A New Form of Hollywood Suicide

Christopher Meloni in a promo
poster for Syfy's Happy!

Syfy’s new comedy-thriller Happy! commences with a shot of somebody vomiting blood into the ice chips in a rust-stained urinal. We naturally respond with revulsion but, like rubberneckers at a traffic accident, we cannot help watching. The camera pulls back to reveal who just upchucked, and zOMG it’s Christopher Meloni! Stabler from SVU! Wait, how did clean-cut, down-at-heels Detective Stabler turn into a burned out contract killer systematically frying his liver in lieu of suicide?

When movies first became an industry in the late 19th Century, production houses (which were mainly technology laboratories, like those of Edison and Marconi) resisted the star system which dominated theatre. They wanted individual films, which were frequently under five minutes long, to exist as freestanding enterprises, without relying on personalities, which could quickly overshadow the production. It’s easy to understand this now: top-grossing actors like Tom Hanks and Scarlett Johansson become lucrative genres themselves.

Television exaggerates this trend. Film actors like Julia Roberts or Christopher Walken cultivate a marketable type, but TV actors invest in a character, sometimes for years. Then they shift to another network, another genre, or another franchise, bringing that character’s accumulated baggage with them. Actors closely associated with famous roles have difficulty shaking them; will William Shatner ever have another role that doesn’t, at least implicitly, carry shades of Captain Smirk? Of course he won’t.

Actors have traditionally had two options after leaving iconic characters. Some resist being typecast, though this usually ends in disaster. Leonard Nimoy’s I Am Not Spock phase, when he tried to recapture his heady youth in Westerns and crime dramas, came to an abrupt end when he realized he couldn’t shake the character without compromising his market viability. Others gleefully embrace their typecasting. Bill Cosby milked the Cliff Huxtable market for years before submarining himself.

Christopher Eccleston in Heroes

But recently, some actors have identified a third option. They can actively kill their personas while winking at the audience. I first noticed this with Christopher Eccleston. Though already established for playing quirky anti-establishment characters for years, he probably secured his stature in the nerd pantheon as the first actor inhabiting the title role in the reëstablished Doctor Who, in 2005. However, the series proved an awkward fit, and Eccleston left after only one year.

After spending 2006 largely in private, Eccleston reappeared in 2007 on NBC’s breakout hit-turned-dumpster fire, Heroes. This series included several iconic genre veterans, especially George Takei (Sulu) and Nichelle Nichols (Uhura) from Star Trek. But where those two genre demigods played jokey, winking versions of themselves (Takei’s license plate read NCC-1071, the Starship Enterprise’s designation), Eccleston played a drunken, washed-out ex-hero who’s given up on humanity. He played the Doctor, after the Doctor stopped caring.

Like Eccleston, Christopher Meloni’s character, Nick Sax, has become alcoholic, stopped shaving, and abandoned his ideals. Eccleston’s character sleeps in a cardboard box; Sax is implicitly homeless, literally and metaphorically adrift in Manhattan’s unscrubbed underbelly. He accepts contract assassination jobs, not because they pay well or because he has any loyalty to organized crime, but because it’s the only thing left that makes him feel alive. Nick Sax is the polar opposite of Elliot Stabler.

Nor is this comparison accidental. The show takes remarkable efforts to assure us Nick Sax used to be an exemplary cop. We see a New York Daily News cover identifying Sax as “Supercop.” His former disciple, Detective Meredith McCarthy, greets him by saying “This piece of shit used to be the best cop on the force.” A prostitute he once busted remembers him as gentlemanly, even fatherly, coaching her to get her life on track.

George Takei in Star Trek (left) and Heroes (right)

These descriptors all apply to Elliot Stabler. Detective Stabler lasted fourteen years in the sex crimes division, a hitch most cops rotate out of every two years, because his compassion for others exceeded his fears for himself. Though sometimes ruthless, with a make-do commitment to professional ethics, Stabler’s clearance rate would make most supercops look lazy. As characters heap praise on Nick Sax’s former career, we realize, Nick Sax is Elliot Stabler’s shambling, undead corpse.

Meloni takes a bold risk here. If Happy! lasts into January, he’ll effectively kill Elliot Stabler, and any chance of returning to the Golden Ticket that made him famous. But it also provides an opportunity many once-notorious TV actors never receive, an opportunity to put his starpmaking role behind him forever. Only time will tell whether this gamble succeeds. Until then, let’s marvel at a successful actor metaphorically stabbing his hard-earned stardom in the face.