Living the Romantic Comedy

Begin Again

That's me in my home office with Tabitha, one of our family of dogs. If you were here, she'd be tail-wagging and wiggling a welcome.

I've been off this blog for about a year, and was neglecting it for a few before that - largely because Facebook and Twitter took over my social media attention, and because the romantic comedy genre itself was in the doldrums. But as of this week, I may be leaving Facebook, for reasons that should be clear to anyone paying attention, while the romantic comedy - in the wake of Crazy Rich Asians and 80 million Netflix subscribers embracing a new crop of funny love stories like To All the Boys I've Loved Before - is back in force.

I like being where I can share interesting stuff and just sound off about whatever, while engaging friends and strangers in conversation about it. It does say "other topics apropos" above, under Living the Romantic Comedy, so I'll be here appreciating the world and analyzing the likes of anything from The Kissing Booth to Karl Ove Knausgaard and beyond.

Happy to have you aboard, first time visitors and returning readers alike. I'm currently working on the revised and expanded 20th Anniversary edition of Writing the Romantic Comedy, which Harper/Collins will publish in early 2020, so as I wrestle with putting the genre's last 20 years in perspective, all input welcomed! Please do comment, and I promise to reply. 

Good News

The great work begins: Harper/Collins will release the updated, expanded & revised 20th Anniversary Edition of "Writing the Romantic Comedy" in 2020.

 

Trainwreck & Catastrophe: Things Are Looking Up

Full disclosure: I can’t “review” Trainwreck because I worked on it. In my capacity as story analyst at Universal, I did notes on each draft of the project, so I can’t be objective about the movie, though I’m delighted to hear that you think it’s good - $30.2 million for a female-driven romantic comedy’s opening weekend is not too shabby, all the usual Marvel juggernauts aside. 

More than a hit, Trainwreck feels like a coronation, and not at all an undeserved one. Queen Amy is the comedy zeitgeist right now. Even her relentless promotion for the movie has been fun and funny, its inarguable peak this past week’s GQ magazine spread in which she appears in bed, literally smoking hot, after an apparent threesome with R2-D2 and C3-PO (Disney, in a wonderful We’re Part of the Gag But We Don’t Know It topper, has huffily announced that it never approved the shoot).

But when I first laid eyes on Trainwreck, in terms of the Four Stages of Being an Actor (1: Who’s Amy Schumer? 2: Get me Amy Schumer! 3: Get me a young Amy Schumer! 4: Who’s Amy Schumer?), Ms. Schumer was still in Stage 1. As an early Schumer adopter, I was then enjoying the first season of her Comedy Central show, so I was merely happy that her first studio-submitted draft came in very good – an unfortunately rare phenomenon in my neck of the industry woods.

 

Trainwreck is based on a simple but effective rom-com reversal: The girl plays what’s traditionally been The Guy Who Can’t Commit’s role. One impressive aspect of the movie, then and now, is that Schumer eschewed the quick-sketch fantasy gags of her series for something more personal and substantial, and managed to sustain interest all the way. With Judd Apatow attached to direct, this sly, raunchy-with-heart script didn’t really need much work, so my professional concern was meta: Could Schumer, while she excelled at stand-up and in sketch comedy, carry a movie? Could she hold the big screen?

Silly Mernit-man. Apparently the camera likes her (really likes her!) and for good, intriguing reason: Schumer joins Melissa McCarthy and other un-stereotypically appealing actresses like Kristin Wiig who’ve found favor with the contemporary audience precisely because, formidable comedic chops aside, she doesn’t look or act like a Beautiful Movie Star. She is, instead, the epitome of “relatable” – she’s someone most of us might know, or could be. 

Except, of course, for her outsized talent. What with the video clips from Inside Amy Schumer gone viral and her other media appearances, Schumer is being talked about as the one most likely to unseat Louis C.K. as our current King of Comedy (Hey, can’t we all just like, get along?), and Trainwreck is now the official grounds for her planting the scepter.

