Action

FOX | Release Date: September 16, 1999

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eje211Jun 28, 2020

Some of Action has not aged perfectly. Hollywood has matured since 1999, particularly in relation to minorities and gay people. But the spirit of the series probably works better now than it did back then. In 1999, it was very unusual to haveSome of Action has not aged perfectly. Hollywood has matured since 1999, particularly in relation to minorities and gay people. But the spirit of the series probably works better now than it did back then. In 1999, it was very unusual to have the main character of a TV show not be virtuous, but instead be someone who does bad things for complicated reasons. Now, it's become commonplace. We've had House, Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, and many others. Nevertheless, we've had few characters like that in comedy. Peter Dragon is introduced first as a completely reprehensible person, but quickly, we get to see that there is more to him than that. He's stuck in a web of problems and, on some level, he's ashamed of everything he does.

It's one of those TV shows that was "too good for TV", at least at the time, before streaming. The original airing bleeped all rude language and, at one point started blurring the lips of the actors when they swore. That fact ended up being referenced in the show itself by the main character, Peter Dragon who hated television, writers and actors, a fact that he keeps reminding us of. The DVD and streaming versions are the so-called "unedited" versions, in which all the dialog is left intact. I think that removes some of the humor of the show. The censorship was part of the content. It was part of what made it TV and not film at the time and part of what the main character mocked when he talked about TV.

There is an essential self-awareness throughout to a series made in Hollywood about Hollywood, but Action is not ham-handedly heavy about it. Everything Peter Dragon says about television makes sense in context. In general, it always feels like everything we see in an extreme exaggeration of something that might really have happened, and if you let your mind wander laterally a bit, you may actually find the original story to which the episode is referring.

The pace is fast and swift, due mostly to the relentless performance of Jay Mohr. The editing is what academics might call "modernist", in that it refers to itself. Illeana Douglas is fantastic, for any of her fans, of which I am. But of all the actors, one of those who is not among the first billed but who really stands out, is I think Lee Arenberg as Bobby G. The character is, like most characters on the show, incredibly well written, but Arenberg mixes an overdose of masculinity, absurdity, fragility and humor to him that just makes him come to life more than I would have thought possible from the dialog alone. Not unlike Peter Dragon himself, the character is terrifying to other characters, but looks rather sweet to us. Both have locked themselves in so many artifice and lies that they are forced into openly absurd actions that stimulate our compassion and that not even their money can help them out of the pretend façade they must constantly hold up.

The pilot is a very simple example of Peter seeing the limits of his absolute power. The cold open shows him wielding complete, unfair power with absolute impunity over a nice, innocent man. And the last scene of that episode shows the consequences of that action. He does not have to suffer the actual consequences, that would be too simple, but he has yet again tangled the web of his already complicated life. It's someone else who will suffer the consequences for him, because that's how his life works. But is that system tenable? We are not in the classic system of "good guys and bad guys" of most Hollywood fiction.

At one point, Peter Dragon makes a speech to the US Senate in a cold intro and, of course, it ends in scandal. But his speech is one of the few times when he's honest and there is some depth in what he has to say. And, even though some of his examples have aged, the substance still holds. So are the consequences that are the topic of the episode.

The professional reviews all refer to Peter Dragon as foul-mouthed character who's completely unlikable. But, that only holds if you stop at the cold open of the pilot. After that, he, and most of the characters of the show, are surprisingly deep, complex and ambiguous. The only character who's the unsung hero is the writer, who unsurprisingly is the forgotten victim that everyone takes for granted. In Hollywood, most film writers are, it seems, not invited to production meetings. That is not the case in TV. And so, it makes sense that TV writers would have something to say about that.

The show also gives a glimpse of what a producer does. In TV and movie titles, most people are credited as "producers" of various kinds, but most people have no idea of what that word means. Action may be an absurd comedy, but it's remarkably precise it terms of what Peter's job is.

Despite its exaggerated nature and its explicit language, it's a raw and even sentimental look at Hollywood from the point of view of someone who obviously knows a lot about it.… Expand

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