Daily Press

After decades of letting the action tell the tales, prime-time TV has become inundated by narrators in various hit series. Now it is dotted with a bunch of unreliable narrators as well.

The latest, a two-bit hustler named Joey Ice Cream, is the one telling the tales of the Irish mob in the new Monday night saga "The Black Donnellys." In police custody and under questioning by investigators ready to pull out their hair, the young hood, played by Keith Nobbs, goes on and on about the Donnelly brothers of New York's Hell's Kitchen neighborhood.

Sometimes the cops call him on his inconsistencies, and he changes details to fit a more coherent narrative. It was 1999, he begins, only to be reminded it couldn't have been 1999. So the scene changes to a new year.

Other times it seems impossible he would know the details of some situations. "What? Didn't I tell you? I was standing right there," he would correct himself.

An unreliable narrator is the guiding force of the NBC sitcom "How I Met Your Mother" as well. The idea is that the kids hearing this story in the future are patiently listening about dad's wild single days -- and a long-standing relationship with one woman -- only to have learned this wasn't the woman who turned out to be their mother after all.

It's not really narration they use on "The Office," but more like a heart-to-heart that its subjects have with an unseen documentary crew, as if they were on a reality show. Because each character is deluded in his or her own way (except maybe Jim and Pam), none of what they say is reliable. This is especially true with Steve Carell's portrayal of the boss, Michael Scott, and his attempts to put a positive spin on every disaster he's complicit in creating.

The history of the unreliable narrator goes back as far as the history of the novel, it can be argued. Some of the greatest works of American literature are told by iffy narrators, from the kid at the center of Mark Twain's "The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" to Nick Carraway in F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby," who was so enamored with his subject that he couldn't see his dark side.

It's trickier in films -- but very effective when done well -- to tell a story from an unreliable point of view, from the 1920 hallmark of German expressionism, "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari," to more recent works such as "The Sixth Sense," "Memento" and "A Beautiful Mind." How far could you trust Robert De Niro's narration in "Taxi Driver," given he was on the verge of a psychotic episode? If the narrators were dead in "Sunset Boulevard" and "American Beauty," how reliable were their narrations?

In television, it always seemed that Mary Alice was an unreliable narrator on "Desperate Housewives," just as Meredith was during February sweeps episodes of "Grey's Anatomy." The former was dead from the beginning of the series and is talking about what happens in her earthly neighborhood. The latter, who appeared to be dead for about an hour after nearly drowning in a ferry accident, was still talking confidently of her experience, seeming to indicate that she had survived. But in these days of unreliable narrators, Meredith could have been telling the tale from the hereafter or just pulling our leg, Joey Ice Cream-style. *

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