In 2013, HBO’s brilliant half-hour Enlightened was forced to stop at just two seasons, plagued by anemic ratings; in 2014, the network bid adieu to Boardwalk Empire, the awards juggernaut that never was. They launched TV’s newest cultural phenomenon (True Detective) that same year, too, before producing the medium’s eminent laughing stock this past summer (again, True Detective). HBO then completely swept the Emmys in September, winning Comedy Series for the second time ever, Drama Series for the first time since 2007 and both Miniseries and TV Movie.
From Game of Thrones-sized successes to Brink-sized bombs, TV's flagship prestige network saw its fair share of ups and downs in the past three years alone. Also featured in that time period, a show that generated far less publicity: the poignant, discomfiting and sardonic geriatric comedy Getting On. The just-concluded half-hour series had a respectable run, at three seasons of six episodes; was created and written by Mark V. Olsen and Will Scheffer, the couple behind one of the network’s definitive post-Sopranos drama series in Big Love; was adapted from an award-winning, well-regarded eponymous British series; and had a cast capable of filling the seats: Laurie Metcalf as a stubborn doctor at its helm, Niecy Nash and Alex Borstein as exasperated nurses behind her, and award-magnets Jean Smart, June Squibb, Rhea Perlman and others in scene-stealing guest spots.
Yet almost by design, Getting On was the silent member of HBO’s roster. Its quiet existence turned the viewing experience into an incredibly rare one, allowing rave reviews to read like poetry and tweets here and there to make up the forum for a sparse cult audience. By existing in such a vacuum, the series felt timeless – a collection of stories and images that themed life and death, empathy and exhaustion, selflessness and selfishness. It could be gross – multiple seasons opened on human waste left for hours in the middle of a hospital ward – and it could be strange. Whenever it delved into the mechanics of our healthcare system, Getting On could also be horrifying, an artfully devastating juxtaposition of on-the-ground compassion and bureaucratic indifference. But between the floor vomit and kidney swaps and corporatized wellness practices, there was one thing the show never ceased to be: human. Achingly, hilariously, cathartically human.
Getting On took place in the underfunded, poorly-maintained geriatrics ward of a Long Beach hospital. Dr. Jenna James (Metcalf) was its ambitious, opportunistic and somewhat deflated captain, desperate for greater respect within the medical community and unafraid to bend the rules to her – or, in some cases, her patients’ – benefit. When the series began, Nurse DiDi Ortley (Niecy Nash) played audience surrogate as the ward’s newest employee, often befuddled by, but quickly embracing of, the unusual combination of incompetence, affection and chaos that characterized its day-to-day. She was mentored by Dawn Forchette (Alex Borstein), a lonely nurse in a most unconventional dalliance with her supervisor, the sexually-ambiguous Patsy de la Serda (Mel Rodriguez). The three women comforted each other, butted heads, gossiped incessantly and, occasionally, wrung their hands in fury at their problematic dynamics. In that respect, Getting On thrived as an effective workplace comedy, elevated by three pros at the top of their game.
The pulse of the show, however, pounded in the squeaky hallways – with sick old women left in the care of three highly dysfunctional professionals. Olsen and Scheffer, along with principal director Miguel Arteta, tended to keep the action within the ward, with the camera kept amused by the many mechanical deficiencies it suffered on a daily basis, and blinded by its fluorescent lighting. The comedy was part of the point: patients ranged from irritable to disassociated to fascinatingly conversational, but they were in need, often in pain and in some cases preparing for their death. The despair of Getting On was complemented with its scathing sense of humor – June Squibb’s senile racist who popped in once a year, or language barriers that built from amusing to outrageous, or technical innovations that rendered the process of caring unimaginably remote and complex. These gags were balanced by moments of profound levity, as characters engaged about losing loved ones, about what it means to care and feel, about dignity and what these patients deserve. Isolated from the world, Dr. James and Nurses Ortley and Forchette balanced their internal dramas with very real, and quite sizable, responsibilities. In a clever gambit, the dilemma shifted to DiDi personally in the final season, as she and her family sparred episode-by-episode over how to do right by her ailing mother-in-law.
Getting On both laughed at and lamented the inefficiencies of our healthcare system; it simultaneously valorized and poked fun at its central characters, the self-involved caretakers. It operated as absurdist humanism; through its silly morbidity, it found purity. And it grew into something remarkable. Old, wide-eyed Birdie Lamb (Ann Guilbert), the only patient in the ward to stick around for each season, would be depicted through the camera like a watchful eye – we’d catch glimpses of her confusion at Patsy and Dawn’s incontestably peculiar love affair, or Dr. James’ ramblings about her fecal-vaginal-geriatrics research, or DiDi pestering her superiors for the raise she’d long been due. In the final season, though, episodes built to her passing, making for the show’s climax of heartbreak. It hit DiDi, Dawn and Jenna a little harder, too. Not long before her death, Birdie asked DiDi – with typical bluntness, but an uncharacteristic softness – “Do you think about me?” Her nurse replied, “More than you can ever imagine.”
By looking death in the face, Getting On invoked an extraordinary sense of life. Rich with laughter and sadness and everything in-between, it captured humanity at its essence – the show made it look ugly, unfair, cruel and mechanized, but never less than beautiful. The series ended with Dr. James and Dawn both on stretchers, preparing to go into surgery. See, Dawn was on dialysis – and, in turn, a strict diet regimine – and went on an eating binge, thereby putting her life in peril because she lacked self-control; suddenly, she needed a kidney. Dr. James, meanwhile, was fending off rampant accusations of selfishness and inhumanity. Dawn crashed Birdie’s memorial, begging for a kidney, and with a twinge of regret to follow, Dr. James offered one to prove herself capable of kindness. She tried to get out of it, but in the end she went through with the procedure – a perfect distillation both of these characters’ capacity for decency and of their self-involved tendencies. Jenna looked at Dawn with warmth in her eyes and, with DiDi watching from outside, said, “There is no justice, but there is mercy.” It was as if the whole show came down to a single line.
Then, a slow fade-to-white to close. An ode to life and an acknowledgment of its difficulties, a call for compassion and a nuanced portrayal of its limits, a contention with loss and a presentation of the beauty that can be mined from within – that was Getting On, right to its final words spoken. It was tender, bracing, intimate, surprising, honest – timeless.