Tynan's Anger

Over thee past year, my father has commented on how he couldn't believe Mary-Louise Parker, a Tony-winning stage actor, would "lower" herself to a TV role for Weeds. My brother, before leaving for college, was arguing with friends over whether Tru Blood or Lost was the worst show ever made. Both arguments seemed ludicrous to me, but it was a rather telling generational gap: on one side, there was the conviction that TV was a fundamentally flawed lowbrow media. On the other side, there was the convictions of those who don't remember a time when there was little good TV to be found, but do understand hype.

What both views ignore is a rather extraordinary transformation in American media and American art over the past decade: this has been the best decade of television we've ever seen, and the competition really isn't close. In fact, TV is so good right now that it may be the most thriving art form in contemporary American society. It may even be the best golden age stretch of any art form America has ever produced.

The process that made TV so good was a combination of a variety of cultural, commercial, and political factors. For one, the end of the Cold War convinced even those far to the left that capitalism was ultimately a more sustainable and democratic economic system. This was a fundamental change in leftist artistic philosophy, to say nothing of world philosophy. The result, for overwhelmingly liberal creative types, was essentially the end of the conviction that working on TV was inherently "selling out." There were still business forces to contend with, but they weren't inherently evil from a personal standpoint, so long as the business process didn't affect the quality of your artwork.

Instead, TV, which began as a commercial medium before it was even considered a potentially artistic one, has come to exemplify how a competitive market benefits everyone. When there are hundreds of channels having to compete for eyeballs, they quality of the product goes up -- and the benefit goes to the consumer. Even as network ratings have drastically declined this decade, the corporate behemoths are still as rich as they've always been, no matter how much revenue shrinks. More importantly, the rise of cable channels has led to more chances for innovation, and more resources to do so. By 2009, the rise of good cable has trickled up to network television.

You couldn't have good TV this decade without industry transformation that took place in the '90s. With the breakdown of the ostensible wall between "high art" and "low art," the few artists who dared to toe the line for profit were often more successful: shows like The Simpsons, Seinfeld, ER, and Law & Order were able to make unprecedented profits while still trumping most of what had been on TV beforehand, even within their own genres.

In addition to the rise of cable this decade, there was the rise of DVDs, On-Demand, and the increased availability of "premium channels" that made it increasingly difficult for the "brilliant but cancelled" phenomenon to persist. The newfound voice the Internet provided for fan masses only helped. It was also more egalitarian: in the bicoastal TV culture that has notoriously marginalized Middle America, the Internet allowed devoted, intelligent fans to have their say, fans who only had TV as their primary source of entertainment.

And these are just the innovations that had clear profit lines: TiVo, YouTube, and piracy made it even easier to get quality television, which means that the networks had to shape up. Furthermore, DVR (the industry-approved response of TiVo), and Hulu are increasingly showing networks that viewers are less hell-bent on sticking it to the man and more interested in easy access to quality programming. DVR and Hulu only make sense in a medium that was always essentially free to viewers.

I would be remiss if I didn't point out the effects of HBO shows like The Sopranos, Six Feet Under, Sex and the City, The Wire, and Curb Your Enthusiam. It's easy to forget that the main purpose for these channels early on was to see things too risqué for network; in his latest stand-up special, David Spade joked that HBO has strayed from its pornographic roots. Late in the '90s, HBO launched an extensive new programming campaign using a tag line destined to be crucial to American history: "It's not TV, It's HBO." You could argue that TV became HBO.

For a nearly decade long stretch, every new HBO show was being described as "the best TV show ever." In many ways, they were true. From an artistic standpoint, The Sopranos, The Wire, and Six Feet Under were light years ahead of what was available for non-diehards previously. For me, a crucial turning point came for me came in 2003, when a dramaturg instructor in my extracurricular theater program hesitantly began watching The Sopranos. Within three weeks, she had gone from saying, "I don't understand what the fuss is about" to exclaiming, "this is drama on the level of Hamlet!"

HBO's effect was not only felt on primetime dramas and comedy; It also affected made for TV-movies and the miniseries. A medium that was previously considered among the lowest of the low arts was now full of projects like Band of Brothers, Wit, Angels in America, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, and John Adams. Many of these projects came from the theater world, especially those that were too ambitious for movies but just right for those in a medium with a higher budget but an ingrained focus on dialogue. The networks still haven't caught up with HBO on this front, and they may not be able to with current business limitations. Still, I can see very few drawbacks to seeing networks compete with HBO on this front.


