Date of airing: May 6, 2000 (CBS)
Nielsen ratings information: 6.64 million viewers, 4.4/9 in Households, 2.0/8 with Adults 18-49
written by: Alex Taub
directed by: Todd Pfeiffer
This is one of those episodes that tried to be funny again, that tried to put its characters into absurd episodes for the sake of comedy and G-rated violence. You have a guest character of the ridiculous kind who thinks he can live through an adventure in hunting down dangerous criminals, you have Gary being seen as a crazy person endangering the lives of Chicago citizens by simply existing on the streets and by engaging with what a psychiatrist thinks is an imaginary person, and you have a dangerous criminal portrayed by a brute force of an actor who decided to stop his career as a goofy villain kickboxer and instead go for being a very nice criminal who tells the truth and helps his bounty hunter's wife to get to the hospital quickly, so she can give birth. This entire sentence is essentially the premise of the episode, and it is what it sounds like.
And even with all of that happening during this hour, it is still a G-rated show, and while the brawl in the bar might have been the most violent scene yet, especially with that one dude threatening to put a dart in Mel Schwartz's face, the writers still remembered that EARLY EDITION is also a comedy series every once in a while, so the real violence happened via sound effects only, by depicting Mel Schwartz getting into his car as Gary was beat up inside the bar. The writers could not just deliver a dark episode in which Mel is in danger and always gets killed at the end of the day and therefore gets Gary in danger, and both of them might even end up dead or in the loonie bin. It looks to me like the writers took a plot – whatever plot they came up with – wrote it all down, and then decided to put some of the funny stuff into the episode, because it is not like the show had a lot of that since the previous hour.
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| With Gary in your city, it is easier to take a nap. |
And yes, all that makes this hour kind of forgettable, as the humor was nothing new, the crazy characters were something the show has already seen before, and the stories could not convince me to think that EARLY EDITION is one of the greatest-written shows in history. Although I do have to note that there were some elements in the script that I appreciated: The show was always good in connecting one of the seemingly random scenes from the first couple of minutes of the episode to the main storyline – in this case, the pregnant woman Gary helped in the store, and who could have just been another instance of Gary helping someone and getting no thanks in return turned out to be the preamble to Mel's story, with the woman turning out to be his overzealously aggressive wife.
But because this episode focused on the guest characters only and decided not to take care of Gary or even Marissa (you could be excused thinking that she was absent from this hour, but she did pop up for, I think, two scenes), it generally becomes a lame episode, since the guest character should never be more interesting than the main characters. You know that they will stick around for one episode only (in the case of EARLY EDITION, It is a surprise and a miracle that some characters turned out to be recurrings with two, maybe three, appearances per season) and after that, you will not have to care about them ever again. Especially with characters you think could make another appearance and could turn out to be important for a better story, but then never appear again. This episode had such a character: Gary's impromptu psychiatrist and therapist played by Andi Chapman. The idea of Gary doing some therapy on the side is an intriguing one, but because the series was not renewed for a fifth season (which turned out to be a correct choice, as this episode had the lowest viewership number so far), the idea was never pursued. That is a shame because it looked like Gary needed some therapy every once in a while.
The problem with Mel Schwartz was that his adventure thrill came over as a character trait that should have started with a depression or midlife crisis of sorts (like Gary mentioned during one of his therapy sessions), but midlife crises did not even seem to be a thing in Mel’s life, and the idea of one seemed to be in Gary's head only. It turns out that Mel just wanted to see some action before becoming a father, and that was the gist of his character exposition. If Mel would have suffered from some form of depression, or going through a midlife crisis, his character arc would have had an anchor, it would have made him more interesting and possibly appealing (especially to me, a chronically depressed person), and there even might have been an opportunity to have a meaningful scene between Mel and his wife, with one of them getting into why they behaved the way they behaved, and the other finally understanding their partner for the first time. But I guess all of that was just an idea in my head.
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| Gary is in some sort of trouble again. |
I would have loved to see more of Gary’s therapy sessions. As I mentioned already, Gary needs some therapy, and he should have accepted the offer of his psychiatrist (did she ever get a name here?), just to give the audience something to remember Gary by as someone who is not just a guy who receives tomorrow's newspaper today. The premise is the perfect idea to have Gary go through the issues he has with dumb people getting into dumber accidents or going through the dumbest ways to die. Gary has never been particularly excited about how certain people reacted when they are saved by him, but it became obvious that Gary was not taking it well when he was being yelled at. Talking to a therapist about these issues, without having to indulge in the mysteries of the paper, might have allowed him to become a little sane again, to maybe find a new angle on how to save people from themselves. It is a shame that an idea like this came too late to the writers, and all that is happening now until the series is officially finished are random episodic storylines.
