Culture Blues

Why Didn’t You Watch? The Job

Every so often in "Why didn't you watch...?" we take a look at a television series that was criminally and irresponsibly canceled before its time; taking a critical look at the show while also delving into what was wrong with all of you people that you couldn't tune in for 30 or 60 minutes each week. The rules are simple: the show must have been canceled, it can't have lasted for two full seasons, and we have to like it. So, why didn't you watch...?

In March 2001, when The Job premiered, it’s safe to say there had never been anything like it on network TV (except for perhaps the wonderful Action, a lock for future attention in this column and a show that also stars a loquacious stand up comedian who was in Suicide Kings). Denis Leary and his newly minted partner in grime Peter Tolan produced a somewhat traditional workplace sitcom with a few major departures from the norm, including an unlikely protagonist, a drastically different production style and a ton of foul language. Unsurprisingly, the world wasn’t ready for it, and it lasted a total of 19 episodes over two seasons. With Leary and Tolan's more recent show, the similarly themed Rescue Me, beginning its sixth and supposedly penultimate season last week, this seems like a good time to revisit its predecessor.

With its single camera, varied locations and lack of laugh track, The Job can  be framed as the progenitor for all of the important half hour comedies of the last decade, including Scrubs, The Office and the granddaddy of them all, Arrested Development. Its adherence to, and willingness to play with, tired traditional sitcom conventions places it very close to these three in particular. What makes The Job significantly different from these though, is that they all employ very obvious attempts at sentimentality. The current mood is to mix laughs with melodrama. The Job, however, never tugs at the heartstrings, and the drama it employs is much more of the existential dread kind. We never really see the warm inner workings of people on The Job. Instead, we just stare into the abyss. In some ways, it’s closer to Homicide: Life on the Streets than its comedy brethren.

Despite the many similarities to modern half hour comedies, I’m thinking of a different show as I revisit The Job’s opening moments. I’m thinking of The Shield. Granted, I’m often thinking of The Shield, and chances are good that if you’re talking to me I’m thinking about The Shield because I wish I was watching The Shield because The Shield is fantastic. But in this case, I’m thinking of the father of the prestige programming movement because it’s the gold standard for establishing your protagonist as a bad guy early on. Of course, Leary’s Mike McNeil does not plan and execute the murder of another cop in the first episode, but he is exposed as a heavy drinker, a pill popper, an adulterer, a cop with a disregard for regulations and results, and just an overall mouthy jerk.

For all the preconceptions that it shatters however, The Job is a pretty standard workplace comedy and a terribly unorthodox cop show. The characters bicker, play jokes, and obsess over small things. Largely they find ways to not do their jobs. There is usually some case or assignment to be worked, but the case and its resolution are often almost an afterthought. This allows for the development of characters and dynamics that fuel the stories rather than investigations.

Another great performance in a career filled with them

Leary’s cohorts in this pageant of rule-breaking make for a truly stellar supporting cast. In fact, on my second viewing of the complete series, I found myself far more interested in and taken with two of the secondary characters than with McNeil. McNeil’s partner, Pip (played to perfection by Bill Nunn), is an extremely well realized character. He’s essentially traded his autonomy in for the love and stability of his marriage to a thoroughly religious and overbearing woman. As exasperated as he is at times, it never seems he would trade it for the tumultuous lives he sees in the squad room around him. He’s a happily neutered man, and Nunn plays it so well that it's almost an understandable choice, despite how awful his wife is.

The other major performance of note is Dianne Farr as Jan, the token female, resident wisdom giver, lonely and sympathetic single mother and earnest object of affection. Farr’s character is a terrific foil for all the juvenile males around her, yet she never turns into an annoying know-it-all, and she’s one of the most consistently funny characters on the show. Her speech to McNeil towards the end of the pilot, in which she tears apart McNeil's claim that he acts out in so many ways because of how tough the job is, gets The Job off to a great start, and makes Rescue Me seem like a bit of a regression.

