The Red Wedding of Network TV.
Creative inspiration from watchin' some cable and going outside of your usual haunts.
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This post contains spoilers for the ABC procedural drama 9-1-1!.
Here’s the word on the street: apparently, Burt Ward, the guy who played Robin to Adam West’s Batman, has a dog food brand. I saw the commercial in a Sonesta Suites in Baltimore, during which the classic 1960s sound effect plays while a bat logo spins around the now-80-year-old actor. A PowerPoint-style animation of the words, “Fresh meats! Fresh fruits! Fresh vegetables!” slams onto the screen. Ward then implies that eating only this dog food has allowed his wolfhound to live to 27.5 years (3 times the average life expectancy). The can looks like this:
Now, I’m no dog scientist, and I’d never commit potential libel against such a figure (who also once claimed that ABC made him take dick shrinking pills because his bulge was too big for television). But I can say that, for no particular reason, my veterinarian partner sitting next to me had a look on her face that read to me as, “What a load of dumb bullshit.”
This commercial is one of the fascinating new things I witnessed in my two weeks watchin’ some cable.
Cable TV has been a stranger to me for some time. I’m old enough to have seen a TiVo in person, and I was around when Richard Karn was shining brilliantly as the host of Family Feud in 2006. But still, it has been over a decade since I’ve lived in a place with cable. If I am ever to watch something, it is either a recommended prestige TV show or some short-form slop algorithmically designed to keep me, a very cool™ improv comedian with bad opinions, sucked into the black hole of a particular social media platform. I was born 30 years after Batman (1966), and I don’t have a dog. There’s no way an algorithm would have ever served me a Robin-based dog food commercial. With that, it was oddly refreshing to see content not tailored to or selected by me.
For the two weeks my partner and I lived in an extended-stay hotel while apartment-hunting, we saw wonders on cable TV: a local news segment where someone forgot to unmute the dialogue track, insane medical commercials for those afraid of aging, and a sitcom with an emoji in the title. Flicking through those 60-odd channels was like a dumb version of studying abroad. “Wow, the world is so much bigger than I realized,” I thought as I watched 24 chefs try to cook for 24 hours straight.
One critical evening, we tuned in halfway through a rerun of an early season of some first-responder procedural show on ABC. In this episode, the B story has all the firefighter characters trapped in a virus quarantine zone. After an explosion, the virus infects a firefighter named Han. Blood is gushing out of his nose, his breath is faint, and he’s becoming paler and paler.
Meanwhile, in the A story, campy intensity ensues. After the star of the show, Angela Bassett, who plays a LAPD patrol sergeant, outmaneuvers a criminal mastermind and the US Military with helicopter shenanigans, she delivers the only vial of the cure to our trapped firefighters.
The biggest firefighter, their leader, played by Peter Krause (here on referred to as Ol’ boy), makes sure Han gets the only cure. The day is saved, and everyone starts to leave the quarantine zone, except Ol’ boy, who slams the door, leaving him alone inside. Ol’ boy starts taking off his mask, still surrounded by the airborne virus. It seems he’s lost his mind. But turns out he’s also already infected. His suit was punctured earlier, but he didn’t tell anyone. Ol’ boy wanted to make sure that no one protested when he gave his infected colleague the only cure.
Hozier starts playing, then the whole cast starts pissing, crying, and throwing up as this dude starts bleeding out of his face (vomiting blood) and nobly saying his goodbyes. Everyone is crumpled over, open-mouth sobbing. Ol’ boy kneels down to pray, Angela Bassett looks on in horror as the sickness takes him.
“Man, this is a pretty intense way for this recurring character to go,” I said to my partner.
Turns out this was the show 9-1-1! And this was not a rerun, but the new 15th episode of the 8th season. We assumed that Ol’ boy was an arc-long character that they were saying a dramatic goodbye to after a captivating few episodes. But apparently, this was like the main guy. He was second on the billing after Bassett.
From what I’ve learned, this show usually has a middling amount of peril. For 8 years, fans watched, knowing that the main cast of their comfort mild-drama show wasn’t actually in that much danger, just for them to ice the main fucking guy. That’d be like turning on the final season of Modern Family just to see Ty Burrell get domed by a sniper. I opened up my laptop to see comments pouring in on the live reaction Reddit thread. People were pissing, crying, and throwing up.
“This totally sucks, I don’t even want to watch anymore, I don’t know why they would do this.”
“I am so miserable,”
“I AM IN SHAMBLES, wth are we gonna do now. We are NOTHING without him. I am truly devastated absolutely no words.”
“They did not survive a capsized cruise ship just to have it end like this.”
Comments from the Reddit thread.
Unwittingly, and by the flick of the remote, I got to witness a cultural moment—The Red Wedding of Network TV—entirely by accident. It led me down a rabbit hole of showrunner Tim Minear interviews, where he talked about the desire to reintroduce stakes into the story, having to fight execs and the cast, to make this choice knowing there would be massive fan backlash. It was a world of fascinating, creative reverberations stemming from a desire to keep the show fresh.
Being too insular is a death knell to art. It’s good to find new inspiration outside of your usual beats, and it’s a dull writer who can only speak about the color of their walls and the exact shape of whatever Meta is forcing upon them. In an early month of the pandemic era quarantine, the writer William Sutcliffe tweeted, “I have been a professional writer for more than twenty years. I have made my living from the resource of my imagination. Last night I had a dream about unloading the dishwasher.”
Watching TV not made for you is a quarter step to the real advice of going outside, being in the world, and having experiences. But regardless, Art is a response, an expression of how you receive the world. Mining your quirks and interests for art is important. But if the only world you are receiving is the same four to five feelings remixed to a slightly different melody, then after a while, your mixtapes are going to suck.
I admire aspects of the decision to kill off Peter Krause’s character, because it stops the show from just being about its past and its known patterns. It forces a change and reinvents itself.
Outside of your comfort zone, it won’t be all sunshine and rainbows. Like a dog food commercial promising Fresh meats! Fresh fruits! and Fresh vegetables! Some things can seem nice but have (in my opinion) alarming Yelp reviews. But it’s this exposure to what is unusual to you that allows us to make interesting creative decisions.
I say then, to honor Ol’ boy and what I can assume his life meant from the 30 minutes of the show that I watched, do what he could not at the end. Read something in a new genre. Watch something not made for you. And critically, if you can, go outside.
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That’s all, thanks for reading!
RIP ol boy
This cracked me up. Good one.