Back to the Future of TV

In the beginning, there was “Hill Street Blues.” The groundbreaking series that debuted in 1981 wasn’t the first hourlong program on TV, but it did herald the dawn of a new television era. Nominally a cop show, set in an inner-city precinct in either an unnamed Eastern metropolis or one of the circles of hell, “Hill Street” was as different from a standard police procedural as “The Mickey Mouse Club.”

“Hill Street” wasn’t just a drama, nor could it be labeled a comedy. Week after week for seven seasons, it was its own manic hybrid, a dramedy that simultaneously raised the bar for serious storytelling and bulldozed the barrier that kept funny stuff separate. Situation comedies like “MASH,” “The Days & Nights of Molly Dodd,” and “Taxi” were altering the shape of TV comedy. “Hill Street Blues” would do that for drama.

Twenty years later, at a time when “Survivor’s” return and the birth of its ugly stepchildren, “Temptation Island” and “The Mole,” will be attended by a tsunami of hype, examining “Hill Street” might seem like an exercise in nostalgia. It isn’t. The dramedy has matured as a genre and expanded as a pop cultural phenomenon, so much so that understanding it is a key to television’s real survival.

When the dust settles and all the islands have washed away, the audience will surely tire of the contrived situations of so-called reality TV. Then they’ll turn, as they have consistently, to dramedies that present existence burnished by a skilled storyteller. The princes of television are the writers, who cite a variety of influences. The reasons dramedies have endured are what makes Dickens still a great read: Good stories, well-told, peopled by complex characters, are irresistible. While attention-grabbing fads come and go, a rare, ticklish breed of programs that audiences make weekly appointments with keeps ticking, beating so steadily that it has come to seem like prime time’s telltale heart.

Just picture that heart as a bit cracked. The ‘90s were the age of irony, when every human experience became a New Yorker cartoon. Stuff happens (popularly expressed in a cruder way) became a bumper sticker, a T-shirt slogan, a worldview. Guided by this mantra, Americans took what in another era would have been a presidential crisis and decided to enjoy it as a dirty joke. As the quipsters who ruled late-night television judged everything grist for satire, “American Beauty”--a movie that somehow found the wickedly funny side of adultery, suicide, voyeurism and materialism--was chosen best picture of the year.

Of course, dramedies are thriving. By already seeing the world as sometimes sad, sometimes laughable, they were ahead of a perceptual shift that came to that big, noisy, population bump, the baby boomers, as they matured. With insight that could be summed up as, “don’t sweat the small stuff,” someone who’s survived four decades learns to find life’s vicissitudes somewhat ridiculous. Television that can stir the emotions but knows when to wink is ideal for today’s wizened audience.

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“Hill Street Blues’ ” innovations were many, including jumpy camera work, overlapping dialogue and story resolutions as melancholy as its soundtrack. Among its startling departures from the conventional episodic shows that preceded it was a skillful blend of drama with bizarre humor.

On the mean streets around the Hill Street station, citizens were shot at and raped, robbed and held at knifepoint. In the midst of this major mayhem bloomed Mick Belker (Bruce Weitz), a detective with a bum’s wardrobe. (Was he working undercover or did he just enjoy looking and smelling that way?) When displeased, he’d crouch on his haunches and growl like an angry yard dog. Within the perfectly mad universe of equally odd yet believable characters writer-producer Steven Bochco created, Belker was foxy, a little dangerous, possibly crazy and hilarious.

The juxtaposition of the tragic and comic continues to surface in new television shows and be refined in established ones, yet the dramedy remains a black art, as valuable as gold in the hands of alchemists like “The West Wing’s” Aaron Sorkin, so over the top in the work of David E. Kelley on “Ally McBeal” that it’s proven capable of spawning its own mutants.

The more we see of TV’s seriocomic cocktails, the louder are the echoes of other voices, other media. With the luxury of more time and space, and without the tyrannical structure that forces a mini-climax before each commercial break, a number of contemporary novelists have built critical and popular followings telling tales that range from sorrowful to silly. Anne Tyler has done it, as have T.C. Boyle and Larry McMurtry. But the master of prose dramedy is, arguably, John Irving.

