When Bad Writing Happens to Good Shows

I recently had a conversation with a friend about the departure of Aaron Sorkin at the end of season four of The West Wing, midway through the Zoey Bartlett kidnapping. Although we're both diehard WW fans (he's in love with Ainsley Hayes; I heart Josh "Lemon" Lyman), we both agreed that it wasn't the show at it's best. For a show that made political action narrative action, the kidnapping plot seemed out of place: a soapy, emotionally manipulative way for the show to scoop up ratings as the show was starting to lose viewers (Rob Lowe left that season, and it dropped 5 million viewers as a result! Dear Rob Lowe, don't ever leave Parks and Recreation. Thanks).

Not that it wasn't fun to watch. It totally was! It was just...wrong for that show.

So that got me thinking about other great shows that suffered the occasional writing misstep. I'm not talking about shows that are already pretty bad, like One Tree Hill and Grey's Anatomy. Bad writing happening to good shows is a special kind of bad writing because it's only bad due to the fact that it's weirdly affecting a good show. Here are some classics:

5. "Jose Chung's Doomsday Defense" on Millennium, season 2. It pains me a little to include this because Millennium was such a great show, and I would venture to guess that many of you have never seen it. Let me just remind you that this post is about bad writing happening to good shows, so you really should watch it if you haven't seen Chris Carter's Millennium. It's freaking cool. That said, its second season had some bumps. I have absolutely no problem with genre shows oscillating between episodic and serial episodes to try to build an audience of geeks. In fact, I welcome it. But I really hated those Jose Chung episodes that Darin Morgan and Chris Carter felt like we needed to see on this and their other big show The X-Files. On Millennium, it halted the movement of the season by altering the ambiance in a distracting and self-indulgent way. It wasn't quite as dramatically jarring on The X-Files, where the Jose Chung episode took place during the unsteady first season of the show, but it wasn't exactly a shining moment either. If you watch Millennium, as per my sage advice, you won't miss anything if you skip over this particular episode.

4. Scrubs: The New Class, seasons 8 and 9. This was a simple case of a great show refusing to go out on a high note, and it was not entirely the fault of the showrunners. Scrubs found itself perpetually in danger of cancellation, and at the end of its seventh season, NBC finally pulled the plug. Both creator Bill Lawrence and star Zach Braff said that the seventh would be its last season. Then, through a series of weird happenings and threatened litigation, ABC ended up picking it up for an eighth season of 18 episodes, in which most of the leads would return at least on a temporary basis. The seventh season finale was pitch perfect as a finale, with JD imagining a happy ever after with Eliot, as he left the hospital. Bringing back these characters for another two seasons, along with new characters that were funny enough, but not the cast we had grown to love, felt like an unwelcome, two-year epilogue. As far as I'm concerned, Scrubs ended on NBC.

3. Lorelai and Christopher hook up and get married on Gilmore Girls, seasons 6 (finale) and 7. Okay, I get why Luke and Lorelai had to break up in season 6. They had legitimate communication problems that centered on Luke being a curmudgeon. What I didn't care for, however, was Lorelai immediately jumping into bed with Christopher the same night she and Luke broke up. Lorelai didn't always make great decisions, but it was a stretch to believe that she'd do something that self-destructive at the expense of slow-moving Luke potentially instigating a reconciliation. I just don't buy it, and I think this was the moment that the usually delightful Girls went a little off the rails. At the time it felt like a big middle finger from departing creator Amy Sherman-Palladino, and it still feels that way.

