lost

There are not many shows as divisive as Lost, I think.

I started watching partway through the pilot episode -- I was still giving Smallville a shot (was this the season they introduced Lois Lane?), and Lost looked like no big deal, like a scripted version of Survivor. But somebody said hey, you should check this show out.

A lot of other people must have been told the same thing, because the pilot aired again pretty soon - - before the second episode, I think -- and before long I was an evangelist for the show, and watched the first season several times before the second season started, usually watching it with other people I was trying to convert.

That first season, which ended on a double cliffhanger, raised as many question as Twin Peaks and the X-Files put together: what is the island? Why did Oceanic flight 815 crash there? Why was one of the castaways healed of permanent injuries by landing there? Who are the Others and why do they kidnap people? What is the hatch? Why did this corpse come back to life, and if it didn't, where did the body go? What is the monster? Why are there polar bears on this tropical island? Why does this child seem to have a wide array of psychic powers? What is the significance of the numbers? What is the sickness the French lady is afraid of? What did this fugitive from the law do for her to be treated as so dangerous and for a U.S. marshal to track her down to a foreign country?

And so on.

The problems started almost right away, as some of the backstory was fleshed out in the Alternate Reality Game (ARG) operated over the summer -- and then never to rarely mentioned again in the show itself, as though by virtue of a small portion of the audience having learned an answer, the characters (and the world of the show itself) lost interest in the question. This turned out to be a chronic problem on the show:

Lost is a show that constantly raises questions about strange occurrences and supernatural mysteries experienced by characters who have almost no curiosity about them.

Let's get to some details.

fall 2015

I have a long post on Lost I need to do so, since as I write this we're a day or two away from finishing our rewatch of the whole series. But for the moment let's just check in on the fall TV season as it ramps up.

One thing that surprises me is that the returning series I'm most looking forward to are iZombie and The Leftovers. In part this reflects the newly fractured nature of TV seasons -- some of my favorite shows aren't airing this fall -- and the fact that several of my favorite shows ended last season. So a sort of attrition has resulted in my favorite new series becoming, essentially, my favorite series tout court.

Also very happy that the second season of The Returned is coming soon, that Red Oaks finally has a full season coming on Amazon, that Fargo will be back in less than a month, and that I finally got around to watching Mom last season. I ought to blog about that show -- I avoided it because, well, it's fucking Chuck Lorre, but it turns out to have more in common with Roseanne than Two and a Half Men.

One reason I'm surprised at how much I love iZombie is because of how perfectly it fits the description of a TV subgenre I loathe:

Person with special abilities teams up with no-nonsense cop to solve murrrrders.

This is a pretty shitty way of telling stories in the first place -- I have so much disdain for the inability of TV writers to come up with anything other than a murder of the week to fill their hour -- even while it's obviously grounded in the traditional Genius + Sidekick formula of classic detective stories going back to Sherlock Holmes. And even Sleepy Hollow is just a brilliant and deranged twist on that formula.

But one reason the subgenre has been the focus of so much of my ire lately is because it's become even more common among every season's new offerings than "Some Doofus and His Hot Wife Parent Badly."

Limitless and Minority Report both waste the potential of the movies they're adapting (not that Limitless was that hot, but whatever) in order to boil out the impurities and reduce the ideas down to Person with special abilities teams up with cop to solve murrrrrders. Furthermore, in order to make this work, Minority Report has to go the additional step of saying that the whole point of the movie -- that using precognitives to fight "precrime" was horseshit -- was wrong.

That fucking Blindspot show that I'm so sick of the ads for -- and I shouldn't be surprised that it did so well in the ratings, because the things I think look awful so often do -- is another Per w spesh + cop essing ems show, which means we had three of these fuckers leading off the fall season. Jesus Christ.

Even the superhero shows tend to veer toward P-spesh & C S M territory. You've got your superhero and then you've got their Regular Folks support team, partly to personify the process by which the superhero finds crime to fight, partly to give them people to talk to / rescue / act as audience-surrogates. I'm not crazy about this -- the comics aren't structured that way, so right out the gate the stories feel very differently than the properties being adapted -- and it's one of the things I don't like about Arrow, though for some reason it bothers me less in Flash (maybe because of the way Tom Cavanagh's character became involved in the story).

I'm hoping Supergirl, which had the most promising pilot I've seen for shows premiering this season, doesn't go the PSCSM route, though there are many indications that it will. I guess I'll wait to say more about that until the show has aired.

