Travis and Taylor were amorous on the football field after last night's Super Bowl.
And in a couple of days it'll be Valentine's Day, where couples everywhere will celebrate their passion.
So this being NYC -- the sexiest city in the world with the best deli -- it's a good time to re-appreciate the fact that Seinfeld determined that pastrami is the most sensual, the most erotic, of all the salted cured meats.
I think corned beef runs a close second.
But, really, bacon and -- hahaha -- sausage, should be considered the sexiest salted cured meats because they can be incorporated into breakfasts that can be served in bed.
Please feel free let me know your thoughts in the comments!
In the mid-to-late 1990s the NBC television network was riding high with shows like Friends, Seinfeld, Mad About You, Frasier, ER, Law & Order and others. In an era before streaming and cable "prestige TV", before YouTube and social media, when hit TV shows accumulated literally tens of millions of viewers, NBC was the highest rated network with its Must See TV lineups.
One of those shows was Caroline in the City.
A sitcom about a cartoonist (Caroline) living in NYC with a wacky next door neighbor, an on-again/off-again boyfriend, a wacky assistant who's secretly in love with her, and various other wacky people who drop in and out of her life, the show ran for four seasons from 1995 to 1999. It was kind of like Sex & the City before that show ever aired -- but much, much more sanitized. Often squeezed between airings of ratings juggernaughts Seinfeld and ER, Caroline in the City was the classic "time slot" hit -- a show that got big ratings because the shows before and after it got even bigger ratings.
Unlike several of the aforementioned shows that remain beloved classics today, constantly in reruns or on streaming, or that have even been rebooted (like Law & Order and Frasier), Caroline in the City is completely forgotten today. Set in a fantasy-land NYC about white people obsessing about their love lives, it's the kind of show that, today, most people probably askance at.
Yet I remember the show, somewhat fondly, for a couple of reasons.
First, it starred the wonderful Lea Thompson who a decade earlier had been in the Back to the Future movies (as well as other '80s classics like Some Kind of Wonderful and Howard the Duck). While the show wasn't great, she was ... some kind of wonderful in this show. Second, the show aired during my college years -- in fact, interestingly enough, it premiered a month after I started college and went off the air a month before I graduated. So, for me at least, it's a kind of time-capsule of a very special, very specific time in my life -- even though I didn't watch the show regularly.
So today I remember a show that, while not great, while it might not "totally hold up", hold a weirdly special place in my heart.
In late 2020 I blogged about my memories of WNYC TV, the long defunct public television station that was owned by the city and was the sister broadcaster of WNYC radio.
The programming, as I indicated, was a weird cross between PBS and public access, with lots of international programming along with local shows. In the evening they would mostly show half-hour comedy and drama shows from the UK, much of it very offbeat stuff.
One exception to the British stuff on WNYC TV (although still quite "offbeat") were repeats of a late 1980s series called Trying Times. This was, unusually, an American show and it was actually created for PBS. Today we would call it an "anthology show" -- every episode was a stand-alone story with a totally different cast and characters. It could also be described as a "dramedy" -- the stories had a comic tone but there was a serious current underneath all of them. The episodes weren't laugh-out loud funny but there certainly weren't intensely dramatic. They were, well, weird.
Each episode chronicled painfully ordinary Americans (almost all white, let's face it, it was the '80) as they dealt with the trials and tribulations of life. A young lady goes home with her boyfriend to meet his family and it ends up with the father getting his hand caught in a food disposal in the sink. A woman gets divorced and experiences a miserable moving day. A guy who's been writing his thesis for 10 years has to get a job. I remember one odd episode where woman breaks into the house of a man to sleep with him because she's setting him up for a mob hit -- only to discover later that he's the wrong target.
And on and on. In many ways it was Seinfeld right before Seinfeld -- normal people who get into odd situations that escalate beyond anyone's control.
