Cheers, Abbot Elementary, and Reservation Dogs are all great, but differently (duh)

THe cold open is deeply important to the pilot of a show, obviously, because it’s the first thing the viewer sees. It introduces them to the world, the main character, and the tone of the show. It also gives the viewer a sense of the show’s sense of humor (if it has one). Hopeully it hooks the viewer.

Here are a few examples of pilot cold opens I love.

First let’s go old school and talk Cheers. Top 5 comedy pilots of all time, maybe top 3.

Immediately we’re in a familiar situation (a bar- I mean, familiar to me at least; I’ve spent a lot of time in places like that, and you’ve been there once or twice, come on). We learn that the guy who opens the bar, who’s clearly a bartender and probably more, takes meticulous care of the place (adjusts a picture, checks inside the coffee cup for dust) (also, that a bartender is concerned about a bar’s coffee cups tells us more about the bar). He’s charming and funny, and kind, even with a kid who is clearly trying to buy beer underage. He won’t let the kid get away with it, but he also disappoints him fairly gently. Also this guy is a bit of a looker! 

Whoever that actor is might have a fairly successful television career.

So we’re in the world of this bar, which is not a dive, but a place treated with care and concern. We know this bartender is the show’s main character (what about Diane? Coach? Carla? Norm? Cliff? Frasier? Harry the Hat? That other lady? Yeah, more on all that later.). 

There are a couple of good jokes (“That’s what they say, war is gross.”).  

And finally, even though this scene is unrelated to the story of the episode, which doesn’t start til the next scene, there is a warmth to the whole exchange (even though it ends in disappointment) that establishes the tone of the show. The bartender is kind. He’s friendly, a caretaker. Which of course is then reinforced by one of the all-time great theme songs (remember the good old days, when theme songs would tell us how these seven people were deserted on this desert island, and what each of them was like? I mean, you say “millionaire” or “movie star” or “professor” and we instantly get everything about that character. 

A little more up to date: how about Abbot Elementary?  Once again we’re in a familiar situation (a school classroom-  I mean, familiar to me at least, I’ve spent a lot of time there,  and even if you didn’t teach junior high school in New York City for six years, you get it) (unless you were home-schooled).

We find out a lot about this one teacher and her struggles. She’s the star of the show. Her struggles involve the student body- what the kids are like, the details she has to deal with constantly. We also learn about one of the big themes of the show- the contrast between the school having no money, and the city paying for a new football stadium.  

This one has the advantage of being a  mockumentary, so Janine can speak directly to the camera about who she is, what she’s doing there, who else is there… I consider mockumentary a cheat code for exposition, and also for comedy (so much comedy can be mined just from the way things are edited- as evidenced by going back and forth between Janine counting and Janine talking to the camera). So you have to decide, when you’re writing, whether it’s worth cheating or not. Do you want to win?

World, star, great jokes, tone- again, all established immediately. And the great punchline of the whole cold open, which catapults us into the A story of the episode (we arguably see a glimpse of the B story when one of the other newer teachers is having severe difficulty in her classroom).

I think Cheers is an all-time classic (wow, hot take). I think Abbot Elementary is a great, well-written, tightly constructed show (so impressive to have such outside-the-lines opinions).

I fucking love Reservation Dogs. The whole show, I mean. All three seasons. But let’s talk about the cold open.

We hear a radio tuning in, then hear an announcer, who tells us we are in “Indian Territory, Oklahoma.” This world is NOT immediately familiar to most of us, or maybe just not to me, so it’s trickier to introduce. 

Some establishing shots of what looks like a fairly rundown, poor community. Not a lot going on. The announcer uses a word that sounds like “Weet-ja!” I presume that is Native American slang or dialect (though so far I have been unable to find anything in Google).  He also uses the term “snaggin’ days,” then talks about shape-shifting, then ends with another word that sounds like slang or dialect. This is consistent throughout the series- we are in a world where people don’t talk the way I am used to.

One kid (we learn he is Bear) gets out of bed, establishing time of day and who the star of the show is, and then Ron Asheton’s guitar starts to ring out; the cold open becomes a heist movie. 

Boom. We’re less than a minute into the episode, and we’re right in the middle of the A story. Four kids stealing a snack truck.

We learn a little about the four kids, and get some great jokes (Bear telling Elora Dana to put her seatbelt on while they steal a car- TRUCK!, the visual of the truck dragging the metal ramp, Willie Jack texting with her Mom during the robbery.) We see some more of the world, the reservation they live on, and meet an antagonist who we immediately learn a little about (he’s a cop and a conspiracy theorist), and then we also see how despite their bickering, Bear and Elora Dana have a very secure friendship (“Skoden!” “Stoodis!” - more slang, but that’s easier to understand, I’m already starting to get it) all in the space of almost exactly two minutes.