Since you’ve probably already heard all you need to hear about the movie, I’ll do a quick recap of the memes: Wait, that was Tilda Swinton?!; good dick jokes are timeless; LeBron James is a scene-stealer, Bill Hader a viable romantic lead; Apatow currently proving to be more adept with other’s material than his own (though for all his great skill with comedic actors, I’ll interject, Apatow is still prone to moments of inexplicably dead air); what’s up with all the SNL cameos?; it’s a comedy that maketh groan men weep; and… “it’s subversive.” 

This last one – “subversive” being the mandatory adjective featured in every piece I’ve ever seen on Schumer’s movie – leads me to a related romantic comedy, the British TV series Catastrophe, which aired in Britain this past January and is now available for streaming on Amazon. In its own low-key, unassuming fashion, it’s perhaps more genuinely subversive than Trainwreck (How “subversive,” after all, is a movie that, unswervingly true to mainstream rom-com tradition, ultimately posits monogamy and parenthood as the cure-all for an unconventional – and tacitly unhappy – single life?).

Catastrophe is the witty cross-cultural brainchild of Twitter-infamous comedian Rob Delany and Sharon Horgan, an Irish actress you may know from the British series Pulling. Aside from its first-rate characterization work and LOL dialogue, the thing that makes it unusually enjoyable, as well as outside the normal rom-com box, is that it’s about 40-somethings.

I know: Perish the thought, right? But these oldsters are not only sexy (on the raunch-meter, Catastrophe can go one-on-one with Trainwreck any time), they’re uncommonly sharp. The series derives a good deal of its charm from the fact that both Rob and Sharon (conveniently, these are their characters’ names) have been around the block more than a few times – but this doesn’t keep them from making the kind of spectacular mistakes real humans make, regardless. 

Some of the catastrophes that befall this instant couple (she gets pregnant from their one night – no, make that six nights – stand, and he decides to be a real dad to the kid) are pure fate, which only adds to the comedy, and provides moments of genuine drama and pathos. That parenthetical log line, by the way, is no spoiler: The series’ premise is set in motion within the first ten minutes of the first six-episode season.

Catastrophe, to its worthy credit, eats clichés for a living. What’s bracing about each episode is how fast the usual formulaic beats pop up and get swatted down, with panache. These two barely know each other – a running gag that keeps on giving – as they’re thrust into the kind of high-stakes situations that usually preoccupy a full-length feature. What gives the show its subversive edge is the depiction of two likable, smart and savvy people who, unlike stereotypically jaded “older couples,” could really make a go of it – if their bizarre situation doesn’t turn them into mortal enemies first. 

All by way of saying that with a fresh new rom-com hit at the multiplexes and a brash new rom-com series now available on smaller screens, the genre that’s been universally declared dead is evidently alive and kicking. That’s something that Living the Romantic Comedy would never, ever (insert sarcasm emoticon here) have predicted.

 

A Million Views

There was a fine white mist at the foot of the Santa Monica mountains as I biked up the path early this morning - my last bike ride on the beach as a resident of Venice: Tater and I are moving to the suburban wilds of North Hollywood tomorrow. It'll be quite a change, as I've lived in Venice for 23 years, but as we're trading a small two bedroom apartment in the over-traversed epicenter of West Side hipsterism for a three-bedroom house with yard and garage, etc. in a charming, quiet neighborhood... Well, I bought a bike rack for the car. I'll happily trek out here once a week.

Seems perfectly synchronistic that Living the Romantic Comedy is celebrating its tenth anniversary this weekend - end of an era, and all that - though not end, I hasten to clarify: I intend to keep blogging, for as long as it's still fun. But the blogger's landscape has certainly changed since I first moved into this neighborhood, ten years ago.

In June, 2005, Facebook wasn't yet as ubiquitous and Twitter didn't exist, let alone all the other platforms. And though I was late to a party that was still going strong - at the time, you could tell someone you had a blog without getting an eye-roll in response - it was a heady, stimulating community to join, especially in screenwriting site circles. These days, to have an active blog makes you feel a little... quaint. It's a bit like writing in longhand and sending an actual letter.

