Everything Bad Is Good for You by Steven Johnson Read Free Book Online Page A

references that jump from one fictional world to another; they’re references that jump back in time within a single fictional world. I think it’s more instructive to see both these devices as sharing a key attribute: they are comic devices that reward further scrutiny. The show gets funnier the more you study it—precisely because the jokes point outside the immediate context of the episode, and because the creators refuse to supply flashing arrows to translate the gags for the uninitiated. Earlier sitcoms merely demanded that you kept the basic terms of the situation clear on your end; beyond that information you could be an amnesiac and you weren’t likely to miss anything. Shows like Seinfeld and The Simpsons offered a more challenging premise to their viewers: You’ll enjoy this more if you’re capable of remembering a throwaway line from an episode that aired three years ago, or if you notice that we’ve framed this one scene so that it echoes the end of Double Indemnity. The jokes come in layers: you can watch that 1995 Halloween episode and miss all the film riffs and still enjoy the show, but it’s a richer, more rewarding experience if you’re picking them up. That layering enabled Seinfeld and The Simpsons to retain both a broad appeal and the edgy allure of cult classics. The mainstream audiences chuckle along to that wacky Kramer, while the diehard fans nudge-and-wink at each Superman aside. But that complexity has another, equally important, side effect: the episodes often grow more entertaining on a second or third viewing, and they can still reveal new subtleties on the fifth or sixth. The subtle intertwinings of the plots seem more nimble if you know in advance where they’re headed, and the more experience you have with the series as a whole, the more likely you are to catch all the insider references.
    In November 1997, NBC aired an episode of Seinfeld called “The Betrayal,” in which the scenes were presented in reverse chronological order. If the Seinfeld formula often involved setups followed by punch lines that arrived years later, “The Betrayal” took a more radical approach: punch lines that arrived before their setups. You’d see Kramer begging Newman to protect him from a character called “FDR,” and only find out why ten minutes later, when you’re shown an “earlier” scene where FDR gives Kramer the evil eye at a birthday party. The title of the episode (and the name of one of the characters) was a not-so-subtle nod to the Harold Pinter play Betrayal , which told the story of a love triangle as a reverse chronology. But comedies are different from dramas in their relationship to time: a dramatic event with no context is a mystery—the withheld information can heighten the drama. But a punch line with no context is not a joke. Nearly unwatchable the first time around, “The Betrayal” became coherent only on a second viewing—and it took three solid passes before the jokes started to work. You’d see the punch line delivered onscreen, and you’d fill in the details of the setup on your own.
    â€œThe Betrayal” was a watershed in television programming, assembling all the elements of modern TV complexity in one thirty-minute sitcom. The narrative wove together seven distinct threads, withheld crucial information in almost every sequence, and planted jokes that had multiple layers of meaning. As the title implied, these were storytelling devices that you would have found only in avant-garde narrative thirty or forty years ago: in Pinter, or Alain Robbe-Grillet, or Godard. You might have been able to fill a small theater in Greenwich Village with an audience willing to parse all that complexity in 1960, but only if the Times had given the play a good review that week. Forty years later, NBC puts the same twisted narrative structure on prime-time television, and 15 million people lap it