There were only about 12 episodes of Trying Times broadcast in 1987 and 1989. It's mostly (okay, completely) forgotten today but it was, in retrospect, way ahead of its time -- a single camera comedy/drama anthology series about wacky people. But what is memorable are the actors and talents who appeared on this show: Rosanna Arquette, Gina Davis, Candice Bergen, Carrie Fisher, Stockard Channing, Griffin Dunne, Robert Klein, Jean Stapleton, Steven Wright -- even Corey Feldman! Many were at the heights of their careers at the time these episodes were made. Some of the directors, also flying high at the time, were Buck Henry, Michael Lindsay-Hogg (currently getting some attention in the epic Beatles documentary), Christopher Guest, and even Jonathan Demme. There was a murderers row of talent in this series -- and one of the producers was, of all people, David Byrne.
You can find episodes of Trying Times on YouTube and watch the Golden Age of Television in its nascent form since you can't time-travel 30+ years and watch it on WNYC TV.
Woody Allen's 1979 classic Manhattan is 30 years old this year and it certainly hasten lost any of its luster over time. It's as funny and poignant as ever. Before Seinfeld, before When Harry met Sally, before Friends, before Sex and the City, before all those TV shows and movies about yuppie life in NYC, Manhattan defined and influenced the sophisticated urban comedy.
If you've never seen it, Manhattan revolves around TV writer Ike Davis (Woody) who quits his job to write a book. Meanwhile he's dating a 17 year old high school student (Mariel Hemingway, foreshadowing Soon-Yi) and getting involved with Mary (Diane Keaton) the mistress of his married best friend Yale (Michael Murphy). To make matters worse, his now lesbian ex-wife (Meryl Streep) is writing a tell-all book about their failed marriage. People lie, cheat, and steal each others hearts. While a very funny movie, Manhattan is, above all, a morality tale about how the way you treat people will eventually come back to haunt you (so people should treat each other well).
Manhattan was Woody's first comedy after the Oscar-winning Annie Hall, and a lot of people consider it to be the superior film. In many ways, this was a daring film for its day. In 1979, New York City was in terrible economic shape and crime was exploding (as referenced in this opening from the movie). To make a movie celebrating NYC at the time wasn't a particularly cool thing to do. unlike n ow. Also, gay characters didn't appear in a whole lot of movies then, particularly gay people who were unapologetically "out" and happy about it. Not to the mention that Manhattan was shot in black and white which wasn't exactly something that set the box office on fire, then or now. Still, it's one of the most beautiful movies Woody has ever made and was actually one of his biggest hits ever.
Woody Allen co-wrote Manhattan with Marshall Brickman (both had won Oscars for co-writing Annie Hall). Marshall Brickman would go on to write other movies and he's one of the writers of the big Broadway musical hit Jersey Boys. It was the last movie they would write together until 1993 when they co-wrote Manhattan Murder Mystery. Coincidentally enough, Manhattan is also the last movie that Woody and Diane Keaton made until Manhattan Murder Mystery. (After Manhattan, Diane Keaton moved to California and her next big movie was Reds in 1981). Sadly, this great triumvirate hasn't made a movie since 1993 and probably never will again but that's okay ... we'll always have Manhattan.
When you have a city of more than 8.5 million people, you're going to have a lot of different voices speaking in a lot of different languages. (In fact there are 637 languages spoken in NYC, as blogged about here). Anywho, for all the different tongues and babble that occurs simultaneously every day in this town, very few voices get the honor of being amplified above the din, of being given the chance to rise and communicate with the rest of the city.
Those voices are the few, the happy few.
Some of these chosen voices are obvious: politicians get a big public voice, as do radio and TV broadcasters, as well as rich and famous and notable people around town. They get the honor and the rare chance to talk directly to us, to share their ideas and opinions to the rest of us, to influence how this town thinks and feels about things, to permeate the consciousness of the city.
A few offbeat exampples:
It was just announced by the MTA that a variety of NYC celebrities like Jerry Seinfeld, Whoopi Goldberg, Awkwafina, even Judakiss (!) and several others will start making the routine announcements you hear on the subways and buses every day -- but with a funky, distinct, NYC personality-driven twist. This is a big, new, fun project to lighten up and uplift the citizens of NYC as they commute from place to place. These are a bunch of creative NYC voices that will be telling us to do routine things like watch our step, stand clear of the closing doors, socially distance, etc.