The most exciting aspect of it, inarguably, was and still is getting a response. These days we're all used to being liked, shared, favorited, and retweeted, but back then it was a more novel experience to blather on about something online, and suddenly get agreement, or disagreement about it from a total stranger. By the time Living RomCom was going strong, it wasn't uncommon for me to get 25-35 comments on a given post. That's astonishing, then and now.

The essential experience - reflected for me in the title of the blog - has been of growing up in public (I like to think I'm still growing), and when I looked back, digging up things to re-post this month, I saw all manner of momentous events annotated here: In my very first post, I was wondering how to write a dating site profile, and over the course of a decade, after seeking romance in all the wrong and nearly-right places, I found true love in my third and final wife; America elected its first president of color; my first novel sold to a major publishing house; and my beloved father passed away.

What I hadn't quite foreseen was a major sea change in my genre of choice. No, the romantic comedy is not dead, as I've exhaustively discussed in these pages, but in the past few years, a certain kind of formulaic chick flick (I call it the Career Girl Gets Alpha Guy movie) has finally lost its audience. I myself had dutifully supported the so-called formula of the traditional romantic comedy, but I lobbied fiercely here for more progressive fare.

One of the things that keeps me blogging about the genre, in fact, is that the rom-com seems to be morphing into something newly relatable, as such hits as Silver Linings Playbook and Her have demonstrated. I'll go out on a very short limb now to declare that when Judd Apatow and Amy Schumer's Trainwreck (which I did notes on for Universal) comes out in a few weeks and makes millions, you're suddenly going to hear - from the same people who danced on the rom-com's grave last year - that "romantic comedy is back!"

Such is the ever-cyclical nature of the industry. Meanwhile, what truly makes the blogging practice worthwhile continues to be the people I come in contact with by doing it, from my first-ever commenter Caroline Ferguson to the blog's most stalwart fan E.C. Henry. I'm amazed and gratified to talk with not just friends, but folks from all over the world on a weekly basis.

Probably the most humbling of such encounters occurred when a former consult client living in Eastern Europe informed me that having read a certain Living Rom-Com post had helped her to make a major life decision about when and how to have a baby. Her child is over a year old now, and the idea that something I wrote on this blog could turn me into a sort of cyber-godfather fills me with awe.

That's the thing, I guess: What I've mostly learned here is that when you write something and offer it to the world at large, you can never know what effect it may have, even on people you don't and may never know. And this is the best endorsement for facing one's fears and continuing to write that I can think of.

Thank you all, at any rate, for keeping me company thus far. And please comment to let me know what you'd like to see more (or less of) on this blog. Largely due to the efforts of blog colleague Scott Myers, whose promotion of a recent post currently has my total page view numbers at 999,690 and rising, I'm within 300+ hits of reaching one million by the day's end. You, my friend, may even be my millionth viewer!

May your days be filled with love and laughter.

(Illustrations by Adrian Tomine) 

The Age of Me

    

Just in case you missed it on SNL this past weekend, here's the spot-on Avengers: Age of Ultron satire that demonstrates (along with Marvel's corporate cluelessness re: feminism) why the trad rom-com has largely bitten the dust. 

Nuggets

Let's get the hyperbole out of the way: No one, nowhere - not on TV, in the movies, in theater, in any spoken medium - is writing romantic comedy right now as brilliantly as Louis C.K. 

Much as we (I'm encompassing me, fans, the people who gave Louis two Emmy awards, and perhaps you) may have enjoyed the first three seasons of Louie, what he's been doing in Season 4 is nothing short of mind-blowing. The first two episodes were perfect little stand-alone short features, the second of them like American Fellini, and the third is already culturally historic due to the Fat Girl's monologue. 

