Josh Schwartz and the Ambivalence of the System

Josh Schwartz has always been accused of having autobiographical characters in his shows, and this is meant as a criticism. Seth Cohen on The OC and Dan Humphrey on Gossip Girl are gifted, misunderstood, self-important teenage nerds, and the shows seem to take them as seriously as they take themselves, arguably to their detriment. But the main character on his other show, Chuck Bartowski, is just as autobiographical, but in a more mature and perhaps more revealing way. Where Dan and Seth represent an artist remembering an adolescence many people can relate to, Chuck is his way of telling the story of his adult life, and as a television producer, this shouldn't be something most people can relate to. By masking autobiography in metaphor, however, he makes his story more inclusive, tells a personal story in a decidedly impersonal medium, and launches a subtle critique of the system that made him what he is today.

This will make more sense with two pieces of context. First is the context in which the show itself appears. Chuck, along with Gossip Girl, is one of two new shows Schwartz created after the cancellation of his first show, The OC. That show had a monumental first season overstuffed with drama and disasters, but couldn't keep up the impossible pace, and in the middle of its fourth season it was announced that it would not be returning for a fifth. The OC was always regarded as a trashy teen drama, but the two new shows reveal that there were, in fact, three elements to The OC: melodrama (which was obvious, and which now resides on Gossip Girl), action (fires, overdoses, earthquakes, all now on Chuck), and, perhaps counterintuitively for viewers who missed the excellent final half of The OC's final season and the relationship between Ryan and Taylor, comedy. These three elements worked in harmony only briefly on Schwartz's original show, but broken out into their own series, they can flourish.

Secondly, there is Josh Schwartz's biography. A child of Rhode Island toymakers, he was a junior in the film school at USC when he sold his first script for $500,000. After two failed pilots, The OC became a massive success. Schwartz was 27 when it premiered, making him "the youngest person in network history to create and produce his own one-hour series." He was so young that he had never been a staff writer; all of his television credits were as a show creator and producer. In a very real sense, he was plucked from obscurity and thrown directly into the maelstrom of the TV business.

It's important that where Schwartz's two other fictional doppelgangers are teenagers. Tolstoy to the contrary, all unhappy adolescences are basically the same, and what makes them so ridiculous in hindsight is that every single unhappy teenager thinks they are going through something totally unique. Seth and Dan certainly do, and this makes them less appealing to adults. But Chuck Bartowski is an adult, and as an adult, you're responsible for yourself. You can't afford the luxury of a generic unhappiness, nor the simple pleasure of believing you are special. Because adults must find their own unhappinesses, Chuck is a much more interesting and complex character. When you're a teenager, you welcome drama with open arms; as an adult, you try constantly to keep it at bay, so when it comes, it's something new.

Where Seth and Dan were characters heady with the excitement of firsts, Chuck is a character settled into smallness, a big fish quite content in a small pond. Seemingly the one member of his class at Stanford not to get a high-status job, he is now the alpha nerd at a fictionalized Best Buy ("Buy More"), living with his sister and hanging out with his loser friend Morgan. When his college roommate Bryce implants a treasure trove of government secrets into Chuck's brain, he falls under the protection of a mildly sociopathic NSA agent named John Casey and a CIA agent, Sarah Walker, who also poses as his girlfriend. As he now has the only copy of these secrets, he is enlisted to assist on spy missions, which he fumbles through successfully in roughly the same way Seth Cohen fumbled through adolescence. At the same time, he stays within his old life, and the conflicts between that and the spy world drive the show's emotional drama.

Removed from the particulars, the setup of Chuck is more familiar than one might expect from ass-kicking espionage. A normal guy with a normal life is suddenly thrust into a world of power, secrets, and action, and must survive within a system that could easily crush him. In other words, he's thrust into Hollywood--a whole world of power, secrets, and action that a newcomer must negotiate without knowledge of the immensely complex interpersonal histories that inform every interaction, without any training and with only the most cursory advice as to what's expected. This is not unlike the story of a college student who gets offered $500,000 for a script and ends up producing his own primetime network show without any prior experience--Schwartz's story.

In the third episode, Chuck returns to Buy More from a mission he feels he's botched. A pile of old computers awaits repair, and though his friend offers to help, Chuck demurs. "It'll be nice to do something I'm good at," he says. For "creatives," especially those who work day jobs, this is sure to resonate. You spend your nights trying to figure out this immensely complex system, whether it be record labels, the art world, magazines, publishing houses, or movie studios, and, most of the time, you aren't very good at it. You make a fool of yourself in public, commit horrible faux pases with people of influence, and seem to repeatedly sabotage your own prospects. It's nice, in that situation, to just come into the office and pump out a spreadsheet, because it's simple and straighforward, and when it's done, you did it right. This is the life of a writer before he gets discovered, and as Schwartz found out, success comes all at once, when it comes. You are a failure right up until the moment you succeed.

