Behind the glass teat: 14 worthwhile television shows about television

6. Knowing Me, Knowing You With Alan Partridge
At the peak of his meteoric career with the BBC, Steve Coogan’s incompetent alter ego Alan Partridge inexplicably was granted his own television talk show, a version of his Knowing Me, Knowing You radio show with pictures added. Fictitious celebrities and guests with unusual talents were subjected first to Partridge’s fawning deference, then to his pompous scorn as they inevitably proved disappointing. The genius of the Alan Partridge character is his single-minded desire to be a television presenter, a job that seems to anger and frustrate him at every turn. Yet his desperation to keep the job is overwhelmed by his outrage at the horrible guests he interviews. Sometimes the gigolos and talentless singers deserve his scorn; sometimes they simply offend his sense of how the world should work, like the child prodigy into whom he tries to slap some sense. Poor (fictional) ratings doom KMKYWAP after a single six-episode season, but Partridge’s BBC career doesn’t die until his Christmas special, during which he punches the network’s head of programming.

7. 30 Rock
Starting out at the same time as Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip, and with a similar premise, Tina Fey’s 30 Rock initially looked like it might get lost in the shuffle. A focus on the day-to-day realities of showbiz was ditched early on; instead, 30 Rock showed a world in which NBC was an underperforming subsidiary of a wig company, its president was also in charge of “microwave programming,” and its biggest star was so disconnected from reality that he had to be talked out of sponsoring dogfights by the ghost of Redd Foxx. 30 Rock occasionally reminds viewers that it’s about a TV network, like when they’re treated to the season finale of MILF Island, or Tracy Morgan is awarded a Pacific Rim Emmy, but Fey and her staff of writers realized that focusing on the cast’s rampaging egos, dysfunctional personalities, and surreal behavior would pay richer dividends than clinging too closely to the show’s original premise.

[pagebreak]8. Murphy Brown
As played by Candice Bergen, news anchor Murphy Brown had a real-world impact that normally escapes television characters. She helped throw the 1992 presidential election in Bill Clinton’s favor. She raised breast-cancer awareness and was reportedly behind a spike in the number of mammograms performed during the late ’90s. She gave the world a reason to laugh with Pee-wee Herman again. Brown’s effect on our world was directly related to her visibility in her own—while Murphy Brown, like 30 Rock, was a workplace comedy where the workplace just happened to be a major television network, it was Brown’s role as a high-paid TV journalist that landed her in the crosshairs of former vice president Dan Quayle. After Quayle criticized the character for viewing single motherhood “as just another ‘lifestyle choice’,” Murphy Brown’s newsroom setting responded to that criticism almost in real time, blurring the lines between fiction and non-fiction in ways that only increased the sense that Quayle thought he was addressing a real person.

9. SCTV
The Canadian Second City TV—later known in its American run as SCTV Network 90—had a brilliant framing device: Most of its sketches revolved around the production of third-rate television programming for the SCTV Network, an underfunded, incompetent outfit run more or less as a tax dodge by sleazy owner Joe Flaherty, a shameless old goat who uses a wheelchair not because he’s disabled, but “for respect.” Soap-opera parodies, a late-night talk show hosted by a druggy egomaniac and his cringing sycophant, a Twilight Zone rip-off run by a incomprehensible Japanese MC, and a horror-movie festival hosted by an indifferent vampire/newscaster were among the regularly featured shows on the network (which had its home in the far-flung town of Melonville); the format perfectly fit the cast’s alternately loving and vicious parodies of shopworn showbiz tropes and venal celebrity immortals. SCTV even once brought us a glimpse of its opposite number, a slapdash Soviet cable network called “3CP1.” From SCTV’s unforgettable parodies of hacky real-world entertainers to original creations, like the relentlessly Canadian McKenzie brothers, the hapless “Rockin’” Mel Slirrup, and ever-hostile funnyman Bobby Bittman, SCTV delivered a pitch-perfect television parody.

10. Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace
Flawlessly executed to the last awkward jump cut, Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace presents its show-within-the-show as a rightfully unremembered relic of the 1980s, the ultimate vanity project for British actor-comedian Matthew Holness, whose titular character bills himself as an “author, dreamweaver, visionary—plus actor.” Befitting his litany of self-granted titles, Garth Marenghi wasn’t just the failed writer of his horror show/medical drama—he was its creator, producer, and star. He even whistled the melodies that spawned its soundtrack. As such, Marenghi is in constant contact with viewers, whether thorough his pigheaded characters or through the retrospective interviews where Marenghi asserts his and the show’s greatness. Though he isn’t the only cast member scoring laughs with the finest bad acting this side of the “I caaan’t stan’ ‘im!” sequence in Singin’ In The Rain, Holness floats Darkplace on Marenghi’s massive ego. Watching him overstep his creative boundaries is hilarious, and it’s even funnier when those boundaries weren’t that wide to begin with.