2. The Mexico foray on Big Love, season four. I'm still not sure how we got to that point on Big Love. From the first season, the elements of the show that frequently proved the most compelling centered on Bill and the wives, their relationships with one another and with the family. Whenever the show drifted too far outside of this nucleus, particularly with Bill's random business ventures and all the compound drama, it lost some of its initial zing. I think this is what happened during season four: it just seemed like Bill was juggling too many balls in the air, and while this was a recurring theme throughout the show (e.g., overworked, stressed out, power-hungry Bill), for the whole of this season, I felt like I was being overworked as a viewer. We should have known something was going to be off this season, when the premiere gave us a literally frozen Roman Grant being transported to the Henricksen's new casino. WTH?? The heights of this season's weirdness, though, came when Bill drove to Mexico to rescue his kidnapped eldest son, crazycakes mother, and SOB of a father, culminating in a bizarre standoff with one of the ruling FLDS clans, in which Lois cuts off a dude's hand. Season five was thankfully better.

1. The Landry-Tyra murder plot on Friday Night Lights, season 2. Ah, season two, the season otherwise known as the season that FNL fans warn their FNL-virgin friends about before they start watching. For the most part, the season was just...off, and the murder plot was a microcosm of where it went wrong. FNL was at the height of its creative powers when characters were allowed to develop through everyday situations. The forced intensity of a murder was too sensational, too unreal to happen to our characters in Dillon. It remains the quintessential example of bad writing happening to a good, nay, great show.

Honorable Mention: Mr. Eko on LOST; the "Jose Chung's From Outer Space" episode of The X-Files (see above); the will they or won't they ridiculata with Joey and Rachel on Friends.

The Creative Wet Blanket that is the Holiday Episode

Am I the only one that thinks holiday episodes of TV shows are TERRIBLE? I hate them. They are often insidious and mind-numbing. Case in point: did anyone see the recent Brothers and Sisters Christmas episode? The whole of the plot was that the Walkers decided to change their Christmas traditions for a while before reverting back to what they had always done. Oh, and there was a stupid dream sequence where Nora experienced a Christmas Carol-type vision of the family without her. Awful. It was one of those things that actors always say they had fun filming, but prove to have the opposite effect for the viewing public. (Anyone remember the black and white episode of Felicity? Barf.) Thanksgiving and Halloween episodes often fall into the same categories of terrible TV, as well. Only a few shows over the years (see below) have truly bucked the trend of consistently making eye-rolling holiday fare.

The qualities that make a holiday episode particularly tedious are usually a mix-n-match combination of the following terrible qualities:
- The episode halts serial action of serial dramas.
- The episode tries too hard to "inspire us" with lame cliches, which typically equate to thematic "Christmas miracles!".
- The episode revolves around family Christmas traditions and the exposition explaining them.
- The episode features stunt casting.
- The episode features songs by cast members who don't normally sing.
- The episode "pays homage" to classic Christmas stories, either through basically reproducing the plot of said Christmas story, or through attempting to "ironically" wink at the audience.

The Christmas episode of Glee recently tried to do make good on the last point I mentioned with recreating How the Grinch Stole Christmas, but to me it seemed like the writers trying too hard to be "clever". I will be skipping that episode in future viewings of Glee DVDs, thank you. It was, as my dear friend Lizzy would say, too self-conscious. (Check out this review of the episode by my favorite TV bloggers.)

Bearing these guidelines in mind, I was trying to think of my five worst holiday episodes of all time, but I was having a hard time. I mean, pick almost any long-running show and you'll find at least one misguided attempt at holiday inspiration. Don't even get me started on Halloween episodes (I'm looking at you, LHOTP episode "Halloween Dream". Just no). Therefore, lest the ten of you (my loverly blog readers) find this particular post too grinchy, here are a few examples of good holiday episodes, along with a short comment about why each distinguishes itself from others. (The rankings of #1 and #2, btw, have to do with my general belief that good drama is better than good comedy, but that's another post for another day.)

1. "Noel", The West Wing, season 2: I mentioned this one in an earlier post about an episode of Private Practice. Simply put, this is one of the finest episodes of an excellent series. Avoiding holiday cliches altogether, the episode uses music, which is increased in frequency at Christmastime, as a trigger for Josh Lyman's PTSD. Josh's psychological breakthrough in the final act is always moving, never cheesy.

