Ned and Stacey: Short-Lived Shows We Loved II

            After our previous salute to the excellent short-lived series Dead Like Me, we now turn to an even more tragic tale, the tale of Ned and Stacey.  While Debra Messing's later homage to all things queer, Will & Grace, went on for season after asinine season, making us laugh in spite of ourselves even as our IQs plunged with every episode, her earlier, far more intelligent series was killed after only two seasons, just as it was poised to really get good.  The key to Ned and Stacey, a show about two shallow people who contract a fake marriage for the purposes of mutual exploitation (the tag line: "To get a promotion, I needed a wife.  To get a life, I needed his apartment") was that the show was not just about them, but also about Stacey's sister Amanda and her husband Eric.

            Eric and Amanda Moyer served as a foil to the eponymous couple of the series.  The healthy, loving, and fecund relationship they shared (they had one son, and Amanda was pregnant as the series ended) contrasted strongly with the selfish, sterile, and exploitative union of Ned and Stacey. (Amanda establishes the nature of her relationship with Eric in the first episode when she says, "Eric?  He's an idiot.  But he's sweet and I love him. In the real world, that's a good relationship.")  The fun of the show came not only from the contrast between the two couples, but also from Ned's lovable narcissistic sociopath personality.  While Stacey sought in her many sexual encounters some vaguely defined Mr. Right (never yet guessing how far she had to go before she could hope to meet the very standard by which she judged), and often pretended to one form or another of moral superiority—even as she schlepped from one moral disaster to the next—Ned appeared free of any moral qualms or complexities.  His goal was the promotion of his career and the pursuit of random women—no liberal social conscience disrupting him as he exercised his will to power.  Still, his narcissism was qualified by his friendship with Eric (whom he referred to affectionately as “Rico”) and the occasional burst of human compassion.

            It was in Ned and Stacey that we first discovered the great talent of Thomas Haden Church, who would go on to play in such excellent films as Sideways and Smart People.  It is also here we find in Eric and Amanda Moyer one of the sweetest, most genuinely realistic versions of a married couple in any sitcom; a thing made possible by their secondary role in the story.  It is a shame that people did not recognize the wit of this show soon enough to keep it on the air longer.  It is an even greater shame that--to this day—they have only released the first season on DVD [they have since released the entire series.  Yes!].  Still, we remember Ned and Stacey, and we hope that somehow , more quality television can be made, before the tide of mediocrity washes us all out to sea, never to return to land again.

 

Dead Like Me: Short-Lived Shows We Loved, Part I

[Since I did not have time to compose the essay I wanted this month, I here present the first of two short entries from an earlier blog of mine.  Although these posts were first written about 10 years ago or so, I think what they say is still relevant, perhaps more than ever.]

            William Butler Yeats, in his poem  "The Second Coming," said "the best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity"; so it seems ever to be.  As a fan of such great dramatists as Shaw and Shakespeare (not in that order), I want to believe that great drama can still be written, and that such great drama can be found not just on the stage, but on the screens, both big and small.  However, Yeats' words remind me that it is the way of the world for things to fall apart, and I am continually disappointed to find an inverse proportion prevailing between the brilliance of a television show, and the length of time it remains on the air.  This post is the first of two dedicated to  remembering some of those brilliant shows that, by the logic of capitalism, were driven to their death by the silence of the majority (one recalls the sage question of Robert Heinlein's character Lazarus Long: has there ever been a time when the majority was right?)

             We begin with Dead Like Me (2003-2005), in which a group of deceased souls find themselves drafted into the ranks of the "Grim Reapers," those who are tasked with remaining amidst this mortal coil to help other souls move on from it (the premise is so original it is nearly impossible to succinctly summarize).  The show lasted only two brief seasons, with a subsequent straight-to-DVD film of questionable value, but it outshone the majority of shows that go on one season after another.  Whereas most shows give us a rehashing of the same stock characters and stock situations, this show gave us original  characters with real personality.  There was Georgia "George" Lass, the 18-year-old who was too smart not to see through the foolishness of most of what passes for "normal" in our world of computers and cubicles.  There was Mason, the drug-addled Brit who was nevertheless ultimately good and chivalrous of heart.  Roxy the no-nonsense meter maid-turned-cop played off of Daisy Adair, whose shallow self-involvement masked her inability to trust in a world where no one had ever loved her.  Rube, their leader, played brilliantly by Mandy Patinkin (his absence from the 2009 film was its greatest flaw), was paternal in a complex way rarely seen in television.

            If the characters themselves were not fascinating enough, the show's continual meditation on  life, death, fate and meaning put to shame the shallow things that pass for drama today.  Who can forget Rube's warning George in the first episode that if she did not take a certain little girl's soul (and only she could do it, for "death is non-transferable"), it would rot inside of her?  What about what happened in the second season when someone was killed who was not scheduled to die?  Even without the fantastical element of grim reaping, George's attempts to make something meaningful out of her time spent working at a temp agency (a quest also found in the brilliant novel Apathy and Other Small Victories) reminds me of the protagonists of Samuel Beckett's works, like Waiting for Godot.

            Perhaps there was only so much that could have been done with this story, but I cannot believe that everything that could have been done was done in just two seasons.  Dead Like Me, R.I.P.