Spoilers may be here, if you haven't seen the series all the way through.
I recall the criticisms of this show at the time of its original broadcast: It was called a wine and brie look at self-absorbed, privileged babyboomers that every self-respecting lumpenprol should be insulted to be expected by the network to care about. (This was the time that saw the launch of Rosanne and Married With Children, after all, as well as the escalation of trash TV/talk TV into a national phenomenon.) I never watched thirtysomething until it reran for years on a popular cable network. Then I stumbled on a single episode one day while scanning, and I was immediately hooked. It hit me hard: How could I have missed this gem the first time? Had I been turned off to it by the universal invocation of yuppie imagery used to condemn it in its time? Probably so.
I taped the entire series in its eventual reincarnation in a matter of weeks. I never missed an episode, and watched each development voraciously, as one imagines an earlier generation may have a serialized novel by Dickens. But ya know what? Aside from certain episodes I have shown to friends, to turn them on to the show, I have seldom re-watched any of these shows. The tapes wait in the hangar for a time when a desperate nostalgia drives me to check this series out again. I do mean that one line summary, the title of this note, in the best possible way. But there is something here, in this decade+ old series, that is totally lacking in most TV and film today. That something would be a sense of what I will call emotional verisimilitude. Whether it was nudging your funnybone or tugging your heartstrings or mordantly evoking the battle of the sexes, thirtysomething rang true for anybody who has ever been there. --And for anybody with a brain and empathy and imagination who hasn't been there.
I believe it is the truth, as in The Truth, that makes it painful to look at a lot of times. Far from coddling a bunch of self-absorbed adults who refused to grow up, it put a mirror up to a good part of the generational demographic, forcing us to relive scenes from our life that we'd rather forget, or reminding us that there are hard days ahead. The quintessential episode goes like this: Michael's father comes to visit the family at holiday wearing an obvious and somewhat ill-fitting hairpiece. After general whispering within the family (they think he's getting vain in his old age, too) and a bit of hard ribbing by Melissa, he makes a nearly inaudible statement. "It's the chemo." That's how the episode in which Michael loses his father begins. And it ends with Michael Steadman crouched on the floor of a dark room, crying. Strong stuff. Throughout the run of the show marriages failed; more people got cancer; a major character gets killed on the bike ride to and from work; people are mistreated with impunity at work and then fired; some of the characters' ambitions, their hope that they might be somehow talented or special, are trashed. Just like real life. If TV wasn't a low common denominator vehicle for commercials, I think we might be tempted to call thirtysomething high drama, or art, or something that really mattered. Despite the vehicle, I think it was all those things, anyway.
Ten Big Stars.
I recall the criticisms of this show at the time of its original broadcast: It was called a wine and brie look at self-absorbed, privileged babyboomers that every self-respecting lumpenprol should be insulted to be expected by the network to care about. (This was the time that saw the launch of Rosanne and Married With Children, after all, as well as the escalation of trash TV/talk TV into a national phenomenon.) I never watched thirtysomething until it reran for years on a popular cable network. Then I stumbled on a single episode one day while scanning, and I was immediately hooked. It hit me hard: How could I have missed this gem the first time? Had I been turned off to it by the universal invocation of yuppie imagery used to condemn it in its time? Probably so.
I taped the entire series in its eventual reincarnation in a matter of weeks. I never missed an episode, and watched each development voraciously, as one imagines an earlier generation may have a serialized novel by Dickens. But ya know what? Aside from certain episodes I have shown to friends, to turn them on to the show, I have seldom re-watched any of these shows. The tapes wait in the hangar for a time when a desperate nostalgia drives me to check this series out again. I do mean that one line summary, the title of this note, in the best possible way. But there is something here, in this decade+ old series, that is totally lacking in most TV and film today. That something would be a sense of what I will call emotional verisimilitude. Whether it was nudging your funnybone or tugging your heartstrings or mordantly evoking the battle of the sexes, thirtysomething rang true for anybody who has ever been there. --And for anybody with a brain and empathy and imagination who hasn't been there.
I believe it is the truth, as in The Truth, that makes it painful to look at a lot of times. Far from coddling a bunch of self-absorbed adults who refused to grow up, it put a mirror up to a good part of the generational demographic, forcing us to relive scenes from our life that we'd rather forget, or reminding us that there are hard days ahead. The quintessential episode goes like this: Michael's father comes to visit the family at holiday wearing an obvious and somewhat ill-fitting hairpiece. After general whispering within the family (they think he's getting vain in his old age, too) and a bit of hard ribbing by Melissa, he makes a nearly inaudible statement. "It's the chemo." That's how the episode in which Michael loses his father begins. And it ends with Michael Steadman crouched on the floor of a dark room, crying. Strong stuff. Throughout the run of the show marriages failed; more people got cancer; a major character gets killed on the bike ride to and from work; people are mistreated with impunity at work and then fired; some of the characters' ambitions, their hope that they might be somehow talented or special, are trashed. Just like real life. If TV wasn't a low common denominator vehicle for commercials, I think we might be tempted to call thirtysomething high drama, or art, or something that really mattered. Despite the vehicle, I think it was all those things, anyway.
Ten Big Stars.