To make up for posting so infrequently, instead of a general catch-up post, a list post. This isn't a list of shows currently airing, but rather, shows that are "current" in that new episodes are either currently airing or forthcoming; shows that are not "done." I'm going to leave Twin Peaks out, partly because it's so obvious, and partly because what the fuck is there to say about Twin Peaks right now? Likewise for The Handmaid's Tale.
You're the Worst and Love. Network TV has played around with romantic comedies, but other than How I Met Your Mother -- which was really a hang-out comedy with the Ross-and-Rachel of it all turned up -- hasn't had many post-Mad About You successes. A to Z was better than you would think from the high concept, but was one and done. Other experiments like Mixology or just about any David Walton show quickly came and went, while an American remake of Gavin and Stacey was canceled before air. The Mindy Project is sort of a borderline case.
But leave the broadcast networks and it's another story. Aziz Ansari's Master of None -- not on this list because at the moment he's not planning to make more seasons -- works in a lot of the same territory as his surprisingly good book Modern Romance. FXX's Man Seeking Woman is not my cup of tea, but has successfully gone for a few seasons.
And two of my favorite series are FXX's You're the Worst and Netflix's Love. I'm grouping them together here, and it's not like they don't have plenty in common -- both are about deeply dysfunctional young couples who meet in the first episode of the series, and for that matter, in both shows, at least one member of the couple works in the entertainment business. (On You're the Worst, Gretchen is a publicist while Jimmy is a novelist gradually depleting the advance from his first book; on Love, Mickey works in radio and Gus is an aspiring screenwriter who works as an on-set tutor for one of the young stars of a Charmed-like TV show.)
Despite this, they're not that similar, largely because each has its own distinctive voice. You're the Worst goes to some dark places -- even before a multi-episode arc in which one character is so deep in clinical depression that they barely engage with the rest of the cast -- and Gretchen and Jimmy start out pretty close to broken. They meet at the wedding of Jimmy's ex, who is the sister of Gretchen's best friend. They hook up. They don't hate being around each other but take forever to admit that there is anything between them but sex. They are both regularly horrible to each other and to people around them, though primarily verbally. Somehow, though, they ground a cast that includes characters who are, in the main, drawn more broadly than they are: the mean, cartoonishly dumb, but delightful Lindsey, Gretchen's best friend, in a not-quite-loveless-but-close marriage to uberdork Paul; Becca, Lindsey's older sister, and her douchey husband Vernon whose friendship with Paul is at the center of one of the show's best episodes. The most grounded, most human character is Edgar, Jimmy's roommate -- an Iraq War veteran whose PTSD has left him unemployed and who basically cooks for Jimmy in exchange for rent. Edgar is fantastic, and the writing of his arc is inspired, and Desmin Borges is one of several actors on this show who should have been nominated for an Emmy.
Love is an Apatow-produced show, but generally doesn't seem like it except at the fringes: Andy Dick recurs a couple times as himself, Freaks and Geeks alumni Dave Gruber Allen and Steve Bannos have recurring roles, and Iris Apatow plays the kid Gus tutors. The series opens with Gus and Mickey going through breakups before meeting by chance encounter at a convenience store. Gus is, on the surface, the classic nice guy, but given to passive aggression, judgment, and controlling behavior; you could easily believe he's a few bad breakups or job losses away from becoming the initial-capitals Nice Guy who spends all his time on the internet bitching about women. Mickey is, on the surface, a mess -- a drug addict, an alcoholic, a love and sex addict, cynical and manipulative -- but more self-aware than Gus, and certainly much more aware of what she needs to work on. Gus hangs out with a large group of friends (and I think probably doesn't have many close friends) who watch movies and make up new theme songs to them -- which is a fantastic recurring bit. Mickey has a new roommate, Bertie (the all-star Claudia O'Doherty), who is damn near the soul of goodness.
Gus and Mickey don't hook up right away -- in fact, Mickey tries setting up Gus and Bertie in one of the first season's best and most awkward episodes -- but the sparks are obvious. By the time they do, you know them both well enough to kind of wish they would cool it and work on themselves for a while, which is a neat trick to pull in a show like this. They spend all of season two either fighting or giving you the sense that a fight is right around the corner.
There is a lot to love about Love if it's for you, but Gillian Jacobs, as Mickey, is the anchor. Co-creator Paul Rust is no slouch as Gus, but Mickey is so self-destructive, sometimes so awful, that making us love her is just more uphill work than showing the cracks in Gus's nice guy facade. You root for both of them -- they have just enough on the ball that it seems like, okay, you guys are being terrible people right now, but we can see the potential for you to not be terrible, so please get it together. (I wouldn't characterize You're the Worst this way, which is one of the key differences: you root instead for Gretchen and Jimmy to stop being terrible to each other, so that they can join forces and be terrible to the world. If the distinction seems trivial, probably neither of these shows is for you.)
Either of these shows can make you squirm -- Love moreso perhaps since You're the Worst is a little less real, a little broader. Depending on where you draw lines in terms of the likeability of characters, they may or may not be your thing.
Closely related here is Catastrophe, on Amazon Prime. Co-created by and starring Sharon Horgan and Rob Delaney, Catastrophe follows Sharon and Rob after they conceive a child in a one-night stand (well, one-weekend stand, if I remember right). I'm discussing it separately from the above two shows in part because their relationship advances more quickly, in part because the characters are slightly older and the show doesn't have that "kids figuring their shit out" vibe (I don't know exactly how old any of these characters are supposed to be, but Horgan and Delaney are in their 40s, while the stars of Love and You're the Worst are in their 30s). The relationship issues that are dealt with are different, there's a kid involved, their friends are married with kids -- it's a different vibe from the other two.
Horgan is a genius, incidentally, and this is the show that's easiest for Americans to watch -- Pulling is one of my all-time favorite shows, but I don't know if it's still streaming anywhere in the US; she also created Divorce for HBO.
Better Call Saul. The reason this Breaking Bad prequel is so good is that it isn't a Breaking Bad prequel: the show has little to do with setting the table for Walter White's arc from Mr Chips to Scarface, and likely won't even add many surprises to the backstories of his main nemeses. By instead tracing the early stories of Saul Goodman/Jimmy McGill and Mike Ehrmantraut, who are both significant to Breaking Bad, it makes its own fun. Most of the time it's really two shows happening simultaneously: Jimmy's life as a lawyer, Mike's life as an ex-cop, both of them struggling for different reasons to stay on the straight and narrow and also having different reasons for the times they bend the rules. Sure, there are Breaking Bad cameos, and some of them are exciting, but this show could arguably go on for five or six more seasons before the name Heisenberg is mentioned.
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is my favorite show on network television in years. It's a hard sell, which is part of why it's also the lowest-rated scripted show that hasn't been canceled (another part is that it's on The CW). It's a musical romantic comedy in which the lead, Rebecca Bunch (played by co-creator Rachel Bloom), is ultimately also the villain -- she is nearly always either pursuing the wrong course, doing terribly unhealthy things to try to Get The Guy, or being self-destructive. The show knows this, mind you, and sometimes so does Rebecca, who devotes one song to self-loathing and another to the realization that "I'm the Villain in My Own Story."
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is intended to be five seasons, with a specific structure that was pitched when the show was first developed. The first season begins when Rebecca moves from New York to West Covina, California, taking a huge pay cut to take a job in a two-bit local law firm, all in the name of pursuing her ex-boyfriend Josh Chan, who she hasn't seen since summer camp ... and who turns out to be engaged. In classic romantic comedy fashion, she immediately meets Greg, a guy who is probably a better match for her (Rebecca is a genius; Josh could understudy for Joey Tribbiani). Her new co-worker Paula, played to perfection by Donna Lynne Champlin, acts as an audience surrogate, egging Rebecca on and rooting for the hypothetical Rebecca/Josh relationship as a way to live vicariously through her.
It's hard to get across how many things make this show work so well. It's a show that understands people better than television comedies usually do. It's a show that invests real writing energy and screen time into showing how one-on-one friendships work, not just relationships, and not just group dynamics, which are the usual fodder of hang-out comedies. It's a show that cast a Filipino man as the romantic lead and spends time showing his family life. It's a show that's absolutely frequently cartoonish -- it has to be -- but still makes room for a subplot about a middle-aged man realizing he's bisexual. It's a show that is ostensibly built around Rebecca's stalker-ish behavior towards Josh, and equally unhealthy behaviors later, but constantly challenges and interrogates not only the correctness of her decisions, but her motivations and the deeper issues surrounding them -- usually while being funny. There's a dream sequence on a plane with angels and a therapist. There's Rebecca's own Crazy Ex-Boyfriend in a later subplot with real potential. There's Patti Lupone as Rebecca's rabbi!
It's a magical show. There is nothing else quite like it on television.
In brief:
Superstore, Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and The Good Place are my favorite network comedies. The first two have terrific ensemble casts, the kinds of casts where there really are no weak characters or weak performances (which is not to say there's no way to pick favorites -- Mark McKinney and Nichole Bloom on Superstore, for instance, and Stephanie Beatriz and Andre Braugher on Nine-Nine). The Good Place is its own thing, and it's hard to say much about what's great about it without getting deep into spoiler territory (which is particularly tough since the season ended on a cliffhanger) -- the characters are not quite as well-developed as any of these other shows (though given creator Mike Schur's history, that will probably change over time, as it did on Parks), and it is maybe a comedy of ideas more than characters, but they are very good ideas.
Top Chef and Chef's Table are the only "reality" shows I really watch or enjoy (I'm not sure whether to count The Great British Baking Show as a current show). The most recent season of Masterchef Junior soured me on it -- it was as though they had focus-grouped it and decided they needed to amplify the worst things about the show. Top Chef, on the other hand, just came off one of its best seasons.
Friday, June 9, 2017
streets ahead: the best community episodes
We recently finished a rewatch of Community, which was the first time I'd rewatched the final two seasons. We wound up skipping most of season four -- we didn't intend to originally, but binging it really drove home how off it was in tone, and after a few episodes we were just eager to move on.
There are so few comedies that hold up to multiple viewings while still being funny. Among 21st century shows, Community is up there with Curb, Arrested Development, and Happy Endings in this respect (maybe Wet Hot American Summer too), as well as in how strong and distinct its voice is -- which is exactly why season four stands out. If season four was all that existed, it would be a solid show, well-written, great actors. But you can't do Arrested Development without Mitch Hurwitz; you can't do Community without Dan Harmon. Losing half the cast by season six, when Pierce, Shirley, and Troy had all left for one reason or another, affects the basic core Community-ness of the show less than losing Harmon for a year did. (Of course, you could argue that the three characters most vital to that Community-ness were among the four who remained, but I don't think that dilutes my point.)
We owe Community's existence in large part to an era of diminished expectations and desperation at NBC, which also gave us Parks, Friday Night Lights (once DirecTV chipped in), and Chuck, all shows that performed pretty poorly in the ratings but not poorly enough to trump the value of their established audience vs. the risks of putting new shows on in their place, because hardly anything was prospering on NBC, so there was no real standard of performance other series had to measure up to.
I think I said when the sixth season was on that Britta was my favorite character, which remains true in rewatching. She may be my favorite sitcom character of all time -- she's certainly up there with Taxi's Reverend Jim, WKRP's Dr Johnny Fever, and Soap's Burt Campbell. The development of Britta parallels the course of the show, in a lot of ways: she is least distinct in the early days of the show, when it's a funny, well-written sitcom in which many of the characters are not fully in focus yet (Troy and Annie are fairly insubstantial sketches, Britta is primarily the hot girl Jeff wants to impress and/or fool, and is overall more serious). Jeff is Jeff from day one. He grows, sure, but in the way that all sitcom characters in his situation grow: he becomes less of an asshole to people he has come to know better. Abed, similarly, is pretty much Abed right away, becoming more nuanced over time, but not in a way that makes his early episodes seem out of character. Britta is the one who doesn't just become more flawed over time, but flawed in ways that become the main way other people characterize her ("Britta is the worst," "The AT&T of people"), with her "I lived in New York," her empty and performative activism, her ambitions to become a therapist. But she also becomes goofier, with more physical comedy and weird tics that are perfectly consistent -- it somehow makes more sense for Britta to be the one who says "baggle" than anyone else, for Britta to have a carnie ex-boyfriend and parents played by Martin Mull and Lesley Ann Warren.
Dean Pelton is the only one who goes through quite the same level of development -- at least successfully, since Chang is used for different purposes in different seasons. In Chang's case it turns him into an unwieldy, unwriteable cartoon, but the Dean becomes both broader and more human.
Anyway, I couldn't resist making a quick list of my favorite episodes. They are in chronological, not ranked, order.
Spanish 101 (season 1, episode 2)
This was one of the great things about rewatching Community: one of the best episodes is the second episode. No, the series hasn't come fully into focus yet, especially when it comes to Troy, Britta, and Annie. But early Chang is probably still the best incarnation of Chang, who becomes not just cartoonish but an active nuisance later in the series and goes through multiple periods in which he is weirdly infantilized. While Dean Pelton -- my second favorite character after Britta -- becomes more interesting and more funny as time goes on, Chang was best as a minor supporting character. What makes this episode is the Jeff/Pierce relationship -- which would always be at its best when played like this, with Pierce's hero-worship of Jeff (and later, Jeff's realization that he will some day be as uncool as Pierce).
