shoop and ed o'neill

These days, I'm happy for Ed O'Neill. Now, that makes no sense, of course, being that emotionally invested in notable TV stars whose paths will most likely never cross with mine. Nevertheless, I'm happy for the guy, because he's got a nice late-in-the-day leading role on an excellent TV show, Modern Family, and I get the sense that, yes, even though I know nothing about what O'Neill is like in real life, that he's earned it--he has it coming. But first, I have to talk about William Bendix.

William Bendix was a go-to character actor in Hollywood in the 40s and 50s, and he created a prominent role in one of the great American bar plays--William Saroyan's The Time of Your Life. (He's in the movie version, too, and he's terrific.) Bendix usually played good-hearted but not-too-bright guys, with occasional not-too-bright bullies thrown in. What relegated him, I think, to playing a lot of "simps," was his shape and his face--he was a bulky guy, with a very easy-to-read face, almost cartoonishly easy to read. So his emotions were always right there, and that leant itself to simplicity. It worked against him in many cases, including what could have been a great role, the title role in The Babe Ruth Story. But that movie made Ruth seem incredibly simple and obvious, and with Bendix's open-faced style, well, it was simple times about a million. But catch him some time in Detective Story--Kirk Douglas has the lead, but Bendix is the straight-shooting, common-sense buddy, and you start to wish Bendix could have done that sort of thing more often. His best-known role, for radio and later TV, was super-dumb husband and father Chester Riley on The Life of Riley, saying things like "What a revoltin' development this is!" And so it was.

O'Neill, I always thought, had a lot in common with Bendix. O'Neill projects the simple, direct, guy's guy aura that Bendix had, and he also found a long-running, popular niche as a dim-bulb family man, Al Bundy in Married With Children--although, to be fair to that show, it started out as a wonderfully subversive alternative to the rebirth of the warmhearted family sitcom before both the show, and particularly O'Neill, degenerated into leering self-parodies. O'Neill, however, gets a chance at rejuvenation that Bendix never had (he died relatively young, at 58; O'Neill turns 64 this year), playing a very down-to-earth and often very funny head of a large extended family. You know this guy, because O'Neill lets you get to know him so easily--it's that easy-to-read face. Plus, the writers give O'Neill a chance to rise to some depth and complexity--O'Neill's Jay is a man who has made, and has to deal with, some unfortunate choices in the past, and he's learning to navigate a future that's much harder to read than he is. The whole ensemble of Modern Family does a great job, and you root for all of them, but O'Neilll does just what you always knew O'Neill could do--he takes a big, messy, multi-layered family comedy, and he holds it together. And he makes it look easy.

So, Ed, although you don't need to hear it from me, good for you.