Grid Effect

I should probably mention that there is some quality television returning/airing tonight. Most notably: The Office, which comes back from its month long hiatus; and 30 Rock, which, while modestly funny last week, Salma Hayek’s heaving breasts manage to dominate all the water cooler talk in some of your more traditional offices last Friday.

And speaking of The Office, look who’s scheduled to make a six episode cameo later this season. If you’re too lazy to click on the link I’ll just tell you: Idris Elba. If you never watched The Wire or never bothered to learn the actor’s names, he played Stringer Bell in the first three seasons. Anyhow, between the reference to the series in “Night Out” and Amy Ryan getting a six episode arc earlier this season (that began in last season’s finale), either a producer or someone in casting is a fan and has a really good eye for talent.

But back to Elba. This, more so than anything else I can recall, is the best example of entertainment world’s colliding. Of all the series’ we recap on here, I can’t think of any two that are more an example of polar opposites than The Wire and The Office. Survivor use to be in The Office’s spot,, but Corrinne went and ruined that this season when she made threats against several fellow contestants lives. Congratulations, Corrinne. You managed to turn an otherwise harmless reality show into something more akin to Baltimore’s west side.

Anyhow, this seems to happen more often than not when you begin to identify an actor with a specific character he’s portrayed. It’s a culmination of the role being so well-executed and well-written that if the role is recurring over several seasons, it’s almost impossible to see the actor in something else and not immediately think of the character that you remember him from. It’s the antithesis of seeing Tom Cruise in Valkyrie.

So what are some other instances of this? Here’s a top five because we’re too busy to do a top ten (Note: We’re keeping this with recent history, anything pre-1980’s is excluded because it’s absurd to act like there is any similarity between television now and then, other than they share the same medium).

1) James Gandolfini as Tony Soprano

It’s not exactly original and from what I can tell it’s the last thing Gandolfini wants to hear, but what does he want everyone to say? He was the central figure in a television series that changed the landscape of scripted television forever. Since everyone who isn’t a counter-cultural dipshit just for the sake of being a counter-cultural dipshit seems agree that The Sopranos is at least one of the five greatest series’ of all time, I’d probably wear it as a badge of honor rather than a scarlet letter. Things would probably go better for Gandolfini’s post-Sopranos career if he did.

2) Ed O’Neill as Al Bundy

I’m not sure if in the 2+ years we’ve been writing on this site that we’ve ever mentioned Married With Children. But some of his other work we’ve seen him in where he was perfectly sufficient if not commendable yet couldn’t shake the typecast: Blue Chips, Dutch, Little Giants. Other films we’ve seen him in where we didn’t expect him to complain about women’s shoes: 0. Actually, that’s not entirely true, he played a short-order cook in Wayne’s World who was more embittered than Al Bundy ever was, so through some form of osmosis we were able to separate the actor from his character. We still remember his most infamous line from the movie: “Why is it when you kill a man in war it’s called heroic, but when you do it in the heat of passion, it’s called murder?” Other than that, this is what 260 episodes with one character will do to you.

Unfortunately, this spawned several casual imitations.

3) Michael Richards as Kramer

I was torn between him and George Costanza, and it was a tough call. Jason Alexander did a whole arc on Curb Your Enthusiasm about how he can’t get noticed for anything other than Costanza. But what ended up pushing Richards over the edge was Alexander has at least attempted to play other characters that aren’t eerily similar to the character he played on Seinfeld. The two movies we’ve seen Michael Richards in: Trial & Error and Airheads, Richards is playing either an abridged version of Kramer or some guy crawling through a ventilation system at a radio station. Essentially, it was distracting just how similar he was to Cozmo.

Of course while he once lamented this fact, he probably now wishes that’s what he was best remembered for. Over the course of time, I’m sure he will be. But when you scream the “N-word” at several audience members during a stand-up, that racist label can really stick.

4) Mary Louise-Parker as Nancy Botwin

This series hasn’t been around for that long and I’m sure there are plenty of better examples for this list, but we were watching The Assassination of Jesse James By The Coward Robert Ford (Great film, but watch it without any distractions or else you’re going to spend the length of the movie checking your watch/cell phone) in which she plays Jesse James’ wife. We couldn’t help but internally scream “It’s Nancy Botwin!”. It was even all the more glaring since the two characters are such polar opposites. Nancy is the prototypical strong, empowered contemporary woman who happens to recklessly sell drugs for…you can’t even say to support her family anymore, so much as for her own amusement.

Meanwhile, Zee James was the standard timid, docile housewife who barely spoke. Towards the end of Jesse James, I was waiting for Zee to seduce a bevy of men to have the Ford brothers murdered. Never happened, because I forgot I was watching Mary Louise-Parker play a different character, and that Nancy Botwin isn’t a real person.

5) Kelsey Grammar as Frasier Crane

For starters, the character spanned two rather infamous series in Cheers (201 episodes) and his own psuedo spin-off Frasier (263 episodes). That is 464 episodes with an actor playing the same character. How does the American public even begin to differentiate him from this character? For all the bitching any actor might do over typecasting, their agents/managers/whoever should put them in the Clockwork Orange suspension chair and make them watch a fourth of the episodes Kelsey Grammar has done with this character, then inform said actor how many more episodes of Dr. Frasier Crane he/she could be subjected too and suggest they just shut the fuck up for awhile. Call me when you get to 100 episodes, much less 464.

That’s five off the top of my head. Since Idris Elba and The Office spun this entire thing, I think it warrants mentioning that all Wire characters avoided the top five because none of them had proportional screen time with any of the aforementioned names. My apologies if this was misleading.

Back with more tomorrow.