"A Job That Needs Doing"
ABC's gritty comedy The Job is back, and thank
god for it. In a season that has seen some of the
worst comedy offerings yet by the networks, The
Job might offer some slight hope for the
resurrection of the seemingly dying art form of TV
situation comedy.
Not that The Job is yet a great show; it only
rarely rises to that level, and often quickly slips
back again to merely serviceable. But it is at least
an honest show -- by which I mean, it strips away the
veneer of the sanitized, saccharin "reality" that
characterizes so much of today's television comedy.
Instead of a world where even cute little kids are
ready with perfect quips, The Job gives
everyone real life dialogue, real life responses, and
at least semi-real-life situations. It takes a generic
TV situation -- the detective show -- and brings an
updated sensibility to it, much like NYPD Blue
meets Barney Miller.
The Job centers around the flawed anti-hero
Detective Mike McNeil (Dennis Leary), whose good heart
is deeply buried under a mound of biting cynicism, a
history of womanizing and drug use, and a massive
American rebel complex. It's a role Leary has been
playing elsewhere for years, and it fits him
perfectly. Surrounding Leary is an ensemble cast of
detectives who fuel the ample side plots available in
each episode. Most essential is Bill Nunn as Detective
Terence "Pip" Phillips, McNeil's partner and
conscience; it's his rather thankless job to point out
constantly just how much trouble McNeil is headed for.
Add Dianne Farr as eye candy that can act; two
likable, joke-adept standups in Lenny Clark and Adam
Ferrara; and the irascible Keith David as the
ever-angry lieutenant, and the show has plenty of
acting pop.
It is also nicely written. The script twists aren't
afraid to go to the edge (a nun strips on an interview
table, McNeil spends an entire episode needing to
"relieve himself" in the same bathroom where an
escaped suspect has two handguns on him), and the
dialogue is crisp, quick, and funny. The writers
scrape their plots together out of the small conflicts
and ordinary situations to be found (or imagined) in
police life. It locates comedy in the merger of a
reality-based form and the sitcom form, where the
reality keeps things from being so TV silly, and the
sitcom keeps things fast and light.
But it is a deeper theory of what television might be
that makes The Job worth watching. It is
created by Leary and Peter Tolan, whose previous
credits include one of the best anti-sitcom sitcoms
ever, the sorely missed Larry Sanders Show.
Like that show, The Job abandons the
multi-camera studio format for an almost
documentary-style handheld camera, but it is its
attitude that truly makes it stand out in stark
contrast to ordinary network programming. It is a show
that isn't afraid of censors, isn't afraid of adult
content, and doesn't limit itself to silly innuendo in
order to deal with its chosen content. Maybe the
ultimate gift of cable will be, finally, to push
network execs away from the conservative policies that
always seem to kill good art by limiting what creators
can try. With shows like Sex and the City, HBO
has shown in splendid fashion just how good TV can be
when advertisers and network business affairs get out
of the way of the artists and let them work. It's
possible -- with its more adult-oriented plots, its
keen writing, and its edgy attitude -- that The
Job is a network comedy reaching for that same
standard.
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