CS Weekly Archive > The Big Picture > 9/05/08

Working in TV:
Beyond Cops, Doctors and Lawyers

By jason davis

In honor of the just-passed Labor Day, CS Weekly casts aside TV stalwarts like the cop, lawyer, and doctor drama to look at some more interesting occupations upon which to build a show.

Since the advent of television, the medium has been dominated by three professions: doctor, lawyer, and policeman. It's easy to see why these occupations have proliferated—the stakes are often life or death, the pressure on protagonists is dramatically satisfying, and each concept easily supports the narrative versatility necessary to maintain a long-running series. Despite the disproportionate representation of these vocations on TV, the medium does occasionally offer glimpses into other fields, and, in celebration of Labor Day, CS Weekly takes a look at shows that eschew the old standbys in favor of more esoteric pursuits.

The following article contains spoilers for several television series, so proceed with caution.

Advertising Executive
As evidenced by the 16 Emmy nominations earned during its first season, Mad Men is making an impact on the television landscape and, like its protagonist Don Draper (Jon Hamm), the series is skilled at selling its product—in this case, the upper-middle-class malaise of a Madison Avenue ad man in the early 1960s. The portrayal of advertising on television is nothing new—Darrin Stephens (Dick York, later Dick Sargent) of Bewitched worked for a Manhattan-based firm, and his job often featured on the show. Though his work was rarely featured onscreen, Stuart Alan Jones (Aiden Gillen), one of the three principal characters in the UK series Queer as Folk, was in advertising and was particularly skilled at selling himself. Every aspect of Stuart's predatory sexual machismo was carefully constructed to facilitate his need for conquest and pleasure. So complete was the persona that only his best friend Vince (Craig Kelly) came anywhere near knowing and appreciating the real Stuart, while characters like 15-year-old Nathan Maloney (Charlie Hunnam) became obsessed with the image to the exclusion of the realities beyond the facade. In Mad Men, creator Matthew Weiner has created an entire world predicated on the dichotomy between reality and presentation found in the advertising industry. Draper, the creative director of Sterling-Cooper, is himself a construct that would put Jones to shame. Indeed, the former Dick Whitman stole the identity of fellow Korean War soldier Don Draper in an effort to re-brand his bastard farm-boy origins.

Clergy
Discounting The Father Dowling Mysteries and Cadfael for their mystery-solving proclivities and ignoring The Flying Nun on account of sheer silliness, the clergy, though ever-present in the ranks of guest characters, is rarely at the center of an ongoing television series. The BBC's The Vicar of Dibley, penned by Richard Curtis (Love Actually), debuted in 1994, with the travails of a liberal Anglican vicar assigned to the quiet and conservative country village of Dibley. After recovering from the horror of receiving a female priest—the jovial Geraldine Granger (Dawn French)—the parish would never be the same as she challenged deep-set values and long-held traditions. On the other side of the pond, the WB took a more conservative approach with the family drama 7th Heaven, which focused on the family of Protestant minister Eric Camden (Stephen Collins) as they cope with ever-changing morals. The long-running series outlasted the network it put on the map, finishing its 11-year run on the CW and always ready for a ratings bump provided by "very special episodes" dealing with touchy subjects. A more cynical take on religion came in the form of NBC's short-lived The Book of Daniel, where Reverend Daniel Webster (Aidan Quinn) regularly debated the tenants of Christianity with a hallucinated Jesus Christ (Garrett Dillahunt). Causing quite a stir, with eight NBC affiliates refusing to air the series, The Book of Daniel was attacked and lauded for its humanistic approach to the divine. Hopefully, its swift cancelation hasn't closed off the possibility for a good look at God's work in future television series—after all, the more important a subject, the more in need for examination, and dramatization is a 3,000-year-old exercise in looking at ourselves and who we are.

[For those who prefer their preachers with a substantial dose of hellfire and brimstone, HBO's Carnivále offered a period-appropriate take on early 20th century radio evangelism with the supernatural caveat that the Reverend Justin Crow (Clancy Brown) did not exactly practice what he preached…]

Criminal
TV opportunities to show off the criminal lifestyle were often limited in the days before cable ascendance. The Fugitive's protagonist Richard Kimble (David Janssen) was, by definition, an outlaw, but broadcast standard and practices made sure the audience knew he was a good guy wrongly accused. Stephen J. Cannell and Frank Lupo's Wiseguy got closer to the mark with the exploits of undercover operative Vinnie Terranova (Ken Wahl), who submerged himself into different underworld scenarios and lived an ostensibly criminal lifestyle for the sake of the eventual takedown. But real criminals didn't get the spotlight until HBO introduced Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini), the neurotic acting boss of a New Jersey crime family in The Sopranos. That series, and its heirs, delve into the realities of living a life outside the law—the logistics of legitimating your income, the paranoia of both law enforcement and co-workers, as well as the meaty drama of turning your back on millennia of moral teachings. Any one of these could have brought Soprano to the shrink's office where the series begins, but the issues of morality in an intrinsically immoral occupation are what kept viewers tuning in to The Sopranos, as well as its successors: Weeds, Brotherhood, and AMC's new crystal meth enterprise Breaking Bad. Not all these crime dramas are as weighty as HBO's pop-culture icon. Weeds couches its malfeasance in humor, with widowed housewife Nancy Botwin (Mary Louise Parker) turning to pot to raise her kids, or the con artists of the BBC's Hustle practicing their scams like skilled performers. Whatever the approach to the material, the days of making sure the audience understands who the bad guys are and punishing them by episode's end, are long gone.

