Lost Battles

When I was in middle school, there was no comparing my obsession with Wings to anyone's obsession with any other TV show.

Come to think of it, it was a time of rather intense viewership for me anyway. Wings towered above all others as my favorite comedy, but thinking back on it, I tended to organize my time in those days around TV shows. Nowadays, I catch up on the few TV shows I watch on DVD and downloads, and even those are slow to plod through. Then I had a listings grid organizing my thoughts - I'd see a 7-7:30 block on Tuesdays, for example, and know what my options were. I was up to date on every time slot Empty Nest was shifted to. I knew the name of the wife that Anthony suddenly picked up in Vegas on a very special Blossom. I had arguments with myself about who was better comic relief, Alfonso Ribero in The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, or, the king of spastic cluelessness, Thomas Haden Church on Wings.

Because Wings was the top contender for any prize then. It's interesting to think of Wings now alongside The Fresh Prince of Bel Air because they are, in fact, once again neighbors on Nick At Nite. And, more importantly, they can be viewed now, a good 10 to 15 years later, and be exposed - at least to people of similar backgrounds as myself - as the absolute least funny things this side of slavery.

I've always remembered a joke that Wings tried to pass off as funny, but it made little sense to me even then. Lowell is asking for time off to go to his cousin's wedding. "What's her last name?" Fay asks. "Hmm. Mather," Lowell answers. "No, what is it going to be," Fay asks. "Hmm, Mather," Lowell answers. The bride and groom, you see, are both Mathers - cousins, Lowell tells us. "Kissing cousins?" asks Fay. "Well, they did a lot more than that, that's why they have to get married." Zing.

To succeed, if such a thing were possible, this joke requires two things - the assumption that one might ask with total sincerity if two people were, in fact, "kissing cousins," and two, that the audience is so familiar with calling any two distantly related people kissing cousins that there would be no question as to what Fay would be referring to in this situation. You see, it's funny because Lowell took "kissing cousins" literally and we, the country of kissing cousins, would never do such a thing.

At the time, I assumed something must be wrong with me for not laughing at this joke. In truth, I still have no idea what a kissing cousin is, but more to the point, I can't imagine anyone bringing the term "kissing cousins" up in any type of conversation, and if they did, I cna't imagine anyone not seizing the opportunity to make a sexual joke (né, an incest joke) on sight.

In fact, Wings trafficked in this type of mistaken-assumption humor. The other terrible joke I recall involved an episode in which Joe and Brian decide they must, for the sake of their dear friend Helen, buy Helen a cello. Brian has looked into the price. Joe asks what it is, and Brian answers, "Fifteen." Joe shakes his head in disbelief. "Well, I guess you can't put a price on friendship - $1500 is a lot of money, but we can do it." "That's good," Brian answers, "because it's $15,000."

Once again, this assumes, to be funny, that a person simply saying "15" about the price of cellos brings up an automatic assumption in the hundred rather than thousand dollar range. Once again I did not laugh at the time, not knowing, in fact, that Brian did not simply mean $15. Once again, this is still not a remotely funny joke.

It may seem like the dregs of minutiae to pick fights with long defunct sitcoms that weren't particularly popular to people other than me. It is, in fact, the dregs of minutiae. Yet I wonder why no one said anything at the time. In fact, watching Wings and The Fresh Prince (of which, seriously, don't get me started) today makes a person wonder why someone didn't say the obvious now or then - that watching a half hour of those programs is something like a perverse form of torture. To be stuck in an episode is to be stuck in a nasty parallel world where people stop having reactions and act like clueless cartoons. I cannot even describe my discomfort in a sitcom of this type except to say that a sense of frustration burrowed deep within myself takes over after even a minute of watching one.

A few years ago, in my heyday of being a film critic, I wrote a DVD review of 1998's Central Station, a Brazillian movie that was marginally successful in America at the time, earning its star, Fernanda Montenegro, a Best Actress Oscar nomination - rare for a foreign language film. This was, I am certain, the result of an especially successful Miramax ad campaign, but that is not the point. My review was patently negative - I greatly dislike Central Station and the type of patented successful-international-release formula it represents: one wise, down-on-his-luck, plucky, misunderstood kid meets one cranky, Scrooge-like curmudgeon of a woman, and despite her initial reservations, she warms to the kid, allowing him to teach her a valuable lesson on life.

A question I never received at the time of that review (and to have received questions about my reviews would have been shocking anyway - that anyone read the things came as a surprise) was why bother, in a DVD recommendation column, to hash out a 6-year-old grudge against a movie that wasn't all that successful in the first place? The next logical question is why pick on Wings or The Fresh Prince of Bel Air? They were enjoyable enough at the time, weren't they?

Perhaps they were, I remember some belly laughs during Wings episodes, but for the life of me I couldn't pick them out today. These fights got lost because the context shifted, but it would make me a little sad if the fights got lost altogether - I think the errors in Wings are instructive for writers, and the last thing anyone should have to do is watch the goddamn thing to find those errors out. I think a successful international release of a foreign language film should not, in fact, have a wise or plucky kid involved. And I think writers and viewers should mock these things until they don't exist anymore, they should get the cliches out in the open until no writer would dream of even typing the things. We should pick the lost fights, the easy fights to knock out creative laziness, or at least, to save our children from canned laughter.