool (often rich) kids, but they keep him around because…he’s the Lillard, man. Incidentally, Matthew Lillard (the Lillard King, himself) now plays Shaggy in the live-action Scooby Doo movies.

The interesting thing about the Lillards mentioned in this article is that a lot of them went on to relatively successful careers—before disappearing off the grid almost altogether. Save for Matthew Lillard (King Lillard, himself) and Dude from Breaking Bad, who kind of resurrected their careers with roles in movies or T.V. shows that…people with entertainment standards like—Lillard with a recent role in the Descendants and Dude from Breaking Bad in…Breaking Bad.

Anyway, here’s the list:

1.      Matthew Lillard

Scream was the first movie I saw from the Lillard-era. I remember kids talking about it at school. At the time, movies like this didn’t really exist for our generation. The kids in the eighties had the Brat Pack. But it wasn’t until Scream came out that we got our first taste of a generation-defining movie—and what a ruckus it caused.

The meta horror movie in-jokes seemed really funny at the time and I seem to remember being really disturbed by the killings in the movie, but…looking back at the movie now, it’s hard to grasp why it was so revolutionary. The parts that stick out like a sore thumb now are the parts that I responded to as a kid and ultimately what made the movie generation-defining. But…it’s also what makes the film now feel dated. 

What we at home don't realize is that the script actually called for McGowan's nipples to be obnoxiously erect during this scene.

I do feel lucky, though, that my first exposure to the Lillard character was THE Lillard and not one of the Lillard knock-offs listed below. 

In Scream, Matthew Lillard plays a character named Stu. The way he talked, the way he acted—the inflated bro-confidence and laid back stoner-but-not-stoner affectation in his voice—really struck a chord with most males my age. Likely, because we’d never seen the comic relief in a movie characterized like that—both funny and cool. He later went on to sort-of reprise the role in She's All That. You could argue that Ferris Bueller is funny and cool (maybe a precursor to the Lillard), but Stu  and whatever-Lillard's character's name is in She's All That belonged to our generation and Ferris belonged to the eighties.

So, here’s to Matthew Lillard. The Lillard of all Lillards. Thanks for ruining us. 

2.      Dude From Breaking Bad

Breaking Bad is a show enjoyed by everybody. And its appeal (for some reason) spans generations. In the olden days of ten years ago, people with very little in common used to bond over broad topics like sports or guess-what-little-Billy-did chit-chat. Now (and I am witness to this), they talk about Breaking Bad. When I go to work, all I hear are people talking about Breaking Bad. Mop-headed hipsters with gauges in their ears ask the baby-boomer next to them if they watched the latest episode. Dorky guys in their thirties relate to moms-of-four in their forties how they used to like Walter but now they don’t but they still feel compelled to watch him. And of course, backwoods Juggalos confide to their straight-laced superiors how making meth seems like a totally viable alternative to what they’re doing now. 

 The guy who prompted one-million Juggalos to ask: "Meth...how does that shit work?"

But before any of this hoopla, one of the show’s main characters, Dude Who Plays Jesse, used to be a Lillard.

That’s right. It was during the tail-end of the Lillard phase—just as my generation was getting sick of being pandered to with formulaic Hollywood schlock and graduating on to things that free-thinking individuals like, like movies-that-say-something and post-grunge Radiohead. 

Pictured: "bleep bloop"

So, lucky for Dude From Breaking Bad, nobody saw his Lillard performance in Whatever It Takes. In the movie, Dude From Breaking Bad is sort of a non-pot-smoking reiteration of Jeff Spicoli. His big plan is to secure his high school legacy by doing something crazy before leaving high school forever. He ends up removing the neck from a statue of the man who the school is named after, which stands on the school’s front lawn. 

Meth-dealer seems like a logical progression from former high school Lillard

The movie is also notable for featuring a young, not-yet-hipster-household name James Franco—and for the fact that Franco and Dude From Breaking Bad get second-billing to then-popular Shane West and that chick who played Gia from Full House. 

The film falls into the high school Pygmalion category of late-90’s/early-aughts teen movies, with Franco as one of the guys who must change in order to date Gia—and by change, I mean learning from her best friend and next door neighbor, Shane West, that Gia’s favorite book is Nine Stories and her favorite band is the Eels, then telling her that those are his favorite book and band. So, note to Facebook stalkers…boning the girl of your dreams is as simple as regurgitating their profile information. 

3.      Jamie Kennedy

Aww, poor Jamie Kennedy. His first and only Lillard role was playing second-Lilllard to the Lillard in the first Scream. 

Not Pictured: Martin Freeman from the UK version of the Office and the Lord of the Rings movies

In the movie, he plays eternal-virgin Randy—a video-store, horror-movie obsessive with his own horror movie “rules”—broken one-by-one, almost the second he voices them.Unlike the Lillard, Jamie goes on to survive for the sequels, where he offers up even more goofball Lillard-isms. 

One line in particular I remember being quoted at my middle school for the better part of a year--the line where the ghostface killer asks Jamie Kennedy what his favorite scary movie is and Jamie Kennedy says: "Showgirls." I don't know why, at that age, we thought it was funny to abuse kind-of-funny one-liners from movie trailers, but that was definitely one that got abused.

4.      Seth Green

Matthew Lillard may be the original Lillard, but Seth Green takes the cake for playing, not one, but two Lillard roles during this period. The first: in Can’t Hardly Wait, where he plays Kenny Fisher—a white kid from a predominately white area trying to act like a black rapper. The character might have been source material for fellow-Lillard, Jamie Kennedy’s Malibu’s Most Wanted, since they’re pretty much the same character. 

Lillard Historians take note: this is what a Lillard looks like (the quirky glasses, late-90's fashion sensibility, pocket chain and crazy hair). Shaggy for the Gen-X/Gen-Y in-betweeners.

The second Lillard role was in Idle Hands, in which Green played “funny, stoner guy zombie-friend” to Devon Sawa. 

Green’s character in the movie is notable for crossing that line that no other movies featuring Lilllard characters crossed: in the movie, Green smoked weed—the fourth wall for Lillards. While the other Lillards on this list owe a lot of their quirk to Lillard prototype, Jeff Spicoli, none of them are shown smoking weed—nor is it suggested that they smoke weed. They follow the Shaggy Principle: Shaggy was obviously a dooby-smokin’ tweaker, but they never explicitly admit that in the cartoon. Green’s character in Idle Hands broke that rule—at a time when the Lillard was on its way out. 

So, maybe it’s safe to say Green destroyed the Lillard in the same way that that new country song, “If ICould Have a Beer With Jesus" destroyed country. What is there left to say or do when you make a song that explicitly says what country music has been about (drinking beer and Jesus) since country music has been country music? Similarly, where can the Lillard character be taken once you’ve explicitly made him what everyone suspected he was: a goofy, on-the-cusp-of-the-21st-century reincarnation of Jeff Spicoli. It’d be like an episode of Scooby Doo, in which Shaggy is shown puff-puff-passing with Scoob and Thelma is shown twenty years in the future as a sexually-repressed, spinster librarian.

So, thanks, Seth Green. Without you, the Lillard thing might have gone too far. It might have been taken where most tropes and franchises go to die: in space!

Goddam it. Never mind.