Evolution of the TV Asshole
Originally conceived this for Chunklet Magazine, but finally ran in The Ottawa Citizen in 2006. Neglected to plug Jack Benny and Phil Silvers, two of the pioneers of TV asswipes.
Let’s call them, err, ‘AH,’ and follow
Chris Robinson as he charts their rise on
the small screen,
and reveals what it says
about each of us
When Nate Fisher bit the dust on the final season of Six Feet Under, the
reactions were astonishing in their venom. Many Six Feet Under faithful
(mostly female) were delighted that the “a–hole” had got what he deserved.
Sure, Nate had his dark moments: he cheated on his pregnant wife with his
sort-of stepsister. But otherwise he was a normal guy. He had good and bad
days, and that’s precisely what made Six Feet Under a powerful, poignant and
honest show.
It’s also something that HBO, more than any network, has done best. On shows
like Six Feet Under, The Wire, and in particular Deadwood and The Sopranos,
we’ve been introduced to characters who are not your typical TV cardboard
cutouts. Characters like Tony Soprano and Al Swearengen are so complex and
unpredictable that our allegiances constantly shift. One minute we loathe
them, the next we empathize.
Even after all these years of television, we’re not quite sure how to react
to the AH.
Archie Bunker
and The rise of the asshole
Television has always had its share of AHs. Among the pioneers are Jackie
Gleason (The Honeymooners), Archie Bunker (All in the Family), Basil Fawlty
(Fawlty Towers), and George Jefferson (The Jeffersons). Add Fred Flinstone
to the list: AHs can be animated.
With the exception of Bunker, the men were playful caricatures mocking the
myopic dimwit within us all. Their actions were tempered by supporting
characters (usually their patient and forgiving wives), who provided a more
agrarian perspective.
Archie was the most profound.
See TV on Page F2
Continued from Page B1
Through his bigoted and misogynistic behaviour, the show’s creators offered a
reflection of white American working class men, who having grown up in the
prosperous and orderly 1950s now found themselves in a world they could no
longer comprehend. Women wanted to work. Blacks wanted equality. Children
questioned their parents.
The voice of this new generation was provided by Archie’s daughter, Gloria
and her hippie liberal husband, Mike (more famously, “Meathead”). In almost
every episode, Meathead and Archie clashed over race, class or gender.
Through these dueling characters, All in the Family captured the growing
complexities and disappointment of post-1960s America.
With the exception of a handful of AHs, including the entire Ewing family
(Dallas) and Family Ties’ Alex P. Keaton - the inverted offspring of Bunker
- television of the Reagan era was primarily littered with saccharine fare
like Alf, Facts of Life, The Cosby Show and Who’s The Boss?
That changed by the end of the decade with a new, animated sitcom about a
dysfunctional family, The Simpsons.
TV comedy in the’90s -
Seinfeld, The Simpsons
Homer Simpson was a return of sorts to Bunker, a loud, opinionated lout with
little care for the thoughts and feelings of others.
Unlike Bunker, Homer is the modern emptyman; a man of little education,
ambition or beliefs, and blissfully ignorant. What little he does know comes
to him through television. As much as his intellectual daughter, Lisa, tries
to challenge him to “wake up,” Homer dwells in Plato’s cave, seeing only the
shadows of things, not the things themselves.
While many episodes end with Homer coming to a new realization about himself,
his family or the world, his awareness is short lived. By the next episode
he’s forgotten everything, and back to his immature and facile ways.
Seinfeld (1990) was the first sitcom with an entire cast of AHs. Jerry,
Elaine, George, Kramer and most of the secondary characters (Newman,
Peterman, Puddy etc. ) were selfish, petty and occasionally nasty people
with little concern for others.
Of the numerous examples, the two most infamous were when the gang reacted
ambiguously to the death of George’s fiancé, Susan. George had a difficult
time hiding his relief that her untimely death - she was poisoned by licking
cheap envelopes that the miserly George insisted on buying for their
wedding invitations - saved him from marriage. Then, in the series’ finale,
Jerry, Elaine, Kramer and George were sentenced to a year in prison for
standing by idly while a man was being robbed.
In many ways, Seinfeld was an extension of Family Ties and The Simpsons in
that it was a portrait of a solipsistic generation. And like those shows,
Seinfeld excavated unsavory characteristics that existed within all of us
and took them to extremes.
Seinfeld’s co-creator, Larry David, took things up a notch with his follow up
series, Curb Your Enthusiasm (2000). The show’s premise was simple. It
followed a day in the life of Larry David, the wealthy co-creator of
Seinfeld. Naturally, there was more. Larry, the inspiration for Seinfeld’s
George, routinely gets into petty arguments and fights with friends, family,
colleagues and strangers because of his often insensitive and brutally
frank opinions. Larry David is the AH within us all - or at least some of
us.
If Bunker was a poster boy of post-’60s intolerance, Homer , David and the
Seinfeld gang - not to forget other misanthropic comic masterpieces like The
Larry Sanders Show and British import I’m Alan Partridge - became a release
valve from the stifling effects of late 20th century political correctness.
Through these characters, our most brutally honest thoughts and feelings
were brought to the surface. The characters said the things we would never
dare to speak.
“That’s the guy that I wish I was,” said David in January when asked if he
was like his character. “I love that guy. This is the guy (pointing at
himself) I can’t stand. But … I can’t get enough of that guy. That guy
does things I wish I could do. He behaves the way I want to behave.”