So with the fall season just starting, there's three new shows I tuned in for worth mentioning briefly:

Scream Queens was awful. I mean, I have been watching Ryan Murphy shows since Popular's first season 16 years ago, so I feel like my expectations are properly modulated: every show will start out decent, with clever touches, and quickly climb up its own asshole. Glee went from being a bright, cute show to completely unwatchable in record time, Nip/Tuck became bizarre in ways that sort of predicted the Ryan Murphy of American Horror Story, etc. What I'm saying is, I didn't have super-high expectations, but I did expect the premiere to be good.

It was nearly unwatchable. Everything is on the nose, the performances are wooden, it's somehow not bad or broad enough to be campy (much less intentional camp), it's like watching a talent show at a school assembly. It's really, really awful. I was first startled at how bad it was, and then I was very quickly bored. I have sleep apnea, so I think I'm constitutionally incapable of watching another episode.

Heroes Reborn, on the other hand, was surprisingly all right. I watched maybe two and a half? seasons of Heroes and then caught random reruns on the Sci Fi Channel and G4. It was an uneven show: a first season that turned out to be better than expected, followed by extensive proof that nobody involved had any idea how to keep the story going in a reasonable and natural way. My hope is that no one would revive Heroes unless they had a solid idea of what to do with it -- why bother otherwise? -- and so far they haven't fucked anything up, though working around the absence of Hayden Panettiere is a little awkward.

Then there's The Muppets, of course. It goes without saying that I was and have always been a huge Muppets fan; this is almost inevitable given my age. Though I loved the Jason Segel movie, I thought Muppets Most Wanted was fairly weak, and wasn't sure what to expect here. The faux-documentary format of The Office makes sense -- there are no variety shows these days, after all -- but I wish they hadn't abandoned the genius fan idea that "Muppets canon" consisted of The Muppet Show and the first Muppet Movie, with everything else being something they had created as part of their Rich and Famous contract. Things like using Sam the Eagle as the standards and practices guy, while funny, don't support the idea of him being a performer who also plays a CIA agent in Muppets Most Wanted, etc.

My sister called it "cold," and I think that's right. It doesn't really seem like they had FUN making it, and so far lacks the manic energy that made The Muppet Show -- and all of Henson's pre-Muppet Show Muppets performances -- what it was. I can easily see that being a function of the pilot, though -- wanting to get everything right in an era that doesn't give shows a lot of time to get on their feet. And certainly the Muppets legacy is such that I have trouble imagining a Muppets show I wouldn't watch. I'm just hoping this one becomes more relaxed and comfortable with itself.

might as well dance

I was listening to Kate Kulzick and Erik Adams discussing Bunheads, which given the season finale of Galavant and the fact of Singing in the Rain sitting on my DVR, reminded me of the way my engagement with musicals has changed. It's weird, when you think about it -- and it comes up every time someone launches a Cop Rock or a Viva Laughlin or a Glee -- that the musical is one of the most popular and significant genres in movies (albeit one with a long-gone heyday) and yet has played so little role on television. Or maybe it's not that weird -- maybe it makes sense given television's live origins, the popularity of the variety show during the only period when the existence of television and the prominence of the movie musical overlapped, the additional lead time it takes to write musical episodes, and the cost of licensing existing music as an alternative. But saying it's weird is the done thing.

[NOTE: This blog entry was begun shortly after Galavant's first season ended, but not finished until Caitlin and I binge-watched Bunheads, which required tracking down torrents since it isn't streaming anywhere, nor released on DVD.]

Bunheads wasn't a musical, but as a show about ballet students, it had enough song and dance numbers that it might not have been produced in the pre-Glee world. It was a one-season wonder on ABC Family (albeit one divided by a long mid-season gap, and ordered in two batches) by Amy Sherman-Palladino, the creator of Gilmore Girls, and in many ways came the closest to that show in tone, outlook, vibe, I don't know what you want to call it. Nobody watched it.

(And because nobody watched it, and because I imagine few of the people who did watch it were also Friday Night Lights fans, hardly anyone knows how versatile Stacey Oristano is, who played quirky delight Truly in Bunheads, who quickly steals the show, and stripper-slash-glimpse-of-the-possible-future-for-Tyra Mindy Collette on Friday Night Lights.)



