Joshua Jackson is the one-time star of Kevin Williamson’s Dawson’s Creek, a popular 1990s programme about teenagers who spoke like jaded college professors, oil tycoons, bachelor uncles and 19th-century polymaths. Williamson’s genius was in realising that teens actually imagined themselves to be talking with the intellectual verbosity and emotional intensity of Henry James characters even when what they were actually saying was, “Wassup my yokels, I’m just hangin’ on the flippity-flop.” (This was the kind of thing we said back in the day.)
Teenagers loved Dawson’s Creek, and Joshua Jackson was the most beloved actor on that show (he played Pacey) because he could make the ridiculously wordy dialogue sound appealing. He had a slightly lopsided smile and sad eyes. This is catnip for a certain kind of viewer (but young men be warned: if you go too lopsided with the smile, and too sad with the eyes, you just look as if you’re having some sort of episode).
Don Johnson is the one-time star of Michael Mann’s Miami Vice, a hugely popular 1980s programme about two hot policemen who had the disposable income, sartorial flair and sportscars of millionaires. They fired guns at drug dealers and never went anywhere without the music of the sophisticated pop sticksman Phil Collins blaring out of their speakers. It was glossy copaganda, and Don Johnson (aka Sonny Crockett) helped make prosecuting an unwinnable war on drugs seem appealing. He had piercing eyes and a face halo of designer stubble (but young men be warned: there’s a fine line between “piercing” and “goggling”, and you can’t just draw the stubble on with a felt-tip pen).
Both Jackson and Johnson are cursed by good looks and what reviewers call “easy charm”. When a popular actor has “easy charm” nobody wants to see them work hard; they just want to see them hang out on a set being easily charming. And so Jackson and Johnson are destined to have their heads forever clasped between invisible quotation marks. They are eternally “Pacey” and “Crockett” and they are cast not purely because of what they can add to a production, but also because we remember them fondly from Dawson’s Creek and Miami Vice. New TV shows basically wear their faces as a serial killer might.
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Speaking of which, both Jackson and Johnson star in the Ryan Murphy-produced Doctor Odyssey (Disney+). Ryan Murphy produces more shows than most viewers can actually watch. (This year alone: American Sports Story, Monsters, Grotesquerie.)
I’m pretty sure Ryan Murphy produces more shows than Ryan Murphy can actually watch. I reckon he lost all his human weakness in and around the third season of Glee and at this stage is a terrifying programme-production algorithm. If so, the writing prompt for Doctor Odyssey was something like “The Love Boat mixed with Grey’s Anatomy featuring Crockett and Pacey”.
Joshua Jackson plays the eponymous Doctor Odyssey, although that’s not his actual name, only his job title, attached to the name of the ship on which he works. So I’m just going to call him Pacey for simplicity’s sake. Pacey is a ship’s doctor on a luxury cruising vessel on which he also gets to use his own cruising vessel (his penis), because, as befits a Ryan Murphy production, there’s a lot of sexual tension on this show.
Much as in his days at Dawson’s Creek, Pacey gets involved in a love triangle within moments of boarding the ship. He kisses one of his two nursing assistants in the first episode, for there are no laws and hence no HR departments in international waters. Indeed, in the next episode the hunky staff of the boat, including Pacey, are urged to dance with the passengers because Captain Crockett (Johnson), the captain of the boat, is basically a sea pimp. Sea Pimp would be another good name for this show.
What is it about rich people and boats? Sailing-boats for the professional classes. Luxury cruises for the merely wealthy. Yachts for the super-rich. In their post-scarcity condition, do they feel the sea calling them back? Is it simply Earth’s attempt to drown humanity’s worst resource-consumers? I’m no scientist but, yes, probably.
In each episode of Doctor Odyssey there are sequences in which the various characters glide around their luxury tub, enjoying their wealth and their abs, until, at some point, one of the passengers has a medical emergency. Then the trio of lovelorn chancers bellow long passages of medical jargon at one another, with blank, uncomprehending looks on their perfectly symmetrical faces, until that week’s day-player is cured and balance returns to their floating world.
There is no doubt that all illness will be cured aboard the Odyssey. There is no friction on this programme. Even the potentially fractious coworkers are so self-actualised that they are on hugging terms by the end of the second episode. “No more fighting over girls,” one hunk says to another, a bit improbably. “It’s regressive and reductive.”
In the same instalment the luxury cruise liner picks up a tiny raft on which there is a stranded migrant worker with a sad tale of poverty and misfortune. At no point does anyone look at her situation and say, “Wow, when you think about it, all this wealth and conspicuous consumption we’re surrounded by is obscene.” Though one character seems to imagine that the migrant worker’s shipwrecked isolation is a metaphor for her own personal problems.
If there’s any core message in Doctor Odyssey it’s just to imagine Pacey from Dawson’s Creek holding you tight and saying, “Shhh, it’s okay.” Which I guess is message enough.
Some people online have been hypothesising that the glossy, smooth, uncanny-valley nature of Doctor Odyssey’s seafaring utopia means that all the characters are actually dead and in some purgatorial space betwixt heaven and hell. But I think it’s more likely that it is we who are dead and the streamers are our recycled, messageless purgatory.
Thankfully, we also have a national streamer that wants to get in on that purgatorial action. Good Boy, which is on RTÉ Player, is a sitcom about a directionless young beardy man (Tony Cantwell) wrangling with his place in the universe, viral stardom, a possible ADHD diagnosis, novelty shoes and a talking dog. It’s very charming, original and funny and has a really strong cast.
I’m not sure why it’s just on the Player and not on the old-fashioned terrestrial channel other than that young people don’t know what terrestrial television is and RTÉ has probably given up on the young anyway. Which is fair enough. Look at them there, the young, trying to replace us with their really good hair. I bet they don’t even know who Pacey is.
