Go behind the scene of the small screen on a big one.
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The TV Set
Written and directed by Jake Kasdan
With David Duchovny, Sigourney Weaver, Ioan Gruffudd, Judy Greer, Fran Kranz and Lindsay Sloane
UA DeVargas
89 min.
R
The
TV Set
focuses not on the crap-funneling box in our living rooms, but on the other half of the title's double entendre-the set of people responsible for producing the crap that gets funneled.
Jake Kasdan, who created the television show Freaks and Geeks, writes and directs
The TV Set
from first-hand experience. He chronicles the creation of a pilot from casting to filming to the question of whether or not it will get picked up for a full season.
But the real arc of
The TV Set
is the gradual but persistent decline of writer Mike Klein's (David Duchovny) artistic vision. His dark and semiautobiographical project The Wexler Chronicles goes through a funnel of talentless actors, market share-obsessed producers and the studio's statistical analysis of what people respond to "positively."
Witnessing the pain and suffering on Mike's face as his vision is repeatedly compromised-displayed with brilliant and restrained deadpan subtlety by Duchovny-is a cackle-inducing pleasure reminiscent of the splendid laughs had watching Charlie Kaufman's (Nicolas Cage) agony in Adaptation.
A particularly delightful scene, causing joy simultaneously from empathy and sadism, has Mike's lead actor, Zach Harper (Fran Kranz), drifting into a bad De Niro impersonation as he mangles what should have been the script's most poignant moment. Mike, sliding steadily lower in his seat, rubs his forehead-as if to smooth out the furrows even as they are ironed in-and struggles to keep the wince out of his eyes.
As for Zach, it takes an actor of high talent to portray one of middling skill, and Kranz plays the insecure and brash overactor with an inverse of the character's qualities: confidence, restraint and spot-on comic timing. In this, he shares much with his colleagues, who manage to keep fresh the well-worn comedic device of archetype familiarity.
Lindsay Sloane does well as the leading lady who steadfastly acts her sweet 'n' cute typecast on camera, while off-camera she attempts to flirt her career into motion. Sigourney Weaver is equally excellent as the production executive with a heart of black coal and a soul of negative space, for whom "artsy," "original" and "smart" are terms of disparagement. Judy Greer, as Mike's agent, is a sunny middlewoman who speaks in the nomenclature of business clichés and euphemisms.
Ioan Gruffudd rounds out the strong ensemble cast as the BBC defector, now network executive, who seems to truly believe that family is the most important thing to him, even as he continually lets his own fall to the wayside as the pressures of his job persist.
All this great acting may just as well be testament to Kasdan's sensibilities, which seem to favor restraint over certainty that the audience will "get it." There are few salient punch lines in
The TV Set
; instead, Kasdan opts to let the humor bubble out at odd moments through the fabric of his biting meta-industry satire.
Kasdan doesn't exaggerate his industry archetypes much, as he could well have done. In making Freaks and Geeks, he certainly came in contact with each of these people and believes they're funny enough left alone.
The TV Set
is funny, but it also deals with a very real facet of modern collaborative existence: institutions that force continual compromise, both literal and moral, on inhabitants tormented by roles that were created to sustain a system rather than a human being. Anyone who has had this type of job will take delight. And, honestly, how many haven't?