Contemporary American Poultry (season 1, episode 21)
After toying with tropes and the characters' awareness of tropes in subplots, this is Community's first full-on homage episode, riffing on Goodfellas in a story about the corruption that comes with power over the cafeteria's chicken fingers.
Modern Warfare (season 1, episode 23)
The first paintball episode probably remains the best, but this episode gets bonus points for the fact that even its sequels were pretty fantastic -- there were absolutely diminishing returns in the paintball episodes over the course of the series, but when you start with such a high point, it takes a while before those diminishing returns bring you low.
Epidemiology (season 2, episode 6)
The zombie episode! Brilliant all the way through, but especially in its use of the cat scare, and of Jeff's ridiculous vanity.
Advanced Dungeons and Dragons (season 2, episode 14)
The fact that Community has two D&D episodes, both of which are good, when the show isn't a show about nerds or geeks like The Big Bang Theory or something ... is ridiculous. The first one is the best of them, both for the way it fits with the season's ongoing character arcs and for Alison Brie's miming, but if the first one didn't exist the second one would be on this list.
Intermediate Documentary Filmmaking (season 2, episode 16)
Out of all the main characters, Pierce-focused and Shirley-focused episodes are the rarest (depending on how you count "Troy and Abed" episodes). Most of them are not among the show's best -- Harmon doesn't seem to have had much of a handle on Shirley (her best scenes are rarely those in which she is the main character of the story, unfortunately), whereas with Pierce, the problem was the opposite. He seems to have understood the character perfectly well -- and made him so petty and unlikeable that, like Chang later, it's often difficult to understand his presence in the show or among these people. This episode is one of two that revolve around Pierce giving everyone a gift with ulterior motives -- and while he is no less petty here than usual, the format is a good occasion to explore his relationship to and impressions of each of the other characters. This leads to some great stuff -- Troy's panic is the most obvious, but Britta's ethical dilemma over Pierce's check is classic too.
Critical Film Studies (season 2, episode 19)
The Pulp Fiction/My Dinner With Andre episode. I mean, what more can you say? It's pitch-perfect, from the choice of those two particular movies (can you think of two indie movies that are less alike, while at the same time both being renowned for their talkiness?) to the continuation of Abed's Cougartown fandom.
Paradigms of Human Memory (season 2, episode 21)
The back half of second season really demonstrates Community's brilliance, and of course the stuff that would make it so divisive. This is a clip show in which all the clips are from study group adventures we haven't seen. It's such a brilliant concept that it's amazing it hasn't been used frequently enough for us to have been sick of it by the time this episode aired, but I can't think of a live-action show that had done it before.
Remedial Chaos Theory (season 3, episode 3)
The episode that introduces the darkest timeline, but there are so many other great moments apart from that, the best of which might be the realization that the happiest timeline is the one where Jeff leaves the room and his absence leads to everyone else feeling happier and more relaxed.
Digital Estate Planning (season 3, episode 20)
The eight-bit episode, which would be on this list even if only for Annie and Shirley's murder spree, but which also features Abed's eight-bit girlfriend.
App Development and Condiments (season 5, episode 8)
Because Harmon never developed Shirley as deeply as some of the others, her religious self-righteousness that was established early on -- and somehow never goes away even as she's fleshed out more and humanized -- is good fodder for episodes like this one, which positions her as an antagonist. Plus, hey, Mitch Hurwitz as Koogler.
Basic Crisis Room Decorum (season 6, episode 3)
The best parts of season 6 are the Britta parts, as she reaches her final evolution as a ridiculous goof. Basic Crisis Room Decorum features Britta shitting her pants and running around in panic, and the first mention of 90s alternative band Natalie is Freezing. This episode is so much better than I make it sound.
Queer Studies and Advanced Waxing (season 6, episode 4)
Dean Pelton's sexuality is front and center, and actually thoughtfully handled in Community's own weird way, rising above making him the butt of a joke about it.
Honorable mentions:
Comparative Religion (season 1, episode 12). It's not quite in the upper echelon, but major bonus points for Anthony Michael Hall (who I wish had returned) and the holiday brawl.
Physical Education (season 1, episode 17). The billiards episode, which features some of first season's best moments of physical comedy.
Aerodynamics of Gender (season 2, episode 7). The mean girls subplot isn't good enough to make this one of the very best episodes, but the transcendent trampoline with its racist guardian is fantastic.
Abed's Uncontrollable Christmas (season 2, episode 11). The stop-motion is terrific, but the novelty wears off on re-watches, and the writing isn't as strong as the novelty.
Horror Fiction in Seven Spooky Steps (season 3, episode 5). The Halloween anthology episode -- a little uneven by Community standards, but certainly great.
Studies in Modern Movement (season 3, episode 7). I don't know what episode better shows how much Troy's character was developed from the beginning of season 1, when he was the ex-jock Annie had a crush on; here he's Abed's childlike playmate, the two of them a couple of Oscars to Annie's Felix. The Dean/Jeff subplot is pretty great.
Introduction to Teaching (season 5, episode 2). Invaluable for Abed's Nic Cage, if nothing else.
Emotional Consequences of Broadcast Television (season 6, episode 13). The Community finale is also one of its most meta episodes, but suffers from the lack of half of its original cast.
There are so few comedies that hold up to multiple viewings while still being funny. Among 21st century shows, Community is up there with Curb, Arrested Development, and Happy Endings in this respect (maybe Wet Hot American Summer too), as well as in how strong and distinct its voice is -- which is exactly why season four stands out. If season four was all that existed, it would be a solid show, well-written, great actors. But you can't do Arrested Development without Mitch Hurwitz; you can't do Community without Dan Harmon. Losing half the cast by season six, when Pierce, Shirley, and Troy had all left for one reason or another, affects the basic core Community-ness of the show less than losing Harmon for a year did. (Of course, you could argue that the three characters most vital to that Community-ness were among the four who remained, but I don't think that dilutes my point.)
We owe Community's existence in large part to an era of diminished expectations and desperation at NBC, which also gave us Parks, Friday Night Lights (once DirecTV chipped in), and Chuck, all shows that performed pretty poorly in the ratings but not poorly enough to trump the value of their established audience vs. the risks of putting new shows on in their place, because hardly anything was prospering on NBC, so there was no real standard of performance other series had to measure up to.
I think I said when the sixth season was on that Britta was my favorite character, which remains true in rewatching. She may be my favorite sitcom character of all time -- she's certainly up there with Taxi's Reverend Jim, WKRP's Dr Johnny Fever, and Soap's Burt Campbell. The development of Britta parallels the course of the show, in a lot of ways: she is least distinct in the early days of the show, when it's a funny, well-written sitcom in which many of the characters are not fully in focus yet (Troy and Annie are fairly insubstantial sketches, Britta is primarily the hot girl Jeff wants to impress and/or fool, and is overall more serious). Jeff is Jeff from day one. He grows, sure, but in the way that all sitcom characters in his situation grow: he becomes less of an asshole to people he has come to know better. Abed, similarly, is pretty much Abed right away, becoming more nuanced over time, but not in a way that makes his early episodes seem out of character. Britta is the one who doesn't just become more flawed over time, but flawed in ways that become the main way other people characterize her ("Britta is the worst," "The AT&T of people"), with her "I lived in New York," her empty and performative activism, her ambitions to become a therapist. But she also becomes goofier, with more physical comedy and weird tics that are perfectly consistent -- it somehow makes more sense for Britta to be the one who says "baggle" than anyone else, for Britta to have a carnie ex-boyfriend and parents played by Martin Mull and Lesley Ann Warren.
Dean Pelton is the only one who goes through quite the same level of development -- at least successfully, since Chang is used for different purposes in different seasons. In Chang's case it turns him into an unwieldy, unwriteable cartoon, but the Dean becomes both broader and more human.
Anyway, I couldn't resist making a quick list of my favorite episodes. They are in chronological, not ranked, order.
Spanish 101 (season 1, episode 2)
This was one of the great things about rewatching Community: one of the best episodes is the second episode. No, the series hasn't come fully into focus yet, especially when it comes to Troy, Britta, and Annie. But early Chang is probably still the best incarnation of Chang, who becomes not just cartoonish but an active nuisance later in the series and goes through multiple periods in which he is weirdly infantilized. While Dean Pelton -- my second favorite character after Britta -- becomes more interesting and more funny as time goes on, Chang was best as a minor supporting character. What makes this episode is the Jeff/Pierce relationship -- which would always be at its best when played like this, with Pierce's hero-worship of Jeff (and later, Jeff's realization that he will some day be as uncool as Pierce).
Contemporary American Poultry (season 1, episode 21)
After toying with tropes and the characters' awareness of tropes in subplots, this is Community's first full-on homage episode, riffing on Goodfellas in a story about the corruption that comes with power over the cafeteria's chicken fingers.
Modern Warfare (season 1, episode 23)
The first paintball episode probably remains the best, but this episode gets bonus points for the fact that even its sequels were pretty fantastic -- there were absolutely diminishing returns in the paintball episodes over the course of the series, but when you start with such a high point, it takes a while before those diminishing returns bring you low.
Epidemiology (season 2, episode 6)
The zombie episode! Brilliant all the way through, but especially in its use of the cat scare, and of Jeff's ridiculous vanity.
Advanced Dungeons and Dragons (season 2, episode 14)
The fact that Community has two D&D episodes, both of which are good, when the show isn't a show about nerds or geeks like The Big Bang Theory or something ... is ridiculous. The first one is the best of them, both for the way it fits with the season's ongoing character arcs and for Alison Brie's miming, but if the first one didn't exist the second one would be on this list.
Intermediate Documentary Filmmaking (season 2, episode 16)
Out of all the main characters, Pierce-focused and Shirley-focused episodes are the rarest (depending on how you count "Troy and Abed" episodes). Most of them are not among the show's best -- Harmon doesn't seem to have had much of a handle on Shirley (her best scenes are rarely those in which she is the main character of the story, unfortunately), whereas with Pierce, the problem was the opposite. He seems to have understood the character perfectly well -- and made him so petty and unlikeable that, like Chang later, it's often difficult to understand his presence in the show or among these people. This episode is one of two that revolve around Pierce giving everyone a gift with ulterior motives -- and while he is no less petty here than usual, the format is a good occasion to explore his relationship to and impressions of each of the other characters. This leads to some great stuff -- Troy's panic is the most obvious, but Britta's ethical dilemma over Pierce's check is classic too.
Critical Film Studies (season 2, episode 19)
The Pulp Fiction/My Dinner With Andre episode. I mean, what more can you say? It's pitch-perfect, from the choice of those two particular movies (can you think of two indie movies that are less alike, while at the same time both being renowned for their talkiness?) to the continuation of Abed's Cougartown fandom.
Paradigms of Human Memory (season 2, episode 21)
The back half of second season really demonstrates Community's brilliance, and of course the stuff that would make it so divisive. This is a clip show in which all the clips are from study group adventures we haven't seen. It's such a brilliant concept that it's amazing it hasn't been used frequently enough for us to have been sick of it by the time this episode aired, but I can't think of a live-action show that had done it before.
Remedial Chaos Theory (season 3, episode 3)
The episode that introduces the darkest timeline, but there are so many other great moments apart from that, the best of which might be the realization that the happiest timeline is the one where Jeff leaves the room and his absence leads to everyone else feeling happier and more relaxed.
Digital Estate Planning (season 3, episode 20)
The eight-bit episode, which would be on this list even if only for Annie and Shirley's murder spree, but which also features Abed's eight-bit girlfriend.
App Development and Condiments (season 5, episode 8)
Because Harmon never developed Shirley as deeply as some of the others, her religious self-righteousness that was established early on -- and somehow never goes away even as she's fleshed out more and humanized -- is good fodder for episodes like this one, which positions her as an antagonist. Plus, hey, Mitch Hurwitz as Koogler.
Basic Crisis Room Decorum (season 6, episode 3)
The best parts of season 6 are the Britta parts, as she reaches her final evolution as a ridiculous goof. Basic Crisis Room Decorum features Britta shitting her pants and running around in panic, and the first mention of 90s alternative band Natalie is Freezing. This episode is so much better than I make it sound.
Queer Studies and Advanced Waxing (season 6, episode 4)
Dean Pelton's sexuality is front and center, and actually thoughtfully handled in Community's own weird way, rising above making him the butt of a joke about it.
Honorable mentions:
Comparative Religion (season 1, episode 12). It's not quite in the upper echelon, but major bonus points for Anthony Michael Hall (who I wish had returned) and the holiday brawl.
Physical Education (season 1, episode 17). The billiards episode, which features some of first season's best moments of physical comedy.
Aerodynamics of Gender (season 2, episode 7). The mean girls subplot isn't good enough to make this one of the very best episodes, but the transcendent trampoline with its racist guardian is fantastic.
