#9
Post
by therewillbeblus » Mon Jul 12, 2021 9:48 pm
Revisited Ed (well, the first three seasons, I will never ignore the sage advice to skip the abysmal season four again..) and it’s just as majestic as the first time through. The show is groundbreaking for its kind in many ways, but- outside of the first ten-ish perfect episodes of pure homegrown warm-hearted comedy (the “le-toose” $10 bet is gold, but hey, they all are)- there are two highlights that need to be broken down.
The first is Dennis Martino’s student election moment, which appropriately channels his roughness into action. He’s a complex character who is actually right about a lot of things, but a born loser who hides himself in a shell of aloofness (the tragedy is that the events surrounding him ultimately fulfill that early self-diagnosed prophecy that spawned his initial defensive disrespectful behavior). The election allows him to blend selfishness and morality together without forcing them to be mutually exclusive, but the kicker comes in his punchline to the jock Class Prez, who thinks the world is about him and that this has all been designed to teach him a lesson. The delivery of blunt egotistical rationalization from Dennis is superficially appalling but his message about self-respect lingers with acidic power. Dennis is a bit of an enigma, occasionally engaging in ardent discourse in between the inert staticity of introverted pain, but it’s also clear that the showrunners respect their own humble distance from alcoholism’s enigmatic qualities as well, and so instead of trying to simplify his psychology they allow him to be a secondary character while validating that there’s so much more there to dissect, just in another story.
The other best scene is the long-winded argument in the bowling alley at the season three midpoint. It’s such a convoluted mess of psychosocial insecurities and passions, confusingly bubbling up and suppressing themselves in tonally-congestive lyricism with the characters’ histories, that I’m amazed Burnett and Beckerman were able to pull this off on a major network and sell it to a popular audience. I haven’t seen a heated social interaction balance dense authenticity and vibrant entertainment so well since the Brooks/Hunter spat in Broadcast News, and that’s the pinnacle of depicting raw and real intimate interactions when we’re hurting.
Also so nice to see John Krasinski show up in a cameo as the guy who serves Ed his court papers in the late-S3 ep where he’s sued for saving the guy’s life, because it’s heartening that an agent assigned him into his deserved ‘tool’-typecasting before people became inexplicably charmed by this persona and collectively championed him into stardom…