THE SITUATION OF COMEDY

Now playing in the BELTWAY TRAFFIC JAM.

If even Bill Simmons is talking about the last ‘Friends,’ I figure I can weigh in too. Simmons has this to say about the show:

People were calling “Friends” the “last great sitcom” this week, begging an obvious follow-up question: “Friends” was a great sitcom?

Really? For a TV show to be great, don’t women and men have to watch it? I don’t know any guys who watch “Friends.” (Hey, they might be out there, I just haven’t met them.) Thinking about a guy watching “Friends” always makes me think of that Seinfeld episode when George gets back with Susan, then realizes he can’t get out, and the show ends with them watching “Mad About You” together as she looks happy and he looks like he might throw up at any second.

It wasn’t always that way. The first season of “Friends” was the closest anyone ever came to capturing Generation X on TV. The characters discussed misunderstandings from “Three’s Company,” made jokes about “Joanie Loves Chachi,” even hummed the theme from “The Odd Couple.” They were constantly fending off nitpicking parents and nosy neighbors. They busted each other’s chops, made constant wisecracks, ripped each other’s latest boyfriends and girlfriends. Some of them had a little money, others were pretty much broke, and there was always tension between the haves and the have-nots. And they were always happiest just sitting around and doing nothing.

Heck, this was what my life was like! Maybe I wasn’t dancing in a water fountain or having a kid with my lesbian ex-wife; but for the most part, this was me. We all had friends like Chandler and Joey, guys who roomed together for too long and almost started to take on couple tendencies (in a funny way). We all knew an over-sensitive guy like Ross, or a ditz like Phoebe. We all knew two smoking-hot chicks who didn’t have boyfriends and laughed at everyone else’s jokes.

(Okay, maybe that was a stretch.)

It’s become something of a dreadful guy meme to hate ‘Friends.’ Not that the feelings aren’t genuine, for the reasons Simmons cites, but still, it’s hardly original. And there are those who complain that the New York of ‘Friends’ was a little too white and a little too affordable.

Well, every great sitcom could be improved somehow.

I’m going to leave aside Simmons’ advocacy of ‘The OC’ for one simple reason: “HIS FATHER IS THE DISTRICT ATTORNEY!” If you remember that phrase, you know why I’m never watching another drama on Fox. But he does raise the question of where ‘Friends’ belongs in the pantheon of sitcoms. Was it really one of the best ever, or was it simply a show which resonated with its audience’s lives? Let’s investigate . . .

I’ll not hold you in suspense. No, ‘Friends’ was not, in my opinion, one of the ten best sitcoms ever. It was decent, and it made me laugh more often than not, but it was hardly one of the best examples of the genre.

The best sitcoms do not depend on their situations; they depend on their characters. Mort Walker, creator of the comic strip ‘Beetle Bailey,’ said that as far as he was concerned, his strip was about a bunch of funny people who happened to be in the Army; they could have been garbagemen or officeworkers and the strip still would have worked. Indeed, ‘Beetle Bailey’ was originally based at a college, not in the military.

The same is generally true of sitcoms. The best ones use their situation as a backdrop and occasional source of humor, but refuse to allow the situation to drive their storylines. What makes a great sitcom is great characters, ones who are consistent and believably unbelievable.

In my mind, that’s what keeps ‘Friends’ off the list of the all-time greats. I couldn’t believe nebbishy Ross suddenly finding a spine when the plot required him to do so, which happened two or three times a season for a decade. He wasn’t a consistent character. And I couldn’t believe a dysfunctional, atonal dingbat like Phoebe living such a charmed life. She was unbelievable, but not believably so. There was way too much Steve Urkel in Phoebe Buffay. Most of all, nobody’s character changed very much over the decade, which is the most unbelievable thing of all. I changed more from 22 to 32 than expect I’ll change for the rest of my life. But where are the signs that the ‘Friends’ characters must be pushing 40 by now? (Lisa Kudrow’s already 40, and Courteney Cox Arquette turns 40 next month.) Ross and Rachel wound up being the ultimate story of ‘Friends’ by default: Nobody else was affected by anything which happened to them, ever.

I can already read that comment you’re forming in your head: “What about ‘Seinfeld’?” That show is guilty, too, of static characters. But that was a show about messing with the form of the sitcom. If anybody on that show ever learned anything, or developed real emotions, the whole show would’ve collapsed. The humor of ‘Seinfeld’ depended on the extreme suspension of disbelief; ‘Friends’ tried to present itself as a reflection of Gen X life. That’s the difference between the two shows.

So if ‘Friends’ didn’t do it for me, what did? Fair is fair; here’s my list of the ten best sitcoms ever, along with my reasons for liking them. To be fair, I’ll also tell you what’s wrong with each show.

