MEMORABLE TV MOMENTS?

posted by James Reel

From the Associated Press:

The most memorable moments in television history will be revealed during the 60th Primetime Emmy Awards next month, and it's up to voters to decide which bits should take top honors. Forty “moments”—20 dramatic and 20 comedic—are in the running. Comedy contenders include _M-A-S-H_, _Mork & Mindy_, _Sex and the City_ and _The Cosby Show_, while _Buffy the Vampire Slayer_, _Miami Vice_, _Moonlighting_ and _The Sopranos_ are among the drama candidates. … Fans can watch clips and vote for their favorite moments online until Sept. 15. The top five vote-getters in each category will be presented during the Emmy show on Sept. 21, and the two winning moments will be revealed just before the year's outstanding drama and comedy series are named.

You can vote for the comedy nominees here, and the drama contenders here.

I stopped watching TV on a regular basis in the late 1970s, but it was a constant, nattering presence in my childhood and every couple of years I do catch up with some series on DVD (my current project is Battlestar Galactica. So I was curious about the nominees.

And disappointed. I didn’t watch all the clips, but I’m not sure that even those from shows I have watched really constitute “most memorable moments.”

Let’s look first at the comedy category. First, the clip from M-A-S-H doesn’t belong there. Yes, Radar’s announcement that Henry’s plane had gone down en route home was certainly a memorable scene, but it was a dramatic scene, not a comedic one. (It was one of the big turning points in the tone of the series, as it evolved from a wisecracking comedy to a humorous drama.) It’s what semanticists would call a category error.

So what about the clips that are there? I skipped the shows I never or rarely watched (about half of them) and sampled only those that I knew I had sympathy for. Even so, I wasn’t impressed. The minute-and-a-half from The Honeymooners is just a slow-paced buildup to a very obvious punchline (about “addressing the ball” in a golf lesson). The final scene from Newhart, in which Bob wakes up in the bedroom of his previous series and realizes that the entire series he’s now ending has been a dream, is a fine joke, but it ends with a very weak line about Japanese food. Richard Nixon saying “Sock it to me?” on Laugh-In was a remarkable coup for both the show and Nixon, but I’m not sure that three seconds of comic incongruity equals greatness. Somehow I’d never seen the Mary Tyler Moore episode in which they memorialize a dead clown, supposedly one of the funniest things in TV history, and now judging from the clip I just don’t find it all that funny; the set-up is too obvious, and the lines just aren’t as zany as they need to be. The Carol Burnett Gone with the Wind parody is, on the other hand, a model of TV sketch comedy and includes a priceless joke about the heroine’s dress, but I wonder what makes this more memorable than any other snippet from that series?

There are problems in the drama category, too. I never watched Little House on the Prairie, but clicked its clip out of curiosity. Pa is telling one of his daughters that she is slowly going blind in a scene notable for effective, long pauses in the very simple dialog, but the effect is spoiled by melodramatic music at the end. James Caan’s mumbled hospital scene from Brian’s Song is not, in my opinion, the most memorable moment from that old made-for-TV movie; I’d prefer Billy Dee Williams’ little speech toward the end (although I haven’t seen it in about 35 years, and it might not be as effective as I recall). The moment in Buffy the Vampire Slayer jumps to her death (only for her to be resurrected in the next season) was excellent in the context of the series, but frankly it wasn’t the best example of Joss Whedon’s writing for that show, and the little post-apocalyptic scene of mourning that followed this one was more moving, and, besides, I can think of a lot of “memorable moments” from the series that were better than this. The X-Files snippet, in which Mulder and Scully finally kiss, was cathartic for the characters and fans of the series, but frankly the scene isn’t as well-written as it could have been. Of the clips I watched, the only one I felt was worth voting for was from the famous “City on the Edge of Forever” episode of Star Trek. There are no 23rd-century aliens and spaceships here, just an intense scene in which Kirk and Spock are reunited with a formerly deranged Dr. McCoy in the 1930s, and in order to prevent history from being changed by their presence, Kirk prevents McCoy from saving the life of a woman with whom Kirk has fallen in what for him passes for love. It’s an emotionally complex scene of reunion and death and motivations that the characters themselves don’t fully understand, and it holds up very well on its own.

Surely there are other scenes of this caliber in the 60-year history of television. Why weren’t they submitted for voting?