I recently binge-watched the entirety of Thirtysomething on Hulu, shortly after being disappointed by Casual and the second season of Transparent -- both of which I think I can fairly call its descendants.
I'd seen some of Thirtysomething when it first aired in the late 80s and early 90s, and again when it reaired on basic cable in the mid-90s, but that means it'd been a minimum of 20 years since I'd seen any of it, and that particular 20 years is a lot of television history. A lot of television history that the show had a pretty deep impact on, as it turns out. Hill Street Blues, St Elsewhere (especially after its first couple seasons), and Thirtysomething -- those were the shows that over the course of the 1980s first started leaning heavily on viewer attention span. While Wiseguy was strongly serialized, it basically functioned like a series of miniseries with an occasional standalone episode as a palate cleanser. These other three shows were different -- any given episode might have a couple self-contained plots as well as serving ongoing plots that might be leftover from the previous episode, might take three or four episodes to resolve, might play out over the course of the whole season.
Hill Street Blues was a cop show. There had been plenty of cop shows before, which doesn't diminish Hill Street's importance any: it's a mammoth show, and without it or something else doing its work, there'd be no NYPD Blue, no Wire, no Shield. It created the modern police drama.
St Elsewhere was a hospital show. There had been plenty of hospital shows before.
But Thirtysomething ... Thirtysomething wasn't a workplace show, it wasn't a comedy, it wasn't a soap opera. The closest predecessor I'm familiar with is Family, the 1970s drama both Aaron Spelling and Mike Nichols worked on, but Family had more in common with its immediate successors like Eight is Enough -- and later watered-down (though I suppose, objectively more successful) versions like 7th Heaven -- in that the focus was, like with many sitcoms, primarily on a single family household, with the innovation being to tell their story as an hour-long show rather than a 25-minute sitcom.
The difference between Thirtysomething and Family is all in the name. Family is about a family. Thirtysomething is about, well, thirtysomethings (a term the series popularized) -- two couples, each of whom have young kids who are never old enough to be characters in their own right, and three friends who are single when the series begins.
Thirtysomething's strength is exactly what its detractors didn't like about it: it's a show about young grown-ups whose challenges are not particularly unusual. That is, it's not one of the workplace genres -- it's not a cop, lawyer, doctor, or detective show -- and it's not a soap opera. Over the course of the whole four seasons, there are some deaths and break-ups and betrayals, but fewer than in any handful of episodes of Dynasty. Even a recent show like Parenthood stretched credulity, both with things like Kristina's ill-advised and unlikely run for office and in terms of "how many dramatic events can occur in the same family over the course of a few years?", compared to Thirtysomething's commitment to realism.
And there's the rub: if you don't have murders to solve or lives to save, if you don't at least have the heavy workplace drama of Mad Men week in and week out, what do you do to fill your time, without making your show either soap opera -- evil twins, everyone cheating on everyone with everyone else, unlikely plot developments at every turn -- or melodrama (by which I mean, in this case, over the top emotional hand-wringing over everything in order to make the small seem large)?
Well, the show was accused of being melodramatic more than once, but that just meant people weren't paying attention. That time was filled the same way it's filled in real life: sometimes characters complain about things that are small. They aren't small to them. They aren't small to us when they happen to us. But they're small by television standards. Michael has forgotten to put his laundry in the hamper for days on end and Hope is tired of reminding him. They have a young child and he has a busy job and they're both distracted, but Hope is tired of being the one to pick up the slack just by virtue of being the one who stays at home. It's an argument about a small thing, eventually an argument about many small things, one they acknowledge is about small things, but it's also an argument about lifestyle choices -- Michael's decision to open a small firm with his friend Elliott, which means working longer and less predictable hours instead of having a dependable 9-5 schedule the way he could if he had remained a cog in the machine at a larger company; Hope and Michael's decision to have a baby at this particular time in their lives; the minor inconveniences of the fixer-upper of a house they bought, and the fact that Michael's income is right at that level where they can afford to fix those inconveniences, but not all at once, and not without being more careful with their spending than they thought they'd have to be at this point in their lives and careers.
