Enough with Prestige TV. Give me the Bloopers!
Sometimes I look at these things as I write. For every paragraph (or sentence) I grind out, I reward myself by returning (briefly!) to the split pants, the juicy plums, the copious giggles. This is not a particularly noble impulse: bloopers distract me, return me to the childlike state that is my favorite adult mode.
But often my love of such nonsense is more complicated, more emotionally charged, more, dare I say, more sophisticated. Because it turns out that sometimes grimly prestigious TV shows also have blooper reels, and I find those bloopers both delightful and bizarrely soothing. See: I hate conflict, stylized cruelty, cross-examination, grimness, gloom, mediocre to intellectual tragedy. Unfortunately, the best (or at least the biggest) TV shows are often full of that stuff. I watched every episode of “Breaking Bad” and “Game of Thrones” and “The Americans” and didn’t really enjoy any of them; I do enjoy the blooper reels of all those shows. I hate seeing people be mean to each other, and I love it when one of those people messes up a line and ruins the take and everyone bursts out laughing. See? They’re really friends! Everyone’s having a good time! The world is a fundamentally friendly, silly, happy place! Gloom and cruelty are completely fictional constructs!
The bleaker the source material, the more reassuring – the more necessary — these screw-ups are. I will personally pay you $500, right now, for a five-minute “Succession” blooper reel; I will pay you $5,000 if you never let me watch “Succession” again. I have absorbed so much ill-lit human misery, so much operatic angst, so much gleeful yet humorless gore, so much soul-destroying cruelty disguised as cleverness, all in the guise of entertainment, all seemingly my break from the real world. Blooperreels are my vacation from that vacation.
Bill Hader turned bloopers into live television on “Saturday Night Live” when he played Stefon, a Weekend Update character who struggled to maintain composure while, say, defining the term “human Roombas.” But then he jumped ship to HBO and created the pitch-black, would-be comedy “Barry,” which ran for four increasingly gritty seasons. It also spawned my current favorite blooper reel. Hader giggles uncontrollably throughout the whole thing. Henry Winkler drops an entire tray of raw meat. A mean guy in a car says something mean and then tries to drive away but accidentally leaves the car in neutral, and everyone laughs, and it turns out the mean guy is actually a nice, dumb guy. I take solace in all of this — the solace that shows like “Barry” provide. have stolen from me. I have enough bleak things to look at, enough conflict and cruelty in the real world to deal with. What I need, desperately, is more chucklebutts.
Rob Harvilla is a senior editor at The Ringer, host of the podcast “60 Songs That Explain the ’90s,” and author of the book of the same name (Twelve, 2023).