Then there are the politicians: did you know that NYC has a cable channel and livestream devoted to the City Council? You can watch Councilmembers speak on the floor of the Council at City Hall or watch their hearings all day, every day. These are the voices that make the laws that we all live under, the voices that decide how much and on what the city's monies get spent. These are the real voices that command us -- and, if you so choose, you can listen in.
But not all the voices that command us do so to tell us what to do or what they are going to do to us. Sometimes the voices that command us do so by moving our spirit, inspiring our souls. For example, Allison Steele, the late great briliant radio DJ that I've blogged about several times. You can just go and listen to some of her old clips, from back in the days when she ruled the overnight NYC airwaves, and her gorgeous voices married to her kind words and gentle messages, forced people, in a good way, to feel better about themselves and their fellow human beings. Now that is a part of the NYC cacophony that we should cherish, always and forever.
These are but a very select few examples of the NYC cacophony, the voices that command us but that can also inform, help, educate, and sometimes even soothe us.
Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, "Perchance to dream." In NYC there is no greater honor than "Perchance to speak, perchance to be heard."
P.S. I'm not really using the word "cacophony" correctly here (it means a mixture of harsh, discordant sounds) but it's one of those fancy sounding SAT words that I learned in days of yore so I'm shamelessly using it here.
Being a New York City resident, being a denizen of this town, is such an identity unto itself that the debate over what makes someone a "real New Yorker" has and will continue to rage ad infinitum.
For me, however, you never feel more like a New Yorker then when you leave it. And you REALLY don't feel more like a New Yorker until you start living somewhere else.
I lived elsewhere for four years in college and I never identified more as a New Yorker than in those years where I was in exile from the city. And apparently this is a common phenomenon: many born-and-bred citizens of NYC who have moved elsewhere, who are "in exile" for reasons good and bad, have made it clear that they feel the same way.
Some famous exiles are people like Larry David, the brilliant comic-mind and co-creator of Seinfeld. If you watch him on Curb Your Enthusiam, you see the rich Brooklyn-native bumbling his way around Los Angeles, a New Yorker to his core. This reminds me, in a very different way, of what I wrote about the movie Heat, a great crime movie set in LA but starring two great New Yorkers (Pacino & De Niro) -- they never seemed more like New Yorkers to me than watching them in this movie where they are both in exile in a strange wild place, far from home.
It reminds me that no "real New Yorker" ever leaves NYC -- you take the city with you, its ghosts and memories exist within you, its roots to your identity gets stronger, and it makes you New Yorker wherever you go.
The TV comedy premise of two divorced women moving in together and re-starting their lives has found new life on Netflix: the streamer has two such shows, Grace & Frankie and Raven's Home. But the origin of this concept was Kate & Allie, a popular and very NYC-based show from the 1980s (on ... CBS!), that's largely forgotten today.
Kate and Allie are recently divorced middle-aged ladies with three children between them. They have moved into a Greenwich Village apartment, dealing with the challenges of single-parenting together, making up an impromtu family. While the show was "edgy" for '80s TV (Divorce! No men! Set in NYC!) it had your old-school basic sitcom format -- something would happen, hilarity and confusion would ensue, a resolution would be found, and important life lessons would be learned. It was unrelentingly wholesome, promoting "traditional family values."
And all on videotape!
Seinfeld this was not (in fact, it went off the air just a few weeks before that other classic NYC sitcom would premiere) but it was a smart, occasionally funny, and very white show, an artifact of its era. Kate was played by Susan Saint James (a popular actress from the 1970s show McMillan & Wife) and Allie was Jane Curtin (a few years after her run in the original cast of Saturday Night Live).Their kids were played by, among others, Alison Smith and Ari Meyers who went to mildly successful careers afterwards.
A couple of interesting things about this show.
First, since it was about two women living together, and on TV during the Reagan era, CBS apparently told the producers to make it very, very clear that Kate and Allie were not lesbians. In fact, they tried to get each episode to end with them withdrawing into seperate bedrooms. The non-romantic nature of their relationship was hammered home a lot.
