Every blog post about summer TV starts out by reminiscing over when there wasn't any summer TV, right? When apart from the occasional show being burned off -- David Lynch and Mark Frost's On The Air! the unfinished Stephen King series Golden Years! -- it was when you caught up on the shows you didn't usually watch, because there were no DVRs. Even in the late 90s, summer rerun season was key, letting me catch up on this weird "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" show I had just caught a few episodes of.
So okay, that's out of the way.
Obviously summer has changed, but it's still the weaker season overall. Sure, HBO runs some strong stuff, and Mad Men has aired in the summer, but the networks never put their biggest hits on in the summer, and comedy especially is thin on the ground.
Here's what I've checked out lately:
Game of Thrones is having both one of its best and its most problematic season. Catching up to the books has forced the showrunners' hands in some interesting ways, and while I won't get specific in this post, I will say that I love much of it, but the rape is out of control. There are a lot of things to say about the ways fiction uses rape, and how often rape is used to tell a story framed so that it isn't even the victim's story, and there isn't room to get into all of it here. But GOT has been pretty fucking awful in that respect, and I can't blame the people who have jumped ship.
The Dorne storyline is also a huge flaw this season, both for the critical changes from the way it plays out in the book and the fact that the country itself is portrayed so shoddily -- let me direct you to Neil Miller's excellent (and of course spoiler-ridden) post about it, because I can't think of anything to add.
Veep and Silicon Valley are as good or better (in Silicon Valley's case) as they've been in previous seasons, I just don't know what to say about them beyond that.
Hannibal is a show I came to late. We checked out the first few episodes of the first season and I couldn't get into it. It seemed well-acted and everything, sure, but I am so burned out on serial killers. Enough with all the fucking serial killers.
I still feel that way, but from the end of season one and through season two, the show really transformed -- while, admittedly, still being about serial killers. It's become more weird and imagistic, disturbing without being a gorey rapefest. It's nothing like Bryan Fuller's previous shows, except insofar as it's never lazy.
Halt and Catch Fire has indeed improved in its second season, though two episodes in I am not persuaded that Sepinwall is correct that it's finally a great AMC drama. Cameron is still obnoxious, and although it's not entirely clear to me how much we're supposed to side with her vision, I'm pretty sure we're supposed to be impressed by her commitment to online gaming -- even though the company would have to coast on minimal profits for a decade before that would pay off.
This is one of the things I really hate about the difficulty that writers, as a group, have writing about smart people. Taking a character in a period show and demonstrating their genius through their commitment to some idea that we in the present know eventually becomes a big hit is, at best, fucking lazy. It worked when John Astin did it on Brisco County Jr but that's a comedy, for heaven's sake. In a case like this, it just makes everyone look dumb: online gaming isn't a big money idea in the mid-80s and the actual smart people realized that. It would be like launching a company providing services to electric car owners or something now - the market just isn't big enough yet, can't be big enough yet.
Think about Don Draper. How terrible would Mad Men be if a season culminated in him introducing McDonald's Monopoly or if he spent all his time trying to convince people that a television channel devoted to shopping from home was the wave of the future?
That said: increasing Donna's presence has been a tremendous improvement, and Joe has not bothered me at all this year, although at the moment it's sort of hard to see why he's actually on the show. It's a flawed show, but maybe the bleeding has stopped.
I really wanted to like Aquarius but I don't think I could even tell you anything about what happens in the two episodes I've seen. I like David Duchovny but he's made weird choices in his post-X-Files work, and while on paper this show sounds like it has a lot of potential, it's just ... forgettable.
Wayward Pines. A Secret Service agent investigating the disappearance of other agents winds up in a weird town he can't escape from. Based on books I haven't read, and apparently promising answers to the whole thing, this just comes across like a bland retread of The Prisoner - the ultimate "where am I, what is going on, and who is in on it?" show, which gave few answers but managed to be engaging and rewarding in every episode. This show has been a trudge. Somehow The Prisoner never left me wondering, what do all these townspeople do with their days when we're not watching them?, a feat its ripoffs never manage. (I was a big Prisoner fan, right down to the DC comics sequel and the GURPS supplement.)