Abed's Uncontrollable Christmas (season 2, episode 11). The stop-motion is terrific, but the novelty wears off on re-watches, and the writing isn't as strong as the novelty.
Horror Fiction in Seven Spooky Steps (season 3, episode 5). The Halloween anthology episode -- a little uneven by Community standards, but certainly great.
Studies in Modern Movement (season 3, episode 7). I don't know what episode better shows how much Troy's character was developed from the beginning of season 1, when he was the ex-jock Annie had a crush on; here he's Abed's childlike playmate, the two of them a couple of Oscars to Annie's Felix. The Dean/Jeff subplot is pretty great.
Introduction to Teaching (season 5, episode 2). Invaluable for Abed's Nic Cage, if nothing else.
Emotional Consequences of Broadcast Television (season 6, episode 13). The Community finale is also one of its most meta episodes, but suffers from the lack of half of its original cast.
Sunday, May 21, 2017
guardians of the galaxy 2 (spoilers!)
Guardians of the Galaxy 2
There are spoilers in this post, so stop reading if you haven't seen Guardians of the Galaxy 2!
Like I've talked about here and there, I got into comics as a kid in 1980 because of television -- especially the original 1960s Spider-Man cartoon (Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends hadn't started yet), and to a lesser extent the Hanna-Barbera Fantastic Four cartoon, the Adam West Batman, and cartoons like Superfriends, Shazam, etc -- and a set of Marvel trading cards that had a bunch of characters in it that I didn't know from the cartoons, like Dr Strange, the Silver Surfer, and Ghost Rider. The trading cards intrigued me because you could tell just by looking at them that those three characters in particular weren't just variations on Superman or Spider-Man -- they didn't look like superheroes, but they didn't look like anything else in my pop culture line of sight either.
Unsurprisingly, those early exposures guided the comics I got into. In the DC comics, my favorite comics by far were the Superman comics that emphasized the weirdest tropes of that character: Mzyztplk, "imaginary stories," the bottle city of Kandor, the Phantom Zone, red kryptonite transformations, Bizarro World. At Marvel -- my default comics publisher until the Vertigo years of late adolescence -- I loved the weirdos, misfits, and the magical or cosmic stuff. The Defenders, Adam Warlock, Son of Satan, Howard the Duck, Dr Strange, the Thor and Fantastic Four comics that dealt with stuff like the Celestials or Galactus, Bill Mantlo's Hulk and ROM comics. I was also a big Spider-Man fan and obsessed with the Avengers, mind you, but I loved the weird little edges of the Marvel universe, the crispy fried-out bits.
The thing about those weird little edges is that they're not exactly superhero comics, but they have all the benefits and features of the larger superhero-centric setting, a setting that is well-trod and intricately detailed, heavy with history and traditions. That's what I loved about Marvel comics: this sense of a story too big for any one person to read in full.
So! That's the frame of reference I bring to the Marvel movies.
If you're not familiar with the comics, the funny thing is that this incarnation of the Guardians of the Galaxy is not the one I grew up with: the original Guardians was an Avengers-like team native to a thousand years in the future. This new Star-Lord-led team (with a Star Lord very different from the way that character was originally written) was introduced in the 21st century, composed of characters who had been introduced independently and kicking around the Marvel universe in various forms. I was more or less familiar with the new team, but they weren't the characters who came to mind when I first thought of the Guardians.
Turns out I loved the first movie, though, for the same reasons everyone else did -- it was funny, it was a good adventure story, it was a little bit Raiders and a little bit Star Wars (or at least the Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, etc., bits in Star Wars' DNA).
I wasn't expecting to like the first movie nearly as much as I did -- I was just tickled that it even existed. But the second movie I was anticipating pretty heavily.
So how did it stack up?
There was a lot of good, some bad, some just hrm-worthy.
The best things about the movie were probably the visuals -- it's the most visually interesting movie out of any of the Marvel movies by far -- and the sense of humor. Those jokes are undoubtedly divisive for some people -- I don't know that the second movie is necessarily funnier than the first, but it definitely feels like Gunn responded to what people liked in the first movie and cranked the knobs a notch, so we get way more Funny Drax than Serious Drax, and how much the movie in general works for you may depend on how charming you find Pratt. It works for me (though I would've been happy with the same amount of Funny Drax but also a little more Serious Drax, i.e. just more Drax in general) but I get that it wouldn't work for everyone.
What's been most interesting about these movies is the changes they make to the characters. Pretty much none of them are the same as in the comics. The comics version of Drax is a human from Earth, not an alien -- because the comics universe is older and better established than the movie setting, he's still a guy who lost his family to Thanos, but this whole "Drax is from a culture that doesn't have sarcasm and so he's totally literal-minded" thing doesn't work with an Earthling Drax. The comics Rocket isn't a one-of-a-kind misfit, he's from a planet of animal-people like himself. Star-Lord is the son of an alien king, not an alien god planet. Etc.
So this trend continues in the new movie, for good and ill.
Ego is pretty different -- he's not a god, even small-g, in the comics, though I'm not sure this is a change that makes a huge difference, beyond his use of the word "Celestial" maybe being a signal that the MCU Celestials differ significantly from their comics counterparts.
But Mantis ...
Like Drax, Mantis in the comics isn't an alien, she's from Earth. She's half-Vietnamese and raised to be the Celestial Madonna. She's also a kickass martial artist. Sure, she's an empath, but these are not separate abilities exactly: her mystical powers also inform her combat skills, by letting her see her opponents' weak spots. Mantis has successfully beaten up Thor.
Making Mantis an alien instead of human is not too big a deal. But between Mantis in the second movie and Gamora's introduction in the first movie, this is the second time that a female character has been tweaked to take away or reduce her combat-related powers. Movie Gamora is no slouch, but she is noticeably less powerful than in the comics, and in particular less strong and more physically vulnerable. Comic-book Gamora would not need Peter Quill to rescue her. Comic-book Gamora is not just a Space Girlfriend. Comic-book Gamora could kick Drax's ass.
This is not great. It was already not great in the first movie, in which the Quill/Gamora subplot is one of the weakest elements. As a trend, it's hard to miss. (It's not super-great that Gamora's Quill-free scenes consist largely of fighting with her sister over who deserves Daddy's love, either.)
It also underscores that Mantis's main purpose in the movie is pretty easy to see as an example of the Submissive Asian Woman stereotype: she serves Ego, she pacifies him, she turns against him not so much of her own agency or for her own interests but because a rival man is nice to her.
I'm not going to downplay those problems. I really want to see an improved, less cringey Mantis in the third movie, or Avengers 7, or whatever her next movie is. I'd like to see an improved Gamora, but it may be too late for that.
All of that said, all in all it's a fun movie. It's an adventure movie, a spectacle movie, without most of the problems that have plagued the Avengers movies. The villain isn't nearly as boring as in the first movie, although villains are still the weak link in most of the Marvel movies -- and Ego as villain is more interesting than Ronan or what little we saw of Thanos in Guardians mainly because it's not immediately apparent he's the villain, which is a different accomplishment from actually portraying interesting villainy. (It does sort of make sense that an Earth kid who grows up to call himself Star-Lord after being space-kidnapped turns out to be the son of a god who calls himself Ego.) It feels like a comic book more than most comic book movies do, and is one of the only movies to capture all that What Is This Crazy Shit vibe I was talking about above -- in that sense, it's up there with Deadpool and the first Spider-Man movie as far as Getting The Tone Right. (Getting That Stuff Wrong is part of what made the various Fantastic Four movies so leaden -- there is no sense in those movies that the filmmakers have any understanding of what makes someone enjoy reading a Fantastic Four comic, and while those are the worst example of the problem, I have similar issues with the Andrew Garfield Spider-Man and most of the Avengers movies.)
Little things:
I love Baby Groot, and Adolescent Groot cracked me the fuck up.
I love Yondu in the sequel, even if I'm not totally convinced that the new parts of his backstory are what Gunn had in mind while making the first movie.
Drax and Mantis's mini-romance is both more believable and more interesting than Quill and Gamora's in either movie, which mainly underscores how boring the Gamora-Quill stuff is.
Kurt Russell's head looks ENORMOUS in his digitally de-aged flashback; maybe they should've got Wyatt to play Young Ego instead.
There are spoilers in this post, so stop reading if you haven't seen Guardians of the Galaxy 2!
Like I've talked about here and there, I got into comics as a kid in 1980 because of television -- especially the original 1960s Spider-Man cartoon (Spider-Man and his Amazing Friends hadn't started yet), and to a lesser extent the Hanna-Barbera Fantastic Four cartoon, the Adam West Batman, and cartoons like Superfriends, Shazam, etc -- and a set of Marvel trading cards that had a bunch of characters in it that I didn't know from the cartoons, like Dr Strange, the Silver Surfer, and Ghost Rider. The trading cards intrigued me because you could tell just by looking at them that those three characters in particular weren't just variations on Superman or Spider-Man -- they didn't look like superheroes, but they didn't look like anything else in my pop culture line of sight either.
Unsurprisingly, those early exposures guided the comics I got into. In the DC comics, my favorite comics by far were the Superman comics that emphasized the weirdest tropes of that character: Mzyztplk, "imaginary stories," the bottle city of Kandor, the Phantom Zone, red kryptonite transformations, Bizarro World. At Marvel -- my default comics publisher until the Vertigo years of late adolescence -- I loved the weirdos, misfits, and the magical or cosmic stuff. The Defenders, Adam Warlock, Son of Satan, Howard the Duck, Dr Strange, the Thor and Fantastic Four comics that dealt with stuff like the Celestials or Galactus, Bill Mantlo's Hulk and ROM comics. I was also a big Spider-Man fan and obsessed with the Avengers, mind you, but I loved the weird little edges of the Marvel universe, the crispy fried-out bits.
The thing about those weird little edges is that they're not exactly superhero comics, but they have all the benefits and features of the larger superhero-centric setting, a setting that is well-trod and intricately detailed, heavy with history and traditions. That's what I loved about Marvel comics: this sense of a story too big for any one person to read in full.
So! That's the frame of reference I bring to the Marvel movies.
If you're not familiar with the comics, the funny thing is that this incarnation of the Guardians of the Galaxy is not the one I grew up with: the original Guardians was an Avengers-like team native to a thousand years in the future. This new Star-Lord-led team (with a Star Lord very different from the way that character was originally written) was introduced in the 21st century, composed of characters who had been introduced independently and kicking around the Marvel universe in various forms. I was more or less familiar with the new team, but they weren't the characters who came to mind when I first thought of the Guardians.
Turns out I loved the first movie, though, for the same reasons everyone else did -- it was funny, it was a good adventure story, it was a little bit Raiders and a little bit Star Wars (or at least the Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, etc., bits in Star Wars' DNA).
I wasn't expecting to like the first movie nearly as much as I did -- I was just tickled that it even existed. But the second movie I was anticipating pretty heavily.
So how did it stack up?
There was a lot of good, some bad, some just hrm-worthy.
The best things about the movie were probably the visuals -- it's the most visually interesting movie out of any of the Marvel movies by far -- and the sense of humor. Those jokes are undoubtedly divisive for some people -- I don't know that the second movie is necessarily funnier than the first, but it definitely feels like Gunn responded to what people liked in the first movie and cranked the knobs a notch, so we get way more Funny Drax than Serious Drax, and how much the movie in general works for you may depend on how charming you find Pratt. It works for me (though I would've been happy with the same amount of Funny Drax but also a little more Serious Drax, i.e. just more Drax in general) but I get that it wouldn't work for everyone.
What's been most interesting about these movies is the changes they make to the characters. Pretty much none of them are the same as in the comics. The comics version of Drax is a human from Earth, not an alien -- because the comics universe is older and better established than the movie setting, he's still a guy who lost his family to Thanos, but this whole "Drax is from a culture that doesn't have sarcasm and so he's totally literal-minded" thing doesn't work with an Earthling Drax. The comics Rocket isn't a one-of-a-kind misfit, he's from a planet of animal-people like himself. Star-Lord is the son of an alien king, not an alien god planet. Etc.
So this trend continues in the new movie, for good and ill.
Ego is pretty different -- he's not a god, even small-g, in the comics, though I'm not sure this is a change that makes a huge difference, beyond his use of the word "Celestial" maybe being a signal that the MCU Celestials differ significantly from their comics counterparts.
But Mantis ...
Like Drax, Mantis in the comics isn't an alien, she's from Earth. She's half-Vietnamese and raised to be the Celestial Madonna. She's also a kickass martial artist. Sure, she's an empath, but these are not separate abilities exactly: her mystical powers also inform her combat skills, by letting her see her opponents' weak spots. Mantis has successfully beaten up Thor.
Making Mantis an alien instead of human is not too big a deal. But between Mantis in the second movie and Gamora's introduction in the first movie, this is the second time that a female character has been tweaked to take away or reduce her combat-related powers. Movie Gamora is no slouch, but she is noticeably less powerful than in the comics, and in particular less strong and more physically vulnerable. Comic-book Gamora would not need Peter Quill to rescue her. Comic-book Gamora is not just a Space Girlfriend. Comic-book Gamora could kick Drax's ass.
