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
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:
Yeah, I think The Simpson's is a case of a show getting weirder instead of dumber. Homer definitely deteriorated as a character in later seasons, but instead of becoming banal, I feel like the show became un-watchably bizarre, even surreal at times. Maybe it was just a staying power tactic. Cheaply exploiting the contextual freedom that the show's concept afforded, to pinch out as many episodes as possible that still have the illusion of being fresh by virtue of their WTF-ness.
ReplyDeleteYeah. I don't know, because I tuned out right around '98 and when I revisited it recently (not the DVDs, but the new episodes) it just seemed like the writers were trying too hard to be the Simpsons.
ReplyDeleteIt's probably a case of a new and younger generation of writers doing a pale imitation rather than being the first or second team of original writers. Or...something.
I think the "un-watchable bizarreness" comes from the new team of writers not understanding that, first and foremost, the Simpsons is rooted in a very particular un-reality: it's not non-sequitur and random for no reason--or, at least, it didn't used to be. They (the original writers) were taking shots at the All-American family and how that notion of the All-American family has devolved into the beer-guzzling, moron dad and all the other Simpsons caricatures.
The problem, though, is that, over time, those caricatures have become archetypal, commonplace even. So, the satire has become more extreme, more absurd, because the satirical gun-sight has shifted--which is what happens when any show, thing, entity, what-have-you tries too hard to recapture what it used to be rather than becoming what it's set to become, had that show, thing, entity not decided to become self-reflexive.
It's kind of like the Republican Party: in trying to become more like the Reagan Era GOP, they've shifted dramatically, becoming something like a cling-for-dear-life-to-the-far-right-fringes self-parody of what they used to be.
Or. Something. I don't know. I'll make sense of what I just said later.