The Whispers is the more promising Mysterious Shit Going Down show, though I'm not sure by how much. If nothing else, the show is more watchable, because it isn't full of people doing weird stilted acting while they pretend nothing's going on. Lily Rabe is in it, which is great, but so is Milo Ventimiglia. I need more episodes to decide what to think of this one, but unlike most of the other new summer shows, at least I'm interested in seeing those episodes.
UnReal has turned out to be the surprise new show of the summer, from fucking Lifetime of all things. It's a Serious Cable Drama that fits Lifetime the way Mad Men fit AMC: just as AMC's brand was invested in nostalgia, the past, and serious drama, Lifetime's brand is invested in melodrama, both strong female characters and crazy ones, and reality shows like The Bachelor. UnReal revolves around a Bachelor-type show called Everlasting, run by exec producer Constance Zimmer (a longtime favorite of mine since Good Morning Miami), who has brought back field producer Shiri Appleby (Roswell) despite her breakdown in a previous season.
There are so many things this show does right:
First, it attacks its subject matter but doesn't parody it. Hotwives notwithstanding, reality shows are poor material for parody, because they're already so broad and ridiculous.
I don't give a shit about reality shows, so thankfully there are other things it does right too -- but that first one is still very important.
Second, Shiri Appleby is kind of the show's Don Draper, to continue the Mad Men analogy. Not because of a Dick Whitman-like past -- the backstory to her breakdown seems to be pretty straightforward, actually -- but because she is very good at what she does, and what she does isn't very pretty. That's been a subplot playing out through Serious TV for a while -- Walter White discovers he's not just a good drug cook, he's a great drug dealer, for instance -- and even apart from the moral greyness, there's always a joy in seeing a character be convincingly good at something. (Again, this is my problem with Halt and Catch Fire.) Appleby's producer is brought in to manufacture drama, to pit contestants against each other and create the narrative of the show-within-the-show. It's shitty business, but the show understands the skill involved, and understands how to portray it.
Third, she's not a villain. She's clearly conflicted about this shit. That said, this show ... brings to mind all the old Mad Men and Sopranos complaints about nobody on those shows being likable. It's a show about people manipulating women and pitting them against each other -- women who are often pretty awful to begin with, but some of whom may be genuine. (None of them stands out for me so far, but neither did Pete's entourage - Ken, Kinsey, Harry - at this point in Mad Men. There is a tall "southern" contestant whose southern accent is just awful, but that is typical of television, unfortunately.)
I used to say that it was more important for me that characters be real than that they be likable. Then I saw Girls, which certainly seems plenty real and which I can't stand watching more than a couple minutes of. So I don't have a pithy explanation of where I stand on likability, empathy, and sympathy. I loved Breaking Bad even when I didn't want Walt to win, and I love rooting for Saul the sleazy lawyer now, and I loved the Sopranos even though Tony became more and more of an asshole with time. I have a sense for why those things are true, which isn't worth getting into when I'm supposed to be talking about UnReal, but the point is that I can't tell yet how it will all work for this show.
Tuesday, June 9, 2015
Monday, June 1, 2015
it's not tv, it's... no, it's tv, fucking everything is tv now
So first we had HBO, which after broadcasting a handful of original series over the years -- most of which were standard fare that capitalized on the network's capacity for nudity and swearing -- suddenly landed on The Larry Sanders Show, the first one to garner really serious acclaim. Within a few years it had added Oz and The Sopranos, and suddenly this was a thing: HBO is in the Serious TV game. Keep in mind, even broadcast networks have only ever dallied in the Serious TV game. It's been sort of like the pro bono work that rat bastards do on the side.