11. Fernwood 2 Night/America 2-Night
Now that David Letterman, Conan O’Brien, and Craig Ferguson have each taken their turn at deconstructing the late-night talk show, it’s hard to think fondly of the kind of stale, “celebrity love-in” gabfests skewered by the likes of SCTV’s “Sammy Maudlin Show” and Fernwood 2 Night. But the days of Merv Griffin were also the days where soap operas danced around any and all sexual innuendo, which started to look mighty silly when the characters on the Norman Lear-produced soap satire Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman started flashing cleaning ladies and checking out Orgasm And You from the local library. Introduced as a summer replacement for Mary Hartman in 1977, Fernwood 2 Night (in its second season, America 2-Night) was an unconventional (though not entirely illogical) way of expanding its parent show’s universe, though the denizens of Fernwood, Ohio were considerably less deadpan when talking about their sexual encounters with aliens from the show’s thrift-store dais. Credit the show’s nervous buzz to the incomparable comedy team of Martin Mull and Fred Willard, playing characters who clearly long for something suburban Ohio can’t give them, even though their handling of guests like Tom Waits proved they didn’t deserve it.

12. The Comeback
Back in 2005, Lisa Kudrow was only a year into her Friends retirement when she created and starred in this short-lived HBO series about a has-been sitcom star who’s staging her comeback through a new sitcom (Room & Bored) and a reality series called The Comeback, about her return to canned laughs. So just to be clear, The Comeback was a mock reality show about a washed-up sitcom actress making a new sitcom, starring recently washed-up sitcom actress Lisa Kudrow. Sound confusing? It wasn’t. In fact, The Comeback is one of the most biting satires of American situation comedies and reality television in recent memory. Kudrow’s character, Valerie Cherish is needy, arrogant, deluded, pathetic, awkward, and completely hilarious. Unfortunately, in 2005, America apparently wasn’t ready to see Phoebe from Friends with her hair in curlers, scared she’s going to be fired as she walks to the writers’ room on her new shitty sitcom, while off-camera, the producer of her reality show (Laura Silverman) shouts, “How are you feeling?… Complete the sentence, ‘I’m feeling blank.’” Which is a shame. Because in spite of the shaky first episode, The Comeback is so dark and funny, it should have been Kudrow’s comeback.

13. Extras
In its first season, Ricky Gervais’ wry, wonderful HBO comedy series focused on a struggling actor, chronicling his embarrassing run-ins off-set with celebs and more successful friends. In season two, Extras shifts when Gervais winds up writing and starring in his own horribly compromised TV comedy, When The Whistle Blows, and the show delves into interesting TV territory: What’s it like for an actor who finally catches a break on a terrible show? What’s it like for an artist who becomes rich and famous creating material that he, and everyone he actually respects, hates? The show shifts to become more about Andy’s ever-changing idea of fame, but also spends time skewering the clueless team behind Blows, who think everything they do is pure gold. In true Gervais fashion, awkward comedy ensues.

14. The Critic
By making their hero balding, doughy television film reviewer Jay Sherman, a man with Gene Siskel’s receding hairline and Roger Ebert’s former girth, Simpsons alum Mike Reiss, Al Jean, and James L. Brooks found the perfect way to simultaneously spoof the absurdities of television and film on The Critic. Jon Lovitz lends his voice and much of his self-deprecating persona to the title role of a smart, good-hearted, slightly pompous movie reviewer who opines on the virtues of the films of the day for a television channel owned by a gleefully deranged Ted Turner-like master of the universe voiced by Russ Meyer/Jonathan Demme repertory player Charles Napier. The movie-review-show-within-a-show afforded the talented writing staff an opportunity to spoof current Hollywood fare and timeless classics without short-changing a delightful supporting cast toplined by Gerrit Graham as the hero’s aristocratic, genially insane adoptive dad. The film critics at The A.V. Club staff can vouch for the verisimilitude of many of the show’s details, like Sherman’s extensive collection of promotional T-shirts advertising half-forgotten films.