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“Do you have any thoughts on Chuck Lorre and why he’s so successful?”
Someone asked me this early in the week and I immediately sighed. Chuck Lorre is a superstar sitcom creator and producer. He has a decades-spanning career that stretches from freak success writing the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme song to a stint at Roseanne to being the mastermind behind such hits as Grace Under Fire, Cybill, Dharma & Greg, Two and a Half Men, The Big Bang Theory, Mike & Molly, and Mom. He’s a big deal, and yet in the comedy community, his name is often accompanied with groans. His uber-popular sitcoms often garner eye-rolls from critics. So I sighed because he’s deceptively controversial. Mainstream audiences adore him, even if the media elite despises him.
I’m not 100% sure Lorre deserves all the ire from my peers. He’s never been my cup of tea, but I do think Lorre possesses a mastery of classic — if also almost embarrassingly dated — sitcom formulas. More interestingly, he also has a surprisingly sensitive ear to many of the top concerns of mainstream American audiences. He’s man operating on two sides of an odd spectrum. He understands that there’s a huge swath of people who have no interest in being challenged by their sitcoms. When they sit on the couch and put on the television, they’re looking to be distracted from their worries. They want to unwind. They want to just…laugh.
Nevertheless, he keeps tip-toeing into the darkness (or seeming dysfunction) that casts shadows over most everyone in modern middle America’s life. In Two and a Half Men, he toyed with the confusing themes of modern masculinity. In Mom, he looks alcoholism and the strains of single motherhood. And in his odd new Netflix sitcom Disjointed, Lorre uses a medicinal marijuana clinic as a staging ground to deal with some of the most awful mental health issues plaguing America: PTSD, anxiety, depression, and pervasive drug abuse.
Disjointed is a truly strange sitcom and it might be the most clear outline of who Chuck Lorre is and what interests him. Kathy Bates stars as Ruth, a life-long pot activist who runs “Ruth’s Alternative Caring,” a medicinal marijuana dispensary that’s found a newfound boom in business after a relaxation of marijuana laws. Ruth’s son Travis (Aaron Moten) wants to use his business degree to good use by outlining a plan to expand the shop’s business. The rest of the shop is run by a motley crew of millennial stoners and Carter (Tone Bell), a veteran who serves as the shop’s security. The show’s brand of humor comes from run-ins with the eclectic clientele and odd interstitial segments that play with form.
Disjointed‘s tone can easily be summed up by its title. Half of it is the most tissue-paper-thin pot comedy I’ve ever seen – and that’s saying something. The other half, though, is something challenging and subversive to the extreme. The show slides up and down these tonal poles with almost ruthless abandon, gleefully juxtaposing silly jokes about marijuana users with somber, sometimes avant-garde, reflections of tragic mental illness. We get striking, experimental animated shorts that reveal Carter’s harangued mental state. The vet is afflicted with PTSD and a major plot point in the series is his reluctance to use marijuana as a means to heal his wounded nerves. In the course of this journey, we discover that another character’s brother went from pot to meth. It’s a sobering reminder of the drug epidemics sweeping the nation. It makes you wonder about Lorre’s perspective as a creator. Yes, he is fond of simplistic sitcom set ups that are familiar to a fault, but these conversations show that he sees the pervasive hurt searing a fiery path all over America. Lorre, it seems, sees comedy as a balm for that pain — an escape, and perhaps a safe place for hard conversation.
In Episode 3, in the midst of many of these tragic revelations, one character, Jenny, gives Carter what is perhaps the kindest, sweetest, and most straight-forward reason to give pot a try. In the midst of a mini-monologue about her own journey, she says, “I don’t know anyone on Earth who isn’t using something or someone to cope with other somethings or someones.”
That seems to be the thesis of Disjointed (if the truly bizarre Disjointed can be said to have a thesis), and the central point of all Lorre’s work. His comedies may not be ground-breaking in the same way that, say, Fleabag or Atlanta are, but they aren’t meant to be. While the Donald Glovers, Aziz Ansaris, Issa Raes, and Abbi and Ilanas of the world are trying to bend the rules of the comedy genre to get their own voices out loud and clear, Lorre is sticking like epoxy glue to tried and true formulas of multi-cam network sitcoms. He’s doing so because he sees comedy as a coping mechanism. His work may seem unsophisticated in contrast to his peers, but Lorre is doing something strangely deft in his own right. He’s just trying to help his audience get by.
