Everything Bad Is Good for You (5 page)

Conventionally, narratives demarcate the line between texture and substance by inserting cues that flag or translate the important data. There's an unintentionally comical moment in the 2004 blockbuster
The Day After Tomorrow
where the beleaguered climatologist (played by Dennis Quaid) announces his theory about the imminent arrival of a new ice age to a gathering of government officials. His oration ends with the line: “We may have hit a critical desalinization threshold!” It's the kind of thing that a climatologist might plausibly say—were he dropped into an alternative universe where implausible things like instant ice ages actually happened—but for most members of the audience, the phrase “critical desalinization threshold” is more likely to elicit a blank stare than a spine tingle. And so the writer/director Roland Emmerich—a master of brazen arrow-flashing—has a sidekick official next to Quaid follow with the obliging remark: “That would explain all the extreme weather we're having.” They might as well have had a flashing “Door Unlocked!” arrow on the screen.

The dialogue on shows like
The West Wing
and
ER,
on the other hand, doesn't talk down to its audience. It rushes by, the words accelerating in sync with the high-speed tracking shots that glide through the corridors and operating rooms. The characters talk faster in these shows, but the truly remarkable thing about the dialogue is not purely a matter of speed; it's the willingness to immerse the audience in information that most viewers won't understand. Here's a typical scene from
ER
:

Cut to KERRY bringing in a young girl, CARTER and LUCY run up.

The girl's parents are also present.

KERRY: Sixteen-year-old unconcious, history of villiari treesure.

CARTER: Glucyna coma?

KERRY: Looks like it.

MR. MAKOMI: She was doing fine until six months ago.

CARTER: What medication is she on?

MRS. MAKOMI: Emphrasylim, tobramysim, vitamins A, D, and K.

LUCY: The skin's jaundiced.

KERRY: Same with sclera, does her breath smell sweet?

CARTER: Peder permadicis?

KERRY: Yeah.

LUCY: What's that?

KERRY: Liver's shut down, let's dip her urine. (To CARTER) It's getting a little crowded in here, why don't you deal with the parents, please. Set lactolose, 30 ccs per mg.

CARTER: We're gonna give her some medicine to clean her blood, why don't you come with me?

CARTER leads the MAKOMIs out of the trauma room, LUCY also follows him

KERRY: Blood doesn't seem to clot.

MR. MAKOMI: She's bleeding inside?

CARTER: The liver failure is causing her blood not to clot.

MRS. MAKOMI: Oh God.

CARTER: Is she on the transplant list?

MR. MAKOMI: She's been status 2a for six months but they haven't been able to find her a match.

CARTER: Why not, what's her blood type?

MR. MAKOMI: AB.

CARTER and LUCY stare at each other in disbelief.

Cut to MARK working on a sleeping patient. AMANDA walks in.

There are flashing arrows here, of course—“The liver failure is causing her blood not to clot”—but the ratio of medical jargon to layperson translation is remarkably high, and as in so many of these narratives, you don't figure out what's really happening until the second half of the scene. There's a kind of implicit trust formed between the show and its viewers, a tolerance for planned ambiguity. That tolerance takes work: you need to be able to make assessments on the fly about the role of each line, putting it in the “substance” or “texture” slot. You have to know what you're not supposed to know. If viewers weren't able to make those assessments in real time,
ER
would be an unbearable mess; you'd have to sit down every Thursday night with a medical dictionary at hand. (“Is
peder permadicis
spelled with a
d
or a
t
?”)

From a purely narrative point of view, the decisive line in that scene arrives at the very end: “AB.” The sixteen-year-old's blood type connects her to an earlier plotline, involving a cerebral hemorrhage victim who—after being dramatically revived in one of the opening scenes—ends up brain dead. Fifteen minutes before the liver-failure scene above, Doug and Carter briefly discuss harvesting the hemorrhage victim's organs for transplants, and make a passing reference to his blood type being the rare AB. (Thus making him an unlikely donor.) The twist here revolves around a statistically unlikely event happening at the ER—an otherwise perfect liver donor showing up just in time to donate his liver to a recipient with the same rare blood type. But the show reveals this twist with a remarkable subtlety. To make sense of that last “AB” line—and the look of disbelief on Carter's and Lucy's faces—you have to recall a passing remark uttered fifteen minutes before regarding a character who belongs to a completely different thread.

It would have been easy enough to insert an explanatory line at the end of the scene: “That's the same blood type as our hemorrhage victim!” And in fact, had
ER
been made twenty or thirty years ago, I suspect the writers would have added precisely such a line. But that kind of crude subtitling would go against the narrative ethos of shows like
ER.
In these modern narratives, part of the pleasure comes from the audience's “filling in.” These shows may have more blood and guts than popular TV had a generation ago, and some of the sexual content today would have been inappropriate in a movie theater back then—much less on prime-time TV. But when it comes to storytelling, these shows possess a quality that can only be described as subtlety and discretion.

It's not a headline you often see—“Pop TV More Subtle and Discreet Than Ever Before!”—but ignoring these properties means overlooking one of the most vital developments in modern popular narrative. You'll sometimes hear people refer fondly to the “simpler” era of television's alleged heyday, the days of
Dragnet
and
I Love Lucy.
They mean “simpler” in an ethical sense: there were no sympathetic mob bosses on
Dragnet,
no custody battles on
Lucy.
But when you watch these shows next to today's television, the other sense of “simpler” applies as well: they require less mental labor to make sense of what's going on. Watch
Starsky and Hutch
or
Dragnet
after watching
The Sopranos
and you'll feel as though you're being condescended to—because the creators of those shows are imagining an “ideal viewer” who has not benefited from decades of the Sleeper Curve at work. They kept it simple because they assumed their audience at the time wasn't ready for anything more complicated.