Then, in a series of episodes (titled "Elevator"), Louie returned to the ongoing linear story format, the central storyline being: Louie meets and falls in love with Amia (Eszter Balint), a Hungarian woman who doesn't speak English. It's the real thing - a rarity for Louie - blessed and cursed with its finite nature: she has to go back home, where a husband and child await, and there's no negotiating. In last night's episode, as promised, after a mere month of bittersweet joy, Amia left, with Louie bereft.

One of the deep pleasures of this season has been the recurring role Louie has written for Charles Grodin, a world-class curmudgeon and one of the great comedic actors of our age. His character, Dr. Bigelow, grudgingly assisted Louie when he had back trouble early on, and has become an unwilling mentor figure to our hapless hero. In last night's encounter, Louie accosted Grodin as he was walking his three-legged dog, and told the good doctor of his terrible situation:

Louie: Look, I liked the feeling of being in love with her, I liked it. But now she’s gone and I miss her, and it sucks! And I didn’t think it was going to be this bad, and I feel like - Why even be happy, if it’s just gonna lead to this?  It wasn’t worth it. 

Dr. Bigelow: (shakes his head, grimly smiling) Misery… is wasted on the miserable. 

Louie: What?

Dr. Bigelow: Y’know… I’m not entirely sure what your name is, but you are a classic idiot. You think spending time with her, kissing her, having fun with her, you think that’s what it was all about? That was love?

Louie: Yeah!

Dr. Bigelow: This is love. Missing her because she’s gone, wanting to die – You’re so lucky, you’re like a walking poem. Would you rather be some kind of a… a fantasy, some kind of a… a Disney ride? Is that what you want? Don’t you see, this is the good part, this is what you’ve been digging for all this time. Now you finally have it in your hand, this sweet – nugget – of love. Sweet, sad, love, and you want to throw it away. You’ve got it all wrong.

Louie: I thought this was the bad part.

Dr. Bigelow: No! The bad part is when you forget her, when you don’t care about her, when you don’t care about anything. The bad part is coming, so enjoy the heartbreak while you can, for God’s sakes!... Lucky son of a bitch, I haven’t had my heart broken since Marilyn walked out on me, since I was thirty-five years old. What I would give to have that feeling again…! Y’know, I’m not really sure what your name is, but you may be the single most boring person I have ever met. No offense.

Critics throw around the word "Chekhovian" a lot, but in the finale of last night's penultimate episode (Louie's been running them in twos every Monday night on FX, because: he can), a scene in a restaurant where Louie and Amia finally transcended the frustrating wordlessness of their relationship, Louis C.K. went head to head with Anton C., and what he delivered was every bit as funny, sad, and soul-moving as anything Masha, Vanya, Sonya, and the rest ever said or did.

So if you're a fan of romance and comedy and/or a human with a beating heart, and you haven't been on top of this? Go forth and watch Louie, and be sublimely fulfilled. 

Fosse

If you’re looking for a holiday gift for someone in The Industry – and by that I mean anyone working in movies, television, theater, even in dance or the music business – the new biography Fosse by Sam Wasson has got you covered. 

Bob Fosse, you may remember, is the only man to have won the show business trifecta: an Oscar, a Tony, and an Emmy in one year (1972). But did it make him happy? Therein lies the tale, or at least, the core of it.

Fosse is a big, fat book that may look intimidating (the text is nearly 600 pages, pre-notes and acknowledgements), but it’s such an engrossing page-turner of a read that I’m not alone in thinking that it could’ve been longer. Reviews have been raves, and the book’s already an Amazon bestseller.

Author Wasson is a friend, but with this definitive bio out now, and the NY Times bestseller Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M. (about the making of Breakfast at Tiffany’s) behind him, he hardly needs any smoke-blowing promotion from me.  And I would’ve eaten this book up with a spoon, regardless.

What Sam has pulled off here is no small feat. Due to his prodigious research and insights, you feel that you are there, fly-on-the-wall style, for all the events that transpire in Fosse’s life, and you feel like you’re getting the real deal – that you’re in Fosse’s head or, at least, that you’re with the man as he actually was, brought to vivid life in all his neurotic glory.