Ironically, since HBO was still remaining somewhat faithful to its pornographic roots. Late night television needed a way to keep eyes off the nudity that was increasingly a presence in the bedrooms of the crucial under-30 demographic, either on the TV or the Internet. The result was a completely transformed late night landscape that made all the bloviating over Leno v. Letterman in 1993 appear moot in hindsight. Those who wanted to relax at night watched Leno, those who had been raised watching Letterman could still do so and get to work on time. Younger generations looking for the edgy stuff could now watch The Daily Show and Conan O'Brien, or, later, The Soup, The Craig Ferguson Show and The Colbert Report.

By being more selective about its guests and more extreme in its political humor -- an advantage cable has over the networks -- The Daily Show became a vehicle for an entire generation's political rage, one that was helped along by Comedy Central's efforts with South Park (a show that reached its prime this decade), and helped make stars of Lewis Black, Steve Carrel, Stephen Colbert and hell, even Ed Helms.

Meanwhile, the vehicle for the sicker side of humor was taken over by Adult Swim on Comedy Central. All the controversies in the '90s over Beavis and Butthead, The Simpsons, and South Park seemed moot compared to postmodern insanity of Aqua Teen Hunger Force and Robot Chicken.

In the '90s, the focus was on shows with ridiculously high ratings on an established network or cable channel. The concerns over those shows ignored the sick sense of humor that Nickelodeon was fostering among those now in their 20s with Ren & Stimpy, Rocko's Modern Life, and The Adventures of Pete & Pete. Those concerns were overlooked at the time primarily because, well, it was on cable. It's no wonder that Invader Zim, despite being just as clever and no less incendiary than the shows of the early '90s, struggled to stay on the air in an increasingly watchful commercial landscape.

All this ended up producing better shows on the networks. Even on the most risk-averse TV channels, the occasional breakthroughs shined through. After the 2000 election, The West Wing provided a vehicle for those who wanted to see how the Clinton administration should have behaved. While still somewhat primitive, The West Wing featured an unprecedented level of verisimilitude for a political network primetime show. Aaron Sorkin's original conception of The West Wing, didn't even feature the President. The addition of Jed Bartlett in the development stage provided one of the most essential characters on TV this decade, one that would be a "concession" for most writers, but one that could only come from a theater veteran who understood the value of being commercially viable in addition to artistically credible.

Meanwhile, 24 provided a primetime network action thriller unlike anything anyone had ever seen before. Not only had there never been a TV show comparable to Die Hard on network; there wasn't even a movie that took the same inventive approach to the political action thriller. All the talk of the show's fantastical view of torture overshadowed the fact that the show took an unprecedentedly realistic view of national security. The conservative implications are the product of a depiction of what an inherently conservative profession, which has the same office politics and struggles with balancing the personal and professional of any job. This one that just happens to have more at stake than, say, a paper company in Scranton, PA.

Unlike most action thrillers in the past, who from John Wayne and Ronald Reagan to Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger had always matched their characters' conservatism, 24's star was Kiefer Sutherland, a Canadian Socialist who, like the character he depicted, has proven to be far more militant than would befit his better judgment.

Network comedy has been a trickier enterprise for the artistically inclined. Perhaps the biggest problem with the high-stakes world of network television has been its tendency to cut off shows before they properly develop. This is especially true of more innovative comedy, which has generally acquired the label of being a "cult classic. Nevertheless, just about any cable channel would have been thrilled with the ratings of shows like Arrested Development, Futurama, and Family Guy, all of which were fully available on DVD and acquired an even more devoted following after being canceled.

DVDs even helped equal the playing field between judging "edgy comedy" past and present. Compared to the first eight seasons of The Simpsons, now uncut on DVD, it was easier to see just how inferior even the best episodes of Family Guy were to the heyday of The Simpsons, a show that was on decline by the time Family Guy was emerging. It was easier than ever to see how Saturday Night Live has lost its vitality since its incarnation in the mid-'70s. Yet, you could also see how many of the problems of today's show, from awkward staging to its struggle to fill time have been issues the show always faced.

The most amazing element of this transformation was that it was happening with almost no attention from the media industry responsible for covering television. The major concerns of a media industry trained to be cynical focused on the rise of reality TV, the censorship surrounding Janet Jackson's Super Bowl pasted-nipple "exposure," and the "criminals" watching YouTube.

These were all concerns that made sense in a previous generation, when TV was the idiot Box, and were valid when Leave It To Beaver, Hill Street Blues, and Dallas were among the "best" products TV offered. In those cases, censorship was a political issue that didn't affect art on TV until the Smothers Brothers or Laugh In. But the lower quality of TV art at the start was mainly the product of a culture where the best artists didn't want to develop their art for television. The stigmatization of television follows the same patterns as the stigmatization of the "Little Theater" movement, pre-Code Hollywood films, Cubist painting and early comic books, all of which are now increasingly essential elements of high culture.

