AMC's computer industry period drama Halt and Catch Fire returns tomorrow for its second season, which Alan Sepinwall -- who I think is far and away the most important TV critic -- assures is significantly better than the first season.
In anticipation of that, my brief thoughts on that first season --
The initial premise is that business suit wildcard Joe (the normally great Lee Pace) and computer dude Gordon team up, along with punky college dropout Cameron, to ripoff the IBM PC by reverse engineering it (like Compaq did in real life).
My father has been in the personal computer industry for nearly as long as there's been one, having left his PhD program in the 60s in order to found a computer company with two of his friends. By the early 1980s, when this show takes place, I was around and certainly well aware of computers (my Christmas wishlists included the early "notebook computers" and 300-baud modems). And that's kind of my biggest problem with the show.
It's like when you're watching a western, and somehow none of the white people are ever racist unless they're bad guys. Except in this case, the history of the early personal computer industry is obscure enough that most of the audience isn't going to be tripped up, most of the time. But it's not history for me, you know? I can't help that so much of the show seems unreal to me.
That problem ties in with a less personal problem, which is the characters. Far and away the best is Donna, Gordon's wife, played by Kerry Bishe from the bizarrely well-cast final season of Scrubs (which also included Dave Franco and future comedy legend Eliza Coupe). Donna might be the brightest of the bunch, and one of the show's strengths is that it lets us realize this early on. Gordon and Donna had tried and failed to go into business for themselves, and now he has the more ambitious job so that she has time to tend the kids, though everyone's circumstances have changed -- for the narratively better -- by the end of the season. Perhaps because she is least central to the plot, Donna is also the most fully realized and nuanced character.
See, the other three -- especially Joe and Cameron -- are an unfortunate collection of Serious Cable Drama tics and cliches, without much consistency. Joe is an erratic wildcard. He's a wildcard, man! He might punch you or screw somebody he shouldn't screw! Whoooa. And Cameron, punky punkity punk punk Cameron, she doesn't design computers according to your RULES, man. Computers want to be FREE, man. She's a VISIONARY, man.
Cameron is an absolutely fucking shitty visionary. For most of the first season I can't stand Cameron.
This is the biggest area where my own experience of the computer industry becomes a stumbling block, but it's not Inside Baseball shit that's getting in my way. Anyone who was alive and using computers in the early 80s would have the same problem: Cameron never once sounds like a real computer person from the 20th century.
Joe is always vague about computers. He's realized the growth potential of the industry, but he's not someone who's going to put a system together in his garage. Gordon is practical enough that most of what he says sounds fine to my ear.
But Cameron is meant to be a visionary, and instead of making her sound like actual real-life visionaries from the computer industry, many of whom are still alive today or have written books, they make her sound like a 21st century audience member who is wandering around 1983 and pointing at computers and saying "we shouldn't make computers like this, we should make them do what they do in 2015." Some of the things that she throws tantrums about are features that were absolutely being discussed in the 80s, but in a "someday we'll be able to do this" kind of way, features that would require several technological revolutions to make possible. They aren't things you could just sit down with a couple people in your company and develop. They took the work of hundreds or thousands of people over many years.
That's my other problem. I'm a historian by training, and one of the most irritating fallacies is the idea that the way history turned out was the way it had to turn out -- the idea, in this case, that the computers we have now are an inevitable consequence of the computers of 1983: that there is a single path the development of the personal computer can take, and it will always transpire the same way. If history did work that way, foreseeing the future development of anything would just require being a little bit smart. No big whoop. You just think about something for a little bit, and it will become obvious to you which changes and improvements will be introduced in the future. Perhaps you'll be off on the timing -- there are funding considerations, after all -- but the broad shapes will be obvious.
Right?
No, not fucking right. There's a whole cottage industry of futurists and they're never fucking right. Pick up any issue of Mondo 2000 for heaven's sake, or an early issue of Wired, and tell me where our grape-sized watermelons are, because I'm pretty sure they were supposed to be the hottest new food of 1995. Futurists are awful at what they do because what they do is not a thing that can actually be done well.
That said, Mad Men may very well get a great deal wrong about advertising in the 1960s. Certainly some people have said so. Does it only not matter to me because it's not my personal experience being contradicted, or because the show had enough else to offer?
