"Houses with kids are always sticky."

(Since there are only so many hours in a day and I have only so much patience, there’s no way I could sit through full series of shows that I might not like. So I’ll be tackling television series in a few different ways. Sometimes I’ll just watch a pilot or specific episode of a show that’s noteworthy for one reason or another. In all cases, I won’t in any way try to be fair to the show and will make hyperbolic generalizations about it. Sorry if you love a certain show that I give this treatment to, if Emmy voters can do it so can I.)

Pilots really are tricky business. On the one hand, your pilot has to set up characters, situations and themes that your series will explore throughout its run. That means a lot of exposition which, as a rule, doesn’t make for the best television. If you don’t set up enough of the story, people will walk away from your pilot wondering what the hell they’ve just seen. On the other hand, pilots have to be engaging enough to entice viewers to watch episodes two through one hundred (the magic syndication number). Pilots really are a tricky thing.

The problem is you can have a great pilot for a series that turns out to be crap in the long run (e.g. “Heroes”) or a crap pilot that turns out to be a great series in the long run (e.g. “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”). It’s a balancing act and a crap shoot all at once and it’s with that in mind that I sat down to watch the pilot of late 80’s early nineties Emmy-darling “thirtysomething”. I was 7 when “thirtysomething” premiered, which is probably why I missed it the first time around. Turns out, it’s full of award-winning performances, writing and directing so I felt sorta bad that I’d ignored it for so long…a feeling that I can’t say I still have.

A Brief Synopsis of the pilot of “thirtysomething”: It’s important that I say that I didn’t hate it. Far from it. For 1987, it’s pretty edgy stuff. I mean in the pilot episode they explore the changing relationship of a couple after their first child, the dark corners of the male mind that lead to infidelity (however unsatisfying) and side-boob. That’s a lot to deal with in the first 49 minutes of a show’s life. The pilot introduces us to all of the central characters…and since it was just the pilot it would be cheating to pretend that I now know all their names. With the help of Wikipedia, I can tell you that we meet:

• Michael and Hope: a couple struggling to maintain the “themness” of their relationship now that their first child has arrived. Hope is a former career go-getter who’s wrestling with her choice to stay home (for now) with Baby Janey. Michael is running his own advertising agency with his friend Elliot.
• Elliot and Nancy: slightlty further into the abyss of their thirties, Elliot and Nancy are a married couple with two kids. While Elliot is working at the ad agency with Michael, Nancy apparently does nothing other than scold their son for tormenting his sister. While walking down the street, Elliot confesses an affair (because that’s where dudes talk about stuff like that) to Michael who’s recently begun to notice other women now that Hope has gone all stay-at-home-momish.
• Melissa: Apparently she’s Michael’s cousin (although that’s never actually communicated during the pilot) she’s the typical Cathy-reading 30 year old woman who’s trying to define herself via a relationship with a man. Seriously, she could have just walked into the room and said “Argh!” and it would have been equally effective. We also learn that she used to date Gary who really just wants to go backpacking.
• Gary: He’s got long hair! He’s got glasses on a string a lanyard! He likes backpacking! Gary’s the walking talking embodiment of the 80’s version of a guy struggling to balance his 60’s roots with his 80’s lust for a Volvo. Gary who alternates between getting touchy feely with Hope on the couch and chiding Michael for not wanting to go backpacking, is apparently an English professor at Haverford College (take that Harvard residuals committee). In the pilot he’s smarmy in a way that’s literally one step above Andrew McCarthy. If Zack Morris had aged to 32 and taken a time machine back to 1987, he would be Gary.
• Ellyn: While Hope’s been busy making a baby and leaving her job, Ellyn’s been at home with a pint of Ben & Jerry’s and a worn out VHS copy of “Working Girl”. While having lunch with Hope and the baby, Ellyn does everything but punch the kid in the face in an effort to quiet her. Ellyn’s gone all Jan Brady since the baby took Hope’s focus away from her and it shows when she tries to convince Hope that the best way to get over being so tired with the new baby is to go back to work. Nice try, second-wave feminist Ellyn, Hope’s too smart for that little ploy. I’m guessing that later in the series Ellyn begins acting out to get Hope’s attention by dating guys in leather jackets with motorcycles.