2. "The One with the Football", Friends, season 6: Friends always did holiday episodes better than every comedy show ever. They generally steered clear of in your face holiday inspiration, but somehow they also avoided cynicism. Far from interrupting the flow of the series with holiday episodes, I always looked forward to their Thanksgiving and Christmas shenanigans. Honestly, it's hard to pick just one of these episodes, but "The One with the Football" always made me laugh the hardest.

3. "Christmas at Plum Creek", Little House on the Prairie, season 1: Now, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "One minute you say that too much holiday inspiration is what brings a holiday episode down, but the next minute you're choosing a holiday episode of Little House on the Prairie, arguably one of the most schmaltzy primetime dramas ever produced! What gives?" I hear you on that, but let me remind you that the inspirational/emotional manipulation overtones on Little House carried on throughout the series. The Christmas episodes were no more or less sappy than the rest of the show. In fact, I would argue that Tragedy on the Prairie, as my roommate calls it, was the most tragic and inspirational during two parters, which were never holiday episodes. "Christmas at Plum Creek" is a lovely episode about sacrificial love.

4. "The Strike", Seinfeld, season 9: This episode is fantastic because of how succinctly it makes fun of family holiday traditions. Obviously, Seinfeld was always good at commenting on the absurdity of social trends, but in this case, the show took peoples' self-conscious "disillusionment" with holiday commercialism and created a kind of anti-Christmas holiday with Frank Costanza's "Festivus for the rest of us". Oddly enough, "Festivus" became its own social trend, and according to Wikipedia, Festivus is now unofficially celebrated as a secular holiday.

5. "Tidings of Comfort and Joy" American Dreams, season 3: By this episode, the Pryor family had known about JJ's MIA status in Vietnam for weeks, and the tension was palpable. As they tried to go about their everyday lives, the potential tragedy underneath the surface could have burst at any moment for any one of them. But in the final scene, just after the Roman Catholic Pryors were leaving church, JJ came home. If we're talking here about most shows' failures in trying to thematically recreate "the spirit of Christmas", American Dreams managed to somehow succeed, for underlying the miracle of Christ at Christmas is the tragedy of humanity's need for Christ. When JJ returned to his family, tragedy subsided, and hope reigned supreme.

Honorable mention: "The Best Chrismukkah Ever" (The O.C., season 1); "Christmas Scandal" (Parks and Recreation, season 2)

Have a great Christmas season everyone!

My Top Ten TV Pilots of All Time

On a pleasant run the other day, I started thinking about which TV pilots I would put in my top ten of all time list in case anybody ever asked (I know, nobody ever would ask, but in my fantasy scenarios, people always want to talk about TV, running, and Renaissance court drama with me. We have great conversations in my head. I promise I'm not crazy). Two points of clarification going into this: 1) Obviously, the choices on this list are late-nineties/2000s-centric, but that's more a reflection on my age than the actual quality of TV shows produced before that. I'm sure the pilot to MASH was just as brilliant as everyone says, but I never watched that show. 2) Just because a show turned into one of my favorites, doesn't mean its pilot episode was brilliant. Gilmore Girls springs to mind: the series is one of my 5 favs of all time, but the first season was largely spent trying to get to the lightning-fast pace of later seasons. The pilot is not one of my favs.

Got it? Great. Here they are:

Honorable Mention: 30 Rock, ER, Life Unexpected, Modern Family, Once & Again, Party of Five, Southland, and V.

10. Glee: I know it's a young show, but its pilot is one of the most fun in recent memory. Pilots can often get so bogged down in trying to introduce the characters and their situations, that they can forget to tell the story effectively. This pilot immediately brought us into its world with hilarious quick cuts and a voice-over that provided just enough info. By the end of the episode, you can't help but to care about New Directions. Plus, it introduced those of us that aren't Broadway geeks to the vocal power of Lea Michele singing "On My Own", for which I will forever be grateful. Pop culture has yet to show how extensive the ripple effects of this show will be, but the closing number to the episode, "Don't Stop Believin'", set a lot in motion.