This is not great. It was already not great in the first movie, in which the Quill/Gamora subplot is one of the weakest elements. As a trend, it's hard to miss. (It's not super-great that Gamora's Quill-free scenes consist largely of fighting with her sister over who deserves Daddy's love, either.)
It also underscores that Mantis's main purpose in the movie is pretty easy to see as an example of the Submissive Asian Woman stereotype: she serves Ego, she pacifies him, she turns against him not so much of her own agency or for her own interests but because a rival man is nice to her.
I'm not going to downplay those problems. I really want to see an improved, less cringey Mantis in the third movie, or Avengers 7, or whatever her next movie is. I'd like to see an improved Gamora, but it may be too late for that.
All of that said, all in all it's a fun movie. It's an adventure movie, a spectacle movie, without most of the problems that have plagued the Avengers movies. The villain isn't nearly as boring as in the first movie, although villains are still the weak link in most of the Marvel movies -- and Ego as villain is more interesting than Ronan or what little we saw of Thanos in Guardians mainly because it's not immediately apparent he's the villain, which is a different accomplishment from actually portraying interesting villainy. (It does sort of make sense that an Earth kid who grows up to call himself Star-Lord after being space-kidnapped turns out to be the son of a god who calls himself Ego.) It feels like a comic book more than most comic book movies do, and is one of the only movies to capture all that What Is This Crazy Shit vibe I was talking about above -- in that sense, it's up there with Deadpool and the first Spider-Man movie as far as Getting The Tone Right. (Getting That Stuff Wrong is part of what made the various Fantastic Four movies so leaden -- there is no sense in those movies that the filmmakers have any understanding of what makes someone enjoy reading a Fantastic Four comic, and while those are the worst example of the problem, I have similar issues with the Andrew Garfield Spider-Man and most of the Avengers movies.)
Little things:
I love Baby Groot, and Adolescent Groot cracked me the fuck up.
I love Yondu in the sequel, even if I'm not totally convinced that the new parts of his backstory are what Gunn had in mind while making the first movie.
Drax and Mantis's mini-romance is both more believable and more interesting than Quill and Gamora's in either movie, which mainly underscores how boring the Gamora-Quill stuff is.
Kurt Russell's head looks ENORMOUS in his digitally de-aged flashback; maybe they should've got Wyatt to play Young Ego instead.
Saturday, November 19, 2016
cutting the cord
Well, as of last month, we are without cable television.
I was reluctant to cut the cord. Believe you me, I was reluctant to do it. For one thing, the first people in my social sphere to get rid of their cable were ... really annoying. These were the people who would rent Firefly or Battlestar Galactica or something years after cancellation, and then complain that TV always canceled the good shows. I get that everyone has to prioritize their entertainment budget differently: nothing wrong with that. But something matters to you or it doesn't. If it matters to you, then you know how it works -- take your money out of the system where the money is collected, and you need to realize that the system is not going to cater to your tastes anymore. This is a TV blog, so I'm probably preaching to the choir here, but Jesus fucking Christ already.
For another, I mean, I like TV. And it's only pretty recently that you could actually still watch TV without having cable or a digital antenna (and most of the good stuff is on cable, so...) I like live sports and live spectacles like the Oscars.
Here's what I don't like, though: I don't fucking like Comcast.
Like most of the country, we don't have a choice of cable TV providers, and we don't live in a Verizon Fios service area. Our options are cable, satellite, and cutting the cord. Satellite means a two year commitment for something we can't try out first, from a company that keeps playing chicken with Viacom, AMC Networks, et cetera. Cutting the cord was a crapshoot. So for a long time it was cable, which meant Comcast.
But two things happened.
First, the bill kept going up. And because two of the channels we wanted the most -- TCM and Sundance -- were only available in the Extended Super Special Whizbang package, we got that package, because if you're going to pay a lot for cable, why pay a lot and not even get the channels you want the most?
And if you're already paying a lot for cable, why not bundle and get HBO and Showtime and all that for an extra fifteen bucks?
And so on, and between that and the internet, our bill was in the neighborhood of $200-250, depending on whether or not I had recently called and threatened to cancel.
The second thing goes back to before I even moved in here.
We live in a three-floor townhouse condo. The way the cable was installed at some unknown date before I moved in is ... unusual, and not good. For one thing, the signal is strongest in the loft, which is only used for storage, and weakens as it descends each floor, meaning it's weakest on the ground floor -- where the living room is, where we watch TV. This was worse at one point because of a lot of unnecessary splitters, but it's not great even now. We have to have the modem and router on the second floor, because on the ground floor the signal would be too weak, but putting the modem in on the loft would put the router too far from everything that needs to communicate with it.
I'm convinced there's some other systemic problem beyond that, something in the walls or where the cable enters the building. But here's the thing: Comcast has confirmed many times over the years that there is a problem with the way our cable is installed. This is immediately followed with "but we can't do anything about it, because it's not our responsibility to fix it." As far as they're concerned, since it was installed before I moved in, I can't prove that the previous owners didn't request a strange and purposefully bad cable installation, and their position is that they would not install cable so weirdly without being asked to do so.
I have had so many conversations with them about this.
Now, every time the Comcast cable box gets upgraded, it also gets more bandwidth-hungry. It does more and more, and it needs more and more. The upgrade to the X1 wasn't the tipping point -- we had been having trouble with Comcast's service all along -- but it started to lead to periodic outages, where we were still receiving a signal (internet worked), but not a strong enough one for the X1 to load up everything it needed to function. The program guide would freeze. Attempting to change the channel or access the DVR would make everything seize up, and stay seized up for hours even after rebooting. You could turn it on and watch whatever channel it was already on, but as soon as you tried to do anything else, you might lose cable TV for the rest of the day.
So you put those two things together, and you see the situation, right? We were overpaying for a shitty product, like goddamn college students.
That was the last straw. I mean, we had been talking about cutting the cord since Mad Men ended, and were leaning hard towards doing it once Rectify ended. But that was it. It was time to say goodbye.
We're still in that post-cable transition period right now, figuring out what we're doing instead. We were already subscribers to various streaming services. So here's the breakdown of what's what in the TvLDR household right now:
PS Vue:
This is a cable-like service offered by Playstation, accessible through your Playstation, but not (I think) actually requiring a Playstation (you can do it through Roku or Apple TV or things like that, I believe). It's a streaming service offering both live and On Demand cable and network television, as well as a limited DVR (DVR recordings expire after 4 weeks). There are several tiers of programming, with the option to add premium channels like HBO.
Pros:
Not only is it easier to get to the "minimum tier we need that has the channels we want" with PS Vue than Comcast, it has a few channels Comcast doesn't, notably Boomerang, which I had harangued both Comcast and Cox to get for years, to no avail. This is the first time I have ever been a Boomerang subscriber! Alas, it's no longer the 1970s Hanna Barbera wonderland it was at launch, but as an animation fan who works at home, I definitely appreciate the morning blocks of Looney Tunes and Tom and Jerry.
Cons:
1: PS Vue is not a cable provider. As a result, when it comes to the networks, it has to negotiate with each affiliate separately for the rights to live streaming. If they haven't secured those rights in your market, you're stuck with On Demand content and watching things the next day -- which, with the exception of CBS shows and a couple of others, you could mostly do on Hulu at a lesser cost. For instance, in our market, CBS is the only network we have live.
1a: They also don't have all the networks: one or two of the Big Four are missing in some markets, if I remember right from the advertising page we looked at before signing up, and the CW is missing entirely. The CW also has its own free app you can watch their shows on a day later, but it means no live streaming of the DC superhero shows, iZombie, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, etc.
2: The Viacom-owned channels - MTV, VH-1, Nickelodeon, TV Land, etc - were just removed, and with very little warning. For most customers, the big deal here seems to be the loss of Nick, because of their kids' programming. It's also maybe an indication of how unstable PS Vue programming could be.
3: It can be buggy. Rectify is the number one reason we got PS Vue, but the DVR has consistently fucked up in its attempt to record it, and although the show is available On Demand through PS Vue, that's been buggy too. What's more, the bugs don't go away -- we had to watch episode two of this season on Sundance's website because, weeks later, the On Demand episode on PS Vue is still the same Behind the Scenes thing instead.
4: The Playstation controller is a lousy TV remote, and the official Playstation media remote sold separately is both expensive (as these things go) and poorly reviewed.
Netflix:
I mean, you know this one. Clearly we're going to keep Netflix.
Pros:
In quantity and quality, Netflix's original content is king. Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Lady Dynamite, Love, Bojack Horseman, Orange is the New Black, Wet Hot American Summer, I'd keep it for those shows alone, nevermind the library of old shows, nevermind movies. Despite Hulu, Netflix is still Destination Alpha for binge-watching everything from the West Wing to Kolchak: The Night Stalker.
At least for now.
Cons:
As Netflix moves towards its ambition of "50% original content," that means a tiny bit of increasing its amount of original content but mostly a metric fuckhaul of "dropping stuff from our catalogue." Who knows what exactly they'll end up keeping. Presumably the mechanics will be similar to what happened to their DVD selection when streaming began to rise, when they stopped replacing some of the less popular discs. So maybe they'll always have the West Wing but maybe not Kolchak? It remains to be seen.
Hulu:
We have the ad-free version of Hulu. Hulu, I think most people are familiar with, has a relatively deep catalogue of both current TV (including current season shows available a day later), older TV (thirtysomething!), and British TV, and a smaller catalogue of movies which I rarely dip into.
Pros:
The above, basically. If you like TV, Hulu has a lot of it.
Cons:
1: They recently changed the interface, and the Watchlist is more annoying than the old Queue, but what're you gonna do.
2: When it comes to older shows, it can be frustrating to realize they don't have all of it. They have like one season of St Elsewhere, for instance, and only three seasons of Hill Street Blues and The Practice.
3: Much less original content than Netflix, and I'm not sure any of it is in the same league, though Difficult People is very good and there is some promising stuff in development. But really, this is the service you get to binge-watch older stuff, or to watch current stuff because you no longer have a cable subscription.
4: That said, neither CBS nor CW current episodes are available through Hulu.
Amazon Prime Video:
We were going to have Amazon Prime one way or the other, so the existence of their streaming service is just an added bonus.
Pros:
1: Some of the original content is good. Red Oaks is light fun, the first season of Transparent was great, and we'll finish The Man in the High Castle eventually.
2: There are some surprising gems among the free movies from time to time.
Cons:
1: The interface is fucking awful, though this is true for most of Amazon across the board.
2: The original shows can seem really cheap at times compared to other streaming services. What I've seen of Good Girls Revolt seems more like a network's poor attempt at emulating Mad Men circa 2009 than the premium dramas we've come to expect from streaming services.
Acorn:
A lesser-known streaming service, Acorn hosts British TV shows generally unavailable elsewhere in the US, as well as a small number of Australian shows and HBO Asia's Serangoon Road. I originally signed up for a free trial intending just to watch Blandings, but became hooked on it.
Pros:
1: There is a hell of a lot of good stuff, even if -- like me -- you are bored by serial killer and detective shows. Not just recent British stuff, but things like the original Upstairs Downstairs and Poldark.
2: It's cheaper than any of the rest by far, at five bucks a month.
Cons:
1: Unless you're an expat, chances are you haven't heard of the vast majority of the offerings, and rather than browsing through the entire catalogue, it's worth just Googling "Best British television" or some such, and then seeing how many of those shows are offered here.
2: ... you will discover many of them are not. I don't know enough about British TV studios or channels to know if it's simply that Acorn mainly licenses from a small handful of them, or if their streaming content mirrors the shows that are available on DVD, or what.
I was reluctant to cut the cord. Believe you me, I was reluctant to do it. For one thing, the first people in my social sphere to get rid of their cable were ... really annoying. These were the people who would rent Firefly or Battlestar Galactica or something years after cancellation, and then complain that TV always canceled the good shows. I get that everyone has to prioritize their entertainment budget differently: nothing wrong with that. But something matters to you or it doesn't. If it matters to you, then you know how it works -- take your money out of the system where the money is collected, and you need to realize that the system is not going to cater to your tastes anymore. This is a TV blog, so I'm probably preaching to the choir here, but Jesus fucking Christ already.
For another, I mean, I like TV. And it's only pretty recently that you could actually still watch TV without having cable or a digital antenna (and most of the good stuff is on cable, so...) I like live sports and live spectacles like the Oscars.
Here's what I don't like, though: I don't fucking like Comcast.
Like most of the country, we don't have a choice of cable TV providers, and we don't live in a Verizon Fios service area. Our options are cable, satellite, and cutting the cord. Satellite means a two year commitment for something we can't try out first, from a company that keeps playing chicken with Viacom, AMC Networks, et cetera. Cutting the cord was a crapshoot. So for a long time it was cable, which meant Comcast.
But two things happened.
First, the bill kept going up. And because two of the channels we wanted the most -- TCM and Sundance -- were only available in the Extended Super Special Whizbang package, we got that package, because if you're going to pay a lot for cable, why pay a lot and not even get the channels you want the most?