Second, Kate & Allie was a rare thing for the 1980s -- a show set and made in NYC (the only other sitcom shot here then was The Cosby Show). One thing that distinguished it from most sitcoms of its time was that each episode had a "cold open" where Kate and Allie (or their kids) would be filmed on the streets of NYC, with no audience or laugh track obviously, making an observation about the city and its people. It firmly established the show as rooted here and gave it a real city-vibe. As a kid who lived in NYC then, it was nice to see a show that took pride in being set here, unlike most shows that were set in anonymous suburbs in middle America.
I don't know if Kate & Allie is streaming anywhere but you can find lots of episodes of it on YouTube. Enjoy!
Man-oh-man that Jerry Seinfeld has a way with words.
Today the comedy legend published an op-ed where he takes aim at anyone who thinks that NYC is "dead" due to the COVID-19 pandemic. As always, his genius is to communicate, in a few short words, in a pithy phrase, so much emotional truth that it bowls you over.
To sum up the idea of leaving New York for simpler environs: "Are ... You ... Kidding ... Me? ... I will never abandon New York City. Ever."
He rejects the idea of "remote everything" taking over the world: "There's no energy ... Crazy places like New York City," the energy that people congregating here, creates a lifeforce that cannot be replicated in any other way..."
And the real conclusion: "Because of all the real, tough New Yorkers who, unlike you [the people who abandoned it], loved it and understood it, stayed and rebuilt it."
As the world drifts through this weird, new normal of COVID-19, we know that life "after this" (whenever that is) will be different -- some way, some how, at least for a while.
So we embrace the familiar. We embrace the things and people that we recognize, that give us comfort, that possess some kind of predictability and order in a world thrown into unpredictable chaos.
Like the virus, it's chaos we cannot see -- at least not on the streets of NYC. It exists behind closed doors and in the minds and souls of our citizens. The world's greatest place has turned into a ghost town, an empty shell, its scared residents hunkered down. Yet the city persists, its iron will stronger than anything holding up any of the city's eddifices. That strength can be seen -- literally -- in the hospitals treating those inflicted by this horror, and this profile of the city's first responders is both a scary and enouraging testimate to that strength. And while doctors, nurses, paramedics, and all "essential workers" are keeping our city going, we can also appreciate the people who bring us another kind of comfort -- laughter. Who's more New York, and more of a comedian, than Jerry Seinfeld? This lengthy interview with him about how the original funny guys who's "about nothing" is dealing, like all of us, with something very real and very serious -- call it "Jerry in Real Life." Oh, and he has a new Netflix special coming up -- something that we could all use right about now. But not only do our essential workers and entertainers give us comfort. Sometimes, at least for me at least, it's comforting to remember what made this afflicted city so fascinating in the first place. That's why I LOVED reading this wild story about the gorgeous building on Madison and 72nd Street built over 100 years ago to resemble a French Chateau and that the eccentric heiress who built it never actually lived in! It's this kind of history, this kind of New York Story, that makes me think about the longevity of this town -- and how the story of NYC is by no means finished yet.
It falls somewhere within the x-y axis of insult vs. compliment to be called "ahead of your time". It means you and your work weren't that popular or appreciated in your time but was discovered and appreciated later on in -- or after -- your life, and that it influenced others who went on to become more successful than you.
For example, The Velvet Underground's music wasn't popular in its time but it was deeply appreciated by, and greatly influenced, later generations of big bands like U2 and REM.
David Brenner's career was definitely ahead of its time. A standup comic, he broke out in the 1970s doing something most comedians hadn't done before -- observational humor. Before that most standup comedy was either "da dum bum" one liners like Henny Youngman and Jack Benny or deeply existentialist stuff like Mort Sahl and Lenny Bruce.
Brenner's was totally different -- not shallow jibes, not deep insights, but simple questions. He looked at the world right in front of him and did routines like, "Hey! What's the deal with tic tacs? How can you walk around carrying them without annoying people?" Long before Jerry Seinfeld made hundreds of millions of people of laugh -- and hundreds of millions of dollars in his bank account -- with observational humor in the 1990s, David Brenner was bringing this new style of comedy to audiences in the 1970s with numerous Tonight Show appearances.