9. Millennium: I admit that I was late coming to this show. A friend introduced me to it on DVD when I was old enough to really appreciate it. I had been an off and on X-Files fan, so the Chris Carter element initially drew me in. What the episode does especially well is to establish the good vs evil fight that the series would explore in its best episodes. Throughout the series, Frank Black (Lance Henricksen) constantly found himself standing on the side of good, but venturing into the evil to ward it off, and this episode took us there from minute one. This episode proved to be the perfect precursor to the depths Millennium would take us.

8. The West Wing: I think this is an example of a show that got better as its first season progressed, but its pilot was still amazing! It was written by my favorite screenwriter Aaron Sorkin in top form, giving us the intelligence and wit for which the series would come to be known. My favorite thing about Sorkin is that he's a good, old-fashioned idealist, and from the very beginning, The West Wing showed us that it was about the ideals that American government aspires to. In Sorkin's West Wing, President Bartlett is just a man, yes, but he's a presence, a truly great man in the flesh. Hey, I'm a Republican but this still sucked me in!

7. Felicity: I've probably watched this pilot about a dozen times, and each time I get something new out of it. I always find the characters to be so honest and beautifully constructed. The last time I watched this series (about two years ago), I was struck by all of the terrible decisions Felicity (the ever brilliant Keri Russell) made throughout, but as we were going through them with her the first time, they seemed like the decisions she would make. That she followed Ben (Scott Speedman) to New York City because he wrote something nice in her yearbook makes her sound crazy, but it turns out transferring to New York wasn't about Ben at all. It was always about her. In this pilot, you can't help but to care about Felicity as she naively follows her heart without restraint. She's awkward, but well-meaning. When she tells Ben, "You made me fall in love with you!", you can't help cringing, but you care that her feelings are hurt by his totally normal response. You're watching her at the cusp of beginning to become an adult, and its mesmerizing.

6. Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip: Aaron Sorkin's idealism again took center stage in this genius two-part pilot. When the Lorne Michaels-type figure on an SNL-type show impulsively uses the live show to air his grievances about network TV in a Network (the movie, that is)-style rant, we're really hearing a Sorkinized soapbox about the problems with TV. Using this incident as a catalyst, Sorkin is able to construct a brilliant, idealized version of a TV network responding to the rant. Say what you will about the show not working as it went on, but I maintain that this pilot is near perfect.

5. Alias: The compelling opening sequence to JJ Abrams' sophomore series juxtaposes our heroine Sydney Bristow (Jennifer Garner) in some kind of Chinese torture chamber with her finishing a test for grad school in Los Angeles. Welcome to Sydney's world! The flashback of Sydney's short-lived engagement to nice-guy civilian Danny Hecht immediately showed us the human side of this girl with fiery red hair that we deduce we'll understand all about later on. As Sydney's world unravels, we see the emotional difficulties she's going to face as she makes the decision to take down SD-6, and she's immediately compelling for it. JJ Abrams said that the idea for Alias came out of a writers' meeting during Felicity, where he half-jokingly suggested that they write an episode explaining that Felicity had actually been a spy the whole time. In many ways, this explains why Sydney was such a convincing character: she was written as a human being (i.e., Felicity) before she was a spy.

4. Friday Night Lights: How could I not include this pilot? Its emotional highs and lows usually take a season to accomplish. When we first meet Jason Street (Scott Porter), we are immediately left with the sense that something bad is going to happen to this golden boy. When it does, although we saw it coming, it's still heartbreaking. I don't know about you, but I loved every minute of watching Matt's (Zach Gilford's) conflicted emotions as he is awkwardly thrust into the team's de facto leadership role. This show is not about football as much as it's about the people who care about football, and the pilot was our first, hypnotizing glimpse into their world.

