Even When They're Bad Guys, I Like Them

Sexiest guy ever. Of course, it makes

a difference that I met Ted Levine

as Captain Stottlemeyer before

I watched Silence of the Lambs

When I watched the first season of Without a Trace, I despised Anthony LaPaglia's character Jack Malone. I thought I would never like the actor in anything.

Then I saw Anthony LaPaglia as Simon Moon in Fraiser. He was hilarious!

Still, Anthony LaPaglia as Malone and Anthony LaPaglia as Simon remain entirely separate in my mind.

On the other hand, some actors never lose a particular aura for me, no matter the role. The amazing John Noble always chills me. And John Glover always kind of creeps me out. Let's face it: they play chilling and creepy characters.

On the more positive side, every now and again, there's an actor I love no matter what role that actor plays: bad, good, whatever.

Here are three examples:

David Zayas makes appearances as a good guy and a bad guy, namely the talkative landlord in Person of Interest and an episode's murderer in Elementary. I adore him. I love his voice. He could show up as an elevator man, and I would be happy. (And yes, I even like him as the unlikable but crafty governor on Blue Bloods.)

Bruce Altman was one of Law & Order's regulars. He also shows up in Elementary. He tends to play ambiguous, sometimes amoral characters. He always strikes me as subtly sympathetic, no matter whom he plays.

And yes, he is also a politician on Blue Bloods (hmmm, I'm beginning to note a pattern here).

Ato Essandoh--who was born in my birth place of Schenectady, New York--is a fantastic actor. He plays Elementary's Alfredo, Sherlock's first sponsor and a definite good guy. On Blue Bloods, he plays Reverend Potter.

Reverend Potter is not exactly a bad guy. The writers give him more complexity than that. I generally dislike manipulative political characters (in real life too). With Essandoh, I listen a little closer because, well, it's Essandoh. He has this captivating warmth that fills the role.

People who hire actors for even minor parts are well-aware of their reputations and prior roles. Whom they hire communicates a long-term vision or desired effect: do they want us to secretly love the character no matter what? That means something.

When Writers Let Down Their Characters

Alan Shore's soap-boxing on Boston Legal gets tedious. Other than the (far more interesting) episodes where he defends murderers, he is often designated to be the "ranter" about contemporary issues in episode after episode. 

Most of the time, I tune it out. There are well-written exceptions, such as when Alan is arguing in favor of the right to die and loses his cool since he is thinking about Denny (who has Alzheimer's). Another is when Alan uses his fast-talking patter to convince a private school to accept a bright female student who doesn't smile as expected. 

The Supreme Court episode, however, was a huge let-down. 

James Spader is no mean actor. Before going before the justices, he conveys Alan's nervousness, his shock that he is being asked to speak before such an august body. He is a ranter, a patter-master, the guy who relies on shock and awe and personal story-telling to convince the jury. Now he has to make a judicious argument about law. 

It was an excellent opportunity to give Alan another side, to show that he has the pure unadulterated strength of will that one sees in characters like Mary McDonnell as Captain Raydor, or the more interesting possibility, to show that he is out of his depth and knows it. 

But no--the writers just gave him another very long rant that I fast-forwarded through because it was so entirely shallow and silly, like junior high students calling each other names. Oh, look, I made fun of a chief justice, ya ya ya.   

Here's what interested me more than the stupid speech:

I didn't hold it against the character.  

When Without a Trace was on, I loathed the Anthony LaPaglia character. Loathed him. And no amount of good writing or poor writing would have made any difference. 

On the other hand, I've always thought it was grossly unfair to accuse Worf of being a bad security officer when it was clearly the writers' fault that he kept missing the bad guys who beamed onto the bridge. Why blame Worf for lousy writing? 

I think the difference comes down to nothing more or less profound that a visceral reaction. 

It isn't (necessarily) the actor. Turns out I kind of like Anthony LaPaglia as long as he is being Daphne's brother. And I like Emma Watson even though I thought she was terribly badly cast as Beauty. 

The visceral reaction is whether or not I like the character. Anthony LaPaglia's character in Without a Trace has this hang-dog attitude that puts my back up. But even though I disagree with 60% of Alan Shore's politics, he is so ready to go fishing with Denny rather than blather on and on--and so willing to see himself as a kind of clown--I forgive him nearly everything.