Keith David was also an excellent post-pilot replacement as the perpetually agitated and shouting captain. It’s a cliché for sure, but David adds an extra dimension by playing him as a man who actually enjoys seeing his subordinates suffer when they mess up. He goes from annoyed to gleefully sadistic in a matter of moments.

Of course, all these people simply exist around McNeil, at least in his self-centered worldview. What separates McNeil from similar anti-heroes is that for all his lies and cover ups, he spends very little time actually attempting to make people believe his bullshit. While cheating husbands on TV often go to comic lengths to make sure their wives don’t find out, McNeil is basically waiting to get caught, tossing out feeble excuse after feeble excuse. He’s even worse when cornered by his girlfriend, since he has so much less to lose with her. The lying seems as annoying to McNeil as any other way of dealing with his problems. His general inactivity and apathy is wonderfully established in the pilot when Jan tells McNeil that his girlfriend called and claims she’s going to tell his wife everything. It’s a joke on Jan’s part meant to elicit a reaction, but McNeil hardly reacts at all. He thinks his life is so shitty that what's intended to be a major catastrophe is really just more of the same.

From Loveline to upstaging professional actors

Leary is at his best when he's most manic and desperate. The episode in which he quits drinking and instead finds solace in a larger quantity of pain killers, new kinds of prescription medication, and green cough syrup is a ride down the drain I’m all too happy to take with him. Likewise, McNeil’s literally pathological lying when he gets leveraged into meeting his girlfriend’s parents gives Leary a chance to really let loose.

For these articles, it’s always interesting to see how the show ends. The Loop, for example, ends on a down note that lasts much of the second season, and makes me sort of happy they didn’t keep it around long enough to tinker it into something unrecognizable. The Job, however, ends on a terrific high note. Unlike many of the modern network comedies it paved the way for, The Job is not all that serialized. You have a cast of well-defined characters with established dynamics and stories that play out on an episode-by-episode basis. This is the reason that McNeil’s girlfriend and (even more so) wife are not seen for episodes at a time. This all changes late in season 2 though, when we are hit with three episodes that lead one right into the next and culminate with what ended up as the series finale. Things end so well that I won’t dare ruin it for you, but so many things go right in the final episode. They show us a new dimension to Pip. They drastically change McNeil’s place in the universe (by brilliantly placing him on the sidelines). They connect the case being worked to the officers’ lives in a way they haven’t previously. All in all, The Job ended with its strongest stuff. I’m not sure if it was a case of a show finally hitting its stride, or of one finally doing what it had wanted to all along because they knew they were cancelled. It set things up great for a third season, but it also brings some arcs to a nice close and a satisfying ending, if you choose to take it that way. The Job is pretty "slice of life" throughout its run, so anything too final would have been out of place anyway.

BFF

Rescue Me, Leary and Tolan’s far more successful, and significantly inferior attempt at the “civil servants in crisis” motif is primed to bow out much more gracefully with its final season airing next fall, to coincide with the 10^th anniversary of 9/11, the event that looms over the premise of the series. I say Rescue Me is “inferior” not based on some serious qualitative study of the two, but rather because I just happily re-watched every episode of The Job and I don’t imagine myself watching another episode of Rescue Me anytime soon. If there are current Rescue Me viewers reading this, I'd love to hear from you in the comments. I gave up on the show in the second or third season when I found the whole thing growing tiresome. What have I been missing? Are the later seasons worthwhile? Is Dean Winters still on?

With The Job and Rescue Me, Leary and Tolan are proud of how many stories they get directly from real police officers and firefighters. Leary has always painted himself as a champion of the blue collars, and both shows celebrate civil servants without glamour. They celebrate them by painting them as flawed, troubled people who are notable less for their superior character, and more for their dogged determination to keep showing up. I imagine there are many more good cop stories than firefighter stories out there though, and The Job had a much better balance of witty character humor and shock laughs than I remember Rescue Me managing. Unfortunately, the history books will always show that Rescue Me is the time Tolan and Leary got it right.