In this, they were probably right.

 

T
ELEVISION DRAMA
is the most dramatic instance of the Sleeper Curve, but you can see a comparable shift toward increased complexity in most of the sitcoms that have flourished over the past decade. Compare the way comedy unfolds in recent classics like
Seinfeld
and
The Simpsons—
along with newer critics' faves like
Scrubs
or
Arrested Development—
to earlier sitcoms like
All in the Family
or
Mary Tyler Moore.
The most telling way to measure these shows' complexity is to consider how much external information the viewer must draw upon to “get” the jokes in their entirety. Anyone can sit down in front of most run-of the-mill sitcoms—
Home Improvement,
say, or
Three's Company—
and the humor will be immediately intelligible, since it consists mostly of characters being sarcastic to each other. The jokes themselves make no reference to anything outside the frame of the conversation that contains them—beyond the bare-bones “situation” that the sitcom itself is grounded in. (A guy pretends that he's gay so he can shack up with two women.) To parse the humor of more nuanced shows—
Cheers
or
Friends,
for example—the scripts will sometimes demand that you know some basic biographical information about the characters. (Carla will make a snotty reference to Sam Malone's sobriety, without bothering to explain to the audience that he once had a drinking problem; or Rachel will allude to Monica's overweight childhood.) Nearly every extended sequence in
Seinfeld
or
The Simpsons,
however, will contain a joke that makes sense only if the viewer fills in the proper supplementary information—information that is deliberately withheld from the viewer. If you haven't seen the “Mulva” episode, or if the name “Art Vandelay” means nothing to you, then the subsequent references—many of them arriving years after their original appearance—will pass on by unappreciated.

At first glance, this looks like the soap opera tradition of plotlines extending past the frame of individual episodes, but in practice the device has a different effect. Knowing that George uses the alias Art Vandelay in awkward social situations doesn't help you understand the plot of the current episode; you don't draw on past narratives to understand the events of the present one. In the 180
Seinfeld
episodes that aired, seven contain references to Art Vandelay: in George's actually referring to himself with that alias or invoking the name as part of some elaborate lie. He tells a potential employer at a publishing house that he likes to read the fiction of Art Vandelay, author of
Venetian Blinds
; in another, he tells an unemployment insurance caseworker that he's applied for a latex salesman job at Vandelay Industries. For storytelling purposes, the only thing that you need to know here is that George is lying in a formal interview; any fictitious author or latex manufacturer would suffice. But the
joke
arrives through the echo of all those earlier Vandelay references; it's funny because it's making a subtle nod to past events held offscreen. It's what we'd call in a real-world context an “in-joke”—a joke that's funny only to people who get the reference. And in this case, the reference is to a few fleeting lines in a handful of episodes—most of which aired years before. Television comedy once worked on the scale of thirty seconds: you'd have a setup line, and then a punch line, and then the process would start all over again. With
Seinfeld,
the gap between setup and punch line could sometimes last five years.

These layered jokes often point beyond the bounds of the series itself. According to one fan site that has exhaustively chronicled these matters, the average
Simpsons
episode includes around eight gags that explicitly refer to movies: a plotline, a snippet of dialogue, a visual pun on a famous cinematic sequence (
Seinfeld
featured a number of episodes that mirrored movie plots, including
Midnight Cowboy
and
JFK
). The Halloween episodes have historically been the most baroque in their cinematic allusions, with the all-time champ being an episode from the 1995 season, integrating material from
Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, Godzilla, Ghostbusters, Nightmare on Elm Street, The Pagemaster, Maximum Overdrive, The Terminator
and
Terminator 2, Alien III, Tron, Beyond the Mind's Eye, The Black Hole, Poltergeist, Howard the Duck,
and
The Shining.

The film parodies and cultural sampling of
The Simpsons
usually get filed away as textbook postmodernism: media riffing on other media. But the Art Vandelay jokes from
Seinfeld
don't quite fit the same postmodern mold: they aren't references that jump from one fictional world to another; they're references that jump back in time within a single fictional world. I think it's more instructive to see both these devices as sharing a key attribute: they are comic devices that reward further scrutiny. The show gets funnier the more you study it—precisely because the jokes point outside the immediate context of the episode, and because the creators refuse to supply flashing arrows to translate the gags for the uninitiated. Earlier sitcoms merely demanded that you kept the basic terms of the situation clear on your end; beyond that information you could be an amnesiac and you weren't likely to miss anything. Shows like
Seinfeld
and
The Simpsons
offered a more challenging premise to their viewers: You'll enjoy this more if you're capable of remembering a throwaway line from an episode that aired three years ago, or if you notice that we've framed this one scene so that it echoes the end of
Double Indemnity.
The jokes come in layers: you can watch that 1995 Halloween episode and miss all the film riffs and still enjoy the show, but it's a richer, more rewarding experience if you're picking them up. That layering enabled
Seinfeld
and
The Simpsons
to retain both a broad appeal and the edgy allure of cult classics. The mainstream audiences chuckle along to that wacky Kramer, while the diehard fans nudge-and-wink at each Superman aside. But that complexity has another, equally important, side effect: the episodes often grow
more
entertaining on a second or third viewing, and they can still reveal new subtleties on the fifth or sixth. The subtle intertwinings of the plots seem more nimble if you know in advance where they're headed, and the more experience you have with the series as a whole, the more likely you are to catch all the insider references.