World, star, supporting cast, enemy, tone, jokes. Expertly and expeditiously.

So anyway, what’s your favorite cold open ever? Or least favorite? Or just a real good one? Let me know in the comments.

And I’ve got the crowns to prove it.

Teeth Are A Scam

(And I’ve Got the Crowns To Prove It)

“Stay right there. I have to get something out of my trunk.”

This would be fine to hear if you were broken down by the side of the road, and a stranger had stopped to help. Or if you expressed mild disappointment to the inept professional magician at your 7th birthday party ..

When my oral surgeon leaned over and said, into my open mouth, “Stay right there. I have to get something out of my trunk.”I was more than slightly disturbed:

“You are supposed to be undoing decades of negligence, sir, not selling me a boosted car stereo,” I thought into various tubes, wires, drills, vacuums, fountains, and jaw-binding contraptions.

I was there because I needed a bone graft on one tooth so it could be crowned (so many crowns- at this point I’d be surprised if my teeth weren’t in the midst of a war of succession). Also the extraction of a broken tooth. Luckily I felt practically no pain while all this was going on, at least after he pushed a novocaine needle through the roof of my mouth into my hippocampus thirteen or fourteen times, and waited four minutes for it to almost begin taking effect before he started breaking shit.

It turns out my current oral surgeon is itinerant, like the knife sharpener (we had a knife sharpener in my neighborhood when I was a kid), or the legendary Pig Man (a friend of mine grew up in Serbia, and same time every year the Pig Man would come to her village with his boar to get all the sows pregnant- fun week!). My guy (I mean that phrase as an indicator of a particular person with whom I have some association, in this case my oral surgeon, not as the condescending phrase “my guy” has lately become with which to address people, my guy) travels from office to office around Los Angeles, depending on the day of the week. Mondays, West Hollywood. Tuesdays, Mid-Wilshire. Wednesdays, Glassell Park. Thursdays, golf. Etcetera.

So it makes sense that he keeps some necessary materials and implements in his trunk. Where else? The wheel well? The ski rack?

It would have been better to have had one dentist my entire adult life, as I did when I was a kid (Elbridge J. Devine, known as Ellie).

But  I have always been an itinerant patient.

The summer I turned 24, after my second year of teaching junior high school, I spent the month of July mountaineering in Colorado (and of course figuring out the rest of my life while in nature, like Thoreau, or John the Baptist) . I learned orienteering, rock climbing, rappelling, what it felt like to fast for three days, self-arrest with an ice axe, what it’s like to be at the top of a 14,000 foot peak, what it’s like to be hypothermic…but every night I would wake up in my tent with excruciating pain in my teeth. I’d grab the clove oil from the med kit and rub some on my gums- instant relief! Perhaps I should have been more proactive, but the clove oil worked. Problem solved! Until the next night…

Great Sand Dunes National Monument, Colorado, a few hours before I woke up screaming for the 14th day in a row…

…That August, directly upon my return from Colorado, my parents decided we should go to Paris to celebrate their anniversary (my kind of celebration).  The pressurized TransAtlantic airplane cabin at 30,000 feet somehow pushed my tooth pain beyond barely tolerable to “I hope we crash.”  Not good.

We met up with my folks in the 14th arrondissement (or something like that). To keep from screaming, I was gritting my teeth (ironically) (ironically in retrospect, of course, not at the time). My mother, obviously responsible, immediately called the U.S. Embassy and got directions to a dentist’s office, right by the Moulin Rouge probably or Sacre Couer or something. When we got there, a dentiste (French for dentist) in a beret eating a croissant sipping beaujolais and cafe au lais sneering haughtily whilst running from the Germans took one look inside my mouth and started screaming at my mother- there was bad stuff going on, and la mère was obviously responsible.

He did some kind of French voodoo to temporarily stop the pain, and when we got back to the States (at that time still United), I had my wisdom teeth removed.

In the late 90’s I became a patient to a dentist in New York who was very pleasant, and very competent.  Mostly just maintenance. She got excited at my first appointment. when I told her I had started doing stand-up. Prior to routine rummaging, she put on a VHS tape: a stand-up from the 80’s (I forget who) who was great and funny until they launched into an obscenity-filled rant which included f-words, p-words, c-words, r-words, k-words, x words, and n-words. Yes to freedom of speech and all but that kind of language does not create a relaxed atmosphere. Particularly when you are getting intimate with your genteel Upper East Side dentist.