And Worf is, well, Worf!

In any case, my reaction explains why characters can survive on their own--Sherlock survived even Conan Doyle's duds.

I Like Kojak but I Don't Like Kojak--And That's Okay

I also like the teamwork aspect
of Kojak; it's the same thing I like
on Law & Order, Seasons 1-3, and
Tommy Lee Jones' team in The Fugitive.

Lately, I started watching Kojak. The show is quite impressive, Law & Order before Law & Order came along (the early seasons). For one thing, I have a yen for dirty police stations. I suppose the clean, shiny police stations of current cop shows are accurate to today, but I miss the sheer grime of Barney Miller's 12th precinct.

Like the first season of Law & Order, Kojak is split between domestic cases and cases involving drugs, organized crime, etc. I prefer domestic, so I don't watch every episode, but I enjoy the gritty police-work aspect of detection: collecting clues, interviewing suspects, etc.

What amazes me especially is that I enjoy the show so much despite not warming to Kojak, the character, at all.

In general, this is rather difficult to do: like a show that hinges so particularly on a single unliked character. I stopped watching Without a Trace because I loathed Anthony LaPaglia's Jack Malone. The guy was a weasel who had an affair, was surprised when his wife left him, and used the Good Old Boys network to get his job back from a more deserving subordinate. Luckily, Anthony LaPaglia did guest appearances on Frasier as Daphne's constantly inebriated brother Simon and was totally hilarious, so I don't despise him, just his character.

Jack Malone was one of several main characters in Without a Trace, and I still stopped watching; Kojak is THE main character (Crocker, Stavros, and Captain McNeil playing back-up), so how can I keep watching when I just don't find him all that inviting?

I think there are two reasons, which come back to one: The scripts don't ask me to pity Kojak. The scripts don't ask me to like him.

In other words, the scripts present Kojak as a fully realized character who frankly wouldn't much care what I think.

In contrast, Without a Trace's scripts definitely asked me to pity and care about Malone. The scriptwriters didn't defend his actions, but I was supposed to step into his shoes and care about his crazy life.

It's the difference between story and soap opera. With story, I can remain objective: Hey, there goes Kojak again confronting a suspect and saying, "Okay, okay, baby." (He doesn't say, Who loves ya, baby" all that much.) I wonder how this suspect will react?

After awhile a kind of fondness builds up because Kojak is so unrepentantly himself. But I don't HAVE to care (although I can if I want to).

Along the same lines, I get a kick out of Pope (J.K. Simmons) on The Closer. He's another adulterous weasel, but I'm not asked to approve of him; I'm just asked to enjoy his character's antics, and I do.

The soap opera approach, on the other hand, expects you to care. Why else would you keep watching? It's not as if there's, I don't know, a plot. Likewise, on Without a Trace, unless I'd gotten  invested in the problems of an adulterous man who thought he'd fixed his marriage but whose wife outwitted him so he had to do everything he could to get his job back because otherwise he'd lose his kids--well, I might as well turn on The Price is Right (and hey, look, there's Drew Carey!).

Obviously, some people enjoy the soap opera approach: Oh, the angst! The problems! The difficult decisions! I wouldn't do that but I do understand why he would do this--people are so complicated; life is all about difficult decisions, blah, blah blah. And most fiction writing assumes that readers will in fact come to care about the characters. (As C.S. Lewis states, fiction can carry us out of ourselves into another point of view.)

I look on the story versus soap opera approach as the difference between Rent and The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Rent, the soap opera, tells us we should care about its characters because people are supposed to care about other people's problems. That is, the existence of problems all by themselves is the thing that is expected to pull us closer, not the quality of the problems or how the characters are handling the problems. Just--there are problems: now, feel bad.

The more objective story says, Look at these characters. I like them. You can too, if you'd want. Here's what they will do next. 

Going back to Christie and her scandalous villagers, I think this is another reason her imitators don't succeed. Christie is objective, even humorous, about her scandalous villagers. This is what is happening. Isn't it interesting? Human beings are so odd. Hmmm.

And, what do ya know, we do care.