Natasha Lyonne and co. remind us what worked about 90s TV

I bet Rian Johnson remembers the one about the fluke monster

Full disclosure – the first TV show I ever loved was The X-Files.

No, that's a lie, the first TV show I ever loved was actually probably Chip and Dale, Rescue Rangers.

Hang on, my mom just called; the first TV show I ever loved was Thomas the Tank Engine.

Probably somewhere on the Wayback Machine is a fan webzine I attempted to publish and maintain about the august paranormal Fox institution after it went off the air – I know, I'm both dating and embarrassing myself, but I can't hide from the truth. On many a 90s evening in our two-story built-in-the-70s stucco LA county home, I would routinely hear that most haunting of intro ditties:

So delicious! The echo effects! The synth! The Looney-Tunes way the jagged zooms into the UFO sync up to the rhythm of the theme – perfect.

The first several episodes of The X-Files I watched via subterfuge

Now, I was way too young for The X-Files when it was on the air in its original iteration, but did that stop me from watching it? It did not; in fact, the first several episodes I watched, I did so via subterfuge. In said two-story built-in-the-70s stucco LA county home, we were arranged such that if you crept down the stairs just so, avoiding the creaky stair, you could covertly watch a slice of the Sharp CRT big black box without alerting the denizens of the couch to your presence.

I was probably 7? 8? I got away with, sincerely, several nights of this until one night, when I audibly gasped at a monster or a reveal of some kind. This was the 90s, and we were definitely too middle-income to afford surround sound; we didn't even have cable yet. I was extremely audible. They heard me, and found me, crouching on the stairs in my pajamas.

From then on, I did manage to get my dad to show me a select few episodes that weren't too scary, by reviewing the gosh-dang TV Guide to see when a given rerun would air – they'd always air the good ones again, and boy were they good. I even saw the first movie IN THEATERS with my dad. I WAS TEN (10) YEARS OLD. X-Files: Fight the Future super still holds up, strong recommend. Not scarred at all from the child murdered by aliens in the Texas desert, black ooze seeping into his eyes.

Episodic TV was (sometimes) pretty great!

I say all of this as preamble to my point, which is only kind of about The X-Files – when Rian Johnson made a bunch of noise about bringing back episodic TV, I was anxious, because I didn't know if I believed that anyone still remembered why episodic TV was freaking great, but it was (sometimes) pretty great!

Now (Obama voice), let me be clear: TV now is generally better than TV was then. Production values, performances, showrunners with generally a solid plan for a given season, and at least an outline for the series arc – all these things were frequently lacking in ye olden 90s and 80s. Shows didn't arc, they spilled, on and on, 28 episodes a year, trying to last long enough to get syndicated, and were worse for the wear as a result – every show, even the good ones, had like 5 you could skip every year.

But episodic TV was, erm, episodic – you mostly weren't punished for missing episode 7 when you went to watch episode 14. It was on the showrunners to set up an arc and deliver a conclusion within the meager bounds of each episode's length, and done right, this was a thrill! Even 90s dilettantes remember sponge-worthy and the parking garage, or the fluke monster and the one with the inbred monster family – Friends went so far as name their episodes this way – the one where whatever whatever. This was absolutely a crutch for lots of shows – still is, on basic cable and broadcast shows – but boy, it sure let each episode be its own canvas, and sometimes the paintings were pretty great! It really could be the fog of time or whatever, but I remember dozens of Simpsons and Seinfeld episodes better than whole arcs of Succession, even though I love that show.

That's not to say that I don't remember individual episodes of today's prestige TV – obviously Mad Men and Breaking Bad and Succession have great, memorable individual episodes. But what these shows often are prevented from doing are the huge stylistic swings that any given X-Files or Simpsons episode could take without upsetting the balance of the show.

Take, for example, episode 8 of Poker Face (I didn't forget that this was supposed to be about Poker Face, see?), Rian Johnson's arch drama about Natasha Lyonne's Charlie Cale, who is cursed not only to always know when someone is lying, but also to be around so many people who are lying about murders in particular. Here, the reins are handed to star Natasha Lyonne herself to not only star, but also direct and write! And she really goes for it! The episode, The Orpheus Syndrome, features a fairly rudimentary plot – you'll be shocked to learn that the episode entails the travails of movie producer and bigwig Cherry Jones (!), film archive master Luis Guzman (!!), and claymation artist NICK NOLTE (!!!), one of whom gets up to some murderin' and lyin' about it to Natasha Lyonne – episodic!

But Lyonne lets the thing breathe

But Lyonne lets the thing breathe – her long, leisurely dialogue with Nolte's Arthur Liptin, the long takes of his beautiful and terrible creations, the surrealist turns it takes in the last act – it's different from the other episodes (which range in quality from at least good to very, very good) in ways both tonal and structural. The sequence that ends the episode is like a fugue state, all jerky claymation and stuttering visions of deceit, and guilt. And if someone has fallen off the wagon, or missed a few episodes in the interim, or heck, only heard the premise from a friend, they can still just watch this episode! Try having someone watch the Breaking Bad episode about the fly, Fly, (directed by Rian Johnson! created by X-Files contributor Vince Gilligan! synchronicity!) without the several seasons' worth of preceding context and plotting^[1] – it just doesn't work in the same way as a great one-er like Orpheus Syndrome.

Is Poker Face "better" than going-on 15 years of "peak," arc-driven TV? I mean, no, maybe not? But I don't want to have to choose! I don't want our best creators to all be forced to only make these 12-to-60 hour-long movies, however great they may be. I'm glad Natasha Lyonne and Rian Johnson (and Quinta Brunson!^[2]) are picking up some of these old abandoned tools and making them new again.