We tolerate and even admire these AHs because they are harmless. They are
taken to extremes that would not be tolerated in the real world. The people
who, for example, humour and feed David’s misanthropic neuroses in Curb Your
Enthusiasm would in reality ignore him, or perhaps beat the crap out of him.
Besides, every comedy needs an ass. That’s the legacy of comedy, whether it
is Buster Keaton, Jerry Lewis, Abbott and Costello, Phil Silvers or Stephen
Colbert. “Good is not funny,” David said in the same interview earlier this
year. “The bad thoughts are funny because they’re unexpressed. I’m letting
these thoughts that go unexpressed - that we all have, all the time - to get
out. It comes from a place inside that somebody else is expressing and that
we can relate to.”
But, what happens when the AH is no longer so funny? Case in point, the
British version of The Office.
Yes, the show is funny, but Ricky Gervais’ David Brent is so utterly
unbearable, pathetic - and, worst of all, real - that that show approaches
tragedy.
Unlike the other AHs, there is no relief from, or for, Brent. We are watching
a miserable human being who is unaware of who he is and how others perceive
him. Brent is a man without an identity. Every gesture, thought, or word is
pinched from some facile fragment of pop culture.
Unlike a similar character like Homer, Brent evokes pain in the viewer
because we not only know people who are like him, but his actions are so
familiar that we find ourselves wondering if we do the same things.
The Office goes farther than any previous sitcom by revealing a side of
ourselves that we don’t want to acknowledge.
THE NEW AH
Although there have been AHs in earlier TV dramas (e.g., NYPD Blue’s Andy
Sipowicz, Homicide’s Frank Pembleton), HBO was the first network to give
viewers a new form of the AH, a multifaceted and inconsistent creature who,
depending on his mood, attracts equal amounts of disdain and empathy.
The most notable examples are Nate Fisher (Six Feet Under), Jimmy McNulty
(The Wire), and in particular, Tony Soprano (The Sopranos) and Al Swearengen
(Deadwood). Another strong example is Vic Mackey (Michael Chiklis), on the
20th Century Fox series The Shield.
The mob boss Soprano is haunted by the past, a man who wants desperately to
believe in old-world values like loyalty and family even as they crumble
around him. He expects others to live up to values that he himself is unable
to uphold. Even as Soprano begins to understand his life better through his
psychiatrist, he reveals how difficult it is to simply toss off the shackles
of habit and rhythm. As such, he often contradicts himself or undermines
the very lessons he appears to learn in his psychiatric sessions. A recent
example came when Tony told his son A.J. that family is the only thing he
count on - only to be shot by his own uncle, to whom Tony had remained
fiercely loyal despite the warnings of most others. Beyond the mob boss
exterior lies a simple, conflicted man.
Deadwood’s Al Swearengen is even more beguiling a creation. When Deadwood
began our stand-in was Seth Bullock, the Etobicoke-born ex-sheriff headed to
the new frontier town of Deadwood to open a hardware store. Initially, the
lines between good and evil are clear. Seth is a stern, upstanding, somewhat
self-righteous hero. The villain is Al Swearengen, the proprietor of the Gem
Saloon and unofficial dictator of the town. Swearengen is a despicable,
ruthless and foul-mouthed creature. He’s also responsible for the slaughter
of an innocent family of settlers.
However, we soon discover inconsistencies in the men. In one episode Bullock
is ambushed by an Indian, whom he overwhelms and viciously beats to death.
Bullock, we realize, is a complex man with a great capacity for brutality and
intolerance. He finds that his notions of good and bad are seriously
challenged by the realities of the frontier. Throughout the series, Bullock
struggles between doing what is good and what is necessary to survive.
Our view of Swearengen takes a similar detour near the end of season one. We
get quick glimpses into his tortured soul when Reverend Smith, who suffers
from a brain tumour, is rapidly deteriorating. In one poignant scene,
Swearengen watches the reverend stumble down the street madly preaching
aloud to animals. Swearengen is clearly pained by Smith’s condition.
In the same episode, Swearengen discovers that Trixie, one of his
prostitutes, has been intimate with Seth’s partner, Sol Starr. Swearengen,
angered by Trixie’s apparent betrayal, confronts Sol and demands he pay for
Trixie’s services. “I’m not paying you,” Starr says. “It wasn’t to do with
you, it wasn’t business.”
Swearengen’s reply is the first of many tortured soliloquies that give us
insight into the complexity of his character: “Don’t you think I don’t
understand. I mean, what can anyone of us ever really f–kin’ hope for, huh?
Except for a moment here and there with a person who doesn’t want to rob,
steal or murder us? … Everybody needs that. Becomes precious to ‘em.”
Led by The Sopranos, Deadwood and Six Feet Under, we see television maturing
and moving away from outmoded ideas of good and bad towards characters and
situations that are not readily definable. What makes the hostile reactions
towards a character like Nate Fisher both surprising and refreshing is that
such shows give viewers the freedom to make their own judgments about the
characters.
It’s through this process that, whatever our opinion, we realize these
morally ambiguous characters can no longer simply be called assholes. They
are far more complex creatures called human beings. And, ideally, through
this attempt to understand Nate Fisher, Tony Soprano, Al Swearengen, Larry
David,or David Brent, we become a bit more enlightened about ourselves.