One dark and stormy night, T.S. Garp, sometime novelist, house-husband and protagonist of Irving’s 1978 novel, “The World According to Garp,” learns that his wife, Helen, has been having an affair with a graduate student at the university where she teaches. Although infidelity is not unknown to the Garp marriage, her husband insists that she end the romance immediately. While he takes their two young sons to the movies, she is to break the news to her lover. Helen at first argues with her lover on the phone, then, because she won’t allow him in her house, they talk in his car parked in the driveway, where she gives in to his demand for one final sex act.

She is orally engaged in that at the moment when her family, heading home through the black rain, slides on the frozen, slushy driveway. The car crash is catastrophic, its consequences so heartbreaking that its deepest horrors --one child is killed, the other loses an eye--are revealed to the reader only in time. As profound as the Garp family’s grief will be, at first nothing distracts from the grotesque justice fate delivers to Helen’s seducer: When her husband rear-ends the car, she bites off three quarters of her annoying boyfriend’s penis.

Earlier in the book, Garp’s writing is described as “rich with lunacy and sorrow.” So is Irving’s. On the phone from his home in Vermont, he explains: “In telling a story, I don’t set about to include both comedy and drama. But I am conscious that you leave an audience emotionally and psychologically unprepared if, in the beginning, you disarm them by making them think nothing too serious is going to happen. They enter into a story that seems to be kind and gentle and believe they’re going to have a good time. My stories always turn. I think of it as moving from light to dark and holding the dark back.”

Irving’s world is a bittersweet place, where elation shares a seesaw with pain. Unfortunately, when his novels have been made into movies, especially in last year’s Oscar-winning “The Cider House Rules,” the absurd humor is overwhelmed by sentiment.

Since he recently finished a novel about a TV journalist, he’s spent a lot of time watching news shows. In them he observed a pattern reminiscent of his own approach, and one that’s almost a working definition of dramedy: crises and disasters, leavened with triviality.

“I have a similar perspective on what’s memorable in storytelling, which is like a child’s. Their lives and memories are composed of the best and the worst of things. Everything in the middle is forgettable. My grandmother died not long ago, a few years short of her 100th birthday. What she retained toward the end were all the highlights of her life, and all the tragedies, the births of her children and the deaths.

“Telling a story, a long one in a novel, or a short one in a film or TV, you’re trying to just hit the extremes, the best time you’ve ever had and the worst. High hilarity and inconsolable, unapproachable sadness get your attention. What the hell else does? One goes through the day, shifting from happiness to dread.”

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McMurtry, author of such dramedies between hard covers as “Lonesome Dove” and “Terms of Endearment,” credits ‘70s sitcoms for changing the way TV tells its stories. “In the Norman Lear shows and ‘Mary Tyler Moore,’ TV had taken over many of the responsibilities of the 19th century novel for character and tragicomedy,” he says. “Those shows and some others started out as pure comedy and became more comedy-dramas as they extended their runs.”

“The West Wing’s” Sorkin also considers a number of classic comedy shows to be dramedy’s forerunners, and it’s been one of his guiding principles as well.

“It would have been easy for ‘MASH’ to be ‘Hogan’s Heroes,’ ” he says. “But [writer] Larry Gelbart made sure that, first and foremost, the reality was respected. ‘All in the Family’ took place in a sitcom kind of set. And yet, Norman Lear created a world in which Archie could cry and Edith could get cancer. These people were more than mechanisms to tell us a joke.

“We do a lot of comedy on ‘The West Wing’ and we have to do the same thing Gelbart did on ‘MASH.’ No matter how much Hawkeye and Trapper are yucking it up, no matter how many dresses Klinger puts on, no matter how much fun is made of Frank and Hot Lips, there’s a reality set up in which the adversaries are real. We have to know that when the choppers come carrying wounded soldiers, these guys are going to drop everything and save lives. On our show, we always have to assure the audience that President Bartlet and the people who work in the White House care about making things better. Once you plant that flag, then you can have the press secretary running around with live turkeys.” (You missed the Thanksgiving show? Don’t ask.)