I genuinely think the latter. Cameron's insistence on the way computers need to be is a huge part of her inconsistently written character. It's not just a tic, and I often get the feeling that we're supposed to be on her side -- or at least recognize her genius. The ads for season two, for instance, have her demanding online gaming. In 1983. I was playing games online in 1993, a full decade after the show takes place, and as far as they had come in that time, they were:
a) nothing a gamer of today would recognize as a video game (they were entirely text-based)
b) apart from the MUDs and MUSHes that only a very small number of people with internet access could play, most of them were turn-based, and were barely more than adaptations of the play-by-mail games that most of you have never heard of.
Looking forward to a future of online gaming in 1983 is one thing, but trying to get a business off the ground that promises to service flying cars when everyone else is saving up for their first Model T doesn't make you a genius or a visionary. And it definitely doesn't help Cameron's case any when the writers so often make her petulant or frustrated at having to deal with how computers actually are in 1983. It just makes her seem like someone who doesn't actually want to work in the computer industry.
Sepinwall says it'll get better. He's right that there was a significant improvement at the end of the season. We'll see.
Saturday, May 30, 2015
Wednesday, May 20, 2015
cape fear
One of my first posts on this still-young blog was about superheroes and the general failure of television to compellingly depict them or capture what works about comic books. Since then, the spring season has begun to wrap up and there have been a few significant developments, so it's worth a followup:
The CW-verse
Is there an umbrella term for the CW's DC shows, now that there will be three of them in the fall? They don't seem to share continuity with any of the DC movies or CBS's Supergirl show (I hope I'm wrong about the latter), so "DC TV-verse" doesn't work.
Anyway. Because The Flash crosses over with Arrow a fair bit, I've watched a few more episodes of Arrow, and ... like I said last time round, I just cannot take it seriously. It's like knockoff Nolan. I'm so tired of the idea that "taking superheroes seriously" means making them grim-n-gritty, an idea that was horseshit in the early 90s and is horseshit 20 years later when other media are catching up to comic books.
I know everyone - well, everyone in their forties - fondly remembers Mike Grell's Longbow Hunters, which de-camp-ified Green Arrow and made people stop focusing on ridiculous trick arrows, but just like with Frank Miller's Batman, it worked in part as a palate cleanser from the excesses of camp, and landed at a time when, because of Crisis, no specific view of the character had come into clear focus. There are plenty of ways to do Green Arrow that don't have him grinding his teeth all the fucking time, and the Hard Travellin Heroes stories that focused on Queen's social activism in contrast with Green Lantern the space cop are a perfect example.
Ugh. This Green Arrow would be such a terrible presence on a Justice League. He would just sit in the corner glowering with Batman.
The Flash is much better, thank God. It always got the tone just about right, and the series has become more populated with superheroes and supervillains as the season has gone on, with compelling time travel twists and an excellent villain in the Reverse-Flash. Some of those new superheroes are going off to do the Legends spinoff, so I hope season two continues to create new recurring characters and do the work to make this feel like a show set in a world with superheroes, not just one or two dudes in costumes.
Netflix
Netflix's Marvel experiment -- four solo hero shows followed by a Defenders series teaming them up -- has started. (I gotta say, I wish they were calling it Champions instead of Defenders, because now that they're doing a Dr Strange movie, an ACTUAL Defenders movie with Dr Strange, the Hulk, and -- well, if Fox still has Silver Surfer, then somebody else, maybe even Spider-Man -- would be terrific.)
Man, people went nuts for Daredevil.
I ... like it okay.
I still haven't finished it.
Look, the cast is just right. They assembled the correct pieces. Vincent D'onofrio is especially good as the Kingpin, and Scott Glenn as Stick, but the trio of DD, Foggy, and Karen are a great foundation. There's just a lot of punching.
I mean, yeah, it's an action show, and it's a superhero show where the character doesn't have other offensive powers. But it's a lot of punching. And my attention winds up wandering, and I check my email or I get up to do the dishes or something. It's not 1986 and I'm not watching The A-Team -- punching wears thin after a while.
Is part of the problem that I'm not enough of a Daredevil fan? I don't know. I was a big fan of Frank Miller and Ann Nocenti's runs on the book back in the day, although to recycle a point from Green Arrow -- at the time, part of what I enjoyed about them was how different they were from other superhero comics, and that contrast is no longer in evidence.