In a recent NPR interview, well worth a listen, Sam relates one of the many great anecdotes that are in the book, about an encounter between Fosse and his close friend, the formidable screen and TV writer, Paddy Chayefsky (the "Gwen" Fosse refers to is his wife Gwen Verdon, and Nicole, their daughter):

Fosse [is] in the hospital having just had a heart attack, facing open-heart surgery the next morning - bypass surgery - he's sitting there with Paddy. Paddy's going over Fosse's will, which he has just rewritten. And Paddy, of course, reads every single word of every single page of the document, expecting to find himself in there. He realizes Fosse's left him out.

And Paddy looks up from the will and looks to Fosse and says: I'm not in here. I'm your best friend of 10 years; where am I? And Fosse says: Well, Paddy, I don't worry about you. You're going to be fine. I wanted to make sure Gwen was OK, and Nicole was OK... I wanted to provide for my family. I don't worry about you. You know I love you. I got to provide for these other people. And Paddy looks up and says: Fuck you, live.

So that gives you a flavor of what these guys were. And Fosse laughs so hard and… all the tubes are plugged into his nose and the heart machine starts beeping and - I mean, it was a constant party in Fosse's room.

 

Yes, there was a lot of laughter, but Fosse also makes it clear that a deep well of fear, anger, and pain lay behind the singular icon’s great achievements. The book chronicles how this infamously driven workaholic sought to deal with his demons, and it serves as a kind of cautionary tale for all of us creative types who seek to somehow keep our work and our personal lives in balance. In an e-mail exchange with Sam, the biographer had this to say about his subject:

It's a book about the problems of insecurity [and] the vulnerability that comes from being an artist. One of the things I love about Fosse is that he endured an amplified version of the problems we in the creative realm deal with, namely, "How do I make it better? Can I make it better? Why is it never enough? Why am I never enough? What's wrong with me?" The fear of creation. Not fear: the panic. For me it is always there. And so I'm very moved by Fosse's story... I hope people read it as being bigger than Fosse.

It felt that way to me, and I think anyone who delves into this addictively readable book will come away with some big-sized thoughts to ponder, as well as an interest in re-experiencing the handful of great movies that Fosse’s panic, and talent, produced.

[Sam Wasson will be signing copies of Fosse this Friday night (12/6) at the Aero Theater, as well as helming a panel in conjunction with showings of Cabaret and All That Jazz – details in this link.]

 

Adam's Rom-Com Run

No, Living the RomCom hasn't become a 24/7 Girls zone, but I can't help taking note of Sunday night's finale, a typically controversial Lena Dunham special, in that it once again reversed expectations... in perhaps one of the last conceivably shocking ways.

After all the dark and disturbing character turns, the archly meta cultural commentary, and the perversely reality-based tweaking of romantic comedy fantasies, in the end [spoilers!] Dunham and her crew chose to honor that mother of all rom-com clichés by having anti-hero-turned-white-knight Adam run, literally run to the rescue of damsel-in-distress Hannah, kicking down her door and sweeping her up in his manly arms.

I suspect that Dunham, Apatow and staff may have availed themselves of Pixar's Rules of Storytelling #9 ("...Make a list of what wouldn't happen next...") to arrive at this unexpected conclusion to their scary roller-coaster of a Season 2, but it was true to the determinedly irony-laden spirit of the show.

Adam you may remember as the ugly sexual abuser of his current girlfriend, so not so much attired in shining armor (he was buff-ly shirtless), and Hannah wasn't so much about to get on a plane to Paris as she was about to disappear down her bedcovers rabbit-hole prior, perhaps, to a stint at Bellevue. But the effect and the execution was about the same: there was even pounding emo-rock on the soundtrack (hey, nice synch between the drums and Adam's footfalls on the stairs, sound editor person!), courtesy of the writer/director's paramour.