In 1986 (until 1987), Brenner had his own late night show called Nightlife. Before the Johnny Carson/Joan Rivers dust up, before Arsenio Hall shook up the old boys network of late night, before the generational defining wars of Leno vs. Letterman vs. Conan, before The Daily Show and other topical shows redefined the purpose of late night, Brenner quietly made a big contribution to changing the face of late night comedy.
And it reeked of NYC. Nightlife was different in every way from most late night shows at the time. It was filmed here, it was syndicated, it didn't have a studio audience or an opening monologue. It was just Brenner, his guests, and comedy. It was rebellious and hip. It had a great attitude. It was very ahead of its time.
Perfect example: Nightlife was one of the first shows to put Howard Stern on TV. Besides a few appearances on Letterman, the shock jock was barely known outside NYC at the time. Brenner totally understood Howard Stern's unique comedic genius and gave him a platform when few others dared. Brenner wasn't just ahead of his time in his own comedy or with his own late night show but he recognized revolutionary comedy in others -- and celebrated it.
David Brenner died in 2014, age 78. His days as a talk show regular and host, as a big-time comic, were long over. He never achieved the gigantic success of observational comedians like Seinfeld or Paul Reiser, and was largely unknown to younger comedy fans. But David Brenner was a true comedic pioneer as his short-lived talk show proved.
Two weeks in the year 1990, and two weeks after I turned thirteen, a previously unknown band from Brooklyn called They Might Be Giants released their album Flood -- and made history.
It was the first big alternative album to go mainstream, with an array of hits like "A Little Birdhouse in Your Soul", "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)", "Minimum Wage", "Your Racist Friend", and many others. Along with The Simpsons, which had premiered on television only a couple of weeks earliers -- and later on Seinfeld and Nirvana's Nevermind -- this album announced that the 1990s had arrived. It was going to be a more funky, more ironic, less conformist than the conservative 1980s that had just ended. Soon enough Bill Clinton would be president and Tarantino movies would be in theaters, and the new decade would have a feel and sound all its own.
Flood is a perfect album of great songs that still hold up thirty years later. As my young adulthood commenced those decades ago, this album came with me through it, a friend that never went away. And I still listen to it today -- like folk music, the music feels like it was never new and it never gets old.
The following are my incredibly deep & brilliant thoughts on this whole college admissions scandal which is ballooning from a news story into a dialogue on socioeconomic inequities:
Basically, trying to get a kid into college is like trying to get laid, you have one of two options: 1) do it honestly by being, as they said on Seinfeld, "sponge worthy" i.e. woo the person, work hard to prove your physical and emotional attractiveness by fitting your l'object d'amour's idea of a good partner and hope you efforts are rewarded; or 2) demonstrate your power, your status, your strength, your awesomeness by buying him or her expensive gifts, taking them to fancy restaurants, sending bouquets and candy to their homes or places of business, introducing them to your big shot friends and co-workers, you know, showing what a "Mr Big" (or, to be PC, "Mrs Big") you are, and, again, hoping your efforts are rewarded.
The analogy to college admissions: 1) your kid gets in on their merit i.e. test scores, grades, recommendations, extracurriculars, essays, the whole merit-worthy package but the competition is fierce and admission is not guaranteed; or 2) you donate massive sums of money to the school over the course of years, making the school's decision to admit your kid a smart, logical, and relatively easy business decision.
What you don't do, in either case, is engage in a quid-pro-quo, a blatant "this-for-that" transaction. You don't directly buy your admission into either a college or another person's body. Society has deemed that illegal -- "getting in" via merit is legal and "getting in" via status is too, but putting an exact amount on it, turning it into just another things to buy, is not.
Perhaps this shouldn't be illegal or perhaps we should try to have 100% merit based "admissions" and status-driven "admissions" should be outlawed too -- but human beings are flawed and therefore our systems are too.