In a lot of ways, Bunheads suffered from the same problem as Friday Night Lights: though it was a show about dancers, it was morethanthat in the same way Friday Night Lights is about football but morethanthat. For one thing, as with Gilmore Girls - or Quirky Place shows from Parks to Green Acres to Newhart - it started to become a show about a place as much as about its main characters, and over time I'm sure Paradise, California, would have become as well-populated and bizarre as Stars Hollow did. But even more than that, the pilot's set-up made this more than just a show about a ballet school. Sutton Foster plays the lead character, Michelle Simms, a talented dancer working as a Las Vegas showgirl when we begin, and reaching the age at which it's increasingly unlikely she'll ever get her Big Break. She impulsively marries Hubbell, a long-time admirer, moves to his hometown with him, and he promptly dies. All in the pilot.

Michelle barely knows her late husband's mother, whose home and ballet school he had supported financially, and Kelly Bishop from Gilmore Girls does a great job playing the mother-in-law as someone who's not quite an antagonist but not welcoming the stranger with open arms either. The cast is rounded out by the aforementioned Truly, who carried a torch for Hubbell, and the high school girls who attend the ballet school.

Like Gilmore Girls, Bunheads combines some fish out of water elements with family-like frictions and a thirtysomething single female lead in an unusual dating circumstance (she's a widow of a one-day marriage: how long does she mourn? how do you process losing someone you were still getting to know?) Michelle isn't a mother-who's-also-a-best-friend, but she's in a mentor position with these teen girls, and so similar conflicts come up. I'm not saying it's at all derivative of Gilmore Girls or fails to feel fresh -- only that Amy Sherman-Palladino is playing to her strengths here.

It differs from Gilmore Girls largely in that it takes longer to find itself. For instance, before the rewatch, I remembered the music-video-like musical numbers being a lot more frequent than they are. While there are partial dance numbers all throughout the show, the use of popular or unexpected music -- like the Sparks song above -- is primarily found in the back half of the show, and even then it's only a handful of times. Meanwhile, supporting characters come and go as though everyone's auditioning to see if they're going to become important -- there's a wealthy guy who's as much an outsider as Michelle who seems like a possible love interest, and he's never mentioned again after an episode that kind of revolves around him; there's another love interest later whose function in hindsight seems to have been only to make Michelle realize that she missed Hubbell and hadn't dealt with his death.

It took a few episodes for the students to really stand out for me - although they were presumably cast for dancing ability rather than acting ability, I think it was more of a writing problem, where it felt like the writers were waiting to get to know the characters (or actors) to differentiate them. For a few hours, they all just kind of blend together. (It didn't help that one of the Bunheads is named Boo and one of the Bunheads is played by Bailey Buntain and these are two different Bunheads.)



It's slower to come together than Gilmore Girls was, and less focused -- Gilmore Girls always has the central Lorelai-Rory, Lorelai-Luke relationships to come back to, and the Friday night dinners for structure, while Bunheads never entirely settles down and finds its center -- but it is nevertheless a great show, and by the end it has developed its central characters enough that their presence on television is really missed. Unfortunately it only seems to be available in paid digital form, no streaming or DVDs.



Galavant, on the other hand, is a full-on musical. Airing Sunday nights while Once Upon a Time was on hiatus, it has a tenuous Disney connection in that Alan Menken is a producer/songwriter/composer, but otherwise has nothing in common with the weird weird mess that is Once Upon a Time. Thank God.

I can't find video of one of my favorite moments, when evil King Richard -- who has been taking lessons to be more funny -- enters the room and interrupts hero Galavant:

Galavant: Where do you think they're keeping your parents:

King Richard: Perhaps they're up your butt.

King Richard: ... you see, because that's the most unlikely place.




 I really should have mentioned Timothy Omundson -- who I previously only really knew from a questionable arc on Xena -- in my Emmys discussion, because as King Richard he gave one of the two or three funniest performances on TV this season. It's a light show -- not quite as silly a spoof as something like When Things Were Rotten, more strongly plot-driven and invested in character relationships than a Monty Python production. Galavant's off to rescue the love of his life, Madalena, from King Richard, only she's pretty happy being the power behind an evil king's throne, and meanwhile there are sparks between Galavant and the princess who's helping him on his quest. Along the way you have frequent songs and guest stars from John Stamos (as "Sir Jean Hamm") to Hugh Bonneville.

If it weren't for Omundson, the show would be just fine. Creator Dan Fogelson has an iffy resume that is more likely to include a guilty pleasure or two (I like Cars because of the character design and use of Route 66) than anyone's favorite movie, but at least Galavant takes more chances than your average network sitcom.

And Omundson ... Omundson is amazing. The other characters are just foils for him to play off of, as far as I'm concerned.