Did your heart swell, nonetheless? Mine did, though I was simultaneously laughing, both at the bald absurd logic of the conceit, and its incidental execution: the detail of Adam barking at Hannah on his iPhone as he ran was about as perfect a 2013 rom-com update as one could wish for. And it is heartening, I gotta admit, to see a trope as old as... well, romance still delivering the goods, at this late date. Be as po-mo proto-feminist as you like, Dunham's resolution suggests, but you'll still swoon for an archetypal clinch.

Proof that we do live in a time that's a little different from medieval can be found in this excellent link, wherein some savvy Brooklynites have managed to specifically locate and time Adam's rom-com run down to the second, suggesting that while we may still fall for the same old shtick, we've gotten a lot more efficient at annotating it.

Girls Talk

Oh, shut up about it, already: The entitlement and the unconscious racial elitism and everything else that's wrong with the kids these days, namely Lena Dunham.  You go write some scenes that are as smart and funny and surprising and button-pushing as Dunham did in this past Sunday night's episode of Girls and get your material produced, and then we can talk. 

Love her or hate her, Dunham was inarguably articulate in responding to her critics re: the "all white girls in an all white world" issue on NPR with Terri Gross last week, noting that she takes such criticism seriously, but was writing what she knows (e.g. being half-WASP, half-Jewish, her foursome is made up of two of each) and that she isn't yet honestly equipped to write an ethnic leading role with the specificity and accuracy that it would require (the second season, apparently, will take on this issue, and without simply plugging in a token person of color).

Once the dust has settled from the backlash and the back-biting (the snarky poster above is maybe the best of it), perhaps we'll be able to acknowledge that at 25, Lena Dunham is one of the most talented comedy/romantic comedy writers who's presently working this turf.  And given what's been an upsetting paucity of active female writer/directors in the industry until relatively recently (with the stats still appallingly low), I for one am happy to give the Girls auteur her props.

Essentially a serial ensemble rom-com in form, like hundreds of such TV sitcoms, Girls is pushing its envelope on a weekly basis, with its characterization work admirably complex, and its dialogue absolutely first tier.  While it's not solving all the world's sitcom problems in a single episode, it is sneaking boldly into territory that formerly hasn't been exposed in your average bear's romantic comedy.  It investigates the mess of contemporary sex and sexual identity and gender dynamics with a refreshingly clear-eyed honesty that allows its characters to have their angst while making LOL fun of them.

The dialogue is eminently quotable; Jessa having sex with an ex-boyfriend who's supposedly over her, to prove "I cannot be smoted" evoked a "wish I'd written that" response in me (There are actually too many good lines in Episode 4 to cite a favorite, but the comments on this "Guys on Girls" post highlight many of the best).  Meanwhile, some of the subtler work is purely cinematic and theatrical: I loved the silent dawning epiphany on the face of Marnie (Allison Williams) as she realizes, mid-fuck, that she really does have to dump her boyfriend.

All of this puts me in mind of a Jezebel post that a Living RomCom reader sent me last week, bemoaning the lack of decent roles for rom-com actresses past their perky prime.  It's not that "the romantic comedy is dead" (a dumb trope that's replaced the hoary "is the theater dead?" query of past decades), but that a very specific paradigm for a very specific kind of chick flick may have finally run its cultural course.

You know the one: It stars Kate or Reese or J-Lo or someone like them, and it's about a 20-something with career issues who's out to land a man, and you didn't go to see it because you'd already seen it and been bored with it too many times over the past two decades.  The codified-to-fossilization status of this particular movie is what's dated it, not any failure of mainstream audience interest in a good date night pic.  If you don't believe me, go look at the box office/DVD figures for Bridesmaids.

The boundary-push of Girls is in keeping with the sensibilities that have made the small screen where a lot of the action is nowadays, event-movies like The Avengers aside.  And if the somewhat older rom-com women want to get in on the action, they might look to the likes of Dunham, Liz Meriwether, Tina Fey, Sarah Silverman, Issa Rae, Amy Poehler and these other top female comedy writers (and these) to give them a new take on a viable rom-com vehicle.

