Byzantium's Shores: chronicling the misadventures of an overalls-clad hippie

One of my favorite television shows is NBC's Ed, about the small-town lawyer who owns the bowling alley. The show has an excellent cast of characters and a quirky type of humor that's reminiscent of Northern Exposure.

That said, something about Ed is bugging me this season.

Remember the scene in the movie Misery, when Annie Wilkes has just read Paul Sheldon's new manuscript, the one she's forced him to write after he's apparently killed Misery Chastain off in his latest novel? Annie goes into a raving rant about how when she was a child she went to the movies, one of those old serials, to see the resolution of the previous week's cliffhanger; but the resolution was actually a cheat because the situation had been changed, and Annie was the only one who noticed. Well, something similar seems to be happening on Ed.

The backbone of Ed is the on-and-off romance between Ed and his life-long love, Carol Vescey. Last season, Carol ended up falling in love with the prickly-but-intelligent high school principal, Dennis Martino, who is a recovering alcoholic and who also has a hard time getting close to people. The key word here is "prickly", because Dennis showed flashes of warmth and depth last year, suggesting that he was a man with a streak of kindness but who was terrified to let it show. One telling episode was when Carol begged Dennis -- a former English teacher -- to critique a short story she had written, and he finally relented after much resistance and basically tore the story to shreds. Then, later on, when Carol's confidence is shaken, he writes out a list for her of opinions he's held that are at odds with reality, to show "his history as a critic". (The only item I remember is his onetime belief that "Aquaman will be bigger than Superman".) And there were other examples of this as well, which made the Ed-Carol-Dennis love triangle interesting: because it involved three likable, flawed characters one of whom we knew was going to end up heartbroken.

Unfortunately, the writers of Ed have changed the dynamic of the triangle in mid-stream, so it's becoming more irritating than interesting. What they've done is to change the "prickly" in Dennis to "prick". Now we're seeing that Dennis is a cold, manipulative jerk whose behavior toward Carol occasionally borders on the emotionally abusive. Not only does this make the whole love-triangle pretty much like every other love triangle on TV these days, but it's doubly bad because it totally contradicts what was established last year about the Dennis Martino character. It makes it easier for things to work out the way that we "want" them to work out, but now there is a note of falsity about the whole proceedings.

You have to be consistent with your characters, folks. It's pretty important.