The fourth episode introduces a DEA agent named Karina. When Sarah gets captured by the enemy, Chuck tries to convince Karina to rescue her. Karina replies, "You know this thing of ours? We're all in it for ourselves. It's what we do." This is not entirely true, in context; spies are at least partially in for their agencies and the policy goals of the government they represent. But it is quite true of Hollywood, which is the real "us" of Karina's statement. Before they leave, she tells Chuck, "It's our job. We shed identities like people shed clothes." Who is speaking here? Is it the character, or the actress playing the character? Where is the mask?

This is Schwartz's way of writing about his experience without being accused of solipsism or whininess. (And if there's any doubt that Chuck is autobiographical, by the ninth episode he's dating a girl named Lou, played by Rachel Bilson, who also played the love interest of Seth, the Schwartz-surrogate on The OC; Chuck even gets into a double-dipping problem with her, as did Seth.) He has constructed an unfamiliar metaphor that nevertheless speaks powerfully to his particular experience and the experience of the struggling writers with whom he ultimately identifies. After all, in a sense he is the loser from his college class: in a program that prepares its graduates for art, he spends his time writing about spoiled teenagers and secret agents.

It is college, significantly, that opens up a new thematic avenue for Schwartz. In the seventh episode, Chuck is forced to return to Stanford, a school that expelled him in his junior year. The autobiographical angle here is obvious--both Schwartz and his surrogate left college in their junior years. But there would seem to be a disconnect in that where Schwartz left on his own terms to pursue success, Chuck's departure was a kind of failure. As the episode continues, though, the strands come together. Chuck thinks he was kicked out because Bryce told a professor that Chuck cheated on an exam. But as we find out, Bryce got Chuck kicked out for his own good: the professor was going to recruit Chuck for the CIA, and Bryce didn't want his friend to face that awful life. So as it turns out, Chuck left to go on to bigger and better things too--it was just against his will, and it took a while. Then again, it did for Schwartz, too.

If we read the CIA as a symbol for Hollywood, this episode changes the scenario significantly. Chuck is not, in fact, an innocent brought into this system against his will; he was implicitly part of the CIA all along. As the professor says, "He's in no matter what." And Chuck would never have been recruited--or made friends with Bryce--if he hadn't gone to a particular college. This is just like Hollywood, which only brings you in if you have a connection, and just like Schwartz, who wouldn't have been creating network shows if he hadn't gone to a very specific college (e.g., USC film school). Despite all the business about the two worlds colliding, it turns out that Chuck's world was always part of this larger system. He just didn't know it yet.

This episode leaves little doubt that the world of espionage is Schwartz's autobiographical metaphor for Hollywood. And this reflects back on the show's depiction of the intelligence game, making it into a subtle critique of Hollywood. When in the next episode Chuck's sister randomly encounters a rogue agent and is poisoned, this is a comment on the way a Hollywood career inevitably intrudes into your personal life. In the sixth episode, Chuck meets a guy named Lazlo who was recruited by the agency as a teenager and had since been locked underground; when he finally escapes, he has gone crazy, a joke about the way Hollywood ruins child stars. Chuck tells Lazlo that Sarah and John can help him. "They're the good guys," Chuck says. "There's no such thing in this business," Lazlo replies, and note the pointed use of the word "business."

Thomas Schatz wrote of "the genius of the system." But while the products of that system may be wonderful for those of us outside it, and while we may admire the almost mechanical process by which those products are created, for the human beings within that system, it can feel crushing even as it enables them to do what they do. Schwartz is not only telling his own story but carefully expressing ambivalence about the business that has made his dreams come true, because it is also a daily horror to actually deal with: the ruthlessness, the power plays, the lies. Schwartz offers the perspective of a "creative" within this system, and speaks for them convincingly, in a language perhaps only they will recognize.

Schwartz also, in the end, demonstrates a way to keep your sanity within the system by being a smartass on occasion. In November of 2007, NBC, the network on which Chuck runs, had a "green week," during which "network logos turn green, on-screen graphics offer tips for reducing carbon emissions and television episodes emphasize environmentally friendly plot line." Chuck did its part, with two of its actors appearing in a promo spot and sporting numerous environmentalist elements in its seventh episode. One of these involved the new manager at Buy More starting a recycling program. He explained why: "Tree-hugging is all the rage these days. I plan on exploiting the burgeoning conscience of the American consumer." This is funny, but it's also a fairly accurate take on the ridiculous spectacle of "green week." Schwartz did his duty to the system by, in effect, trying to undermine its message.

Josh Schwartz is no fool. As a writer-producer, he is a member of an extremely select club, and he uses his position to not only make art, but to tell his own story in a new kind of way. But he also has to be honest, and honesty demands criticizing that which surrounds him. Chuck may not be the best show ever--and to be honest, I have largely stopped watching it--but the fact that Schwartz is able to do all this while still making a reasonably satisfying spy show is a testament to how much thought he puts into his entertainment products.

Labels: chuck, gossip girl, media studies, the oc, TV

posted by Mike B. @ 10:43 AM