Favorite Scenes: Engaging the Mind, and Learning To Commit

So just because, sure, why not -- what I really need at this point in my life is more things to help me to procrastinate...

Callaghan posted a challenge a few days ago: "What's your favorite scene from television, ever?" Now that's a pretty big deal. I have two. Yes, two. I will not be constricted by Callaghan. Why? Because Callaghan is a punk. There. I said it. Them Film Centre Nuggets need to be kept in line.

Anyway. I have one scene that made me want to write for television. And one scene that made me ache at its goodness, once I was writing full time.

The first, of course, involves the lovable denizens of WKRP in Cincinatti. Arthur Carlson (the sublime Gordon Jump) feels that he's being ignored. He hates the way the station's being run without him. He gets it in his head that he's going to do his own super-secret promotion. He won't let anybody help. He won't tell anyone what's going to happen. Les is dispatched to cover it.

It's a Thanksgiving Promotion.

And the rest, my friends, is TV history:






Okay. Now this is a pretty well known scene. And the blow line is part of comedy folklore. But the thing that's amazing is: I must have seen this sequence a hundred times. Yet there are still lines that, when I watch, I laugh harder at than the last time I watched it. And they're different lines every time. There's that many good jokes. Today's anemic comedies are rendered even more shameful when you look at the construction of the final act of this show.

I remember gasping on my parents' couch when I first saw it. I remember patiently waiting through rerun after rerun for the chance to see it again. (See, children, in the olden times, before the intertubes...) And how simple is it? Really, you're on standing sets...with one location in front of a store. Simple deployment of sound effects, intercutting, a few props and wardrobe alterations, and a couple of spot on performances.

As a teenager, once the tears cleared from my eyes the first thing I thought was, "I cannot believe that they managed to do a comic riff on the Hindenburg."

Watching it now, all those years later, I marvel at the little things -- the precision of the wording and the construction: "Like wet cement..." "the turkeys mounted a counterattack..." "Lots of turkeys don't survive Thanksgiving."

And I'd forgotten that the blow line -- to my mind, the single greatest blow line in the history of television comedy -- is said as the tail credits are already rolling.

The fact that this show's not on DVD is a tragedy. Damn you, music rights!

Anyway. That's one.

For the second, we go back a couple of years. I'm just back from a few strange months: four months in Cape Town writing Sci-fi, followed by Two Weeks in NY with my musical playing Off-Broadway.

I settle down to watch this new show I'm not sure about, about a bunch of marooned survivors of a plane crash. It's been interesting so far, but I'm a little on the fence.

One of the interesting things about it is that because there's such a large cast, they track the plot through different eyes each week. This week, the first thing I see is Terry O'Quinn wake up, put on his shoes, then rush around to help the other survivors. I love Terry O'Quinn. He's one of those wonderful character actors who's always good: whether he's in XFiles or Alias -- always solid, never celebrated. But as the story of this character, John Locke, unfolds in flashback through the episode, it gets a little intriguing, and a lot dissonant. Locke is the power guy, the guy who seems so in control and knows things about survival. Is he a special agent? Is he a military, black ops guy? Can't say for sure.

But in the past, in the flashbacks, there seems to be something else going on. He's a Walter Mitty type. He's got a terrible job. He's a lonely, pathetic bastard, reduced to calling phone sex lines for companionship. What the hell is going on here? Why is the guy in the flashbacks so different from the badass man of action and mystery on the island?

Then comes the penultimate scene. All through the flashback, Locke has been planning this great trip. This mystical adventure. And everyone seems to be making fun of him for it. It's weird, it's tense...because in the present you're seeing this guy who represents himself as a man who knows his way around things, and has survival knowledge, but the flashbacks are making him out to be a bullshitter. You think you know what's going on.

Then comes this scene:




The clip's cut off a bit, but basically, what they do is repeat the sequence of images that opened the episode, then go a little further. As you're processing all this stuff: Jesus, he was in a wheelchair? You do the whole Bruce-Willis -Sixth-Sense thing of going back through the episode. You see the genius of the staging -- how he was always sitting down, or lying down...how all those lines that you thought meant one thing actually meant another.

And watching that show, on its original broadcast date, which, weirdly, was exactly two years ago today -- I reached the commit moment.

The commit moment is something really important in series that we never talk about. It's the moment you stop auditioning the series and say to yourself, "clearly, I have to watch every episode of this show, ever." Very rarely does that moment come in the pilot. For me, Six Feet Under is one of the few shows where that moment came in the pilot (right at the moment Claire learns that her father has died as she's just taken meth, and says, "I guess this moment's going to burn a little brighter.") I don't remember what my commit moment was for The Sopranos. For Deadwood it was probably the first Al Swearengen monologue. But for LOST, the moment I realized, "I don't know what this series is, but I'm in" -- was when they revealed John Locke in that wheelchair.

The last image of that episode was the wheelchair, (which you'd seen people pushing around stuff on in the previous couple of episodes) alone and abandoned, on the beach.



I love discovering the commit moment. That's why, no matter how many people try to convince me that watching TV episodes on DVD is the best way to watch them, I say fie and feh upon you. Re-watch, maybe. But you're missing the experience if you don't discover, in real time, just how awesome a group of writers are. You miss out if you don't allow the possibility of saying, "Into your hands, I commit my spirit, oh scribes."

Or maybe that's just the Catholic boy in me.