At a later visit, she invited me to a fundraising benefit for orphaned orangutans (apparently due to deforestation and poaching there are quite a few, and like all orphans, their lives can be difficult). She assured me that not only would there be wine and cheese, but the artwork of one of the orangutans would be on display, as it was at all their fundraising events.

 I remember at the time reflecting on how I was doing open mics on Ludlow Street while Jay Jay the orangutan’s art work was touring the country, and on the difficulties of being an artist, and then on how maybe he deserved success more than I did because he was an orphan, and on how Van Gogh died broke… It was depressing, and exhilarating.

I did not go. Didn’t even contemplate it.

In the fall of 2020, mid-pandemic, I drove from Los Angeles to Idaho to spend some time with generous friends for Thanksgiving (after I first quarantined in the elegant apartment above their barn for two weeks- very safe). Second night there, I woke up in horrific pain. I had had a root canal a month or two earlier, and this pain was right in that spot- this is how I learned one thing that can happen with a root canal is if they don’t get it exactly right and get all the whatever out the first time sometimes they need to do it again shortly thereafter (not quite clear on the details of this, but it is not uncommon). 

So I drove from the small town I was in to the major metropolis of Twin Falls. Heading into a city I’d never been to, in a part of the country with which I was unfamiliar, to find somebody who would perform follow-up oral surgery, competently, hopefully rectifying somebody else’s mistake, made me feel like a bit of a daredevil. This made sense, since Twin Falls is where Evel Knievel tried to jump his motorcycle over the Snake River Canyon on September 8, 1974. 

We both dared. He failed. I succeeded.

Fittingly, I found the office in an office park, near a textile manufacturer probably and an accounting firm maybe or a brewery restaurant (they put them in office parks because business). I entered the waiting room in my KN95 mask, secure in the knowledge that I was doing all I could to keep myself from catching COVID. The bare-faced receptionist snorted contemptuously: “We’re not crazy like those folks up in Sun Valley, no need for masks here, you can take that off.”

As an eldest child, I am by nature a rule-follower, and the rule at that time was “Do no task without a mask.” Of course I made that rule up just now, but I was very distressed by this. Did this mean the dentist was going to be unmasked above my gaping mouth, in the middle of the worst pandemic in over 100 years? Would the sweet relief of a root canal do-over be undone over by COVID?

When he showed up he had a mask on.  Good dentist.

Unfortunately, while he worked he forced me to watch The Blind Side, an aggressively terrible depiction of the life of NFL tackle Michael Oher (not an orphan) (a foster child!) (also a conservatee!), a movie which starred Sandra Bullock as a caricature. I later learned that her silly accent and hair dye had both won Academy Awards for Best Actress.

Just watched The Blind Side, drifting on Percocet, 100 miles of icy highway to the barn…

I go back to the current guy in a month, so he can do more stuff. Eventually, this problem will be fixed. And granted, part of it is my fault- I should have flossed more and chewed Trident. But also, why are teeth? So difficult for so many. There’s a whole profession dedicated to them. Shouldn’t they have been evolutionized out by now? Or made more self-sustaining?

And here’s what happens, forever: because they are not self-sustaining, they keep causing trouble: extractions. crowns, bridges, implants, fillings, dentures, grinding, Invisalign, veneers… the list goes on. Or would, if I could think of anything else. Constant problems, or at least every once in a while regularly.

Until you die.

And then what happens? Time goes by, decay, global warming, orbits change, eventually the Earth hurtles into the Sun, and you know what’s left of you as the planet immolates itself?

Teeth.

Failing nonstop in life. Relentless survivors in death.

A scam.

Yes, my current problem will be solved. But soon enough another will come along. I wonder where I’ll find my next dentist. Bangkok? Omaha? I hear Tijuana’s very cheap… 

COMING UP

-I have a new podcast and a new Substack (in addition to this one, and of course subscribing is optional) in the works, both pertaining to writing, specifically writing for television (one of my many areas of expertise). Coming soon.

-The Long Shot (Podcast) Rides Again! July 7, 730 PM, Dynasty Typewriter, we’re getting the gang back together… more details and ticket sales soon! And we will probably Livestream it!

-New Writing Classes start soon. If you want to write a sitcom pilot, I can help (it’s harder than you think, just me, and there’s a lot of stuff I wish I knew when I was starting out). For more info, DM or message or email or skywrite me, or just go here and read about it.

THE SIGN-OFF

Thanks for reading.

Any questions? Problems? Perplexities? Dilemmas? Enigmas? Queries? Comments? Addendums? Sidebars? Let me know.

Sean