Lucking Out - James Wolcott [39]
The taping began. The first guest was Ed Asner. It took him only a few minutes to sink the pilot and send Davidson’s hopes of an American career nosing to the ocean bottom. I thought—assumed—that Asner the talk-show guest would be like his Mary Tyler Moore Show alter ego, Lou Grant, a gruff ball of ornery no-nonsense. If only. He began by asking if the microphone attached to his shirt (or was it a sweater?) was picking up his stomach gurgles. No, he was assured, first by our host, then by the stage director. But Asner was not assured, returning to the issue of his growling stomach and the distraction it might cause. “Maybe they can edit this out of the tape later,” I whispered to Pauline, who said, “We may want to edit ourselves out of the tape later.” “Why don’t they just start the taping over? It’s not like this is going on the air tonight.” I was hushed by a sidelong look from someone connected with the production. Giving his stomach a rest as a topic, Asner then began talking honestly and sincerely, earnestly and devoutly, about how therapy had helped him as an actor, gotten him over some hurdles. The last of our curmudgeonly hopes were dashed. It was like listening to a testimonial at a 12-step meeting, euthanizing the show before it had had a chance to perk up its ears. “Actors …,” Pauline quietly groaned, as if despairing of their entire race. The interview finally tapered to an end, and Pauline and I were ushered onto the set for our segment, the bright studio lights beating down and blocking out everything beyond the island rim of the stage, our butts making those crucial last-minute adjustments to achieve comfort as we were wired with mikes.
The subject of our segment, the reason we were there, was a new sitcom called United States, an unpeeling portrait of a marriage in close captivity starring Beau Bridges and Helen Shaver. Influenced by the unsparing domestic glumness and eruptive psychodrama of Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage, whose original five-hour version for Swedish television had been compressed into a powerful depressant that was released into U.S. art-houses in 1974 and hailed as a landmark study of intimate warfare, United States was the first series created and written by Larry Gelbart after the success of M*A*S*H. It was greeted as an artistic growth spurt, solemnized by many reviewers much as Woody Allen’s forays into mirthless seriousness were lauded for their “growth” and “maturity.” In those days before the arrival of the prestige cable series (no Sopranos, no Wire, no Mad Men), United States was one of the rare shows that smart people felt a semi-obligation to have an opinion about, to adopt as their own. Also, male critics by the carload had major crushes on Helen Shaver, whose gravelly voice was a seductive warm-up act for Demi Moore’s.
Pauline and I hadn’t rehearsed or vamped anything ahead of time, not wanting our comments to sound canned. So when the first question came about United States, directed at Pauline, I was interested in what particular points she would make, the tack she would take. Then, you know, we’d chat, compare notes. Instead, it was as if everything fell away as Pauline’s voice, almost independent of her person, began to screwdrive into the show’s aspirations and pretensions, articulating everything that was wrong with its format and execution with a lucid, methodical, almost lilting precision that was like a mini-tutorial in criticism. So rapt was I by Pauline’s analysis that I forgot I was supposed to chip in too as I sat there fascinated at this fencing display of formal rigor, not wanting to break the flow. It wasn’t just the brilliance with which she took the series apart cubistically; it was this palpable sense of criticism as a higher power, something that made you lean into the pitch, not just a series of opinions