And if you're already paying a lot for cable, why not bundle and get HBO and Showtime and all that for an extra fifteen bucks?
And so on, and between that and the internet, our bill was in the neighborhood of $200-250, depending on whether or not I had recently called and threatened to cancel.
The second thing goes back to before I even moved in here.
We live in a three-floor townhouse condo. The way the cable was installed at some unknown date before I moved in is ... unusual, and not good. For one thing, the signal is strongest in the loft, which is only used for storage, and weakens as it descends each floor, meaning it's weakest on the ground floor -- where the living room is, where we watch TV. This was worse at one point because of a lot of unnecessary splitters, but it's not great even now. We have to have the modem and router on the second floor, because on the ground floor the signal would be too weak, but putting the modem in on the loft would put the router too far from everything that needs to communicate with it.
I'm convinced there's some other systemic problem beyond that, something in the walls or where the cable enters the building. But here's the thing: Comcast has confirmed many times over the years that there is a problem with the way our cable is installed. This is immediately followed with "but we can't do anything about it, because it's not our responsibility to fix it." As far as they're concerned, since it was installed before I moved in, I can't prove that the previous owners didn't request a strange and purposefully bad cable installation, and their position is that they would not install cable so weirdly without being asked to do so.
I have had so many conversations with them about this.
Now, every time the Comcast cable box gets upgraded, it also gets more bandwidth-hungry. It does more and more, and it needs more and more. The upgrade to the X1 wasn't the tipping point -- we had been having trouble with Comcast's service all along -- but it started to lead to periodic outages, where we were still receiving a signal (internet worked), but not a strong enough one for the X1 to load up everything it needed to function. The program guide would freeze. Attempting to change the channel or access the DVR would make everything seize up, and stay seized up for hours even after rebooting. You could turn it on and watch whatever channel it was already on, but as soon as you tried to do anything else, you might lose cable TV for the rest of the day.
So you put those two things together, and you see the situation, right? We were overpaying for a shitty product, like goddamn college students.
That was the last straw. I mean, we had been talking about cutting the cord since Mad Men ended, and were leaning hard towards doing it once Rectify ended. But that was it. It was time to say goodbye.
We're still in that post-cable transition period right now, figuring out what we're doing instead. We were already subscribers to various streaming services. So here's the breakdown of what's what in the TvLDR household right now:
PS Vue:
This is a cable-like service offered by Playstation, accessible through your Playstation, but not (I think) actually requiring a Playstation (you can do it through Roku or Apple TV or things like that, I believe). It's a streaming service offering both live and On Demand cable and network television, as well as a limited DVR (DVR recordings expire after 4 weeks). There are several tiers of programming, with the option to add premium channels like HBO.
Pros:
Not only is it easier to get to the "minimum tier we need that has the channels we want" with PS Vue than Comcast, it has a few channels Comcast doesn't, notably Boomerang, which I had harangued both Comcast and Cox to get for years, to no avail. This is the first time I have ever been a Boomerang subscriber! Alas, it's no longer the 1970s Hanna Barbera wonderland it was at launch, but as an animation fan who works at home, I definitely appreciate the morning blocks of Looney Tunes and Tom and Jerry.
Cons:
1: PS Vue is not a cable provider. As a result, when it comes to the networks, it has to negotiate with each affiliate separately for the rights to live streaming. If they haven't secured those rights in your market, you're stuck with On Demand content and watching things the next day -- which, with the exception of CBS shows and a couple of others, you could mostly do on Hulu at a lesser cost. For instance, in our market, CBS is the only network we have live.
1a: They also don't have all the networks: one or two of the Big Four are missing in some markets, if I remember right from the advertising page we looked at before signing up, and the CW is missing entirely. The CW also has its own free app you can watch their shows on a day later, but it means no live streaming of the DC superhero shows, iZombie, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, etc.
2: The Viacom-owned channels - MTV, VH-1, Nickelodeon, TV Land, etc - were just removed, and with very little warning. For most customers, the big deal here seems to be the loss of Nick, because of their kids' programming. It's also maybe an indication of how unstable PS Vue programming could be.
3: It can be buggy. Rectify is the number one reason we got PS Vue, but the DVR has consistently fucked up in its attempt to record it, and although the show is available On Demand through PS Vue, that's been buggy too. What's more, the bugs don't go away -- we had to watch episode two of this season on Sundance's website because, weeks later, the On Demand episode on PS Vue is still the same Behind the Scenes thing instead.
4: The Playstation controller is a lousy TV remote, and the official Playstation media remote sold separately is both expensive (as these things go) and poorly reviewed.
Netflix:
I mean, you know this one. Clearly we're going to keep Netflix.
Pros:
In quantity and quality, Netflix's original content is king. Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Lady Dynamite, Love, Bojack Horseman, Orange is the New Black, Wet Hot American Summer, I'd keep it for those shows alone, nevermind the library of old shows, nevermind movies. Despite Hulu, Netflix is still Destination Alpha for binge-watching everything from the West Wing to Kolchak: The Night Stalker.
At least for now.
Cons:
As Netflix moves towards its ambition of "50% original content," that means a tiny bit of increasing its amount of original content but mostly a metric fuckhaul of "dropping stuff from our catalogue." Who knows what exactly they'll end up keeping. Presumably the mechanics will be similar to what happened to their DVD selection when streaming began to rise, when they stopped replacing some of the less popular discs. So maybe they'll always have the West Wing but maybe not Kolchak? It remains to be seen.
Hulu:
We have the ad-free version of Hulu. Hulu, I think most people are familiar with, has a relatively deep catalogue of both current TV (including current season shows available a day later), older TV (thirtysomething!), and British TV, and a smaller catalogue of movies which I rarely dip into.
Pros:
The above, basically. If you like TV, Hulu has a lot of it.
Cons:
1: They recently changed the interface, and the Watchlist is more annoying than the old Queue, but what're you gonna do.
2: When it comes to older shows, it can be frustrating to realize they don't have all of it. They have like one season of St Elsewhere, for instance, and only three seasons of Hill Street Blues and The Practice.
3: Much less original content than Netflix, and I'm not sure any of it is in the same league, though Difficult People is very good and there is some promising stuff in development. But really, this is the service you get to binge-watch older stuff, or to watch current stuff because you no longer have a cable subscription.
4: That said, neither CBS nor CW current episodes are available through Hulu.
Amazon Prime Video:
We were going to have Amazon Prime one way or the other, so the existence of their streaming service is just an added bonus.
Pros:
1: Some of the original content is good. Red Oaks is light fun, the first season of Transparent was great, and we'll finish The Man in the High Castle eventually.
2: There are some surprising gems among the free movies from time to time.
Cons:
1: The interface is fucking awful, though this is true for most of Amazon across the board.
2: The original shows can seem really cheap at times compared to other streaming services. What I've seen of Good Girls Revolt seems more like a network's poor attempt at emulating Mad Men circa 2009 than the premium dramas we've come to expect from streaming services.
Acorn:
A lesser-known streaming service, Acorn hosts British TV shows generally unavailable elsewhere in the US, as well as a small number of Australian shows and HBO Asia's Serangoon Road. I originally signed up for a free trial intending just to watch Blandings, but became hooked on it.
Pros:
1: There is a hell of a lot of good stuff, even if -- like me -- you are bored by serial killer and detective shows. Not just recent British stuff, but things like the original Upstairs Downstairs and Poldark.
2: It's cheaper than any of the rest by far, at five bucks a month.
Cons:
1: Unless you're an expat, chances are you haven't heard of the vast majority of the offerings, and rather than browsing through the entire catalogue, it's worth just Googling "Best British television" or some such, and then seeing how many of those shows are offered here.
2: ... you will discover many of them are not. I don't know enough about British TV studios or channels to know if it's simply that Acorn mainly licenses from a small handful of them, or if their streaming content mirrors the shows that are available on DVD, or what.
Sunday, September 11, 2016
star trek and johnny carson
It's been a summer of vacations, a summer of work, a summer of reading, a summer of working on a novel, and of course, a summer of fewer television shows, but nevertheless, pretty good time for a wrap-up post on What I Did Over My Summer, right?
Star Trek: The Next Generation
We wrapped up our re-watch of this over the summer after a very slow start God knows how long ago, because of what a slog the first season or two are. But once you get to season three, things are really kicking.
I grew up watching the original Trek -- my father had been a fan and we watched the first few movies on a regular basis as well -- and I have distinct memories of anticipation of Next Generation premiering. I think, honestly, the original series might still be the one I prefer. It has aged, Lord knows, but maybe I forgive it its cornball moments because it's before my time instead of contemporary with me, whereas I find the flaws of Next Generation harder to forgive because I feel like it's recent enough to know better.
The bad stuff first:
* The Prime Directive is horseshit, in no small part because any foreign policy framed as such a broad general principle without considering context is going to be horseshit, no matter what the content of that principle is. This is simply not well thought out. In fact, it's two kinds of horseshit: first, it's horseshit in that following the Prime Directive is often going to cause more harm than good. The show acknowledges this particular horseshit, which is why Picard (and Kirk, earlier) so often either defy the Prime Directive or are put in moral dilemmas (Picard especially) where they feel conflicted about it. (And there are many other episodes where had someone been thinking more clearly, the Prime Directive SHOULD have come up, but no one bothered to bring it up.)
The second kind of horseshit, though, is this: I don't believe in this culture's treatment of the Prime Directive.
The Prime Directive is so plainly horseshit that I don't believe it would be treated as a sacred principle to which people do not regularly and routinely object. It's one thing to believe that the Federation would insist on its adherence -- though like I said, that's ridiculous in of itself -- but to believe in a world where that is not the source of regular and ongoing controversy is just not possible. Every time Picard says, "Well, that would violate the Prime Directive," Riker should be like, "Man, my parents met at an anti-Prime Directive protest in Trombone City," and Crusher should be all, "Yeah, I spent a summer in the Academy doing volunteer work for Doctors Against the Prime Directive Because It's Dumb." Which is a subset of the next bullet point:
* The Star Trek writers do not really know how to create or write about cultures.
This is a Roddenberry problem, I think. I mean, I know that it begins with Rodenberry, especially because I know about the Star Trek writers who have complained about some of Rodenberry's rules. The idea that this future utopia has no economy, for instance, is at odds with a show about a military. What is the incentive to join a job that puts your life at risk if there is no material gain for you or your loved ones? I have no doubt some people would join out of their love of the Federation, a desire to kill Romulans or Cardassians or what have you (though of course, they're not currently at war), or in order to explore the galaxy, but Starfleet seems very large -- are there enough such people? And if they're assigned a boring duty out on some remote mining planet, what incentive do they have to not just quit and say "well, fuck Starfleet, then"? (I realize that the show is in fact inconsistent about whether money exists in the Federation, insofar as it essentially says that it doesn't but portrays private possessions and even people purchasing things. I also realize that there are probably Star Trek novels that explain how it all "works," but that's not really a defense of a shittily conceived culture as depicted on the actual on-screen television show.)
It's obviously not JUST a Roddenberry problem, since most of the episodes that deal with "the Enterprise has to deal with a culture that..." are pretty cringe-worthy and just feel completely impossible. No culture is fully fleshed out -- most feel more like versions of humanity with all the features removed except one. Star Trek writers don't seem to have a basic understanding of any social science, and the cultures they create are created with far less care and detail than the spacetime anomalies are. What I'm describing is of course the science fiction cliche, especially for a particular period and especially for science fiction on television and film, but just because every other restaurant is serving a shit sandwich too doesn't mean I've suddenly decided I don't mind yours.
* Like I said, it really does take a while to find its voice. Some of this is just age -- the special effects and sets, for instance, were expensive and cutting-edge for their time, relative to what was normal for a television show, but that says as much about the cost of special effects at the time as it does anything else. It can be hard to muster up a sense of wonder when a show ostensibly about, in part, the spirit of exploration for its own sake keeps encountering aliens who look and act like humans who have had extra bits glued to their faces. I mean, there is a kind of wonder to that, but it's not really the right one, and I am not really the kind of soaked-to-the-bone science fiction fan who can suspend his disbelief enough to feel the wonder anyway, I guess.
* The ladies. LEAVE THE LADIES ALONE, STAR TREK.
Jesus, if they ever write another episode of any Star Trek series where a Star Trek lady gets seduced, raped, mind-controlled, etc., it will be too soon. Ensign Ro is largely spared, if I remember right, but I don't entirely trust my memory.
Subset to this is the disservice to Troi's character in the episode when, because she's lost her empathic powers, she's pretty much helpless to do ANYthing, and this is a huge crisis for the Enterprise. Okay, a) I get that empathy is a big deal for Betazoids, but you did go to Starfleet Academy, right, plus regular fucking school and stuff like that, so somehow you must have picked up other skills -- not to mention, is having magical empathy that you were born with seriously your only job qualification for being Ship's Counselor? I'm pretty sure they didn't put Spock on the Enterprise just for being a Vulcan and being super-rational, I think he still had to demonstrate measurable skills. b) What does every other ship in the fleet do for a Ship's Counselor? One assumes there are not enough Betazoids to go around. One assumes, then, that other Ship's Counselors received training in Starfleet. One assumes that you went to class with them. Break out your textbooks.