But HBO started to turn Serious TV into a large part of its brand identity. Maybe they looked at the shorter and shorter delays between movies' theatrical releases and their showing up on Blockbuster shelves, and maybe they even realized how much shorter those delays would become once DVDs arrived. Maybe they understood that movies couldn't always be the reason to subscribe to the Home Box Office, is what I'm saying. But maybe they just got lucky.
Anyway, Showtime eventually followed, and today it's just assumed that a premium cable channel will have a handful of original series that can hold up to or surpass the quality and budgets of what you find on broadcast television.
Then FX premiered The Shield, during the last years of NYPD Blue, picking up the Serious Cop Show baton. It's a slow burner of a show that only a decade later can seem, if not dated per se, at least ordinary, because the violent antihero has become a drama staple.
Now FX was in the Serious TV game, and AMC followed with Mad Men, and although most other basic cable channels are still pretty early in the Developing Serious TV timeline, they contribute over half of the more than 300 scripted series that air each year. Some networks have forgone the Serious TV game in favor of more commercial programming -- MTV comes to mind here -- but the point is that broadcast's share has been eaten away by basic cable now, not just premium cable.
And then Netflix picked up Orange is the New Black, the House of Cards remake, and Arrested Development, followed by the rapid launch of a real network's worth of shows; Hulu picked up The Mindy Project; Amazon streamed Transparent; Yahoo Screen picked up Community after NBC failed to.
Fucking everything is a TV channel now.
This is the year that really hit home. The third season of House of Cards has aired, and although it's the weakest to date, it's still a sign of the new power of streaming services. The third season of Orange is the New Black starts soon, and God knows I am looking forward to Netflix's Wet Hot American Summer. On top of that -- still just talking about Netflix here -- Bloodline and The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt have wound up being two of my favorite series of the year.
All of that by way of introducing some quick coverage of the state of streaming TV this year.
Netflix
Like I said, House of Cards was a disappointment. I think Robin Wright is the best thing about the show -- not that Kevin Spacey isn't fun -- but this season just didn't feel very compelling, and that's only part because of the wealth of choices we have to watch these days.
Bloodline, though, features a cast of actors I absolutely love -- Coach, Lindsay Weir, Sam Shepard, Sissy Spacek, Jacinda from the Real World for pete's sake! and some guys I wasn't really familiar with before -- in a dark drama by the creators of Damages, a show I haven't watched much of. Yet.
I have a soft spot for Suspenseful Narratives About Families With Secrets, so this definitely hit my target.
The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, originally developed for NBC which passed on it after the first season was already produced, turned out to be one of the two or three best new shows of the 2014-15 season. I'm sure if you have Netflix you've seen it by now. Created by Tina Fey and Robert Carlock, it has a lot of the sensibility of 30 Rock -- right down to Jane Krakowski in a similarly self-involved role -- but is centered around the optimism and naivete of Kimmy, who has recently been rescued from a cult. It's a hard show to sum up, and interestingly it really feels like a cable/streaming show -- it's a 13 episode season, with a well-defined beginning, middle, and end. Titus Burgess is clearly the newcomer of the year, and it's fantastic to have Carol Kane on the air again. Or on the stream. Whatever.
Grace and Frankie is a fairly traditional modern sitcom in most respects, except that the premise -- Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin's husbands, Martin Sheen and Sam Waterhouse, leave their wives for each other, and the women try to get their lives together -- would piss off some of the red states. It's a solid show with well-above average actors.
Amazon
Amazon is a weird one to keep track of, because they launch a crapload of pilots, wait to see which ones are the most popular, greenlight those, and then take forever to get around to launching the series. (Once in a while something goes straight to series, like the as yet untitled Woody Allen series.)
Transparent, which hit the streams last September, is fantastic, and probably the best new show of the 2014-15 season. Jeffrey Tambor plays a man who, having secretly dressed as a woman for years, finally tells his family that he's decided to transition. Jill Soloway, a writer and producer on Six Feet Under, showrunner of The United States of Tara, and director of the disappointing Afternoon Delight, was inspired by her own parent's coming out as transgender. It's a perfect premise for a show because, as Tambor explains everything to his adult kids, he walks the audience through what's going on as well.