As every student of history knows, President Andrew Jackson placed a big block of cheese in the lobby of the White House, and any American was welcome to come in and take a slice. One day a year, the Bartlet administration throws open its doors to special interest groups who ordinarily can’t get near the Oval Office. Key staff members assigned to listen to a parade of crackpots refer to the annual ritual as Big Block of Cheese Day.

One group arrives armed with maps and photographs to propose building a wolf’s only highway from Northern Canada to Yellowstone. On the face of it, aiding wolf migration is a benevolent idea. Unfortunately, it carries a $90-million price tag.

The faction in favor of more resources for studying UFOs is a fixture of Big Block of Cheese Day. Deputy Chief of Staff Josh Lyman isn’t completely attentive to them, because earlier in the day, high-level national security personnel gave him a card telling him where to go in the event of a nuclear attack. Josh is consumed by guilt when he discovers that his co-workers don’t have similar instructions. After much soul-searching, Josh tells the president he doesn’t want the card. If the members of his workplace family wouldn’t survive nuclear holocaust, he doesn’t want to either.

Josh’s (Bradley Whitford) personal crisis was all the more poignant played against the Big Block of Cheese Day circus. His discomfort resonated because it arose from the show’s emotional core, the attachment the people who work together in the West Wing feel to one another. “The West Wing” projects such warmth that if its audience continues to grow this winter, the rising cost of heating oil might not be a national problem.

Yet no one would mistake it for “Touched by an Angel.” Sorkin says, “Oftentimes the humor will come from the fact that these are very capable, intelligent people, and they can’t tie their shoelaces.”

The political situations absorbing “The West Wing” workers are typically so complex that watching it is like reading Stephen Hawking--you have to skip over what you don’t understand and just go with the flow, or you’ll fall behind and wind up completely lost. Not an hour to entertain multi-taskers, “The West Wing” staff’s banter moves at a relentless pace. Sorkin was a successful playwright and screenwriter before he came to television, and his dialogue is a staccato symphony of conversational nuisances--repetitions, questions answered with questions--that are both familiar and droll.

“If you’re listening to a song on the radio, you don’t say, gee, are there elements of jazz there, and do I hear some folk in there too? You just enjoy the music,” Sorkin explains. “The West Wing’s” remarkable ensemble of actors are virtuosos with Sorkin’s musical language. Guest directors, he admits, don’t always get the unjoke that makes dramedy sing. They can be heavy-handed or err on the side of silliness.

“When that happens, not only will it not be funny, but there’s a ripple effect that hurts the rest of the show because we’ve blown the credibility of these characters. If along the way, you drop the ball, it’s hard to get an audience back. It’s like a magician blowing a trick.”

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If the characters and situations aren’t realistic, if the dialogue isn’t smart, if the actors are too clownish or the direction too this or too that, a dramedy can self-destruct. “The West Wing,” Bochco’s best and “St. Elsewhere,” another outstanding ‘80s example, make crafting a winning dramedy look deceptively easy.

To an outsider, “Gideon’s Crossing” appears to be a victim of television’s oft-criticized herd mentality. One imagines a philistine of a network executive, mindful of “The West Wing’s” best drama series Emmy, insisting that a hospital show must sometimes walk on the light side.

As chief of experimental medicine at a Boston teaching hospital, Dr. Benjamin Gideon (Andre Braugher) regularly comes to a juncture where puzzles must be solved. Will a bone marrow transplant save an acutely anemic patient, or could subjecting him to that risky procedure hasten his death? How can the doctor admit some terminal patients into a limited clinical trial of a new cancer drug while turning away others?