Educator
Many people will point to a teacher when asked who had the most influence on them outside the home, so it's no surprise that educators make up a small, but memorable, demographic in the TV workplace. Sitcoms have generally been the preferred medium, as in Welcome Back, Kotter and Head of the Class. The former found wisecracking Gabe Kotter (co-creator Gabe Kaplan) trying to knock some sense into a class of delinquents, while the latter series explored the other end of the spectrum as substitute history teacher Charlie Moore (Howard Hesseman) tried to get his gifted and talented students to apply their knowledge to the world at large. In both cases, the teacher was an inspirational figure surrounded by kids who needed something to strive for. More often than not, the one-hour drama has produced educators with the same inspirational qualities, but with a more extracurricular bent. The White Shadow's Ken Reeves (Ken Howard) and Friday Night Lights' Eric Taylor (Kyle Chandler) both serve as coaches and surrogate fathers to the players on their teams. Reeves played in the NBA before an injury took him off the court, and much of the drama revolved around his transition from millionaire sportsman to inner-city inspiration. Taylor lives in a world that spins like a pigskin hurtling toward the goal posts. His every thought is of football and the kids whose futures are inextricably linked to the game in a series where winning on the field equates to winning in life. While we're hanging around high school, it's worth mentioning Boston Public, David E. Kelley's four-season look into the disheveled lives of a public school's faculty and administrators. If you thought the kids had problems, Kelley's quirky characterizations and lurid storylines highlighted the nobility of the job while showcasing the impossibility of doing it correctly under the system as it stands.

Hotelier
The hotel is an obvious venue for a television series. Like the ER, the stories come to the standing set. Like a cop or a lawyer show, the things that happen behind closed doors make for great drama. Hotel dramas generally fall into two categories predicated by the size and location of the establishment. The Independence Inn in Star's Hollow, Connecticut formed the focal point for the WB's Gilmore Girls, wherein the peculiarities of the hospitality industry often impinged upon the personal life of general manager Lorelai Gilmore (Lauren Graham). A similar approach was taken in the CBS series Newhart, which found DIY guru Dick Loudon (Bob Newhart) operating an inn surrounded by oddball locales, though the hotel played a diminishing role in the series as it went on. Fawlty Towers, which featured the anti-social hotelier Basil Fawlty's (co-creator John Cleese) rude encounters with sometimes tedious (but often perfectly reasonable) clients whom he refused to treat with any courtesy, much less hospitality. Departing these quiet villages for more urban adventures, we find Hotel Babylon (as featured in today's DVD reviews below). Based on an anonymous book detailing the mind-blowing things that happen when the do-not-disturb sign hits the doorknob, the series explores the goings on in a five-star London hotel where the staff are living only slightly less interesting lives than their guests. Rich in details you'd probably rather not know, the series is a fast-paced romp through the world of privilege and decadence, and generates all its stories—even those centering on staff—through the actions of hotel guests.

(For a period take on Hotel Babylon's excess, check out The Grand, a series that explores much the same mentality in post-World War I Manchester.)

Retailer
Having worked in retail for a decade encompassing high school and college, I can categorically state that the British sitcoms Are You Being Served? and Black Books do an uncanny job of capturing the misanthropic mindset that develops when one idiot after another bombards the sales counter with arrogance and stupidity. The former series, airing for 10 seasons on the BBC, found the staff of a London department store selling apparel to unappreciative or vacuous clientele while attempting to spice up their mundane employment with traditionally absurd sitcom antics. While some of the schemes featured on the show strained believability, the interaction between customers and staff—as well as relationships within the strict class-based company hierarchy—presented an honest take on the job. Black Books, though veering toward Fawlty Towers in terms of the vitriol bookseller Bernard Black (co-creator Dylan Moran) spews at his customers, nevertheless captures the continuing decline in literacy that leads to questions like, "Do you have an English translation of Hamlet?"

Undertaker
In a class by itself is Alan Ball's Six Feet Under, an HBO series following the lives of the Fisher family and their mortuary. Suffused with the ever-present imminence of death, the series used that inevitability to explore how its characters chose to live their lives—whether it was freewheeling Nate Fisher's (Peter Krause) slow evolution toward responsible adult or uptight brother David's (Michael C. Hall) journey to self-acceptance outside his late father's shadow. Throughout the show's five-year run, each story began with a death that eventually arrived in the Fishers' establishment, and the series illustrated that what we do with the time allotted is all that matters in the end…a fine lesson for any aspiring screenwriter to take to heart.

Jason Davis has been the DVD Manager for CS Weekly, a contributing editor for Creative Screenwriting Magazine, and has written for Cinescape.com, MSN.com, and created the TV series Studio 13, which ran on Lorne Michaels' Burly TV network. He lives in the small space left over by his ever-expanding library of books, movies, and music.

Mad Men courtesy Lionsgate Home Entertainment
Six Feet Under, The Sopranos courtesy HBO Home Video

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