Less like a sitcom and more like an indie movie told in small doses, Transparent is fantastic, funny, sometimes frustrating in the good way -- where you're frustrated with the characters, not the narrative -- and probably other F-words. Thank God it was renewed for a second season. Hurry up and air it. Stream it. Whatever.
Yahoo Screen
How are we even talking about Yahoo Screen? What even is Yahoo Screen? Its interface, at least on the Roku, is awful.
Community is how. After NBC failed to renew it for a sixth season, Yahoo said fuck no, "six seasons and a movie, dammit!", and picked it up. Yvette Nicole Brown left for personal reasons, Chevy Chase and Donald Glover had already left, and after filling in for a year, Jonathan Banks left too. Two new cast members joined -- showkiller Paget Brewster and Keith "not David Keith" David.
Let's stop and point out that Keith David was on The Cape, that Abed's obsession with The Cape and his insistence that it would last for "six seasons and a movie" is what led to the phrase "six seasons and a movie" that has become emblematic of Community fans' faith and determination, and that even though a cast member from The Cape is now in the sixth season and presumably a movie, there have been no references to The Cape this season!
Whether because of the cast turnover or a similar creative turnover -- I assume not all the same writers and directors are involved, but I don't know for sure -- Community has felt different this year. There have been a couple of weak episodes, but for the most part I don't mean different in a bad way. It's often just weirder.
"Basic Crisis Room Decorum" is the best example. Both the third episode of the season and the 100th episode of the series, it's one of the ten, maybe even one of the five, best episodes of Community of all time -- not because of the A-plot, in which City College premieres an attack ad because Greendale let a dog graduate, but because of weird jokes that don't translate well to print, like a drunken Britta shitting her pants and later hallucinating a music video by 90s college rock band Natalie Is Freezing.
Sometimes the show seems a little off tonally. Abed especially just seems ... different, maybe simply because Troy isn't around, or maybe because there aren't many new angles from which to approach his meta thing, without it seeming forced. Maybe it's this simple: in contrast with earlier seasons, where all-time-great episodes like "Critical Film Studies" (the "My Dinner with Abed" one) were driven by Abed or by the interplay between Abed and either Jeff or Troy, Abed hasn't been my favorite thing about any episode so far this season. That's not a liability or anything, it's just a change. On the other hand, Gillian Jacobs has been doing Emmy-quality work, which is all the more remarkable given that somehow after six years she's finding new things to do with this character. The introduction of Britta's parents has been terrific too, and if we say fuck the hashtag and storm forward with a season seven, I would love to see them show up more frequently.
(In retrospect, I guess Abed's importance actually peaked as long ago as season two, which included not only "Critical Film Studies" but "Abed's Uncontrollable Christmas" and "Paradigms of Human Memory.")
Despite the fact that The New Yorker ran an article on its casting, I haven't heard anybody talking about Other Space, Paul Feig's sitcom on Yahoo Screen. The marketing line seems to be "it's The Office, in space," but it's so, so much weirder than that.
It's clearly not a high budget series -- outside of Joel Hodgson and Trace Beaulieu from MST3K (who I mistook for the stars of the show before I saw it), it's a cluster of sorta-kinda familiar faces, like that guy from those phone commercials and that girl from those other phone commercials, But it's funny and weird and does a great job finding the comic potential in familiar space show concepts -- ground you figure has already been well-trod by Red Dwarf, but if there's room for a zillion Star Treks, there's room for a few funny Star Trek parodies.
There are so many other streaming shows and platforms I'm not even talking about, because there's too much to watch. I haven't even watched Powers, for instance, because although I have a Playstation and am a fan of the comic book, I don't have Playstation Plus and don't feel like paying for a TV show when we're already paying for cable and two streaming services (three if you count Amazon Prime).
