NOTE: This piece was originally published on Critics at Large on October 14, 2012. If you wish to comment, please do so on that page.
“It was a car accident. She was texting. Janie …. was driving – not fast – but at that moment, and it couldn’t wait, she needed to tell me to buy a bag of coffee. So at least it was important.”
– Ryan King (Matthew Perry), describing his wife’s death in the pilot episode of Go On
Last spring, NBC aired Awake, a fantasy-crime drama with a protagonist struggling with an almost unimaginable loss. As I wrote at the time, Awake’s rich ambitions and complicated narrative technique came as close to anything I’d ever seen on television to telling a sustained story from a mourner’s perspective. One reason was that the fantasy situation itself (its conceit that Det. Britten would effectively alternate one day to the next between two separate realities – one in which his wife had died, and another in which his teenage son had) gave weight and reality to the resistance one often feels in ‘moving on’ after suffering a comparable loss. Though Awake was unfortunately not renewed for a second season, its 13-episode first season still succeeds in telling a powerful, if prematurely abbreviated, story, and it is well worth seeking out.
What was so unique about Awake was
that surviving the death of his family member wasn’t simply the
situation that set the larger story in motion: it was essentially the
substance of the story itself. Though Awake didn’t survive into
this new season, it has a surprisingly inheritor in a new series on NBC,
in of all things the new Matthew Perry comic vehicle, Go On. In Go On,
Perry plays Ryan King, a minor local celebrity with his own sports
radio talk show forced against his will into group therapy after the
death of his wife Janie, where he finds a mismatched collection of
others also trying to live on and survive their own stories of pain and
loss. In character-driven sitcoms it is often the details that matter
most, and even so early in the season, Go On has exhibited a
knack for getting them precisely right. Among the otherwise
underwhelming batch of new network comedies this fall, NBC’s Go On is one of the few bright spots.
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Matthew Perry stars in Go On, a new comedy series on NBC |
“It was a car accident. She was texting. Janie …. was driving – not fast – but at that moment, and it couldn’t wait, she needed to tell me to buy a bag of coffee. So at least it was important.”
– Ryan King (Matthew Perry), describing his wife’s death in the pilot episode of Go On
Last spring, NBC aired Awake, a fantasy-crime drama with a protagonist struggling with an almost unimaginable loss. As I wrote at the time, Awake’s rich ambitions and complicated narrative technique came as close to anything I’d ever seen on television to telling a sustained story from a mourner’s perspective. One reason was that the fantasy situation itself (its conceit that Det. Britten would effectively alternate one day to the next between two separate realities – one in which his wife had died, and another in which his teenage son had) gave weight and reality to the resistance one often feels in ‘moving on’ after suffering a comparable loss. Though Awake was unfortunately not renewed for a second season, its 13-episode first season still succeeds in telling a powerful, if prematurely abbreviated, story, and it is well worth seeking out.