3. LOST: That opening sequence, right?! We see an eyeball coming into focus, then a jungle. Next we see a man in a suit waking up in the jungle, a yellow Labrador, and soon enough the screams coming from the beach as the man finds his way out of the jungle. This opening sequence, including the mayhem on the beach, is enough to make this pilot one of the best ever, but it's only improved upon by the seasons that followed it. The image of a man in a suit, lying in a jungle is a good microcosm for the whole series, as well as a precursor for Jack's (Matthew Fox's) journey [FOR THE LOVE OF TIVO, I CRY SPOILER ALERT!!!]: in the finale, he would find himself lying in the same place, only not as an outsider (signified by the suit) this time, but as a person who had found his home. Forgive my placing CS Lewis out of context here, but there's no other way: as Jack's eye opens in the pilot, he starts riding the bus to the High Places, and when it closes in the finale, he's finally able to move beyond his supposed desire to return to the Gray Town and into the Light. It's a beautiful journey that begins within the first :15 of the pilot.

2. Little House on the Prairie: "Little H on the P", as it is affectionately known in my house, began as a two-hour TV movie/pilot that aired on NBC in the spring of 1974 before the new fall season began. After watching it, it's not hard to see why the network was keen to pick it up as a series. Dramatizing the Ingalls' move from The Little House in the Big Woods (of Wisconsin) to the apparently dangerous flat lands of Kansas to, finally, the house in Plumb Creek, the movie pilot focuses in on the family at the center of the series and the hardships they endured. During one scene, Charles (Michael Landon, otherwise known as TV's greatest dad) has to leave the family alone in their depressing little homemade cabin in Kansas (it didn't even have a door, for crying out loud!) while he goes hunting, leaving Caroline (Karen Grassle) alone with the sound of distant but too close for comfort Native American war drums. As she sits up at night with a ready shot-gun, we get a glimpse of the real fear this family must have faced in the barely settled Midwest. The series (book and TV) tells the stories through Laura's (Melissa Gilbert's) eyes. It's not gritty realism because it's filtered through a child's lens. This particular episode shows both sides of the situation: Laura remembers the drums and her mother sitting up at night afraid for her family, but in the same breath, she remembers the Christmas where they each received a shiny new penny and candy from Mr Edwards. This pilot perfectly set up the perspective of the series: whenever it was dark, it was also coupled with a child's hope that everything would be okay.

1. My So-Called Life: I actually wrote a paper in college about this pilot. I've chosen it as my favorite of all time because I think it is one of the very few perfect episodes of TV that I've ever seen. At the beginning of the episode, Angela Chase (played with brilliant teenage conviction by Claire Danes) tells us in voice-over narration, "So I started hanging out with Rayanne Graff. Just for fun. Just 'cause it seemed like if I didn't I would die or something. Things were getting to me. Just how people are. How they always expect you to be a certain way, even your best friend." The dialogue is perfect in its imperfections, here: Angela's imperfect high school English is the kind of dialogue a teenager trying really hard to not seem like she's trying too hard would use. Phrases with "like" and "or something" flow tripping off the tongue as she attempts to explain to us her world in her own terms. She almost always uses first and last names to describe people in her high school, as if saying both of their names makes her know them better. "Rayanne Graff" (A.J. Langer) is Angela's grungy hero, and she loves that Rayanne likes her. She's "hanging out" with Rayanne because Rayanne is Angela's idea of cool, but in choosing to hang out with Rayanne at the beginning of her sophomore year in high school, she has passive aggressively abandons her old best friend Sharon Cherski (Devon Odessa). Angela doesn't see it this way, though. She's chasing after approval just as desperately as poor Sharon is. The pilot is told from Angela's skewed, self-involved perspective, but what could be more true about being a teenager than that? The thing that I love about this episode is that in spite of the mistakes Angela is making and the ways she tries to mask how she really feels, we can see how vulnerable she is, and we love her for it. She's me and everyone else at that age.

So there you have it. In case you're concerned about the state of my PhD dissertation, this post was written at small procrastination intervals throughout the week. Do you have any favorite or memorable pilot episodes? Feel free to comment below!