Gentrification isn't just happening to the NYC streets, skyline, and pocket books -- now it's hit our TV.
Specifically HBO.
Like most legacy premium cable channels, HBO has featured uncut, uncensored, commercial-free movies, big-time sporting events (like boxing), as well as original programming (e.g. The Sopranos and Game of Thrones, as well as documentaries). They also featured "adult" fare, including shows like Cathouse, Real Sex, and others.
One HBO show, however, defied easy categorization.
It was called Taxicab Confessions. It started on HBO in the mid-1990s and ran, off and on, for another decade or so. Taxicab was a brilliant, innovative program, an early "reality show", where regular people were filmed in the backseats of cabs, talking with their fellow passengers and the "drivers" (who worked for the show). These cab ride vignettes were usually filmed in the middle of the night, and all sorts of wacky characters and behavior would be revealed. It was an amazing "keyhole" into a moment in time, into simple interactions and conversations among people, a literal rolling revelation of human behavior. At the end of each show you'd see the drivers reveal to the passengers that they'd be filmed for Taxicab Confessions, and they'd freak out and then happily sign a release form. The show invented the whole genre of people talking in cars (Jerry Seinfeld even ripped it off!).
The show originated in NYC, and most of the early shows were filmed here (before moving to Las Vegas for a while, and then returning to NYC). As you might imagine, the people featured in the cab rides were often dirty -- dirty mouthed, dirty minded, dirty moving. They were funny, weird, sometimes delightful, sometimes sad, sometimes confused and confusing, sometimes shockingly normal, but they were always interesting. Always.
Why? Because even though a new episode of Taxicab Confessions hasn't been produced in a while, up until recently, the past episodes were available to watch on HBO On Demand and HBO Go. You could go back in time to the 1990s and early 2000s, and see these parade of lovable freak shows in cabs. You could see NYC (and, yes, Vegas) in the middle of the night, for real. You could see a whole other strange, sometimes dangerous, sometimes sexy, sometimes just odd, world. But no longer. HBO has removed it from these streaming services, along with the rest of their "adult" programming.
Taxicab Confessions is not only over but now it's gone, totally gone, a blatant garbage-canning of part of the city's past, a kind of digital gentrification. It's another dirty part of NYC that's been sacrificed to "taste" and cleanliness.
And it's wrong! While it certainly had "adult" moments (people removing clothing or getting frisky in the back of the cab), Taxicab Confessions was not necessarily an "adult" show like its other shows -- 99.9% of the time it was people just talking. It was a great show, a wonderful time capsule of humanity and NYC, and now it's vanished into the electronic ether.
Farewell Taxicab Confessions. This one New Yorker will remember you fondly.
Twenty years ago this week marked a key moment in the history of television.
And it happened on HBO.
On May 31, 1998, the comedy The Larry Sanders Show aired its final episode. The creation of brilliant comedian Garry Shandling about a narcissistic talk show host, Larry Sanders was one of the great, defining shows if the 1990s. More than that, it looked more like what is on TV now than then: it broke down the barrier between reality and fiction, it was single camera, its humor had more "cringe" and less punchlines, it was funny but also dark, it was deeply human. Today, most comedies on TV are like this but, in a time when wild, hyper sitcoms like Seinfeld and Home Improvement were ruling the air, Larry Sanders was quietly revolutionary -- and influential.
Then, on June 6, 1998, along came Sex and the City.
The show about four female NYC friends -- a sort of East Coast, female-centric Larry Sanders -- easily became one of the most popular shows about NYC but, more importantly, one of the first great "Golden Age of Television" cable shows. Six months later The Sopranos hit the air and the "Golden Age" had officially begun.
As this article indicates, without SATC, the culture as we know it today would be quite different. Think about everything that SATC influenced. There would have been no Girls, no Broad City, and a whole universe of shows and culture dedicated to the professional and romantic lives of women. It was a cultural trailblazer. Also, without SATC, there's be no Cynthia Nixon for Governor, no cupcake culture -- and, arguably, less gentrification in NYC.
TV as we know it was largely shaped in that week back in the spring of 1998 -- and, today, we live in its wake -- as does NYC.