But comics-wise, I've always been a bigger fan of the cosmic/weird stuff, along with the Avengers and Spider-Man. Daredevil was probably never in my top ten books at the height of my comics fandom (though also never lower than my top twenty). So maybe I'm just responding at the appropriate level of enthusiasm to a well-made adaptation.
It does play in to my frustration that so many superhero adaptations are just, you know, punching in costumes -- the super powers in evidence here are on about the same level as pulp hero stuff like The Shadow, where I want webshooters and Olympian gods and bio-stings.
The Avengers: Age of Ultron
I won't spoil any specific plot developments. This movie is in that tricky area where it was disappointing while still being good.
The Black Widow criticisms are all absolutely valid, but that's easy for me to say, because I thought she was terribly written in the first Avengers movie. She was moderately better written in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, but that movie contributes to the trend of pairing her off -- as a love interest or at least flirting partner -- with a different character in every movie she shows up in.
The movie version of this complicated and interesting comic book character has always been sorely underwritten, and I don't think she was even accidentally underwritten, I think she was created as a cipher who would be available for whatever plot needs became manifest, given that they needed her to appear in a dozen or so movies, filling slightly different needs. They purposefully chose a character without powers -- and therefore without additional special effects budget requirements -- to bridge these many Avengers-verse movies, and paid little attention to her beyond her plot-serving uses. I know the ScarJo version of the character has a devoted following, but I don't pretend to understand why.
She's not the only character who seems to serve the plot more than her own needs, here -- Tony Stark is very important to the movie but for the first time comes across as a character with little existence beyond his plot-use. There are times when the same almost seems true of Thor, but Chris Hemsworth is really underrated in his Marvel work, and ably does more with less.
The new characters are largely good; Scarlet Witch and the Vision are terrific, and I would love to see them in their own movie.
The movie is way too long, and at least some of that bloat is pretty transparently caused by the movie's need to serve multiple masters, which does not bode well for the next Cap or the next Avengers movies (though I am glad Whedon is off the train by then).
Another reason it's too long is that some of the action scenes are way too long and, really, not very interesting. I'm glad a lot of the action minutes are spent saving bystanders, but so many of them are devoted to smashing buildings and Michael Bay shit like that, and it's just boring.
Bonus: iZombie
Okay, it's not a superhero show, and although it's a comic book show, it's a very loose adaptation from what I understand (I haven't read it).
But it handles so many superhero tropes so well, and it's about a character with a secret identity, who is hiding from her loved ones the fact that she developed new powers following a traumatic accident, and that she uses those powers to solve murders and fight bad guys with the same powers as hers. One of the people she's hiding her secrets from is her ex-fiance. So I mean. It's a superhero show.
And it's such a good one.
I don't want to spoil anything. The premise, if you can't piece it together from my Mad Libs, is that Olivia Moore became a zombie after a wild party on a yacht went berzerko, and she took a job as a medical examiner in order to fill her need to eat brains -- without which she gradually becomes dumber and more aggressive, more like the zombies of the movies. (The need to eat brains to stave off zombie-mind is also used to good effect in Marvel Zombies - there you go, another superhero connection!) When she eats brains, she occasionally gains skills or other traits of the deceased for a temporary period, which provides the juice for the "case of the week" plots, as she solves murders and whatnot by drawing on the victims' memories and abilities.
Meanwhile, another zombie is amassing power by turning people into zombies and making them dependent on him to supply their food; Liv's social worker ex stumbles onto this without knowing what he's stumbled onto, when he investigates a rash of missing kids.
There are a lot of things the show does well. It starts out feeling like Veronica Mars, which makes sense -- this is a Rob Thomas show, with a snarky blonde solving crimes. But over the course of the first season, it develops its own identity, and it's doing things shows of this stripe have often veered away from doing: most significantly, Liv's decision to keep her secrets hidden from her ex and others has had real consequences beyond Lois being mad at Clark or Mary Jane dumping Peter. The ethics of the double life are really called into question -- and really, this aspect was there even in the pilot, given that Liv only breaks up with Major because she knows she has these secrets to keep, instead of trying to maintain a relationship and a secret life. It just wasn't clear from the pilot that this dilemma was going to become so important to the show. (To be fair, The Flash has done a better than usual job dealing with the secret life dilemma, too. But it has also given Barry Allen an almost nonexistent social life outside of his work as The Flash, so that the matter of secret-keeping is much more narrowly focused.)
