LIFE USA TODAY ❚THURSDAY, AUGUST 22, 2019❚ 5B
‘22 Jump Street’ (2014)As villain Mercedes, Bell had plenty
of memorable moments opposite Jo-
nah Hill’s police officer Schmidt, many
of which involved her making fun of
how old he looks when he goes under-
cover as a college student.
“Jillian makes me want to quit show
business and realize I am a complete
fraud because she is the funniest per-
son I have ever met in my life,” Hill
once said in a roundtable interview for
“22 Jump Street.”‘Workaholics’ (2011 to 2017)For six years, Bell played socially
awkward office manager Jillian Belk in
the fratty Comedy Central series co-
created by Blake Anderson, Adam De-
vine and Anders Holm. Though she
wasn’t part of the triumvirate central
to the show, she became the most en-
joyable and multidimensional charac-
ter to watch, with her outbursts and
outrageous attempts at forming
friendships. “We always knew that she
had to be in it,” Anderson told Vanity
Fair about casting Bell. “We poached
her” from another improv group.‘Eastbound & Down’ (2013)In the final season of Danny
McBride’s HBO series, Bell plays Dixie.
It’s a character that could’ve been asmemorable as wallpaper: a wife who
doesn’t get jokes and carries on inane
dinner conversation. But Bell makes the
character comically vanilla, even turn-
ing a conversation about her sex life into
something mind-numbingly boring.‘Office Christmas Party’ (2016)This cliched comedy is filled with
such funny people as Jason Bateman,
T.J. Miller and Rob Corddry, yet Bell
plays the only indelible character: Trina,
a pimp. She initially comes off like an
overprotective mom to a young female
escort, before taking out a gun and
threatening to shoot everyone.
“This week has been a scheduling
nightmare. My iCal crashed and now all
my appointments are set in 2019,” she
says in one scene, getting angry when
her driver tries to shut a car door for her.
“I can close it myself! I’m a woman in- Jesus.”
‘Rough Night’ (2017)As the former college roommate of
bride-to-be Scarlett Johansson’s Jess,
Bell’s Alice is a Type A bachelorette par-
ty organizer. Though Kate McKinnon’s
Aussie character Pippa has the movie’s
most over-the-top scenes, the subtler
moments of Alice wanting to make sure
that everyone has the greatest time ever
really hit home. After she accidentally
kills a man, Bell’s character says, “This
can still be the best weekend of our (ex-
pletive) lives! Let’s just smile a little bit
about it, right? Smile more.”
As McKinnon put it, Bell “may be the
funniest woman alive.”Bell
Continued from Page 4BIn “Brittany Runs a Marathon,” Bell plays a woman seeking answers. JON PACKed by society and must learn from their
own mistakes.
“You’re not supposed to let children
fall; you’re supposed to guide them,”
Tench says heatedly.
“Guide them into what you guided
them into?” Manson retorts with a
laugh. “This anger that you’re feeling,
Agent Tench, it’s just anger that you’ve
got for you.”
It’s a charged confrontation that re-
flects Tench’s feelings of guilt for not be-
ing home often enough, as he wonders
whether he’s responsible for Brian’s
seeming lack of empathy.
“What we see in that (scene) are two
opposing philosophies about children
and life,” McCallany says. “Does Bill pri-
vately harbor doubts that he could’ve
done certain things differently? Abso-
lutely. Like many men of his generation,
Bill is an absentee father, he travels
many weeks a year and has tremendous
difficulty connecting with his son. Man-
son is able to identify that Achilles’ heel
and exploits that in their interaction,
and that’s why we see Bill get so deeply
affected.”
The season ends on a shattering note
for Tench, as he returns home to discov-
er his wife (Stacey Roca) has left him fol-
lowing disagreements over his frequent
absence and Brian’s well-being.
Ford is left feeling similarly helpless
by the final scene, having spent Season
2 doggedly investigating the so-called
Atlanta child murders, a string of ab-
ductions and killings over the course of
two years that resulted in the deaths of
29 black children (mostly boys) and
young adults.
Contending that serial killers target
their own race, despite pushback from
FBI higher-ups, Ford eventually nar-
rows in on suspect Wayne Williams
(Christopher Livingston), a 23-year-
old black man who was tried and con-
victed of two adult murders in the
case. (The other 27 deaths technically
remain unsolved.)
But even after Williams’ arrest, one
of the victim’s mothers (June Carryl)
expresses her dissatisfaction with the
FBI’s handling of the investigation,
calling Williams a mere “scapegoat” so
they could close the case.
“Wayne just might be Atlanta’s 30th
victim,” she tells a stunned Holden,
who until that point had never consid-
ered the case’s racial implications. At-
lanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms re-
opened the case this year, citing the
desire to “bring closure” to the victims’
families.
“It’s chillingly relevant today, just in
the way that we can sweep people in
poverty and people of color’s cases un-
der the rug,” Groff says. That it took “
victims before people really started
paying attention was incredibly frus-
trating, I’m sure, for people going
through it at the time.”
Ford’s new uncertainty over Wil-
liams’ conviction is expected to inform
the character going forward if “Mind-
hunter” is picked up for Season 3.
Jubilation over Williams’ arrest
quickly dissipates in the final minutes
of the season, with “Holden watching
on TV that it’s basically case closed in
Atlanta – I don’t think he thought that
was going to happen,” Groff says. “It’s
pretty earth-shattering, and I’d be
really interested to see how that af-
fects him.”Mindhunter
Continued from Page 4B
The “nature vs. nurture” debate is central to “Mindhunter” after Tench's (Holt
McCallany) antisocial son watches a boy's murder. NETFLIX
Fifty years ago, following a headline-
making, counterculture-driven summer
of Stonewall, Woodstock, Manson,
“Easy Rider” and “Midnight Cowboy,”
the 1969-70 TV season kicked off. And
the new schedule suggested that in a
country screaming for change, the tele-
vision networks were listening: The
child that was TV was about to grow up.