It's crazy to realize that it's been twenty years since one of the greatest shows of all-time, and certainly one of the quintessential NYC shows, went off the air.
Seinfeld defined the '90s and popularized the NYC neuroses for middle America like no show before or since. In many ways, you can look at this show as part of the transformation of NYC from Fear City to Luxury Product.
Read more about how Seinfeld came to be and also check out Mr NYC's various Seinfeld-related coverage over the years, including my exclusive interview with Kenny Kramer!
Even though it's two decades in the past, Seinfeld is a show that'll never be forgotten and that people'll always yada-yada about.
Growing up, I'll admit, I probably watched too much TV -- but that's because TV had some good stuff on it. And, in retrospect, it was changing.
As a kid, I enjoyed watching all those 80s and 90's shows that appealed to adolescent minds -- The Cosby Show, Family Ties, Growing Pains, Cheers, Seinfeld, etc -- but there were also other shows, usually dramas, that were darker and morally complex, which featured flawed characters who sometimes made bad decisions, very often because they were living under immense personal and professional pressure.
Very often those shows had been created or co-created by a man named Steven Bochco. He died yesterday at the age of 74.
His big hits in the closing decades of the 20th century were Hill Street Blues, LA Law, Doogie Howser MD, and NYPD Blue. These were brilliantly written, very moving, and often very funny shows that showed the complexity of people living their lives in intense professional environments. In many ways, those shows gave me insights into what it would be like to be a grown up, what the worlds of love and friendship and work might be like, how things could erupt at any moment that might upend people's lives -- and how we weren't always guaranteed happy endings. The plots of episodes would build on each other in the manner of soap operas (but without the cheesiness) and sometimes characters, characters who we had come to love and adore, would -- GASP! -- die. Like, you know, in real life.
Today we live in "The Golden Age of Television" (TV is the only things in our society that seems to be getting better instead of worse) but it wouldn't have been possible if Bochco hadn't paved the way more than thirty years earlier. To this, we owe him a huge debt.
And Steven Bochco was a NYC boy, a graduate of the High School of Performing Arts. RIP.
P.S. I remember an episode of LA Law that I saw when I was a kid, where the sleazy lawyer Arnie is trying to convince his hapless secretary Roxanne to help him defect to another law firm. She's torn, excited by the opportunity but saying that she doesn't want to leave the old firm because it's her "home" and the people who work there are her "family." Arnie then reminds Roxanne of a couple of times (from previous seasons) when she almost got fired and was also denied a raise. He tells her that, despite her feelings, this firm isn't really her home and the people there aren't really her family.
That, right there, was what made that show and others by Bochco so great: a mostly unsympathetic character like Arnie offering an underling some very good, brutally honest advice, based on events that had happened earlier in the season. It also taught me, a kid who had never had a job at that point, what the working world was really like. I never forgot that lesson and have remembered well into my long working life.
Thanks again, Mr Bochco. Hill Street Blues, LA Law, Doogie Howser MD, and NYPD Blue also had the best opening credits and themes of any TV shows at the time. I can't find one of them but here are the other two:
Twenty-five years ago the TV show Seinfeld was riding high, conquering the ratings and, more importantly, the culture.
People from all over America were falling in love with the distinctly New York neurosis of this show, quoting it endlessly, and finding in it a mirror to their own non-New York lives.
Perhaps the most famous episode is "The Contest" where the four frenemies bet on who can or who cannot remain "Master of their Domain." What made this episode and, indeed, the whole series, so beloved was the in-joke quality of it, the you-have-to-read-between-the-lines-to-get-it attitude. This was a show that respected its audience intelligence, viewed its fans as smart and sophisticated -- and, in the long-run, changed TV for the better.
Want to know the inside story behind the most famous episode of the one of TV's greatest shows? Read this.