Anyway, it's one of my favorite new shows, and deserves more attention.
The CW-verse
Is there an umbrella term for the CW's DC shows, now that there will be three of them in the fall? They don't seem to share continuity with any of the DC movies or CBS's Supergirl show (I hope I'm wrong about the latter), so "DC TV-verse" doesn't work.
Anyway. Because The Flash crosses over with Arrow a fair bit, I've watched a few more episodes of Arrow, and ... like I said last time round, I just cannot take it seriously. It's like knockoff Nolan. I'm so tired of the idea that "taking superheroes seriously" means making them grim-n-gritty, an idea that was horseshit in the early 90s and is horseshit 20 years later when other media are catching up to comic books.
I know everyone - well, everyone in their forties - fondly remembers Mike Grell's Longbow Hunters, which de-camp-ified Green Arrow and made people stop focusing on ridiculous trick arrows, but just like with Frank Miller's Batman, it worked in part as a palate cleanser from the excesses of camp, and landed at a time when, because of Crisis, no specific view of the character had come into clear focus. There are plenty of ways to do Green Arrow that don't have him grinding his teeth all the fucking time, and the Hard Travellin Heroes stories that focused on Queen's social activism in contrast with Green Lantern the space cop are a perfect example.
Ugh. This Green Arrow would be such a terrible presence on a Justice League. He would just sit in the corner glowering with Batman.
The Flash is much better, thank God. It always got the tone just about right, and the series has become more populated with superheroes and supervillains as the season has gone on, with compelling time travel twists and an excellent villain in the Reverse-Flash. Some of those new superheroes are going off to do the Legends spinoff, so I hope season two continues to create new recurring characters and do the work to make this feel like a show set in a world with superheroes, not just one or two dudes in costumes.
Netflix
Netflix's Marvel experiment -- four solo hero shows followed by a Defenders series teaming them up -- has started. (I gotta say, I wish they were calling it Champions instead of Defenders, because now that they're doing a Dr Strange movie, an ACTUAL Defenders movie with Dr Strange, the Hulk, and -- well, if Fox still has Silver Surfer, then somebody else, maybe even Spider-Man -- would be terrific.)
Man, people went nuts for Daredevil.
I ... like it okay.
I still haven't finished it.
Look, the cast is just right. They assembled the correct pieces. Vincent D'onofrio is especially good as the Kingpin, and Scott Glenn as Stick, but the trio of DD, Foggy, and Karen are a great foundation. There's just a lot of punching.
I mean, yeah, it's an action show, and it's a superhero show where the character doesn't have other offensive powers. But it's a lot of punching. And my attention winds up wandering, and I check my email or I get up to do the dishes or something. It's not 1986 and I'm not watching The A-Team -- punching wears thin after a while.
Is part of the problem that I'm not enough of a Daredevil fan? I don't know. I was a big fan of Frank Miller and Ann Nocenti's runs on the book back in the day, although to recycle a point from Green Arrow -- at the time, part of what I enjoyed about them was how different they were from other superhero comics, and that contrast is no longer in evidence.
But comics-wise, I've always been a bigger fan of the cosmic/weird stuff, along with the Avengers and Spider-Man. Daredevil was probably never in my top ten books at the height of my comics fandom (though also never lower than my top twenty). So maybe I'm just responding at the appropriate level of enthusiasm to a well-made adaptation.
It does play in to my frustration that so many superhero adaptations are just, you know, punching in costumes -- the super powers in evidence here are on about the same level as pulp hero stuff like The Shadow, where I want webshooters and Olympian gods and bio-stings.
The Avengers: Age of Ultron
I won't spoil any specific plot developments. This movie is in that tricky area where it was disappointing while still being good.
The Black Widow criticisms are all absolutely valid, but that's easy for me to say, because I thought she was terribly written in the first Avengers movie. She was moderately better written in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, but that movie contributes to the trend of pairing her off -- as a love interest or at least flirting partner -- with a different character in every movie she shows up in.
The movie version of this complicated and interesting comic book character has always been sorely underwritten, and I don't think she was even accidentally underwritten, I think she was created as a cipher who would be available for whatever plot needs became manifest, given that they needed her to appear in a dozen or so movies, filling slightly different needs. They purposefully chose a character without powers -- and therefore without additional special effects budget requirements -- to bridge these many Avengers-verse movies, and paid little attention to her beyond her plot-serving uses. I know the ScarJo version of the character has a devoted following, but I don't pretend to understand why.