The show has time to unspool all of this because this isn't a subplot about two people in a lawyer show or a Cylon show. It's not just there to add some color so you can keep track of which CSI is which. It's what the show is actually about. It's a show about regular people.
It's definitely a show about regular people who are predominantly white and upper middle class, although I'm not sure it's any worse in those respects than most of television in the late 80s -- or now, for that matter.
You can't talk about Thirtysomething separately from its era, of course. One reason it was interesting rewatching it is because I was younger than the characters when it first aired, and older now -- though they were younger than my parents. That's another important signal in the title. Thirtysomethings in the late 80s were the tail end of the Baby Boom, whereas my parents were born at the very beginning of the Boom. My father's childhood was represented on Leave it to Beaver, not the Wonder Years, and while my parents missed out on the hippies and the Summer of Love because they were married, employed, college graduates starting a family by then, the Thirtysomething characters missed out because they were still kids. They started college in the 70s, not the 60s, and although they were still peace activists, I suspect it's important to these characters' struggles with individual and group identity that their activism took place later -- that the 80s was very invested in celebrating the activism of the 60s, of Steven and Elyse Keaton, while forgetting about the decade in between.
I think I want to talk about everything else character by character, or anyway group by group, rather than season by season.
Michael and Hope Steadman.
It blew my mind finding out that Ken Olin (Michael) is married to Patricia Wettig, who plays not Hope (Mel Harris) but Nancy, his business partner's wife. And they've been married since years before the show!
Anyway, Michael and Hope are the central couple of the show, with a baby daughter. He's in advertising -- running his own agency with Elliot at the start of the show -- she's a stay at home mom with mixed feelings about putting her writing career on hold. They have their arguments, but they're also the most stable part of the show, the show's center.
Consistently one of the most intriguing parts of the show for me is the fact that, although the show is, yes, overwhelmingly white, it's also one of the few TV shows to prominently feature an interfaith couple where the difference in religion is not just a part of the backstory that has been resolved at some unstated point in the past, but continues to be a source of friction and confusion. Michael is Jewish, Hope is Presbyterian, and there's so much more to it than that: Hope has deep sentimental attachment to her Christmas rituals, while Michael has always been ambivalent about his Jewishness, at least the spiritual and religious aspects of it, so historically, in the years of their relationship before the series begins, he has given in to her on everything. They celebrate Christmas together, they eat ham and other pork, and Hope has basically just gotten used to the idea that Michael's Jewishness is only a label on a family tree, something that has no impact on her or her children. She's never had to be the one to make adjustments, though she probably doesn't see it that way, and so every time she's asked to make adjustments now, it feels unfair to her -- where was this five years ago, ten years ago? Why now, all of a sudden?
But now that Michael has a child and is planning more, he's thinking more about his faith and his identity. It starts with his reservations over Christmas -- now that he has a house and a family, when Hope puts up Christmas decorations, it's his family celebrating Christmas, not him celebrating Christmas with Hope's family the way he had thought of it in the past. He's not a visitor to the holiday anymore. This is a very different thing. Hope isn't especially understanding about this -- though to be fair, thoughout the series Michael has a lot of difficulty articulating his feelings about why these things bother him.
It becomes a much bigger deal later, when they have a son and the issue of circumcision comes up -- not exactly unusual for Presbyterians in America, but Hope's not crazy about the idea, especially the idea of a bris, and pushes Michael to explain to her why it's so important. What the show doesn't explicitly address, but implicitly makes clear, is that Hope has adopted the attitude of many Americans: that mainline Protestant denominations like Presbyterianism are "normal," default, unmarked American religion, and it's deviation from that path -- like Michael's Jewishness -- that has to be justified. Celebrating Christmas is "normal" -- it's being uncomfortable with Christmas that requires an explanation.
I'm making her sound bitchier than she is, in part because I'm talking about multiple stories over the course of four years as though it's all one conversation. A lot of it has to do with her response to the fact that Michael is so silent or inarticulate on these things -- but (in this viewer's opinion) she should see that he's struggling and should try harder to help him with that instead of taking advantage of it to preserve her own family's way of doing things.