This blog harps (perhaps too much) about the changing nature of NYC
-- the gentrification and evolution of funky town into sterile city --
so I need not belabor that point ad infinitum. Yet as NYC has changed and evolved over the decades, popular TV shows have reflected this upheaval in numerous ways: think of the working class worlds of All in the Family and Night Court in the 1970s and 80s, to the more middle-class worlds of Seinfeld and Friends in the 1990s, to the luxe
worlds of 30 Rock and Gossip Girl in the 2000s. Yes, TV has reflected
the changing image of NYC back to ourselves for years and years, and we
can't get enough of it.
And here is where I dare
to be the contrarian to my usual feelings what's happening to NYC: TV
shows about NYC have never been better. Certainly, they've never been
this numerous (thanks generous tax credits!). Dare I sound a little too
sanguine, just check out this list from Esquire magazine about the 20
best NYC shows from the aughts.
It's a pretty
amazing bevy of quality (not that I've seen them all): think Mad Men,
think Louie, think Girls, think the aforementioned 30 Rock, even think
How I Met Your Mother (or, as New Yorkers might have said in the past,
"Your Muddah'). Pretty great shows. And shows that bring to life the
struggle and the promise of living and working in NYC, the glamour and the
indignities, the valleys and the peaks. This list has some of my
personal favorites, like Bored to Death and Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. They keep a little funk alive.
If you haven't caught up this any of these shows, and you love NYC, you must watch them. They prove that while NYC might not quite be the town it used to be, the creativity and vitality of NYC is still very much alive.
It's a testament to the eternal greatness of Seinfeld -- the ultimate New York show "about nothing" -- that now, almost two decades since it went off the air, people still watch, talk, and write about it.
Recently the Internet streaming service Hulu licensed all of the episodes, netting the creators and owners of the show a cool $150 million.
And now this nostalgic article in The New York Times about the New York food culture on the show -- the coffee shops, hot dog stands, restaurants, and soup Nazis that Jerry, Kramer, George and Elaine all frequented during their madcap, 90's adventures. Several of the places featured on the show have closed but many are still around and can be visited by any fan.
Great food, great comedy -- just part of what always make NYC great.
Twenty-five years ago this month a little TV show premiered on NBC. Not considered good enough or appealing enough for mainstream audiences, this pilot episode was burned off during the summer, outside of the regular TV season. It was a show about a New York City comedian and his oddball friends as they did exciting things like talk about the placement of buttons on shirts and wait for a table at a Chinese restaurant. Many TV critics, as well as the executives at NBC, didn't know what to make of this odd pilot and figured that this show would be a "one and done" -- broadcast once and then never seen again.
Instead it went on to change television history.
"Seinfeld" was a show of its time and ahead of its time. Although the first episode was shown in 1989, it became the defining show of the 1990s. What made it stand out? What made it so great? What made it so ... revolutionary?
Many reasons but, most of all, "Seinfeld" was defined but what it wasn't. It wasn't sentimental. It wasn't warm and funny. It wasn't about anything important. It was about four very unlikable New Yorkers as they wandered about the city and vented about the trivialities and petty annoyances of life. "No hugging, no learning" was the mantra of co-creator Larry David. But most of all, it was a show that appealed to the intelligence of its viewers, that invited the audience to be in on the in-jokes, that said "you're smart, you'll get this humor" -- and tens of millions of people did. It was a low-concept show with a very high IQ.
It was a real New York show. It was the first time that a show with a deep-seeded NYC sensibility permeated middle America. You might say today that it was a very Blue America show that Red America embraced.
You also have to remember what was on TV in 1989. Shows like "Cosby" and "Cheers" were popular at the time -- family friendly, touchingly sentimental shows with an "aw-shucks" humor that were set either in family homes or work places. "Seinfeld" was the opposite of these shows -- it was about four single New Yorkers who were supposedly friends but didn't seem to like each other very much.
"Seinfeld" went off the air in 1998 but today, 17 years later, it's still very popular. You can still catch repeats of it on TV. Also, there is a Twitter feed called "SeinfeldToday" that incorporates that various aspects of social media and smart phone culture that didn't exist back during the show's hey-day. The legacy and impact of this late 20th century show still reverberates here in the 21st. In many ways, in this age where the trivial predominates while the world burns, "Seinfeld" is more relevant today than ever before.
