You know when you rave about a TV show to your friends or co-workers, and they come back in a few days and say, "Yeah, I tuned in, but I couldn't see what's so special about it," and you say, "That wasn't a very good episode; I promise, it's really better than that"? You know how you feel kind of desperate and crazy trying to convince them against the evidence of their own eyes, as if you're one step away from becoming a fanatic yelling on a street corner and putting tinfoil on the windows?
I imagine there were Newsradio obsessives in exactly that situation after "The Breakup." A few episodes into the second season, we fans felt the momentum and the buzz building. This is our moment! And then Tommy from Customer Service reports being underwhelmed. We start to wonder: are we the crazy ones?
So many of the elements of effective NR comedy are present in "The Breakup": Bill's unfocused suspicion, open-plan office eavesdropping, Matthew's heedless enthusiasm, and Dave and Lisa in Bickering Bickersons mode. They've had a fight the night before in which Dave let slip the b-word (Beth: "we are talking about bitch, right?"), and now Lisa's giving him the cold shoulder. Beth is about to snap because of the strain of keeping the relationship secret from the staff. Meanwhile, Catherine would prefer that everyone ignore her birthday, but when Bill insists on broadcasting his felicitations ("Here's to 36 more wonderful years!"), she employs all her wiles to discover his birthday and return the favor.
But it mostly falls flat, and it's up to us to figure out why. Here's my theory: The episode is mostly designed to solve a story problem, to move the Newsradio premise from point A to point B. Dave and Lisa's secret romance is played out, and the creative team decided that they needed to go public so the show could get on to other business. "The Breakup" is largely tactical, then, and it shows. When Beth contrives to make Dave and Lisa think that the staff already knows in order to make them admit it, it's not only unbelievable — it's highly conventional. Hoary, even. Hasn't this plot device been trotted out in every sitcom since the Paleolithic era? It's disappointing that the writers couldn't think of any way to twist it into something less expected.
Even though Bill gets some choice moments in both storylines — I love his quickly-abandoned interrogations of Beth and Lisa over the keys and the white sock in a plastic bag, and his foiling of Catherine's machinations — the Catherine-birthday storyline crosses the line from playful pranks to near-hostility. It's probably just my own dread of conflict and my hatred of practical jokes, but I get uncomfortable when the staff is hateful to each other. When Bill is tormenting Matthew, it works because Matthew's pathetic sense of wounded dignity keeps our sympathies where they belong and because everybody else will stand up for him, but in the Catherine-Bill fight there's no one to root for: Catherine is driven by pure vanity, and Bill is just being mean.
Extract some of the elements, though, and you could put together a clip reel of good stuff: Dave feeding Beth a full rundown of lies for Matthew and Bill, Beth trying to hold it all together at the conference table ("Lisa's fine, menstrually"), Matthew providing running commentary on Catherine's extraction of his gift from the big box and tissue paper, and Dave doing his lurching self-conscious walk (the one with the exaggerated head bobs that attempts to say, "No problem, just walking from here to there!") as he and Lisa exit his office to admit the relationship to the staff. For anyone tuning in for the first time back in 1995, though, I think they'd be hard pressed to unwrap the latent genius from all the extraneous wrapping in this episode.
The show perks up (at first) in "The Shrink," an episode with a solid premise tailor-made for the Newsradio style. The staff is at each other's throats, and Jimmy calls in Dr. Frank (John Ritter) to spend a day counseling them and clearing up the stressful vibe. Dave is wounded not only by his employees' eager embrace of Dr. Frank's advice, but also by the revelation that Lisa had an affair with him when she was in his psychology class in college. In the office's most visible example of pathology, Bill has erected a freestanding cubicle around his desk to get the privacy he needs for psychic equilibrium (and for smoking).
The show's unique spin on the center-eccentric formula is on full display in the first two acts of "The Shrink." An element of office culture that predates Dave's arrival puzzles and perturbs him. The staff responds with relief and enthusiasm to what Dave perceives as unwarranted intervention in his domain. A confident and charismatic outsider threatens Dave's position in the office. Best of all, the cubicle itself, which is always shot so that the gray walls take up the entire bottom half of the screen, creating only a sliver of space above it for interaction among disembodied heads. Framing-based comedy … it's the show's bread and butter.
But something goes terribly wrong in the last act. There's a classic sitcom reversal: the powerless gain power, the mighty are dethroned, what was topsy-turvy is set aright. Except it's not aright. Dave shouldn't become smug and confident — that's not his character, and besides, it's kind of ugly. Dr. Frank should not be humiliated — we've gotten too much pleasure from his easy competence, and besides, he really seems to help people that we care about; what's the point of exposing him with a moralistic "physician, heal thyself" twist? It's Dave's ascendancy that bothers me most, I confess. I find vindictive Dave and even magnanimous-winner Dave antithetical to the comic tone of the show, and the laughs I enjoyed prior to his transformation start to feel hollow.