Part of the beauty of long-form storytelling is getting to experience the complex lives of interesting characters alongside them. You get a glimpse of their boring office jobs, their petty friend drama and even their embarrassing losses. You get to know them on an intimate level, finding the comedy or sadness coloring their world. You want to know how they react to it and what they’ll do next. Like any nuanced human being, these characters contain multitudes, and that’s why we love them; but, after a (possibly too-long) while on the air, the complex characters we once knew can turn into caricatures of themselves.
All characters are exaggerated in some way — especially on sitcoms or teen dramas — to keep the audience entertained. But when every new season tries to top the previous one with more laughs, more tears and more drama, the level of exaggeration takes once-interesting characters and distills them into one-trick ponies. Hundreds of characters have suffered this fate, and it morphs their respective shows into what is, essentially, a lower-quality parody of itself.
“The Office,” for instance, was a sitcom tasked with highlighting the everyday wonders of mundane nine-to-five work, and it did so with its down-to-earth ensemble cast. They play off of each other’s boredom, each harboring their own hopes and dreams of leaving work at the end of the day and finding fulfillment in their personal lives. In season one, they all get to have that, but by the series finale, some characters are just a shell of their former fleshed-out selves. No character demonstrates that more clearly than Kevin Malone (Brian Baumgartner, “Trash Truck”). In his early days, he’s a competent accountant who sometimes takes a while to wrap his head around what’s happening in the office. If he was confused about one of Jim’s (John Krasinski, “A Quiet Place”) pranks or couldn’t figure out how the copier worked, you’d laugh, but you’d never think he was a harebrained fool for it.
The problem arises, as it inevitably does, when the fervor for a laugh outweighs the well-being of the character. It slowly ceased to matter whether Kevin could actually do the job he’s had for years — or even do basic math. What mattered most by the end of the series was how dumb he could be for a punchline. The Kevin we meet at the start of the show is not the same person who spilled an entire pot of chili all over the carpet and thought scooping it back in would solve the problem, or the guy who needed to be talked out of omitting placeholder words because he actually thought he’d be able to save time that way. No one bats an eye when he does these things, because his exaggeration by that point had become the new normal. Of course, he’s the bumbling idiot of the office, who can even remember when he used to be just another accountant?
These exaggerations don’t stop at writing choices, they extend to all points of characterization. In season one, Kevin’s voice is disinterested and slow as he delivers his lines. He laughs along when his coworkers do, but he doesn’t do so at childish sex jokes every chance he gets. The new Kevin, however, is practically a child. From his higher-pitched voice that rounds out every word out of his mouth to the incessant laughter at things only a 12-year-old would find funny, he’s a new man-child. That’s what gets the laughs, right? That’s what it’s all about?
The issue with this isn’t just that it prioritizes cheap and easy comedy — a laugh makes you feel good regardless of how sophisticated its construction is. It takes a much bigger toll on the show’s storytelling. Any arc Kevin could’ve had is thrown out the window; any audience members identifying with him — the way they might identify with a fully-formed Jim — is tossed out with the bathwater. You’re no longer watching a person, you’re watching a walking punchline.
One of the most famous instances of this descent down an exceedingly slippery slope is “The Simpsons’” Ned Flanders (Harry Shearer, “This is Spinal Tap”). His case was so egregious this phenomenon was coined as “flanderization” after him. He began the show as a well-rounded character who happened to be religious and ended it as the epitome of a negative Evangelical Christian stereotype with no other personality traits. He’s no longer a caring father, a generous neighbor or an upstanding citizen — just an extremist caricature for the show to poke fun at. Over the course of a staggering 35-season run, turning the dial up on certain character traits is bound to happen, but there’s no excuse for drowning out the rest.
Part of the issue is the indulgence in overly-prolonged series runs. We hate to see our favorite shows canceled too soon, but it can be just as painful to watch them go on for way too long because of some overzealous desire for production. By the time they become entirely unrecognizable to us, we wish they’d ended while they still had their heart. Flanderization doesn’t end at just characters; it extends to entire TV shows. Series that started out with the intention to make a statement about their genre or the world at large can turn into the quintessential example of the very thing they set out to criticize. Take “Glee,” which began with already overly-exaggerated characters as a way to satirize kitschy teen dramedies. Sticking to this goal in its first season, the show set itself apart as a uniquely inventive story among its peers. Having too much of a good thing made it lean heavier into the outlandish teen drama storylines so much that, by its final season, audiences didn’t know if the show was even satirical anymore.
A similar fate befell the legendary “Gossip Girl,” which began as a satire of soap operas. They poked fun at the insta-love and dark family secret storylines that were a staple of the genre in its early seasons to enormous popular success. Just a few seasons later, however, they lost that heart and began pumping out evil twin plots and secret baby reveals like there was no tomorrow. “Gossip Girl” became the biggest culprit of tawdry, predictable soap opera trope abuse in sincerity; it wasn’t making a statement about these patterns anymore, it was using them to keep itself going at the cost of its inventiveness. It stopped being itself and, subsequently, stopped being fun to watch.
Without intentional storytelling, TV shows morph from rich escapes and reflections of the world to empty calories meant to occupy as much of our time as possible. Its capacity to make us feel and think and dream shrinks interminably. I’m not going to sit around and watch a bunch of flanderized caricatures bounce around a screen, it’ll take real people to keep the TV lights on.
Summer Managing Arts Editor Mina Tobya can be reached at mtobya@umich.edu.
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