It's a shame that Mel Harris hasn't had a high-profile career since Something So Right, the post-Thirtysomething blended family sitcom she did with Jere Burns. Mind you, this is something I can say about everybody on the show. It's a phenomenal cast, especially for the 80s -- the kind of cast you'd expect on a cable show today.
Elliot and Nancy Weston
Elliot (Timothy Busfield) is Michael's business partner. Nancy's an artist and stay at home mom to their two kids, both of whom are older than Michael and Hope's daughter -- I think Elliot and Nancy may be a couple years older than Michael and Hope, which would fit one of the ongoing subplots in the show of Michael having always been slightly more successful, or successful earlier, than Elliot. While the first episode establishes the Steadmans as our stable center, it also immediately establishes the Westons as falling apart -- Elliot confides in Michael that he's had an affair in the past, and it seems to come up because he wants to have more (that is, he's not in love with any specific woman apart from his wife, he just wants to fool around in general), and the most difficult part of watching the first season is the slow pace at which the Weston marriage falls apart. This is old school network drama, remember: twenty-something episodes, not cable's 10 to 13. And pre-DVRs, pre-DVD, etc., major plot points like Elliot and Nancy considering a separation, going to counseling, and so on had to be hit again and again -- because it isn't a subplot the way it would be on a cop show, it can't just be mentioned in dialogue, so their unhappiness has to be demonstrated for us over and over.
Again, that's often how it happens in real life, and it's not as repetitive as it sounds, actually. There's a Rashomon-ish episode in which an uncomfortable dinner with the Steadmans and the Westons is replayed from multiple perspectives, leaving us unsure who said what in which tone of voice, which is exactly the kind of approach to television that seems so anachronistic in something from 30 years ago, because it requires you to sit your butt and actually watch it.
But one reason I opened this blog post with talking about Thirtysomething heirs like Casual and Transparent -- and I'd add Togetherness, I think, among current shows -- is that they all share that common goal of realism, and of depicting "real people" rather than people (however ordinary) in unusually interesting lines of work (at least as depicted on television) like murder-solving and trial-lawyering. Each of the modern shows, in contrast with Thirtysomething, uses an inciting incident to either bring the cast together or as an excuse to introduce them -- Maura's coming out to her family in Transparent's case, a break-up in the case of Casual and Togetherness.
And each tends to regularly dwell on everyone being unbelievably shitty to each other.
In Transparent's case I put up with how awful most of the characters are for a couple of reasons -- because of how interesting Maura's story is (and though it may be unfair to wonder this given that the family is at least partly based on Jill Soloway's, I wondered if part of the point was that before realizing who she needed to be to be happy, Maura wasn't able to properly parent her children, so they all turned out shitty), partly because hooray Judith Light being back on TV, partly because I have so much love for the actors themselves. Season two was less focused, made Maura less the center, and I found myself actually resenting the fact that otherwise interesting plot premises that I would have welcomed on some other show were being wasted on characters I had grown to loathe. (Transparent has quickly become guilty of the Parenthood problem of "how much of this drama can happen in the same nuclear family?" as well.)
In Casual's case, I would have been much happier with a show in which we saw fewer, or no, scenes without Michaela Watkins in them -- don't give her daughter and brother their own independent plots, make them supporting characters in her story. I can't stand her daughter, I'm indifferent at best to her brother, and as much as I love Eliza Coupe, she was part of the show's dumbest plotline. Which, again, involved everyone being terrible to each other.
Togetherness is the best of these three, I think, and I don't know how much of that is my preexisting affection for not only the Duplass brothers but all of the cast members -- it's a show tailor-made for me in a lot of ways. But it still has a lot of moments that frustrate me and that feel like they're there principally because having the characters mistreat each other is the easiest way to generate believable drama.
This is a significant storytelling challenge: staying realistic, staying focused on life outside of the "typical TV show jobs" (cop, lawyer, etc) and workplace scenarios, holding interest over a long period of time, and making the characters likeable without making them unrelatable. Above, we've already talked about avoiding the soap opera tropes. When you think these things through, there's a reason why television drama tends to fall into the genres it does -- and even when you go outside those genres, there's a reason it tends to fall into specific dramatic patterns of People Who Do Jobs That Involve Solving a Puzzle While The Clock Is Ticking and People Whose Jobs Involve Unpredictable Dangers That Test Their Mettle and so on. When something shakes things up even a little -- Breaking Bad and Mad Men are two great examples, the former because the status quo of the series changes so often and so radically, the latter because it is so hard to classify in the terms I've been using -- it really stands out. And there are plenty of very good shows that don't shake it up.