The difference with TV is that it became a viable medium after World War II, when the economy was thriving and the prominence of Communism was rapidly declining among the American left. As a result, capitalism came first with television, quality second. There were ups and downs along the time, just like there were ups and downs in American society. Nonetheless, television's progression into higher quality, higher profitability, and more equitable distribution is consistent with a variety of historical, economic and sociological equivalents. Despite the inherent negativity of academia, television has practically implemented what academia has worked out in theory.

There are still some areas where I would like to see television improve, namely the development of quality female characters without the need model-quality looks, and the development of television as smart as The Sopranos for more rural audiences. Those caveats aside, I would still maintain that over the last 10-15 years, television has become America's greatest artistic and culturally vital medium, and a model for all other artistic media. With its increasingly global presence, (even after the War in Iraq, Friends was the most popular show in the Middle East), American television has already begun to change cultural values that have been conflated by political values. As with all art, the fantasy world is better. But it's getting closer to the reality.

Top 10 Shows of the Decade:
10. 30 Rock
9. Arrested Development
8. Invader Zim
7. The West Wing
6. The Colbert Report
5. Six Feet Under
4. 24
3. The Wire
2. The Daily Show
1. The Sopranos

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Labels: daily show, decade in review, dvds, dvr, high art/low art, hulu, sitcoms, Sopranos, television, the wire, tivo, youtube

New York has lost a lot of its luster of late, but one area in which it will retain its dominance is as a breeding ground for underground comedy. What you see in a closet-sized space in New York will often end up as a cultural phenomenon five years later, and while Andrew Connor and Mike Mathieu of The Cody Rivers Show technically hail from Seattle, they subscribe to the New York/Chicago style of comedy, which is grounded in theater, as opposed to the Los Angeles style based on semi-spiteful mockery of the arrogance and contradictions of the entertainment industry.

If right now the Frat Pack of Judd Apatow and Seth Rogen are the dominant force in comedy, in five years I guarantee you will be seeing more acts like Cody Rivers. You can argue that their style of cerebral, inverted observational comedy has already broken through, with TV shows like Important Things with Demetri Martin and Robot Chicken, but as bro-comedy icon Peter Griffin said on Family Guy, “You’re not really a success until you’re on a respectable network like NBC, ABC or CBS.” As it stands, the next wave of comedy is shaping up to be one of the most cerebral we’ve ever seen, and even within the theater realm. Cody Rivers's new revue, Meanwhile, Everywhere, may be the most joyous, hilarious, effervescent brand of cerebral comedy I’ve ever seen, and the only act of its kind that didn’t make me depressed (comedy nerd that I am) without hiding the utter chaos behind its humorous exterior.

Granted, the crowd at UNDER St. Marks was exactly the kind catered to by the Cody Rivers Show's style of comedy. Yet I am still hesitant to call any comedy act too cerebral until I am proven wrong. The fact of the matter is, the era when most comedians started performing at 16 or 17 and had to be funny to stay alive is further and further in the past. For more and more people, joining the working grind is a reality, and going without food for days for an artistic dream is even less practical than it once was; more and more comedy troupes are populated by lawyers and accountants, and even those who live in relative Bohemia are educated at places like Yale, Columbia, and Harvard.

A similar change is occurring to comedy’s audience. Those in their 20s have an unprecedented level of college education, and can pick up on little highbrow touches more than ever, even if they didn’t make much of an effort to learn in college. Thus, when Cody Rivers does a routine on speaking in opposites, mixes real-life storytelling with an absurd mock-ballet, or flips through a talk show on Greenland Independence, Robot Chicken style, by using the “magic of theater,” what was oblique even in the Steve Martin era is becoming increasingly mainstream. Needless to say, if the under-30 vote can put Obama in the White House, I think it can dictate comedic taste.

In an era when The Simpsons has turned finding parallels or previous reference points into a comedy nerd’s game, it’s still hard to find a parallel to The Cody Rivers Show, as few acts I’ve seen intertwine physical humor so seamlessly with the highbrow. In fact, the only parallels I can think of are the short absurdist plays of Beckett, Artaud, and Ionesco, and SITI's brand of physical theater, but The Cody Rivers Show is a hell of a lot funnier and a lot less depressing than all of those. Between Conner and Methieu, the classic straight man/buffoon dynamic is shifted on a nearly constant basis, and their chemistry is so strong on a physical, emotional, and intellectual level that you’d think they were soul mates—and they’ve got that covered too, by not even trying to hide the bulges in the full-body wetsuits.