If the 2000s was Revenge of the Boy-Man for romantic comedy (The Apatow Decade), the teens is looking like Game On For the Girls.  And it's certainly made my watch a lot more interesting.

Little Screen, Big Characters

By now you've heard the news, if you haven't already articulated the meme yourself.  War's over: The movies lost, and TV won.  For both the writers and the fans of good storytelling, the action used to be at the multiplex on Friday and Saturday night, and now it's in your living room on Sundays.

I mean, really: If you're over 25 years old, can you think of a single feature release in the past couple of years that has galvanized your attention and made you care, fiercely and consistently (in an OMG, I can't wait for the next episode way) as a season of Mad Men, Game of Thrones, or Breaking Bad?  Sub in your own recent small screen addiction of choice, be it The Walking Dead or Downton Abbey, et al (I'm in the "Killing, you cheated on me last year, and you're dead to me now" camp, but you may be more forgiving), and now quick: Name me the movie that excited your passions that intensely.

The Artist?  AH-HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA...

The industry/cultural reasons for this have been chewed over in print and online so extensively that I won't waste your shortened attention span with the details, except to highlight one that doesn't always get its due emphasis: It's the characters, stupid.

Yes, cultural juggernaut The Hunger Games does have over-25 appeal, and despite its absymal direction and meh screenwriting, has finally delivered unto us if not the, at least a 21st Century Heroine We've Been Waiting For.  But in its characterization work, as in its storytelling craft, Games is a plastic Sears Roebuck guitar next to Game of Throne's Stradivarius.  And need we invoke the obvious two word argument ender, The Wire?

Of course it's a function of time and space.  It's exceedingly difficult to approach the level of depth and complexity of character in a feature's two hours that you can achieve in a whole season of hour-long episodes.  But there's a basic difference in sensibility at stake.  The big screen has become our culture's colisseum, where nuances of personality aren't exactly the main event.  The little screen has exuberantly taken on just such nuance, and succeeded in capturing the culture's hearts and minds.

[Note: SPOILAGE ahead.] Mad Men has been careening all over the place this season, which only makes it all the more watchable.  Last week's Gothic weirdness had Don Draper's murder victim under his bed (When they cut to daughter Sally under Grandma's couch, my wife said, "God, everyone's under the bed," and I said, "Yeah, including the shark!" but fortunately, said murder was only a dream sequence, so no actual sharks were jumped).  Last night was slapstick comedy.

When Laine rolled up his sleeves and prepared to duke it out with Pete Campbell in the Sterling Cooper Pryce conference room, Roger said, "I know cooler heads should prevail, but am I the only one who wants to see this?"  To which most of us fans undoubtedly replied, "Are you f--king kidding me? Get in line!"  By the way, good season setup misdirect, Mr. Weiner, since we were fully expecting Pete to come to figurative blows with Roger, not Laine.

Pete Campbell is a supporting character in this ensemble, yet in an episode that deepened the story line of even lesser supporting player Ken Cosgrove, we experienced the equivalent of a John Cheever novella in the depiction of Pete's rise and fall.  We don't "like" but we certainly understand Pete by now, in all his many layers; as a quietly tragic shadow Don who will never be Don, he's a more fully realized character than the protagonists of most major studio releases in recent memory. 

Kudos to actor Vincent Kartheiser, who's brought all kinds of shading to snivelly Pete over the years, but it's the writing, obviously, that has kept us so thoroughly absorbed in the machinations of such people who - had we met them briefly in real life - we probably wouldn't even want to know.

Putting us in the shoes of the Other has always been a primary pursuit and profound pleasure of good writing.  This past Sunday night, whether you were with Mad, Games, the new (and extremely promising) Girls, and/or all of the above, you got to revel in that pleasure.  And here's the thing.  I had to go to Imdb to double-check the writing credit of that Mad Men episode afterwards, but yes, it was that Frank Pierson - the guy who wrote the big screen movie classic Dog Day Afternoon.

Where else would a writer that good be working today?  It's not even really a question.