I'm blaming the writers for this, not Troi, because again: Star Trek writers flunk social studies.
The good stuff:
* It really picks up after the first couple seasons. The characters come into focus, Beverly Crusher comes back after the Pulaski interlude, there are fewer episodes that feel like they could have been written for the original series.
* Worf!
Although I don't like episodes that revolve mainly around Problems With The Klingon Empire -- the least interesting running subplot in the show -- I love Worf-centric episodes, and once they realize Worf is funny in a straight man kind of way, Worf is so great. Worf is fed up with your bullshit. Worf is fed up with your human frailty. Worf is just so tired of all this. Worf-eyeroll. Worf-sigh.
I can't imagine the challenge of acting and emoting week in and week out in the amount of facial prosthetics that Michael Dorn had to deal with -- even if most of it is on his forehead and not interfering with his facial muscles, it still must be a lot more distracting than pointy ears -- but he got so good at conveying Worf's reactions that in a lot of episodes, I started just watching Worf in every scene, even scenes that were not about Worf.
And although I don't like Problems With The Klingon Empire, Worf's family are exempted from that issue, by and large -- his challenges dealing with his parents, his brother, K'Ehleyr (I had to look up that spelling), and Alexander are part of the great fun of Worf.
* The crazy "science" stuff.
As bad as Star Trek is at cultures, it's pretty great at its crazy fake sciencey shit.
Time loops, monsters in the transporter tube, Yesterday's Enterprise and its later ramifications, all this kind of stuff, this is the good shit. One of my favorite episodes is "Parallels," where Worf keeps blipping into alternate universes where things are slightly different than the previous one, including one in which he's married to Troi, one in which the Enterprise is at war, etc. The series finale is great too.
And while the holodeck logic never really works -- and it's a little ridiculous how often the holodeck is used to recreate "times from history" that just happen to be from Earth's past, sometime before 1950 (never, you know, the 22nd century, or the Sapphire Dynasty of Planet Blerk) -- most of the holodeck episodes are a lot of fun.
* Q. You'd think he'd be overused, but even binging the show, the Q episodes are highlights.
* Barclay, the second-best character -- kind of a joke character in his first appearance, but what's great is that they bring him back and develop him more, and in doing so he becomes an actual human-seeming character where most of the rest seem like paragons
Feed the Beast
This show was fucking awful, and I'm so pleased to learn AMC -- which renews almost everything for a second season -- canceled it after its first season.
I watched four episodes, and Caitlin couldn't take more than one. It was a collection of such awful cable-drama cliches of the Male Antihero type -- two troubled grunty men being troubled and grunty over what troubled grunty genius chefs they are, with a completely unnecessary organized crime element AND a completely cliche disapproving grunty father character.
You could reduce this show to both of the guys whipping their cocks out and slamming them against a dry-aged steak while cry-shouting about their feelings, and if anything, it might be an improvement.
The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson
I am just old enough to have grown up watching Carson, but it was Carson's waning days -- the days of frequent guest hosts and reruns, and for me, sometimes the endgame of watching Carson was to stay up to watch Letterman and Tom Snyder after. It's been cool having the reruns -- out of order, so you might get a couple from the 60s followed by a few from the 70s -- on ... MeTV, if I remember right, and we watch a couple episodes a week, based on who the guests are.
The guests are one of the interesting things about the show, of course -- oh, that's what Teri Garr had to say about Tootsie when she was doing the PR for it, or oh that's her anecdote about Mr Mom, or what have you -- but the show itself has a lot of interest beyond that. For better or worse, obviously it set up a lot of the structure of late-night talk shows that remains in place today, and what was already set up, it ensured would become almost sacred features: the sidekick, the desk, the monologue, the skits, the characters. It's hard not to view it with cynicism and realize that, at base, what's being served is the need to fill time so that little more is asked of guests other than that they plug their movies and pad out their appearance briefly with a rehearsed anecdote.
All of that is far more true today than it was then, but it began then.
One of the other interesting things is that -- and I say this without detracting either from Carson's impact and legacy, or from my opinion of him -- Johnny is not actually a very good interviewer.
This is where you see Letterman's similarities to him, actually. While they were both on the air, the contrast was pretty stark -- Letterman was much zanier, much weirder, much goofier-looking. But in both cases, their demeanor in interviews varies wildly according to the guest -- which means, I'm assuming, according to their interest in the guest, and what the guest has to say. Letterman fawns on the ladies, of course. Johnny asks them a couple of superficial questions, usually gives them only a few minutes of airtime and, in the 70s, asks them about their poster. He barely seems to be paying attention, at least to their answers. But with male guests there are other issues -- sometimes he seems to have trouble absorbing the point of a long answer, like he was listening to a producer in his ear instead of to the guest, and at other times he'll just look for the opportunity to deliver a punchline instead of having a conversation.
What makes this interesting is that, apart from his handling of women (especially in the 70s, and especially if it's anyone who would have had a poster for sale), it still pretty much works. Johnny Carson wasn't an expert interviewer. I don't just mean he wasn't a journalist, I mean by the standards of late-night talk show hosts, he wasn't one of the better interviewers -- Craig Ferguson was better until he gave up, Dick Cavett was obviously better. But he had a natural charisma that made it kind of not matter very much to the overall quality of the show. Now, in terms of the success of the show in its era, obviously it helps that it also didn't have the timeslot competition that talk shows have now. But I don't think I'm looking at things with rosy-colored glasses here.
Star Trek: The Next Generation
We wrapped up our re-watch of this over the summer after a very slow start God knows how long ago, because of what a slog the first season or two are. But once you get to season three, things are really kicking.
I grew up watching the original Trek -- my father had been a fan and we watched the first few movies on a regular basis as well -- and I have distinct memories of anticipation of Next Generation premiering. I think, honestly, the original series might still be the one I prefer. It has aged, Lord knows, but maybe I forgive it its cornball moments because it's before my time instead of contemporary with me, whereas I find the flaws of Next Generation harder to forgive because I feel like it's recent enough to know better.
The bad stuff first:
* The Prime Directive is horseshit, in no small part because any foreign policy framed as such a broad general principle without considering context is going to be horseshit, no matter what the content of that principle is. This is simply not well thought out. In fact, it's two kinds of horseshit: first, it's horseshit in that following the Prime Directive is often going to cause more harm than good. The show acknowledges this particular horseshit, which is why Picard (and Kirk, earlier) so often either defy the Prime Directive or are put in moral dilemmas (Picard especially) where they feel conflicted about it. (And there are many other episodes where had someone been thinking more clearly, the Prime Directive SHOULD have come up, but no one bothered to bring it up.)
The second kind of horseshit, though, is this: I don't believe in this culture's treatment of the Prime Directive.
The Prime Directive is so plainly horseshit that I don't believe it would be treated as a sacred principle to which people do not regularly and routinely object. It's one thing to believe that the Federation would insist on its adherence -- though like I said, that's ridiculous in of itself -- but to believe in a world where that is not the source of regular and ongoing controversy is just not possible. Every time Picard says, "Well, that would violate the Prime Directive," Riker should be like, "Man, my parents met at an anti-Prime Directive protest in Trombone City," and Crusher should be all, "Yeah, I spent a summer in the Academy doing volunteer work for Doctors Against the Prime Directive Because It's Dumb." Which is a subset of the next bullet point:
* The Star Trek writers do not really know how to create or write about cultures.
This is a Roddenberry problem, I think. I mean, I know that it begins with Rodenberry, especially because I know about the Star Trek writers who have complained about some of Rodenberry's rules. The idea that this future utopia has no economy, for instance, is at odds with a show about a military. What is the incentive to join a job that puts your life at risk if there is no material gain for you or your loved ones? I have no doubt some people would join out of their love of the Federation, a desire to kill Romulans or Cardassians or what have you (though of course, they're not currently at war), or in order to explore the galaxy, but Starfleet seems very large -- are there enough such people? And if they're assigned a boring duty out on some remote mining planet, what incentive do they have to not just quit and say "well, fuck Starfleet, then"? (I realize that the show is in fact inconsistent about whether money exists in the Federation, insofar as it essentially says that it doesn't but portrays private possessions and even people purchasing things. I also realize that there are probably Star Trek novels that explain how it all "works," but that's not really a defense of a shittily conceived culture as depicted on the actual on-screen television show.)
It's obviously not JUST a Roddenberry problem, since most of the episodes that deal with "the Enterprise has to deal with a culture that..." are pretty cringe-worthy and just feel completely impossible. No culture is fully fleshed out -- most feel more like versions of humanity with all the features removed except one. Star Trek writers don't seem to have a basic understanding of any social science, and the cultures they create are created with far less care and detail than the spacetime anomalies are. What I'm describing is of course the science fiction cliche, especially for a particular period and especially for science fiction on television and film, but just because every other restaurant is serving a shit sandwich too doesn't mean I've suddenly decided I don't mind yours.
* Like I said, it really does take a while to find its voice. Some of this is just age -- the special effects and sets, for instance, were expensive and cutting-edge for their time, relative to what was normal for a television show, but that says as much about the cost of special effects at the time as it does anything else. It can be hard to muster up a sense of wonder when a show ostensibly about, in part, the spirit of exploration for its own sake keeps encountering aliens who look and act like humans who have had extra bits glued to their faces. I mean, there is a kind of wonder to that, but it's not really the right one, and I am not really the kind of soaked-to-the-bone science fiction fan who can suspend his disbelief enough to feel the wonder anyway, I guess.
* The ladies. LEAVE THE LADIES ALONE, STAR TREK.
Jesus, if they ever write another episode of any Star Trek series where a Star Trek lady gets seduced, raped, mind-controlled, etc., it will be too soon. Ensign Ro is largely spared, if I remember right, but I don't entirely trust my memory.
Subset to this is the disservice to Troi's character in the episode when, because she's lost her empathic powers, she's pretty much helpless to do ANYthing, and this is a huge crisis for the Enterprise. Okay, a) I get that empathy is a big deal for Betazoids, but you did go to Starfleet Academy, right, plus regular fucking school and stuff like that, so somehow you must have picked up other skills -- not to mention, is having magical empathy that you were born with seriously your only job qualification for being Ship's Counselor? I'm pretty sure they didn't put Spock on the Enterprise just for being a Vulcan and being super-rational, I think he still had to demonstrate measurable skills. b) What does every other ship in the fleet do for a Ship's Counselor? One assumes there are not enough Betazoids to go around. One assumes, then, that other Ship's Counselors received training in Starfleet. One assumes that you went to class with them. Break out your textbooks.
I'm blaming the writers for this, not Troi, because again: Star Trek writers flunk social studies.
The good stuff:
* It really picks up after the first couple seasons. The characters come into focus, Beverly Crusher comes back after the Pulaski interlude, there are fewer episodes that feel like they could have been written for the original series.
* Worf!
Although I don't like episodes that revolve mainly around Problems With The Klingon Empire -- the least interesting running subplot in the show -- I love Worf-centric episodes, and once they realize Worf is funny in a straight man kind of way, Worf is so great. Worf is fed up with your bullshit. Worf is fed up with your human frailty. Worf is just so tired of all this. Worf-eyeroll. Worf-sigh.
I can't imagine the challenge of acting and emoting week in and week out in the amount of facial prosthetics that Michael Dorn had to deal with -- even if most of it is on his forehead and not interfering with his facial muscles, it still must be a lot more distracting than pointy ears -- but he got so good at conveying Worf's reactions that in a lot of episodes, I started just watching Worf in every scene, even scenes that were not about Worf.
And although I don't like Problems With The Klingon Empire, Worf's family are exempted from that issue, by and large -- his challenges dealing with his parents, his brother, K'Ehleyr (I had to look up that spelling), and Alexander are part of the great fun of Worf.
* The crazy "science" stuff.
As bad as Star Trek is at cultures, it's pretty great at its crazy fake sciencey shit.
Time loops, monsters in the transporter tube, Yesterday's Enterprise and its later ramifications, all this kind of stuff, this is the good shit. One of my favorite episodes is "Parallels," where Worf keeps blipping into alternate universes where things are slightly different than the previous one, including one in which he's married to Troi, one in which the Enterprise is at war, etc. The series finale is great too.
And while the holodeck logic never really works -- and it's a little ridiculous how often the holodeck is used to recreate "times from history" that just happen to be from Earth's past, sometime before 1950 (never, you know, the 22nd century, or the Sapphire Dynasty of Planet Blerk) -- most of the holodeck episodes are a lot of fun.
* Q. You'd think he'd be overused, but even binging the show, the Q episodes are highlights.
* Barclay, the second-best character -- kind of a joke character in his first appearance, but what's great is that they bring him back and develop him more, and in doing so he becomes an actual human-seeming character where most of the rest seem like paragons
Feed the Beast
This show was fucking awful, and I'm so pleased to learn AMC -- which renews almost everything for a second season -- canceled it after its first season.