But HBO started to turn Serious TV into a large part of its brand identity. Maybe they looked at the shorter and shorter delays between movies' theatrical releases and their showing up on Blockbuster shelves, and maybe they even realized how much shorter those delays would become once DVDs arrived. Maybe they understood that movies couldn't always be the reason to subscribe to the Home Box Office, is what I'm saying. But maybe they just got lucky.
Anyway, Showtime eventually followed, and today it's just assumed that a premium cable channel will have a handful of original series that can hold up to or surpass the quality and budgets of what you find on broadcast television.
Then FX premiered The Shield, during the last years of NYPD Blue, picking up the Serious Cop Show baton. It's a slow burner of a show that only a decade later can seem, if not dated per se, at least ordinary, because the violent antihero has become a drama staple.
Now FX was in the Serious TV game, and AMC followed with Mad Men, and although most other basic cable channels are still pretty early in the Developing Serious TV timeline, they contribute over half of the more than 300 scripted series that air each year. Some networks have forgone the Serious TV game in favor of more commercial programming -- MTV comes to mind here -- but the point is that broadcast's share has been eaten away by basic cable now, not just premium cable.
And then Netflix picked up Orange is the New Black, the House of Cards remake, and Arrested Development, followed by the rapid launch of a real network's worth of shows; Hulu picked up The Mindy Project; Amazon streamed Transparent; Yahoo Screen picked up Community after NBC failed to.
Fucking everything is a TV channel now.
This is the year that really hit home. The third season of House of Cards has aired, and although it's the weakest to date, it's still a sign of the new power of streaming services. The third season of Orange is the New Black starts soon, and God knows I am looking forward to Netflix's Wet Hot American Summer. On top of that -- still just talking about Netflix here -- Bloodline and The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt have wound up being two of my favorite series of the year.
All of that by way of introducing some quick coverage of the state of streaming TV this year.
Netflix
Like I said, House of Cards was a disappointment. I think Robin Wright is the best thing about the show -- not that Kevin Spacey isn't fun -- but this season just didn't feel very compelling, and that's only part because of the wealth of choices we have to watch these days.
Bloodline, though, features a cast of actors I absolutely love -- Coach, Lindsay Weir, Sam Shepard, Sissy Spacek, Jacinda from the Real World for pete's sake! and some guys I wasn't really familiar with before -- in a dark drama by the creators of Damages, a show I haven't watched much of. Yet.
I have a soft spot for Suspenseful Narratives About Families With Secrets, so this definitely hit my target.
The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, originally developed for NBC which passed on it after the first season was already produced, turned out to be one of the two or three best new shows of the 2014-15 season. I'm sure if you have Netflix you've seen it by now. Created by Tina Fey and Robert Carlock, it has a lot of the sensibility of 30 Rock -- right down to Jane Krakowski in a similarly self-involved role -- but is centered around the optimism and naivete of Kimmy, who has recently been rescued from a cult. It's a hard show to sum up, and interestingly it really feels like a cable/streaming show -- it's a 13 episode season, with a well-defined beginning, middle, and end. Titus Burgess is clearly the newcomer of the year, and it's fantastic to have Carol Kane on the air again. Or on the stream. Whatever.
Grace and Frankie is a fairly traditional modern sitcom in most respects, except that the premise -- Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin's husbands, Martin Sheen and Sam Waterhouse, leave their wives for each other, and the women try to get their lives together -- would piss off some of the red states. It's a solid show with well-above average actors.
Amazon
Amazon is a weird one to keep track of, because they launch a crapload of pilots, wait to see which ones are the most popular, greenlight those, and then take forever to get around to launching the series. (Once in a while something goes straight to series, like the as yet untitled Woody Allen series.)
Transparent, which hit the streams last September, is fantastic, and probably the best new show of the 2014-15 season. Jeffrey Tambor plays a man who, having secretly dressed as a woman for years, finally tells his family that he's decided to transition. Jill Soloway, a writer and producer on Six Feet Under, showrunner of The United States of Tara, and director of the disappointing Afternoon Delight, was inspired by her own parent's coming out as transgender. It's a perfect premise for a show because, as Tambor explains everything to his adult kids, he walks the audience through what's going on as well.
