Situationist Comedy?

If the medium is truly the message, as Marshall McLuhan so openly asserts, the message of today's TV, network or cable, is Brain Rot. From the suburban mayhem of `The Brady Bunch,' to Dr. Marcus Welby, who after having treated his patients, followed them around for, like, years, to `Diff'rent Strokes,' where a philanthropic white millionaire adopts two young black Harlem boys (see, poverty is the white man's burden and to be altruistic to is to exert power over), we have awaken from are sedation and we are bored. All that cable has done is to re-present us with the stuff we were already fed up with 10 years ago. Calgon©, take me away!
Luckily, some dramatis personae took it upon themselves to give us more. Who hasn't thrilled to the Pop Art-ish antics of the 1960s `Batman'? The archcriminals liked their outfits so much that they even kept them on in jail (and what hardened murderer wouldn't be turned on by Frank Gorshon's Riddler pygamas?). If superficial shows reflect our superficial lives, and equally, vice versa, postmodernism suggests that all has been attempted, every nuance has been tried. Our remote control-wielding fingers are caught in the rusty hinges of late capitalism; what remains is to formulate a simulacrum of entertainment in the guise of the spectacle of Entertainment.
`It's Garry Shandling's Show' was a bold instance of self-deconstructive critique in situation comedy. Until recently broadcast on Showtime and Fox, Shandling involved his live`amera operators at every step. He parodied himself as the show was in progress, such as sitting in his living room, watching a video of his show,during his show. We could relate to his neurotic obsessions (e.g. hair) and his dorky friends (Leonard, Grant Schumaker). In one episode, he is on a date. He goes back to the woman's house and they are sitting there watching `Gilligan's Island.' The date was just bombing. His date sat there, singing along with the theme song, Garry is sitting there thinking about how the crew can't get off the island and how he can't get out of this loser date. I'm almost halfway finished, how do you like it so far?
A sterling sitcom, although a one season wonder, has to be Chris Elliott, Jr.'s `Get a Life,' on Fox. Elliot stars as Chris Peterson, a 30-year old paperboy in a small Minnesota town. He still lives at home with his parents, with his real life father playing his dad. The plot revolves around jr.'s futile attempt to put some meaning into his worthless life, yet it turns out to be exciting anyway, pretty much by accident. Cool episodes include Peterson starring as a wildebeest in a zoo animal disco musical on rollerskates, and a soap parody, in which he meets a beautiful model, falls in love, marries her, has an affair, a fight, and gets divorced, all in an afternoon (a 30 min. show). All the more tragic because it was love at first sight:
Model: "What's your favorite song?"
Chris: "`Billy, Don't Be a Hero.'"
Model: "So's mine!"
References to consumer products, in innocuous contexts, abound: "I'm going to treat you to a traditional Peterson Sunday breakfast, lots of bacon and Sprite©."
An interesting new show of the TV season is `Herman's Head,' on Fox. It stars a guy, Herman. Whenever he thinks about stuff, there's this whole group of people inhabiting his head. They slug it out over which course of action Herman should follow. The group consists of a dweeby moral guy, an intellectual, mature one, a female with a mystical, spiritual side, and a slob who wants to gets drunk and laid all the time (he's my favorite).
Methodologically, this show is potentially radical. Whereas Shandling established a rapore with his audience and the camera, Herman introspects himself: deconstructive in a different way. Yet `Herman's Head' is wrought with numerous problems.
As with every mainstream TV show I can remember, the voyeur is still the man. It is Herman the male who imagines what that woman would look like without her clothes. I'm not saying that it's wrong to wonder what people look like naked, but that every viewer, regardless of gender, sees the world through the `masculine' perspective. Herman is white, straight and middle class, so the same arguments could follow here, too. So although the form is radical, the content, what the Herman character `is,' lags far behind. The audience is forced to adopt the voyeurism of the dominant segment of society. Which is not to say that there aren't ways of subverting this; see for instance ways the Situationists suggest (e.g. Guy Debord).
Another equally disturbing facet of the show is its moralism. Herman has the chance to fuck a woman, and indeed that is the intention of the slob in his head. Alas the holy Trinity of the other three inhabitants merges to form the Platonic truism that order in the Republic can be preserved only if Reason holds the base passions in check. Herman ends up not sleeping with the woman and he is rewarded; she really respects him and thinks he is exceedingly romantic because of his moral fortitude. Of course in real life, 90% of straight guys would've gone for it, but capitalism will not favor art that isn't its propaganda tool. Even `Married with Children' which at first glance appears to be a renegade challenge to traditionalism (e.g. the characters are cynical and are slobs), defines itself as the anti-family program, in reaction to the `legitimate' Platonic idealism of `The Cosby Show.'
Our present situation does not favor art in which the characters desire to, and willfully do, lose their self-control: the antithesis to Taylorization, the rationalization of production, efficiency, and its concomitant society of surveillance, which Foucault so eloquently critiques. There is a good passage by Nietzsche in The Birth of Tragedy. In it, he writes that Greek tragedy was killed off by the type of productions that Plato and his disciples favored, ones that would inculcate moral values and a sense of civic virtue in the polis. Here is a victim.
PeeWee Herman has gotten a bad rap. I'm not going to get into an infantile argument against the hypocracy of moral puritanism in our society, nor against cultural feminists who say that Herman must be a sexist for patronizing the establishment he did. Those factions are wrong here, but I want to discuss PeeWee's brilliant show, `Pee Wee's Playhouse,' until recently shown on CBS. If there is one show on Sat. mornings that encouraged kids to create instead of being receptacles for garbage, to challenge instead of accepting, to think freely instead of sitting there to be raped by docile consumption, it was PeeWee Herman's show. He challenged gender roles (c'mon, that genie was a flamer!), racial stereotypes (the African-American Cowboy) and in the end dispelled the myth that all children's characters are, or should be, squeaky clean with their morals. The problem now is the Watergate problem (see Jean Baudrillard's discussions): Now that the `criminal' has been caught, now that the moral order, the myth upon which this rickety heap of lies we call our democracy stands has been purged, we can accept uncritically everything that will be fed to us in the future. It is beneficial for a system such as ours to have a Nixon, a Herman, a Milli Vanilli every once in a while, to identify them as conspirators; it tends to reify the `legitimacy' of a whole rotten system that can pass off the untruth that is pure and the ideal to which we aspire and should want to preserve.