I watched four episodes, and Caitlin couldn't take more than one. It was a collection of such awful cable-drama cliches of the Male Antihero type -- two troubled grunty men being troubled and grunty over what troubled grunty genius chefs they are, with a completely unnecessary organized crime element AND a completely cliche disapproving grunty father character.
You could reduce this show to both of the guys whipping their cocks out and slamming them against a dry-aged steak while cry-shouting about their feelings, and if anything, it might be an improvement.
The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson
I am just old enough to have grown up watching Carson, but it was Carson's waning days -- the days of frequent guest hosts and reruns, and for me, sometimes the endgame of watching Carson was to stay up to watch Letterman and Tom Snyder after. It's been cool having the reruns -- out of order, so you might get a couple from the 60s followed by a few from the 70s -- on ... MeTV, if I remember right, and we watch a couple episodes a week, based on who the guests are.
The guests are one of the interesting things about the show, of course -- oh, that's what Teri Garr had to say about Tootsie when she was doing the PR for it, or oh that's her anecdote about Mr Mom, or what have you -- but the show itself has a lot of interest beyond that. For better or worse, obviously it set up a lot of the structure of late-night talk shows that remains in place today, and what was already set up, it ensured would become almost sacred features: the sidekick, the desk, the monologue, the skits, the characters. It's hard not to view it with cynicism and realize that, at base, what's being served is the need to fill time so that little more is asked of guests other than that they plug their movies and pad out their appearance briefly with a rehearsed anecdote.
All of that is far more true today than it was then, but it began then.
One of the other interesting things is that -- and I say this without detracting either from Carson's impact and legacy, or from my opinion of him -- Johnny is not actually a very good interviewer.
This is where you see Letterman's similarities to him, actually. While they were both on the air, the contrast was pretty stark -- Letterman was much zanier, much weirder, much goofier-looking. But in both cases, their demeanor in interviews varies wildly according to the guest -- which means, I'm assuming, according to their interest in the guest, and what the guest has to say. Letterman fawns on the ladies, of course. Johnny asks them a couple of superficial questions, usually gives them only a few minutes of airtime and, in the 70s, asks them about their poster. He barely seems to be paying attention, at least to their answers. But with male guests there are other issues -- sometimes he seems to have trouble absorbing the point of a long answer, like he was listening to a producer in his ear instead of to the guest, and at other times he'll just look for the opportunity to deliver a punchline instead of having a conversation.
What makes this interesting is that, apart from his handling of women (especially in the 70s, and especially if it's anyone who would have had a poster for sale), it still pretty much works. Johnny Carson wasn't an expert interviewer. I don't just mean he wasn't a journalist, I mean by the standards of late-night talk show hosts, he wasn't one of the better interviewers -- Craig Ferguson was better until he gave up, Dick Cavett was obviously better. But he had a natural charisma that made it kind of not matter very much to the overall quality of the show. Now, in terms of the success of the show in its era, obviously it helps that it also didn't have the timeslot competition that talk shows have now. But I don't think I'm looking at things with rosy-colored glasses here.
Friday, July 15, 2016
2016 emmy nominations and summer season check-in
What is the purpose of having a blog if not to contribute my two cents on every little thing as it happens, right? I actually have wondered in the past whether I'll always do an Emmy post, but I suppose as long as I have thoughts about the nominations, then sure.
First, as always, I don't want to take these TOO seriously, because there are certain factors that are obvious: while the TV audience is fractured to a degree unforeseeable except by satirists, "broadcast" network shows and shows on cable channels with a well-established track record like HBO are significantly more prominent and likelier to have robust Emmy marketing campaigns. It is a nice fiction to imagine that nominations reflect only a group of voters' thoughts about the most worthy shows, but the obvious truth is that there are too many shows for voters to have seen everything.
Not that that benefits broadcast networks -- a big part of the common ground voters share -- all that much, since they barely show up in the major categories anymore, outside of reality shows, the genre that premium cable and streaming networks for the most part haven't touched. Still -- the point is that it's natural that certain shows become repeat nominees even after their peak, that familiar faces become nominated even if theirs wasn't the best performance on their series, and so on. There's a big fucking landscape to sift through and voting patterns like that are a natural consequence.
In a weird way, it sometimes feels like the Emmys are becoming more populist, corresponding more closely to the general public's tastes, rather than representing an Oscars of television.
Anyway, on to the nominations --
The complete nominations are here, and I mean, many of them are good.
It's great to see some recognition for The Americans, for Rami Malek, for Tatiana Maslany even if Orphan Black's best days are probably behind it (but this season was definitely a step up), for Aziz Ansari and Master of None, and especially for Constance Zimmer, who has elevated the shows she's been on for a long time and finally has an incredible role on a complex show. That Horace and Pete got any recognition, given its distribution model, is amazing. Likewise, I'm glad to see a writing award for Catastrophe, a show I literally never see anyone mention except me and critics.
If there were no unacceptable exclusions, that would all be fine. But it's hard to take all these House of Cards nominations -- a show that had one great season that was really a character sketch, followed by punctuations of great acting amid muddled writing ever since -- when The Leftovers got nothing, Rectify got nothing, and these are head and shoulders the two best dramas on television. In the comedy categories, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend got no major award nominations (I was confused why it was only nominated once for best original song, but it's because they could only submit one for consideration), and should certainly have had two acting noms (Rachel Bloom and Pete Gardner) and at least one for writing or directing. To leave out Broad City is one thing, but to leave out Constance Wu, who is not only the best thing about Fresh Off the Boat but probably the best thing about broadcast network sitcoms, period?
I can't even comment on Claire Danes' nomination because, as much as we love her, at some point we realized we had never bothered to finish the most recent season of Homeland and that we didn't particularly want to. That is definitely a comment on Homeland's nomination for best drama, though, which is a ridiculous one. They have tried hard, certainly, but the show should have been a miniseries.
As for what we've been watching this summer? On Netflix, we're slowly making our way through both Star Trek: The Next Generation and The West Wing. Star Trek definitely picks up once it hits third season and they have a little fun -- it's a bit of a slog before that. They are still pretty terrible at writing about How People Or Societies Work, though, but that has been my complaint about sci fi TV since ... since Star Trek: The Next Generation was brand-new, actually (it is clearly a problem that precedes my teenage self having noticed it, mind you). We've also been delving into Caitlin's Road to Avonlea discs and my brand spanking new limited edition complete set of the Monkees.
But in the world of Actual New Television --
On Netflix, Bloodline and Orange is the New Black both suffered a bit from ending without closure, but Bloodline's second season had problems deeper than that -- like House of Cards, it was a show that started with a tightly focused first season, but even more than most shows, the events of that first season made it a) hard to justify the show continuing in the first place, b) even harder to maintain that focus. I love the actors, but the writing is not at the same level.
Orange is the New Black, though, had one of its best seasons. How you feel about this show will always depend in part on how much you give a shit about Piper, and I give no shits about her. While some of the flashbacks were, as they've been in the last couple seasons, about as shrugworthy as many of Lost's after the first two seasons (Brooke's, for instance, seemed completely unnecessary and added nothing to what we know about her), the way the show handles the privatization of the prison and its impact on both inmates and staff is stellar.
I know there have been some strong feelings about the final arc of the season. I won't get into spoilers. I will say that one criticism I can't agree with is the idea that showing the guards as being multifaceted is the same as asking us to sympathize with them or forgive them for their collective and individual sins. I think it's clear that one of the season's overall goals was to show that while there are definitely "bad" guards who are worse than others, the prison's biggest problems -- the prison industry's biggest problems -- are systemic. The existence of systemic problems does not mean that individual actions are not individual responsibilities, it only means that there is a bigger picture that is more important, that requires understanding that only addressing individual actions will not stop the problem.
This is the kind of territory The Wire got into, and more recently David Simon's Show Me a Hero, and I think it probably did a better job with it, if only because it was taking that scope from the beginning, whereas Orange has worked up to it over time.
I think I already mentioned Lady Dynamite, but I just have to point out again that I think it's one of the best things Netflix has yet done, and a perfect example of what TV is now, in that it is so specific to Maria Bamford's voice and experience, instead of pigeonholing her into a show about a Single Mom Trying To Keep It Together or what the fuck ever.
On Hulu, it's great to see Difficult People back, especially since The Mindy Project regularly irritated me this season, or second half of the season, or whatever they're calling it.
On Actual Television:
Match Game with Alec Baldwin has been surprisingly fun, but I am a huge fan of the original.
Outcast, Preacher, Scream, and Dead of Summer make this a pretty horror-filled summer - I'm still getting used to both Outcast (which I'm not familiar with from comics) and Preacher (which I started reading from the moment the first issue hit the shelves), and Tulip's my favorite thing by far about the Preacher adaptation. Scream has been more engaging in the second season, perhaps because most of the weaker or more generic-looking actors were killed off in the first season. Dead of Summer, which has a more interesting mythology going on, suffers from generic characters and egregiously lazy props that, at least once or twice an episode, make me or Caitlin go "wait, there's no way that's something from the 80s."
Not QUITE horror because it's just so ridiculous and played for laughs is BrainDead, the D.C. body snatchers comedy from the Good Wife creators -- it's fun and pretty obviously seems to have been a palate cleanser for them.
Roadies is fast becoming awful. I used to love Cameron Crowe, but from Elizabethtown on he has just kind of been an embarrassment. The actual showrunner is My So-Called Life's Winnie Holzman, which had seemed promising, but boy, you sure can't tell.
Unreal is probably the highlight of the summer for me so far. I wasn't sure where they would go with a second season, but they've not only avoided being repetitive, they are arguably turning in a better season than the first.
First, as always, I don't want to take these TOO seriously, because there are certain factors that are obvious: while the TV audience is fractured to a degree unforeseeable except by satirists, "broadcast" network shows and shows on cable channels with a well-established track record like HBO are significantly more prominent and likelier to have robust Emmy marketing campaigns. It is a nice fiction to imagine that nominations reflect only a group of voters' thoughts about the most worthy shows, but the obvious truth is that there are too many shows for voters to have seen everything.
Not that that benefits broadcast networks -- a big part of the common ground voters share -- all that much, since they barely show up in the major categories anymore, outside of reality shows, the genre that premium cable and streaming networks for the most part haven't touched. Still -- the point is that it's natural that certain shows become repeat nominees even after their peak, that familiar faces become nominated even if theirs wasn't the best performance on their series, and so on. There's a big fucking landscape to sift through and voting patterns like that are a natural consequence.
In a weird way, it sometimes feels like the Emmys are becoming more populist, corresponding more closely to the general public's tastes, rather than representing an Oscars of television.
Anyway, on to the nominations --
The complete nominations are here, and I mean, many of them are good.
It's great to see some recognition for The Americans, for Rami Malek, for Tatiana Maslany even if Orphan Black's best days are probably behind it (but this season was definitely a step up), for Aziz Ansari and Master of None, and especially for Constance Zimmer, who has elevated the shows she's been on for a long time and finally has an incredible role on a complex show. That Horace and Pete got any recognition, given its distribution model, is amazing. Likewise, I'm glad to see a writing award for Catastrophe, a show I literally never see anyone mention except me and critics.
If there were no unacceptable exclusions, that would all be fine. But it's hard to take all these House of Cards nominations -- a show that had one great season that was really a character sketch, followed by punctuations of great acting amid muddled writing ever since -- when The Leftovers got nothing, Rectify got nothing, and these are head and shoulders the two best dramas on television. In the comedy categories, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend got no major award nominations (I was confused why it was only nominated once for best original song, but it's because they could only submit one for consideration), and should certainly have had two acting noms (Rachel Bloom and Pete Gardner) and at least one for writing or directing. To leave out Broad City is one thing, but to leave out Constance Wu, who is not only the best thing about Fresh Off the Boat but probably the best thing about broadcast network sitcoms, period?
I can't even comment on Claire Danes' nomination because, as much as we love her, at some point we realized we had never bothered to finish the most recent season of Homeland and that we didn't particularly want to. That is definitely a comment on Homeland's nomination for best drama, though, which is a ridiculous one. They have tried hard, certainly, but the show should have been a miniseries.
As for what we've been watching this summer? On Netflix, we're slowly making our way through both Star Trek: The Next Generation and The West Wing. Star Trek definitely picks up once it hits third season and they have a little fun -- it's a bit of a slog before that. They are still pretty terrible at writing about How People Or Societies Work, though, but that has been my complaint about sci fi TV since ... since Star Trek: The Next Generation was brand-new, actually (it is clearly a problem that precedes my teenage self having noticed it, mind you). We've also been delving into Caitlin's Road to Avonlea discs and my brand spanking new limited edition complete set of the Monkees.
But in the world of Actual New Television --
On Netflix, Bloodline and Orange is the New Black both suffered a bit from ending without closure, but Bloodline's second season had problems deeper than that -- like House of Cards, it was a show that started with a tightly focused first season, but even more than most shows, the events of that first season made it a) hard to justify the show continuing in the first place, b) even harder to maintain that focus. I love the actors, but the writing is not at the same level.