Why is it a PCBS? “thirtysomething” won a slew of Emmy awards during its four years on the air. It’s a touchstone for that generation of Boomers who had to deal with the fact that they were selling out as they got paid buckets and buckets of money to sell out. And while I was originally going to say that it launched the career of Timothy Busfield while simultaneously burying the careers of 6 other actors, I was proven wrong. Basically half the cast went on to be a part of either “Alias” or “Brothers & Sisters” or both. The style of “thirtysomething” also influenced shows for years to come. Watching the pilot I couldn’t help but think of shows like “Sisters” (Swoozy Kurtz, FTW), “Once & Again” and all the other “adults dealing with real problems” shows that came in the 90’s and early 00’s. “thirtysomething” also pushed boundaries of what was acceptable to talk about and show on prime time network television. So if you can’t sleep at night because the image of Dennis Franz’s ass is burned into your memory, thank “thirtysomething”.
How does it look in the rear view mirror? These 7 people make up the world that we’re introduced to in the “thirtysomething” pilot and while I can relate to the ideas behind the struggles of the transition from 20’s to 30’s (although I’m still in my 20’s, for now), I felt that it was all come through in a very Lifetime movie of the week kind of way. The struggles of men and women to deal with life, children and each others is something that TV’s tread and retread over the years and while I can appreciate the fact that “thirtysomething” gets to yell “FIRST!” on a lot of these issues, the fact that they bit off so much in the pilot was a bit off-putting. Showing me that Elliot and Nancy and broken in episode one isn’t as strong a choice as making me fall in love with Elliot and Nancy and then stabbing me in the heart with the revelation of his infidelity. I feel like I’ll start to see a pattern as I get through more and more 80’s dramatic television of shows that go for the cheap shock over the longform character development. Of course, developing a character in one direction and then breaking that convention with a shocking event totally goes against my description of a successful pilot at the top of this post but whatever, it’s my stream of consciousness, suck it. “thirtysomething” feels like it’s trying too hard to say something about the people, places and things that it portrays. While 80’s audiences might have gasped and tuned in for more at the first signs of taboo subjects (like adultery and side-boob), I tend to prefer my dramas a bit more subtle than that. Think about the pilot for “Mad Men”. It spend the first 55 minutes convincing you that Don Draper is a hard working ad man with a penchant for the ladies and booze…only to turn around in the last 5 minutes and turn that notion completely on it’s head. (and I’ve already contradicted myself, awesome) But you know what I mean. It’s the choice between Crock Pot and Flash Fry drama. With Crock Pot, you get the slow simmer of characters who have time to develop flavor and idiosyncracies. They’re always more complex than you first think and constantly suprise you with their subtle flavors. Flash Fry, on the other hand, takes characters and immediately introduces them to heat at level 11. Yes, the sizzle and pop is there in the beginning, but over time the characters get burned to an unrecognizable crisp. (+1 for the meat analogy).

Final Thoughts: At the end of the day, the pilot for “thirtysomething” is exactly what it promised to be: the story of people struggling to find an identity in that gray area past your twenties and before your fourties. I think today’s thirtysomething’s would make for a somewhat more interesting show (what with 30 being the new 18 and all). will I watch another episode of “thirtysomething”? Maybe. After I post this, I’ll bring up the series with friends and see what people remember about it. Does it stand the test of time in their minds or was it just the “Gray’s Anatomy” of 1987-1991? Part of me thinks that people will remember it fondly. Like the Happy Hour at your favorite bar way back when. You always knew who would be there, what they were serving and how the evening would end. That’s just not quite the way I want to spend the last few months of my twentysomethings.