In Defense of NBC's 'The Slap'
This week, The Slap moves to 10 p.m., a much better time period for this darkly brooding series — it was never an 8 p.m., just finished the dinner dishes, wait-did-that-jerk-just-slap-that-kid? show.
Yes, this puts it up against another good show, ABC’s American Crime. But The Slap has been awfully good, and Thursday’s episode, told from the point of view of the family’s saucy babysitter/clinic worker, Connie (Makenzie Leigh), looks very promising. In general, The Slap is briskly downbeat. It’s a well-written and –directed enterprise that is glum about the inherent goodness of the human race, perhaps, but who doesn’t like watching a show take a dim view of humanity? What do you think the Real Housewives franchise is about?
I realize invoking the Housewives is not the best way to entice you to give The Slap another shot. Because I know you: You watched the pilot, said to yourself, Oh, I get it: Zachary Quinto hit a kid, now everyone’s going to whine about it for a couple of months, no thanks.
But it’s not playing out that way. Quinto’s Harry is indeed a despicable example of a man — he’s a high-class car salesman with the instincts of a pimp, for heaven’s sake. But part of the interest I’ve taken in The Slap is the way the show wants us to understand how the people around Harry — his wife Sandi (Marin Ireland), his cousin Hector (Peter Sarsgaard, who has never used his droopy gaze with more ardent intensity) — deal with Harry’s raging ego and outsized sense of entitlement.
Related: ‘The Slap’: 20 TV Kids We’d Like to Slap
One of the fine things that writer-producer Jon Robin Baitz has done in adapting this Australian series for the U.S. is to make sure Harry is well-matched in his chief adversary. Each episode is seen from the point of view of a different character, and I’m looking forward to the one about Melissa George’s Rosie, the mother of the slapped brat, herself a brave monster of self-regard. Indeed, I’d watch a lot more episodes of The Slap if it simply chose to concentrate on Rosie, her marvelously morose, deluded-artist husband Gary (the adroit Thomas Sadoski), and the kid that inspired everything, Hugo (if the show was more of a hit, the nation would owe young Dylan Schombing an Emmy for portraying a howling obnoxiousness worthy of adoption papers signed by Mad Men’s Don Draper).
I feel as though The Slap is being punished, in a sense, for its own truth in advertising. If the show hadn’t carried that title, viewers might be less likely to peg it as a drama about one kind of child abuse (a worthy but too often drearily-addressed TV subject), and might more easily look beyond the inciting incident to see the show for what it really is — an examination of the various definitions of family, squarely in the tradition of Zwick-Herskovitz shows such as thirtysomething and Once and Again, and Baitz’s own network credit, Brothers & Sisters. Right now, I know, there’s a lot of TV clamoring for your attention. This miniseries deserves some of it.
The Slap airs Thursdays at 10 p.m. on NBC.