1. Cheers. Face it, ‘Friends’ was just ‘Cheers’ without the alcohol. The action more or less all took place on three sets, nobody on the show seemed to have a real job, and the only consistent story line was ‘will Sam and Diane/Rebecca hook up or not?’. What made Cheers better was better writing and multi-dimensional characters. (Well, except for one–I thought they never really dealt well with the subject of Sam’s alcoholism.) Cheers also treated its characters with respect, never asking them to do anything that you know they just wouldn’t have done. This, to me, remains the best sitcom of all time.
2. Seinfeld. I’ve already talked about this–how ‘Seinfeld’ was more about subverting the form of the sitcom than anything else. It was a brilliant satire of how we determine what is and isn’t funny, right down to the level where Jerry Seinfeld wound up being the least important and worst-developed character on his own show. It fell short by trying to end the series. A show about nothing doesn’t need a finale; you should just stop making it.
3. M*A*S*H. It’s hard to watch M*A*S*H now, even though it’s still funny. One reason is that this show is well into its syndication dotage; the other is that its fundamental preachiness hasn’t worn well. But when it was good, it was great, with well-crafted characters, great acting, and a willlingness to embrace dark themes. M*A*S*H was the first sitcom that wasn’t always funny. That was its greatest strength and its worst flaw. Especially at the end, M*A*S*H demanded that its characters pay a horrible price for being in the war. It even killed Henry Blake, although that was just the producers’ way of extending a middle finger towards McLean Stevenson. And Klinger was hard for me to believe.
4. Frasier. This is the only spinoff that ever worked, if only because it centered around an interesting character, developed him more, and put him in a role-reversal situation. Instead of bouncing off Cheers’ blue-collar slackards, suddenly Frasier was dealing with a brother who was just like him, only a little more so. The comedy of the two brothers’ interaction with the father was great too, although it was hard to believe that a street cop like Martin could’ve produced two preening fops like Frasier and Niles. Frasier was also the most theatrical sitcom ever produced.
5. Newhart. Another great character-driven show, with the best final episode of any sitcom thus far. Newhart was a very subtle satire of 1980s values. It was ultimately let down by Larry, Darryl, and Darryl, who were just a wee bit over-the-top.
6. That 70s Show. Yes, I’m serious. When it debuted, I thought, “Everybody will laugh at the leisure suits and pet rocks, then it’ll die in six weeks.” I was wrong. This show is not about ironic appreciation of the 70s; this show is about being 18 years old at any time and in any place. I think it’s getting played out, though, as it tries to appropriate the Ross & Rachel dynamic.
7. Family Ties. This was a lot less of a subtle 80s satire then Newhart was, but it’s one of the great all-time concepts: aging hippies try to deal with their conservative kids. The characters were pretty good, but the show suffered a lot from forced relevance and an attempt to expose every social problem imaginable. Sometimes this led to great TV (like the episode where Alex’s friend dies in a drunk-driving crash); more often, it was like an ABC Afterschool Special with rimshots. But when it worked, it worked beautifully, and it gave teen sitcoms the best annoying geek character ever, Skippy. The show ultimately failed because, in the end, somebody’s values had to win. They spent seven years building Alex up as the yuppie archetype, then tried to cheat by making him ambiguous about his job in New York. I hate it when shows try to cheat like that. The real Alex would’ve just gone, realizing that New York and Columbus aren’t really that far apart.
8. The Mary Tyler Moore Show. They couldn’t say she was divorced, but that was the implication driving her character. ‘Single woman trying to do anything by herself’ was a groundbreaking concept in 1970. MTM worked because of its characters, all of whom had fatal flaws which blended perfectly. It bombed by making us think we’d miss Rhoda, and by taking the character of Ted a little too far into buffoonery.
9. All in the Family. There had been shows about unlikable characters before, but never one quite like Archie Bunker, the original pigheaded lout who’s never wrong about anything. AitF worked as social commentary because it dared to present prejudice as something we could laugh about. That laughter defused much of the tension and allowed AitF to go into places where dramas couldn’t in the early 70s. But in the end, AitF created an anti-hero and had to find ways to center the stories around him, which is hard to do. So they cheated and made him less hateful, which took all the humor out of the show. If they’d stopped making it in, say, 1978, I’d probably put near or at the top of this list. But in the end, the situtation wound up driving the characters, and it should’ve been the other way around.
10. Cosby. Not The Cosby Show, which was good, but not great. I’m talking about the later CBS show which never quite caught on. The former show was Cosby’s admirable attempt to provide positive black role models while promoting his child-rearing theories. It had a lot of good moments, but in the end, perfect people just aren’t funny. The CBS show allowed Cosby and Phylicia Rashad to explore the darker, more bitter sides of their comedic personae, and I thought it worked better. Not only that but, in Doug E. Doug, Cosby finally got a comedic foil to play off of. I thought their interactions were the best thing about this show. But after Cliff Huxtable, it was hard to believe Bill Cosby as bitter and grouchy. That killed the program for me and a lot of people. If the order of the two shows had been reversed, things might have been different.

I left The Simpsons off because it’s unfair to make real people compete with cartoons. If you’ve quibbles and quarrels with my selections, that’s what the comments are for.

Was Friends really “the last great sitcom”? Naah. We’ll fall in love again. Some genres, like Westerns or family-based dramas, have become played out. But comedy will always be around.