Hanging Out with Television Characters

Coming to the Star Trek reboot project, J.J. Abrams understood the most important thing there was for him to understand: that he had to get the casting right, or he would have nothing. And so he got the casting spectacularly right, and the movie was a triumph. Why was the casting so important? Because we really don't watch Star Trek mainly for its stories, even though sometimes the stories are very good (much of the time they're just serviceable); and we certainly don't watch it for the action sequences, even though the genre requires that there have to be some action sequences. We watch it to hang out with the (by now iconic) characters, and the actors who play them. Most of television is like that; it's an intimate, companionable medium, and it is very character-driven. Most of the series I truly love have this hanging-out aspect: I Love Lucy, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, M*A*S*H, WKRP in Cincinnati, The Avengers, The Wild Wild West, Upstairs Downstairs, Hill Street Blues, St. Elsewhere, Six Feet Under, Mad Men: the list could go on and on. Even that sociopath Tony Soprano and his fellow sociopaths are fun to hang out with, at the viewer's safe distance. A series like the charming All Creatures Great and Small relies so heavily upon the companionability of its characters (and animals) that one scarcely remembers the stories at all. Even with a show like The Fugitive, so strongly dependent upon a single character rather than a social set, it could be said that the viewer is hanging out with Richard Kimble; after all, the viewer is the only dependable friend that Kimble has got.

It follows that good actors can to some extent save television projects that otherwise don't have a lot going for them. I recently purchased the first season box set of White Collar because I knew that the show highlights two handsome actors (Matt Bomer and Tim DeKay) who wear suits, and sometimes that is enough for me. The series has many hackneyed elements and is not anything I could write a rave review of, but the actors bring some spark to it and make it watchable in a way that's perfect for those times - the end of a long work day, for example - when one's mind is set at "Idle." Sometimes we want undemanding as long as it is not also insulting, and medium-good TV with fetching actors can fill that bill.

Tim DeKay and Matt Bomer