It held on for me to finish last week’s column and three episodes of “The Boondocks,” but when summoned upon to provide the soundtrack for two rounds of shots (one guess as to what the song would have been) my faithful Toshiba Satellite finally relented to my flagrant disregard for McAfee SiteAdvisor and started booting up for eternity on a fateful Tuesday night. Three years under the benevolent overlords at ResComp and surrounded by CS majors means that I know how to defibrillate it with relative ease, but a broken computer is such a convenient excuse for so many things. Nevertheless, having a childhood in the 90s means that I still needed to fulfill my daily quotient of staring at a screen, so Quick Batman! To My Next-Door Neighbor’s DVD Collection!
Occupying my fancy for the past week has been “The Larry Sanders Show,” and let me just say I needed HBO in my life a lot sooner. Considering that it aired in a decade when the Farrelly Brothers and Carrot Top defined comedy, this show truly had to be groundbreaking television.
One of the more annoying byproducts of the current incarnation of hipsterism is the need to classify every social interaction into moments, especially epic ones. Evidence Example A: Textsfromlastnight. Every conversation is a scene in The Most Original Television Show, a.k.a. their life. When the dialogue is not up to snuff, in comes the awkward turtle. Admittedly, this tendency is less pronounced among the demographics of people whose characters never have any interiority. Still, with its greater reliance on low-budget stories and its long-format episodic structure, TV is perhaps the form of entertainment closest to real life.
My favorite character on “The Larry Sanders Show” is the producer Arty, expertly played by Rip Torn. The oldest character in the show, he gets to drop fatty loads of knowledge on everyone else, and since I had just resolved within myself to no longer avoid conflict like the songs on my iTunes I only downloaded for show, I was taking notes.
Scene: outside, walking toward a group of people engaged in a glorious bit of day drinking on a beautiful Sunday afternoon with the intention of joining them. The character sees the maddeningly popular girl that has been on his mind far more than he is happy about. They have not spoken in person for over a month. The last time that happened, her first line of dialogue in their next scene together was “Can you get my friend some cocaine?” It is a question that had absolutely no grounding in the rest of the show. The character is not a drug trafficker. He had been meaning to tell her how hurt and offended he was that she would greet someone she had gone on a date with, such a rarity at Stanford, in such a callous and presumptuous matter, but the character previously was meek and non-confrontational. Now, armed with a willingness to move on with his life, Arty’s war-worn wisdom and society’s greatest emotional crutch, alcohol, he was going to have his catharsis. She approaches him with a cordial greeting.
Cut to: An hour later. She does not appreciate the character’s joke about her aging grandmother.
Cut to: another hour later. The character is walking quite steadily back from one of the more unglamorous trips to the bathroom in his life. She shoots him a look of mild disgust and asks with beautiful condescension “Are you alright?” He replies with as much contempt as he can find “Yeah, I’m fine.” As she exits she says “OK then, I’ll see you next week,” a statement both characters know is not true.
Oh goddamn it. Can we reshoot that one? I guess it turns out people only want to model their lives after trendy sitcoms and not awkward teen dramas, and that television as escapist entertainment goes beyond the joy we get from watching attractive people solve all their problems in 45 minutes. The real allure of television, of dialogue, of engaging characters, is the ability to see people say the things we always wish we had the smarts, power, or courage to say. We want them to deliver on the spot the beautiful one liner we came up with 45 minutes too late, the line that will save that friendship, get us that job or win over our crush. No one told me that part of growing up is learning that there will be some words that you want to say, need to say, but just can’t. Shit. Do people always get this emo without Gawker and Sporcle to distract them? I really need to reformat my computer.
Freeze frame. Roll credits.
Unnamed girl, please send your justifiably angry response to [email protected].