They Made a TV Show I Enjoyed Watching
But I Had to Use MGM+ to Watch It
Desperation to entertain my family hemming me in, I activated yet another streaming service the other day in order to show my constituents American Classic. Don’t worry, I shan’t be out on the streets any time soon: it’s a free trial.
A recent-ish streaming series hyped to me by NPR and my other mom-oriented sources, American Classic stars the GOATed Kevin Kline and was created by a team including Bob Martin, one of the people behind beloved Canadian TV series Slings & Arrows. Now Slings & Arrows is probably a top 10 best ever TV show. American Classic possesses only one-third of the team behind Slings & Arrows, and it’s thusly about one-third as good. But one-third as good as Slings & Arrows is three-thirds better than most of the absolute junk my television spews upon most days.
In American Classic Richard Bean (Kline), a self-obsessed Broadway star, returns home to small town Pennsylvania, prodded out of NYC by a recent public crashout, pulled onward by his mother’s death and impending funeral. At home in Millersburg, he reunites with his brother Jon (Jon Tenney), his ex-turned-sister-in-law Kristen (Laura Linney), his niece Miranda (Nell Verlaque), and his mildly-demented father Linus (Len Cariou). They’re all delightfully funny and delightfully troubled. As mayor of broke Millersburg, Kristen spars with a wealthy investor as to how much power he can exert over the town. Jon suffers beneath the humiliating legacy of converting the esteemed family performance venue into that hackiest of locales: a dinner theater. Miranda fights her parents on whether she can skip college for show biz. And Linus keeps coming out as gay because he can’t remember doing it the day before (somehow this joke threads the needle miraculously to remain funny haha, not funny sad).
On one hand, this content is exceedingly standard. My mother aptly described the show as “like one of those Hallmark movies but good!” and this is not inaccurate. Of course Richard must deploy all his charm, talent, and clout to save the town and theater while growing as a person and at last deflating a bit of his enormous ego here in the twilight of his life. The town furnishes various humorous secondary characters, including a married couple called Mr. and Mrs. Pat Patterson (they are both separately named Pat and unfortunately this kind of joke is endlessly funny to me).
On the other hand, craft matters. The writing is efficient and reliable, executed cleanly by talented actors working with skilled directors. Every episode delivers a crisp unit of narrative, advancing the overarching plot while serving up satisfying moments of charming character interaction. The show works because every part of it has been well-constructed and well-maintained, every element reviewed to ensure it’s worth putting onscreen.
Within the familiar construct of the heartwarming television show form, American Classic makes likable interventions, conjuring up a little extra tenderness for the stock-est of characters. When sexy Russian trophy wife Nadia appeared with her exceedingly broad accent, I feared a corny one-note ethnic stereotype character who would harry the Beans with hackneyed antics. In the end, Nadia reveals hidden depths of pathos and power, while staying admittedly quite funny. Though the story elements may seem familiar, the show never resorts to the lowest reiteration of those tropes.
And then of course there is the theater of it all. Slings & Arrows ran on an engine of pure uncut Shakespeare, which works great if you suffer from the Shakespeare disease as I do. American Classic dials the Shakespeare down a bit to accommodate an exuberant enthusiasm for all forms of American theater, from Our Town to Sweet Charity. To see great actors perform great work is always wonderful, so when the show paused occasionally to delight in the spectacle of Kevin Kline or Laura Linney monologuing I clapped. Everybody clapped.
I have loved/do love/will love the theater for its mania and its absurdity, its comical self-seriousness and its free-and-easy reflexivity. I love it for its cringe. Perhaps the show would make less sense to someone who didn’t believe so completely in the value of the theater, an artform with limited popularity in our culture. But that’s the lovely part of American Classic: it argues for a theater which can hold everyone. Richard casts Our Town from the denizens of the town, not only for heartwarming Hallmark reasons, but because that will draw out the truth of the show. Lowering the quality of the performance or the material is not the answer to the theater’s financial problems: investing the whole community in doing the good work together is.
This is wishful thinking, but TV was once about wishing. For all its maaaaaany problems, it held a space of comfort and familiarity for its viewers. Not the sprawling canvas of the cinema, just regular performers doing small stories on cheap sets. I liked viewing the theater to see Kevin Kline ham it up, obviously. I also liked pretending that the morally faulty business mogul might soften his greed in the face of a particularly well-staged run of Our Town.
Wishful thinking, I know.
American Classic was a cute show and I enjoyed it. I’m still going to cancel MGM+, though. There’s not shit-else to watch on there.