Less like a sitcom and more like an indie movie told in small doses, Transparent is fantastic, funny, sometimes frustrating in the good way -- where you're frustrated with the characters, not the narrative -- and probably other F-words. Thank God it was renewed for a second season. Hurry up and air it. Stream it. Whatever.
Yahoo Screen
How are we even talking about Yahoo Screen? What even is Yahoo Screen? Its interface, at least on the Roku, is awful.
Community is how. After NBC failed to renew it for a sixth season, Yahoo said fuck no, "six seasons and a movie, dammit!", and picked it up. Yvette Nicole Brown left for personal reasons, Chevy Chase and Donald Glover had already left, and after filling in for a year, Jonathan Banks left too. Two new cast members joined -- showkiller Paget Brewster and Keith "not David Keith" David.
Let's stop and point out that Keith David was on The Cape, that Abed's obsession with The Cape and his insistence that it would last for "six seasons and a movie" is what led to the phrase "six seasons and a movie" that has become emblematic of Community fans' faith and determination, and that even though a cast member from The Cape is now in the sixth season and presumably a movie, there have been no references to The Cape this season!
Whether because of the cast turnover or a similar creative turnover -- I assume not all the same writers and directors are involved, but I don't know for sure -- Community has felt different this year. There have been a couple of weak episodes, but for the most part I don't mean different in a bad way. It's often just weirder.
"Basic Crisis Room Decorum" is the best example. Both the third episode of the season and the 100th episode of the series, it's one of the ten, maybe even one of the five, best episodes of Community of all time -- not because of the A-plot, in which City College premieres an attack ad because Greendale let a dog graduate, but because of weird jokes that don't translate well to print, like a drunken Britta shitting her pants and later hallucinating a music video by 90s college rock band Natalie Is Freezing.
Sometimes the show seems a little off tonally. Abed especially just seems ... different, maybe simply because Troy isn't around, or maybe because there aren't many new angles from which to approach his meta thing, without it seeming forced. Maybe it's this simple: in contrast with earlier seasons, where all-time-great episodes like "Critical Film Studies" (the "My Dinner with Abed" one) were driven by Abed or by the interplay between Abed and either Jeff or Troy, Abed hasn't been my favorite thing about any episode so far this season. That's not a liability or anything, it's just a change. On the other hand, Gillian Jacobs has been doing Emmy-quality work, which is all the more remarkable given that somehow after six years she's finding new things to do with this character. The introduction of Britta's parents has been terrific too, and if we say fuck the hashtag and storm forward with a season seven, I would love to see them show up more frequently.
(In retrospect, I guess Abed's importance actually peaked as long ago as season two, which included not only "Critical Film Studies" but "Abed's Uncontrollable Christmas" and "Paradigms of Human Memory.")
Despite the fact that The New Yorker ran an article on its casting, I haven't heard anybody talking about Other Space, Paul Feig's sitcom on Yahoo Screen. The marketing line seems to be "it's The Office, in space," but it's so, so much weirder than that.
It's clearly not a high budget series -- outside of Joel Hodgson and Trace Beaulieu from MST3K (who I mistook for the stars of the show before I saw it), it's a cluster of sorta-kinda familiar faces, like that guy from those phone commercials and that girl from those other phone commercials, But it's funny and weird and does a great job finding the comic potential in familiar space show concepts -- ground you figure has already been well-trod by Red Dwarf, but if there's room for a zillion Star Treks, there's room for a few funny Star Trek parodies.
There are so many other streaming shows and platforms I'm not even talking about, because there's too much to watch. I haven't even watched Powers, for instance, because although I have a Playstation and am a fan of the comic book, I don't have Playstation Plus and don't feel like paying for a TV show when we're already paying for cable and two streaming services (three if you count Amazon Prime).
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