First out of the gate was ABC’s “Room
222,” a half-hour comedy/drama star-
ring Lloyd Haynes as Pete Dixon, a his-
tory teacher at the fictional Walt Whit-
man High School.
Demonstrating that TV academia
had come a long way since “Our Miss
Brooks” in the 1950s, the new series
used Dixon’s classroom as a spring-
board for discussions of hot-button is-
sues including race, gender, religion and
war. And it did so with an ethnically di-
verse, Afro-sporting, bell-bottomed
cast of student characters, some of
whom were still teens themselves.
That Dixon was involved in a rela-
tionship with school counselor Liz Mc-
Intyre (Denise Nicholas) only upped the
ante of innovation: Few sitcoms of the
day featured two black leads, let alone
as a romantic pair. The scenario report-
edly had nervous ABC executives re-
thinking the show, but 29-year-old cre-
ator-producer James L. Brooks (a year
away from “The Mary Tyler Moore
Show”) insisted “Room 222” would pre-
sent a more accurate picture of contem-
porary American life.
The series went on to win an Emmy
in the (since-eliminated) category of
Outstanding New Series, ran for five
seasons, during which it continued to
offer real-world story lines, including a
take on the generational divide in a 1970
episode that won a Writers Guild award.
Making real-world inroads of their
own that September were CBS’ “The
Leslie Uggams Show,” the first variety-
series hosted by a black woman; NBC’s
“The Bill Cosby Show,” the actor’s first
solo outing after his “I Spy” success (as
well as the first sitcom to feature a black
actor’s name in the title); and NBC’s
“The Courtship of Eddie’s Father,” a sit-
com that starred Bill Bixby as a single
dad and featured an Asian-American as
a cast regular. Playing housekeeper Mrs.
Livingston, Miyoshi Umeki was not a
comic-relief domestic along the lines of
Hop Sing of “Bonanza.” Instead, she of-
ten was the emotional backbone and
mother figure of the show.
Other freshman series more overtly
nodded to the country’s rising counter-
culture, among them “The Governor and
J.J.” (CBS), about a conservative widow-
er dealing with his hippie daughter;
“The New People,” ABC’s “Lost”-meets-
the-Peace-Corps drama; “The Music
Scene,” ABC’s rock-and-roll showcase
hosted by comedian David Steinberg;
NBC’s “Then Came Bronson,” a drama
about a disillusioned young man’s
search for meaning; and NBC’s “The
Bold Ones,” an umbrella title for four ro-
tating series that explored the changing
faces of the medical, legal, police, and
political professions.
Even a pair of conventional medical
dramas displayed a sort of generational
retrofitting. ABC’s “Marcus Welby, M.D.”
and CBS’ “Medical Center” revolved
around the conflict of old-guard/new-guard pairings (Robert Young and
James Brolin on “Welby,” James Daly
and Chad Everett on “Medical”). And in
early episodes, each dealt with current
events such as Vietnam refugees and
abortion. The doctor-as-savior formula
was tweaked, too: In the shades-of-gray
world of 1969, medical powers proved
limited, and sometimes patients died.(Trivia alert: The patient in the “Medical
Center” premiere was an “aspiring foot-
ball star” played by O.J. Simpson.)
Two more new shows that fall best
reflected the realities of late-’60s cul-
ture. ABC’s “The Brady Bunch” had one
foot in cookie-cutter sitcom shtick
(coming from “Gilligan’s Island” pro-
ducer Sherwood Schwartz), but planted
its other firmly in modern suburbia, re-
flecting the changing makeup of the
American family and innovating with
often-dramatic storytelling about day-
to-day life as seen through the eyes of
the teen generation.
For every episode about a dog allergy
or a sibling singing contest or hair mis-
takenly dyed green was another explor-
ing school bullying or social conformity
or gender roles – and even race.
In November, on the new PBS net-
work, “Sesame Street” arrived to serve
up new ways of looking at both televi-
sion and childhood learning, featuring a
mulligan’s stew of faces and races tack-
ling ideas as well as the ABCs.
The generation gap wasn’t new to TV
in 1969. As long ago as two years before,
“The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour,”
“Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In” and
“The Mod Squad” mined countercultur-
al themes. Yet the 1969-70 season ex-
panded them greatly.
A prime-time revolution was under-
way. Television was the portal to a new
decade when much of the creative deci-
sion-making would come into the hands
of the first generation raised on it and
awakened by it in the ’60s.
It was a generation that suspected
TV’s reach could extend further – and
that audiences were open to it. “Mary
Tyler Moore” and “All in the Family” ar-
rived soon after.
The season represented the bridge
between prime time’s then and now,
wrapping up in the spring of 1970 with
the rules-breaking “Laugh-In” and a
legacy western (”Gunsmoke”) as the
country’s two most popular series.
The end, it appeared, was only the
beginning.
Jim McKairnes, a contributor to USA
TODAY, is the author of “All in the Dec-
ade: 70 Things About ’70s TV That
Turned Ten Years Into a Revolution.”TELEVISION
50 years ago, TV – and the US – grew up
Jim McKairnes
Special to USA TODAY
Lloyd Haynes, center, as history teacher Pete Dixon, along with Karen Valentine,
left, and Judy Strangis, starred in ABC's groundbreaking series “Room 222,”
which premiered in 1969. WALT DISNEY TELEVISION VIA GETTY IMAGESRobert Young, left, as “Marcus Welby,
M.D.,” in 1969 with James Brolin.
ABC PHOTO ARCHIVES VIA GETTY IMAGES