Each question is rife with fascinating moral dilemmas as well as scientific problems. Any medical show could be concerned with such situations, and most of them periodically are. But “ER” brilliantly claimed the hyper-energy of a trauma center as its signature, and the conventions of that environment (residents shouting for drugs as blood splatters their masks, nurses warning that a patient’s blood pressure is dropping) have become as reliable as the visual cliches of rock videos (tattooed babes in tank tops, bands rehearsing in the wilderness).

“Gideon’s Crossing” has a slower, more thoughtful pace, and it’s intelligent and moving when serious. In striking contrast, its moments of comic relief are terrible. Suffering through them would be akin to having your favorite college philosophy professor abruptly channel Henny Youngman in the middle of a cogent explanation of existentialism. “Stop it,” you want to shout. “Get back to the good stuff.”

No network suit can be blamed for turning a perfectly good drama into an inept dramedy. The tone reflects the philosophy of series creator Paul Attanasio, an Oscar-nominated screenwriter who developed the admired, and largely dark “Homicide--Life on the Street.” “My aesthetic is that life isn’t any one thing, so I’ve pretty much always done dramatic stories with humor,” he says. “It’s part of what makes a show modern. That leaden, Stanley Kramer, ‘Playhouse 90’ seriousness feels old-fashioned now.”

An episode titled “The Mistake,” a hindsight investigation of death by hospital screw-up, shone a frightening light on the banality of catastrophe. Mercifully, no clumsy humor distracted from what Attanasio called its “tremendous velocity.” He says “Gideon,” in its first season, is still finding itself. “The directions in which it’s evolving don’t exclude humor at all. We’re trying to do more muscular narratives, like ‘The Mistake.’ The shows that are coming up move faster.” An episode that aired in late December did, and it was also free of the pseudo-comic detours that marred the show’s beginnings.

Beware the amusing interlude. In the pilot, an intern is saddled with the care of a dowager’s lap dog, which, despite the young doctor’s ministrations, croaks anyway. That situation could be a metaphor for the show’s deadly attempts at comedy, since an ambitious group of interns invariably bears the task of trying to breathe life into hopeless subplots.

Ruben Blades, playing a hospital administrator, and Kevin O’Connor, as a medical researcher, have a way with sarcasm, but at least a third of the cast is so bad at farce that we wish a fatal staph infection would afflict their characters. To explain that reaction in one viewer and Attanasio’s satisfaction with “Gideon’s” balance of drama and comedy, consider words of wisdom from Nora Ephron’s “When Harry Met Sally . . .” screenplay: “Everyone thinks they have good taste and a great sense of humor, but not everyone could, could they?”

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Maybe if dramedies were less delicate souffles, there would be more good ones on the TV menu. The argument could also be made that audiences can’t live on souffle alone. “Law & Order: SVU,” “The X-Files” and “The Practice” stay comfortably grave. “Once and Again” is strongest when it doesn’t attempt humor, and its lame efforts are easily forgiven because it explores emotional territory everyone else on TV has left uncharted.

Like a beautiful woman who looks fine without makeup or pretty clothes, and breathtaking when she gilds the lily, some series choose to tell their stories straight, then confidently add wit when they’re in the mood to dazzle in a different way. “The Sopranos,” “ER” and “NYPD Blue” fill that category, accomplished dramas with well-toned comic muscles always ready to be exercised.

Just as some dramedies lean toward the dramatic, others go more for laughs. “Ally McBeal” surprised a lot of traditionalists when, in its first season, it offered some of its episodes for Emmy consideration in the comedy category. It was an hourlong show and it didn’t have a laugh track, so how could it be a comedy?

Despite such early confusion, it has shown itself to be just that. The series takes place in a make-believe world, where office restrooms are unisex, lawyers burst into song, hallucinations are as prevalent as pollen, and a dream lover is just around the corner. To borrow a literary term, “Ally” is TV’s prime example of magical realism. Sorkin and Bochco’s yardstick for dramedy, reality that grounds goofiness, can’t be applied.

It is still a charming, original show, but the search for love is central to Ally’s existence. There is a hopscotch between fantasy and reality, or in novelist Irving’s terms, a lifelong course that alternates between the best and the worst of times. But the extremes are significant only when they relate to matters of the heart. For Ally and Ed Stevens, a cute lawyer who has a series on another network named after him (“Ed”), whimsy and romance rule.

