HBO Canada
Ken Finkleman says he’s “terrible at writing women. I should not be allowed to do it.” So why is Good Dog, the newest series from Canada’s most famous TV creator-star (The Newsroom), about his relationship with a woman—and not just any woman, but one half his age? The pilot, which aired on the Movie Network last Sunday, seemed like another of Finkleman’s reality-TV parodies, as his character, George, is forced to move in with his beautiful young girlfriend (Lauren Lee Smith) by a network that’s making a reality show about his life. In the episodes to come, though, the show plot goes by the wayside, and the show becomes something fairly new: a Finkleman show about relationships. If we thought it was awkward to see Finkleman satirize the world of news and media, wait until we see him try to deal with what he calls “a social situation with this woman.”
Finkleman has hardly ignored women in his previous work. The Newsroom featured a lot of scenes for the long-suffering TV producer Karen (Karen Hines), and another series, Married Life, made a young woman a sympathetic character in yet another satire of reality shows. But the women were often overshadowed by the large cast of lunatics played by Finkleman and other actors. This may be because, as Finkleman explains, he has trouble getting inside the heads of female characters: “I can see only how they react to me. I can describe how they look, how they sit, how they dress, tons of things. But only on the surface. My perception stops there.”
On Good Dog, though, Finkleman has to dig a little deeper. The regular cast is smaller than usual for his shows, meaning the female lead has to carry more scenes, and this time he plays a romantic lead—though an unlikeable one. Finkleman explains that the relationship is based on a typical entertainment-business type of arrangement. “It’s a cultural phenomenon that exists, though it’s not often spoken about. The old guy with money, the younger woman with the body.” While Claire still fits the sitcom tradition of the sensible straight woman, she gets occasional chances to do funny things, like throwing a plate at George and taking up Zen Buddhism to deal with the strain of living with him. And in other scenes, she displays a warmth that makes him almost believable as a human being: “She saw something in him,” Finkleman says, and conveys it through “her posture toward him.”
Finkleman thinks Smith managed to create an interesting attitude for her character mostly because he didn’t try to direct her too much: “I just let her react. I don’t know how she did it or what it was, but she has a very natural quality, and I like her very much.” When Finkleman is up to his usual cringe-making antics, like accidentally starting a rumour that Jack Nicholson is dead, Claire occasionally gets to give the show some extra depth through her reactions to him. Instead of the show just being about George, it’s also about the question of how a woman can live with such an impossible person.
Some of this may be seen as Finkleman’s take on Curb Your Enthusiasm, another show about a neurotic affluent Jewish media figure and a younger blond woman. Though Finkleman repeatedly refers to Larry David in the pilot, he now says the comparisons are overblown: “I just happened to bring it up. I’ve only seen 10 minutes of two of his episodes.” But he says that something the two shows have in common is that they’re both about “self-examination.” David plays someone who has to step out of the world of comedy and deal with things he’s not good at; on Good Dog we see Finkleman getting out of his comfort zone and dealing with a more normal world.
But that doesn’t mean he wants to stay there for long. For the second season of Good Dog, which he started to write even before the first season aired, Finkleman plans to “go back into the world of news” and take the show into the studio by giving his character a job at the Canadian equivalent of Fox News. He knows how TV works, but has “no idea how women think. I’ve decided my whole life long I don’t understand them. I think they’re all crazy. I know they’re not.”