So, Thirtysomething does fall victim to the Modern Bickering Family problem, but primarily with Elliot and Nancy -- which means it's not central in most episodes, and not present in all episodes or all seasons. Most of the time, like I said, the fights are about smaller things, and no one's being awful about it, which is where the accusations of whining come from.
I don't mean to imply there is nothing good to say about Elliot and Nancy, either! Nancy has a great arc over time about her return to work as an artist, first teaching and later illustrating. She's also a great foil in a lot of important scenes involving the other women, precisely because she doesn't have the close relationships with them that they have with each other, so every conversation doesn't become a rehash of something that happened in high school.
Melissa, Gary, Ellyn
Melissa, played by the fantastic Melanie Mayron, is Michael's cousin, a freelance photographer. She's the quirky Bohemian artist type, a single woman whose singleness is at first portrayed mainly in terms of how hung up she is on Michael's best friend Gary. They dated and broke up a few years before the series begins but it's made clear neither got over the other, and implied that Gary's fear of commitment was the only real reason they broke up. Eventually (whether or not we can ever say she moves on), her singleness is the source for more plots than just moping about Gary -- maybe the writers were originally planning on having Mel and Gary get together, and gave up on that, I don't know -- and Melanie Mayron herself has described Melissa as a precursor to Ally McBeal, which I think is about right. A more grounded and self-aware Ally McBeal, but it's there.
It's hard to describe Melissa, in part because she's not as central to the show as the couples are, so she goes through a number of different situations over the course of the series, and in part because words like "quirky" convey so little. She's idiosyncratic, she's funny but often deeply sad, she's insecure because of her experiences with Gary and the age at which she's still single (she and Ellyn have a conversation at one point in which they bluntly discuss the fact that single women their age are expected to occasionally date married men because there aren't enough age-appropriate single men available, and that it's just how things go, being a single woman of a certain age).
I'm not doing her justice, really - she's one of my favorite characters in TV. There's a great episode late in the series (with Brooke Adams and Colleen Camp) where Melissa goes to Hollywood to shadow a sitcom actress on set and take photos of her for an accompanying article, and the actress is playing a tough young single lady, so keeps stealing mannerisms and clothing items from Melissa to try to "make it real." The deconstruction of Melissa's outward character -- who, meanwhile, winds up hired to rewrite some of the dialogue toward the same end -- just reinforces that she's more than this system of tics, even if that's how so much of the world responds to her.
Gary Shepherd (Peter Horton and his long hair) is Michael's old college roommate, now an English professor who picks women up in hardware stores and on campus. For Melissa and Ellyn, singleness is a burden, something society judges them for, a sacrifice Ellyn has made for their career. For Gary, it's a lifestyle choice -- dating younger women with few expectations, avoiding the commitments of more serious relationships in the same way that he's using an academic career to avoid the 9-5 grind of a corporate one. He does grow up over the course of the series, though I don't know what message it sends that he also goes from being happy all the time to becoming more ponderous and distracted.
Ellyn is Hope's best friend from childhood (when we get flashbacks to them as kids, it's eerie what a good job they do casting teens who look and sound so much like them, enough so that if it were a modern show I would suspect they were just processing the adult actresses' voices), played by Polly Draper. Yet another terrific actress, whom you may have seen recently in Obvious Child, and if not, you ought to go rent it. Or stream it, I guess. That's how it is now. Go stream it.
At first, Ellyn and Gary seem to serve similar purposes in that each shows how different one of the Steadmans is from their closest friend. Michael is the former activist turned advertiser -- and not just advertiser, but running his own shop -- and family man, while Gary is the unattached prof who bicycles everywhere and still has the long hair he had in college. Hope is the homemaker dealing with the insane amount of attention a baby needs, while Ellyn is the career woman who, when the series opens, barely has the patience to have lunch with Hope because she's not crazy about being around the baby and is kind of pissed that Hope is spending all of her time with it instead of just hiring a babysitter so that they can go have their girls' lunches like always.