She's not the only character who seems to serve the plot more than her own needs, here -- Tony Stark is very important to the movie but for the first time comes across as a character with little existence beyond his plot-use. There are times when the same almost seems true of Thor, but Chris Hemsworth is really underrated in his Marvel work, and ably does more with less.
The new characters are largely good; Scarlet Witch and the Vision are terrific, and I would love to see them in their own movie.
The movie is way too long, and at least some of that bloat is pretty transparently caused by the movie's need to serve multiple masters, which does not bode well for the next Cap or the next Avengers movies (though I am glad Whedon is off the train by then).
Another reason it's too long is that some of the action scenes are way too long and, really, not very interesting. I'm glad a lot of the action minutes are spent saving bystanders, but so many of them are devoted to smashing buildings and Michael Bay shit like that, and it's just boring.
Bonus: iZombie
Okay, it's not a superhero show, and although it's a comic book show, it's a very loose adaptation from what I understand (I haven't read it).
But it handles so many superhero tropes so well, and it's about a character with a secret identity, who is hiding from her loved ones the fact that she developed new powers following a traumatic accident, and that she uses those powers to solve murders and fight bad guys with the same powers as hers. One of the people she's hiding her secrets from is her ex-fiance. So I mean. It's a superhero show.
And it's such a good one.
I don't want to spoil anything. The premise, if you can't piece it together from my Mad Libs, is that Olivia Moore became a zombie after a wild party on a yacht went berzerko, and she took a job as a medical examiner in order to fill her need to eat brains -- without which she gradually becomes dumber and more aggressive, more like the zombies of the movies. (The need to eat brains to stave off zombie-mind is also used to good effect in Marvel Zombies - there you go, another superhero connection!) When she eats brains, she occasionally gains skills or other traits of the deceased for a temporary period, which provides the juice for the "case of the week" plots, as she solves murders and whatnot by drawing on the victims' memories and abilities.
Meanwhile, another zombie is amassing power by turning people into zombies and making them dependent on him to supply their food; Liv's social worker ex stumbles onto this without knowing what he's stumbled onto, when he investigates a rash of missing kids.
There are a lot of things the show does well. It starts out feeling like Veronica Mars, which makes sense -- this is a Rob Thomas show, with a snarky blonde solving crimes. But over the course of the first season, it develops its own identity, and it's doing things shows of this stripe have often veered away from doing: most significantly, Liv's decision to keep her secrets hidden from her ex and others has had real consequences beyond Lois being mad at Clark or Mary Jane dumping Peter. The ethics of the double life are really called into question -- and really, this aspect was there even in the pilot, given that Liv only breaks up with Major because she knows she has these secrets to keep, instead of trying to maintain a relationship and a secret life. It just wasn't clear from the pilot that this dilemma was going to become so important to the show. (To be fair, The Flash has done a better than usual job dealing with the secret life dilemma, too. But it has also given Barry Allen an almost nonexistent social life outside of his work as The Flash, so that the matter of secret-keeping is much more narrowly focused.)
Anyway, it's one of my favorite new shows, and deserves more attention.
Wednesday, May 13, 2015
mad men, mad men, mad men, mad men
Mad Men is one of the reasons I started this blog. One of the interesting things about it is that while a lot of the Everyone Agrees These Are The Best shows of this century have suffered or prospered according to their finale, I'm comfortable calling Mad Men one of the all-time best dramas regardless of how the final season goes. It isn't Lost, it isn't Breaking Bad or Battlestar Galactica -- unless it ends with Dick Whitman being publicly revealed, it's hard to imagine how it could be constructed as having told a single narrative. There aren't episodes that will seem shitty or inexplicable in hindsight once a finale "reveals all," like with Lost.
And yeah, I'll get to Lost's finale in another post, or maybe even will have done already before this post goes up.
I can't even tell you how many times I've seen Mad Men. I stopped buying the DVDs at some point - despite my love of audio commentary and preference for owning physical media - once we had Netflix streaming and a Roku and all that, and AMC runs marathons fairly often. I'm sure I've seen the first season at least seven or eight times, and there are undoubtedly episodes I've watched a dozen times. And I've rewatched it all in writing this post.
Episode by episode thoughts after the break.
Episode by episode thoughts after the break.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)