I use the term "comedy nerd" liberally, nowadays, and I think that is okay in a culture where our lexicon is dominated by the nerdiest of the comedy nerds (“spam,” “yoink,” “freaks and norms,” and “cromulent” are among the relatively common terms originating from comedy that have been popularized by the Internet). In fact, things were like that even 15 years ago, before the Internet. If the postmodern philosophy of Foucault and Derrida was based on the chaotic philosophy of Nietchze, Darwin, or Kant, depending on who you ask, The Cody Rivers Show is similarly indebted to the comedic breakthroughs of Steve Martin, early Saturday Night Live, and The Simpsons. But The Cody Rivers Show is possibly as far down the rabbit hole as comedy has ever gone, turning the ability to find humor in chaos into a means of survival for the soul.

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The Cody Rivers Show: Meanwhile, Everywhere was presented at UNDER St. Marks (94 St. Marks Place) by The Horse Trade Theter Group. For future tour dates of the Cody Rivers Show, please visit www.codyrivers.com. Photos by John Meloy.

This review was originally published on Blogcritics.

Labels: cody rivers show, comedy, Demetri Martin, high art/low art, observational comedy, physical humor, post-modernism, Robot Chicken, Saturday Night Live, sketch comedy, Steve Martin

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Few music videos have ever drawn as much endless debate, controversy, and mystery as Radiohead's "Just." One of the highlights of their second album The Bends, the album that established Radiohead as international leaders of anthemic alternative rock,"Just" is one of the better songs Radiohead ever recorded. Strangely, the band may actually be underrated in the music video department, and none of their video tops their exploration of existential middle age malaise that left the most horrific thing anyone has ever heard unspoken:

"Yes I'll tell you, I'll tell you why I'm lying here... but God forgive me... and God help us all... because you don't know what you ask of me."

Radiohead's video has spawned endless debate among the band's fans, and over the past 14 years the question has never stopped raging on forums across the Internet. But how many of these debaters know of a precursor set all the way back in the 1957, by legendary playwright and Tynan's Anger patron saint John Osborne? Osborne's The Entertainer, his devastatingly brilliant follow-up to his breakthrough Look Back in Anger, followed the fall of the British music hall scene as personified by Archie Rice. Archie Rice was immortalized by Lawrence Olivier's greatest modern performance on both the stage and in the 1960 film. Left out of the film, however, was this particularly fascinating parable in the play's final scene, delivered by Archie after he has lost everything and is giving his pathetically dated performance one last time:

Before I do go, ladies and gentlemen, I should just like to tell you a little story, a little story. This story is about a man, just a little, ordinary man, like you and me, and one day he woke up and found himself in paradise. Well, he looks up, you see, and he sees a feller standing next to him. It turns out that this feller is a saint or something. Anyway, he's on the welcoming committee. And the feller says to him---the Saint---says to him: 'Well,' he says, 'you're now in paradise.' 'Am I?' he says. 'You are,' says the Saint. 'What's more, you have earned yourself eternal happiness.' 'Have I?' he says. 'You most certainly have,' says the Saint. 'Oh, you're well away,' he says. 'Can't you hear the multitudes? Why, everyone is singing, everyone is joyful. What do you say, my son?' So the little man took a look around him at all the multitudes of the earth, spread out against the universe. So he says to the Saint: 'Well, can I get up where you're standing, and take a proper look?' So the Saint says: 'Of course you can, my son' and makes way for him. And the little man stood up where the Saint was and gazed up at the sight around him. At all the Hosts of Heaven, and all the rest of it. 'All the wonder and the joy of eternity is round about you,' said the Saint. 'You mean, this is all eternity and I'm in Paradise?' 'That is so, my son. Well, what have you to say?' So the little man looks around again for a bit, and the Saint says: 'Well, my son?' 'Well,' he says, 'I've often wondered what I'd say if this ever happened to me. I couldn't think somehow.' And the Saint smiled at him kindly and says again: 'And what do you say, my son?' 'Only one thing I can say,' says the little man. And he said it! Well, the Saint looked as if he had been struck across the face by some great hand. The Hosts stopped singing and all the Angels hid their faces, and for a tiny splash in eternity there was no sound at all in Paradise. The Saint couldn't speak for a while, and then he threw his arms round the little man, and kissed him. And he said: 'love you, my son. With all my soul, I shall love you always. I have been waiting to hear that word ever since I came here.'

What's the point of this blog post? I cannot say.

Labels: Bends, Entertainer, high art/low art, john osborne, just, lawrence oliiver, Music video, Radiohead, weird juxtapositions