But both grow out of their roles. Hope needs someone to talk to who knows her as often as she needs someone to talk to who doesn't know her well (Nancy), and Ellyn gets fleshed out in those scenes simply because that's what good writing does, and it's interesting to see over time that even though she and Melissa both have similar self-deprecating senses of humor about their singleness, they're otherwise immensely different (though of course we wind up with a story about them both interested in the same man). On the one hand, Ellyn is more selfish than Melissa; on the other she's also more willing to settle, whereas Melissa sometimes seems like she'd spend her life alone rather than with the wrong guy (this may be because Melissa has a Gary in her past, and Ellyn doesn't).
Miles Drentell
Although there are a lot of important secondary characters -- I am leaving out Susannah, for instance, and not even mentioning key appearances over the years by pre-Murphy Brown Faith Ford, pre-Raymond Patricia Heaton, pre-Law and Order Mariska Hargitay, Lynne Thigpen, Terry Kinney, Kellie Martin, Stanley Tucci, Barbara Barrie, Shirley Knight, Paul Dooley, Talia Balsam, Dana Delany, Richard Masur, Charles Rocket, Patricia Arquette, a teenage Brad Pitt! -- Miles deserves special mention.
Eventually Michael and Elliot's agency can't stay afloat. Miles is a legend in the industry, and they first meet him while trying to get him to farm work out to them; he doesn't bite. In a subsequent season they end up working for his agency, where Miles grooms Michael to be his possible replacement, while barely concealing his disdain for Elliot.
It's a character who is introduced at an unbelievably slow pace. Maybe they weren't even intending to use him the way they did, but just loved the performance in his early appearances and so tailored the later seasons accordingly. Where most of the series is about home life, once Miles is introduced, we have our first melodramatic elements -- solely in the workplace, as Miles represents the high-powered corporate world, with its hostile takeovers, corporate espionage, and professional manipulators reading Sun Tzu.
It probably sounds like it shouldn't work, especially in this show, but the show is never centered in the workplace (though the Michael plots become more work-focused later in the series, this is balanced out by some heavy family-centric episodes) and certainly isn't a full-fledged Mad Men predecessor, in terms of showing us the ins and outs of an advertising agency and how ruthless the business can be, or simultaneously how meaningful the work -- though it takes a step in that direction.
Miles is almost a shamanic figure -- he's fascinated by Michael to a degree that is hard to explain without Miles knowing that Michael is the protagonist, but it works because David Clennon sells the idea that Miles can just sniff out talent and character.
In Sum
We owe much to cable television and HBO, of course. HBO's ability to rerun episodes all the time, to marathon previous seasons in anticipation of upcoming seasons, that was key to its ability to launch shows like Oz, The Sopranos, and The Wire. Those shows in turn demonstrated a desire on the public's part for more serious drama, and a willingness to sit through a season without needing everything resolved at the end of each episode -- and for that matter, a willingness to see a season end without having all of its loose ends tied up. But The Sopranos launched at about the same time TiVo did, and DVDs came not long after, and so that particular stretch of the path to the Golden Age was paved by the promise of rewatchability.
More than a decade earlier, when 2 out of 5 American households didn't even have a VCR, Thirtysomething offered serious dramatic television that required just as much of the viewer, with more than twice as many episodes per season as any HBO show -- and unlike HBO, they had sponsors and affiliates to answer to. They somehow enlisted amazing actors in an age when there was no prestige attached to doing television projects and a very real divide between television acting and movie acting. Episodes were directed by Claudia Weill (the documentarian and director of Girlfriends and It's My Turn), future action movie director Rob Cohen, Gary Sinise, and most of the cast members (Ken Olin, Peter Horton, Timothy Busfield, Melanie Mayron, and Mel Harris all directed multiple episodes), among others. The creators, Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz, went on to create Once and Again (which brought back Miles Drentell) and, perhaps most famously for my generation, produced My So-Called Life, created by Thirtysomething staff writer Winnie Holzman.