Eighteen-year-old Felicity Porter and Noel, the resident advisor in her coed dorm, spend the beginning of her freshman year doing an approach-avoidance tango. When she isn’t busy studying American poetry or the history of Western art, she gives her friends daily bulletins on her emotional temperature. On a cool day, she decides she and Noel should just remain friends. When she can’t ignore that he is sweet, funny, considerate, sensitive and adoring, she concludes that maybe they have deeper feelings for each other that should be acted upon.

Felicity returns from a Christmas break visit with her family and tells Noel, “I think you and I should have sex.”

She comes into his room and makes her announcement just as he’s lifting his new, blue iMac off his desk. Noel smiles, registers shock by losing control of his motor skills and drops the computer on the floor.

Now in its third season, “Felicity” is one of the most slyly effective of current dramedies. Its achievement is all the more impressive because it follows the adventures of a bright, sensitive California girl (Keri Russell) enrolled at NYU, and if ever there was a group that could be accused of taking itself too seriously, it would be college kids.

J.J. Abrams and Matt Reeves, the creators and executive producers of “Felicity,” met as students at USC’s cinema school. Now in their early 30s, they each wrote and directed movies before creating “Felicity” for television. They slip easily into screenwriting jargon, speaking of character arcs and a story’s issues of consequence in a manner that belies their breezy way with a narrative.

“Something’s funnier if the stakes are higher, and a serious situation is easier to accept if its funny,” Reeves says. “When something is so heavy that there is no hope, audiences have a tendency to want to withdraw from it. Having humor allows for some hope, and that lets you draw people in and make them root for the character.”

Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, as the Wizard of Oz said. “Felicity’s” characters are endearingly clueless about their own limitations. The series is well-cast and surprising. Just when you thought having sex would be a constant preoccupation, half of one of the show’s central couples is revealed as a Christian dedicated to premarital celibacy and another character must cope with a testicular cancer scare. The minute it seems that all the soft-focus ramifications of Felicity’s decision to lose her virginity will be exploited, mushiness is sidestepped as she approaches that rite of passage with the finesse of a crash test dummy. That episode was honestly concerned with jealousy, the parameters of betrayal and the intricacies of friendship. But it’s hard to get bogged down in those weighty matters when Felicity is watching a solemn Student Health Services advisor demonstrate proper condom application on a contraption that looks like a strawberry Popsicle.

Reeves and Abrams’ offices are next to each other in the Culver City studio that serves as “Felicity’s” production headquarters. Each is depicted in a homemade cartoon tacked on his door. A caricature of Reeves looks up from a script and says to a writer, “Make it more emotional.”

Abrams is shown in the same pose. In the bubble above his head are the words, “Make it funnier.”

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“Hill Street Blues” and later “L.A. Law” (a hit from 1986 to 1994) both reveled in mood swings--some emotional, some funny. From the beginning, humor was wired into the show’s concept. Bochco remembers he and his contemporaries were bored with working on predictable scripts they found formulaic.

“It wasn’t so much, gee, we should do a drama that is also funny,” says Bochco, who created the show with Michael Kozoll. “We knew people under stress do weird things, and law enforcement often attracts odd personalities. As you talk to cops, as I have for years, you will hear some of the funniest stories. If you’re really doing that world fully, you access an awful lot of absurdity. What people responded to was a dynamic range of human behavior inside an environment we normally think of as extremely strait-laced. We discovered that when you put that behavior, both on the part of cops as well as citizens and perpetrators, next to intensely dramatic story lines, it almost intensifies the humor. Then you hope you’ll have some kind of internal monitor for what’s an appropriate balance between the dramatic and the bizarre.

“Of course, you never play this stuff for laughs,” Bochco says. “You play its reality. You have to make sure that whatever story you’re telling has its own internal logic of behavior or else people won’t believe it and it won’t be funny.”