Orange is the New Black, though, had one of its best seasons. How you feel about this show will always depend in part on how much you give a shit about Piper, and I give no shits about her. While some of the flashbacks were, as they've been in the last couple seasons, about as shrugworthy as many of Lost's after the first two seasons (Brooke's, for instance, seemed completely unnecessary and added nothing to what we know about her), the way the show handles the privatization of the prison and its impact on both inmates and staff is stellar.
I know there have been some strong feelings about the final arc of the season. I won't get into spoilers. I will say that one criticism I can't agree with is the idea that showing the guards as being multifaceted is the same as asking us to sympathize with them or forgive them for their collective and individual sins. I think it's clear that one of the season's overall goals was to show that while there are definitely "bad" guards who are worse than others, the prison's biggest problems -- the prison industry's biggest problems -- are systemic. The existence of systemic problems does not mean that individual actions are not individual responsibilities, it only means that there is a bigger picture that is more important, that requires understanding that only addressing individual actions will not stop the problem.
This is the kind of territory The Wire got into, and more recently David Simon's Show Me a Hero, and I think it probably did a better job with it, if only because it was taking that scope from the beginning, whereas Orange has worked up to it over time.
I think I already mentioned Lady Dynamite, but I just have to point out again that I think it's one of the best things Netflix has yet done, and a perfect example of what TV is now, in that it is so specific to Maria Bamford's voice and experience, instead of pigeonholing her into a show about a Single Mom Trying To Keep It Together or what the fuck ever.
On Hulu, it's great to see Difficult People back, especially since The Mindy Project regularly irritated me this season, or second half of the season, or whatever they're calling it.
On Actual Television:
Match Game with Alec Baldwin has been surprisingly fun, but I am a huge fan of the original.
Outcast, Preacher, Scream, and Dead of Summer make this a pretty horror-filled summer - I'm still getting used to both Outcast (which I'm not familiar with from comics) and Preacher (which I started reading from the moment the first issue hit the shelves), and Tulip's my favorite thing by far about the Preacher adaptation. Scream has been more engaging in the second season, perhaps because most of the weaker or more generic-looking actors were killed off in the first season. Dead of Summer, which has a more interesting mythology going on, suffers from generic characters and egregiously lazy props that, at least once or twice an episode, make me or Caitlin go "wait, there's no way that's something from the 80s."
Not QUITE horror because it's just so ridiculous and played for laughs is BrainDead, the D.C. body snatchers comedy from the Good Wife creators -- it's fun and pretty obviously seems to have been a palate cleanser for them.
Roadies is fast becoming awful. I used to love Cameron Crowe, but from Elizabethtown on he has just kind of been an embarrassment. The actual showrunner is My So-Called Life's Winnie Holzman, which had seemed promising, but boy, you sure can't tell.
Unreal is probably the highlight of the summer for me so far. I wasn't sure where they would go with a second season, but they've not only avoided being repetitive, they are arguably turning in a better season than the first.
Friday, May 13, 2016
kimmy and cancellations
Really a housecleaning post, I suppose:
First of all, the problem with doing a "streaming shows I've watched lately" post after a few months is that you're bound to forget one, and I forgot a big one:
Season two of The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt!
I have mixed feelings here actually.
For the most part, there was a lot to love. With the exception of a couple episodes, the jokes are always funny, and several of the plots -- Kimmy dealing both with the trauma of her life in the cult and with her feelings about her mother, Tina Fey as her therapist, basically anything to do with Carol Kane -- worked really well. There was a lot of speculation about whether this season would be different since it was the first one they knew would be on Netflix -- the first one had been made for NBC before NBC decided at the last minute not to air it.
But man. Tina Fey, once again, consistently embarrasses herself in the face of criticism: announcing prior to the season that she's not going to read the internet anymore, then having the last word by devoting an early episode to internet commenters and portraying them as people who literally vanish from existence if they run out of things to complain about. This is dumb enough without further context, but even more wince-inducing given that Fey's politics have long been ... well, pretty Liz Lemonish, in that she seems very much like someone who likes the idea of being perceived as a liberal but is not particularly committed to actual liberal ideals, especially when they take effort. The show's commitment to Asian stereotypes for the sake of lazy comedy, and weird origin story for Jackie, are perfectly valid targets for criticism, and if you don't want to engage with that, then be a fucking adult and don't engage with it -- don't slam your bedroom door and then hang a sign outside it that says everyone who disagrees with you is a poopy doo doo head.
Second, I feel the need to react briefly to the news of the many cancellations that were announced yesterday. As many have noted, it's become unusual to cancel this many shows -- the "death" of cancellation had already become the topic of TV columns, though largely in reference to cable networks, which don't have to answer to affiliates and in some cases don't have to worry about advertising dollars.
These cancellations, though, come from the broadcast nets, and to be fair, when you look at which shows are being cancelled, it doesn't exactly seem like an indiscriminate massacre. You have a mix of shows that had already been given a second chance to get their ratings up and had failed to do so, Fox shows that lived out their seasons but would have been canceled long before now on any other network (Fox is more likely to let a show go a full season and then fail to renew it rather than drop it after four episodes the way the alphabet networks do, which winds up contributing to their reputation for "abandoning" shows), and a cancellation that isn't even a cancellation, just the announcement that a pilot isn't being picked up.
That latter bit -- ABC announced it isn't picking up the latest version of an attempt to spin off Adrianne Palicki's Bobbi Morse from Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. I can't stand the SHIELD show but would give a Bobbi Morse show, or any Adrianne Palicki show a shot, so this is a shame ... but not a cancellation.
An actual cancellation, though, is Agent Carter. On the other hand, this had sort of always been treated as a series of miniseries anyway, and Hayley Atwell and Dominic Cooper have already taken roles in other shows, so I don't think anyone had been assuming there was going to be a third miniseries.
Castle was canceled because as much as we all love Firefly, Nathan Fillion was a dink and got his female co-lead kicked off her own show because they weren't getting along, which gave the network no reason to renew it. Not a show I watched, but I have to role my eyes at Fillion anyway.
cf: Sleepy Hollow, the cancellation of which was previously announced, which also saw the departure of the female co-lead, whose presence is built right into the premise -- even moreso than in The X-Files or Moonlighting. Doing Sleepy Hollow without Abby is like doing Mad About You without Paul or Jamie, so naturally the network cancelled it.
I've posted about Sleepy Hollow this season -- it was one of our favorite shows in first season, felt a bit uneven in second season, and immediately lost focus (and half of the cast) in third season. We gave up only a few episodes in -- it just wasn't the same show anymore.
Back to ABC, though, which also cancelled ... Galavant and The Muppets.
Sigh.
This is what I mean about second chances, though. Galavant had such low ratings in its first season that it's a surprise it ever got a second season, and ABC has changed bosses since that renewal. The Muppets is an important franchise, but premiered to critical shrugs, went on hiatus, changed showrunners, improved considerably ... but saw little change in the ratings. The idea is probably that a low-rated show does more harm than good to the brand, I suppose, but I wish they would stick with it and just try to make it better.
Honestly, I still think the best way to do a Muppets TV show is to just do it like the original Muppet Show -- a variety show, even though that's anachronistic now. Go ahead and include jokes about it being anachronistic. Anything else has always just felt a little forced.
Galavant is going to sting. Like I said, yes, it's a surprise it got a second season, but it was such a good second season, and as I've said before, Tim Omundson has been doing Emmy-level work on this show in both seasons -- and the show did an excellent job transforming him from scene-stealing villain to deuteragonist to capitalize on that. I hope his next job makes the maximum use of his talents, but the problem with these little gems of shows is that so often they fit people into niches that let them shine in ways that other shows just don't, and instead he'll wind up playing somebody's dorky husband or something.
ABC also cancelled Nashville, which has had ongoing showrunner problems and became ever soapier after first season -- something they were apparently going to rectify by bringing on the thirtysomething creators, of all people, as showrunners in the event of a renewal. On the one hand I am saddened that we won't get to see that, because what a very strange match that would be. On the other hand, this frees the thirtysomething guys up for another project.
Speaking of freeing people up, CBS cancelled the awfully titled CSI: Cyber, so perhaps Patricia Arquette can do something better and James van der Beek can rustle together a reunion of everyone's favorite show ... I'm talking, of course, of Don't Trust the Bitch in Apt. 23.
Fox cancelled ALL of their first-season comedy shows: some stupid fucking Seth MacFarlane thing which who the fuck cares about because fuck Seth MacFarlane, Cooper Dooper's Guide to Something, Grandfathered, and The Grinder.
Grandfathered was cute, but never essential for me. Every episode always had a few too many lazy jokes, and it felt like pieces were always being moved around while the show found itself. Still, I think it could have found itself in time.
The Grinder, though. This was something I had only moderate interest in at first, based primarily on the cast -- Rob Lowe's newly discovered comedic chops thanks to Parks, the return of Fred Savage, Mary Elizabeth Ellis, the underused and underrated Natalie Morales, William Devane, this is a fucking great cast long before you get to the insanity and delight of Tim Olyphant playing himself in the middle of the season. It quickly became one of the funniest, smartest, meta-est shows on TV -- though Natalie Morales remained underused, and any episode that really leaned on her did so by making her a love interest prop, which is my only real complaint about the show -- and sometimes you'd stop mid-laugh and go, are they really making that joke? Not in a Two and a Half Men, oh that's so dirty, kind of way -- more the Arrested Development third season, oh that's so fourth-wall-breaking, kind of way.
The Grinder rests :(
First of all, the problem with doing a "streaming shows I've watched lately" post after a few months is that you're bound to forget one, and I forgot a big one:
Season two of The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt!
I have mixed feelings here actually.
For the most part, there was a lot to love. With the exception of a couple episodes, the jokes are always funny, and several of the plots -- Kimmy dealing both with the trauma of her life in the cult and with her feelings about her mother, Tina Fey as her therapist, basically anything to do with Carol Kane -- worked really well. There was a lot of speculation about whether this season would be different since it was the first one they knew would be on Netflix -- the first one had been made for NBC before NBC decided at the last minute not to air it.
But man. Tina Fey, once again, consistently embarrasses herself in the face of criticism: announcing prior to the season that she's not going to read the internet anymore, then having the last word by devoting an early episode to internet commenters and portraying them as people who literally vanish from existence if they run out of things to complain about. This is dumb enough without further context, but even more wince-inducing given that Fey's politics have long been ... well, pretty Liz Lemonish, in that she seems very much like someone who likes the idea of being perceived as a liberal but is not particularly committed to actual liberal ideals, especially when they take effort. The show's commitment to Asian stereotypes for the sake of lazy comedy, and weird origin story for Jackie, are perfectly valid targets for criticism, and if you don't want to engage with that, then be a fucking adult and don't engage with it -- don't slam your bedroom door and then hang a sign outside it that says everyone who disagrees with you is a poopy doo doo head.
Second, I feel the need to react briefly to the news of the many cancellations that were announced yesterday. As many have noted, it's become unusual to cancel this many shows -- the "death" of cancellation had already become the topic of TV columns, though largely in reference to cable networks, which don't have to answer to affiliates and in some cases don't have to worry about advertising dollars.
These cancellations, though, come from the broadcast nets, and to be fair, when you look at which shows are being cancelled, it doesn't exactly seem like an indiscriminate massacre. You have a mix of shows that had already been given a second chance to get their ratings up and had failed to do so, Fox shows that lived out their seasons but would have been canceled long before now on any other network (Fox is more likely to let a show go a full season and then fail to renew it rather than drop it after four episodes the way the alphabet networks do, which winds up contributing to their reputation for "abandoning" shows), and a cancellation that isn't even a cancellation, just the announcement that a pilot isn't being picked up.
That latter bit -- ABC announced it isn't picking up the latest version of an attempt to spin off Adrianne Palicki's Bobbi Morse from Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. I can't stand the SHIELD show but would give a Bobbi Morse show, or any Adrianne Palicki show a shot, so this is a shame ... but not a cancellation.
An actual cancellation, though, is Agent Carter. On the other hand, this had sort of always been treated as a series of miniseries anyway, and Hayley Atwell and Dominic Cooper have already taken roles in other shows, so I don't think anyone had been assuming there was going to be a third miniseries.
Castle was canceled because as much as we all love Firefly, Nathan Fillion was a dink and got his female co-lead kicked off her own show because they weren't getting along, which gave the network no reason to renew it. Not a show I watched, but I have to role my eyes at Fillion anyway.
cf: Sleepy Hollow, the cancellation of which was previously announced, which also saw the departure of the female co-lead, whose presence is built right into the premise -- even moreso than in The X-Files or Moonlighting. Doing Sleepy Hollow without Abby is like doing Mad About You without Paul or Jamie, so naturally the network cancelled it.
I've posted about Sleepy Hollow this season -- it was one of our favorite shows in first season, felt a bit uneven in second season, and immediately lost focus (and half of the cast) in third season. We gave up only a few episodes in -- it just wasn't the same show anymore.
Back to ABC, though, which also cancelled ... Galavant and The Muppets.
Sigh.
This is what I mean about second chances, though. Galavant had such low ratings in its first season that it's a surprise it ever got a second season, and ABC has changed bosses since that renewal. The Muppets is an important franchise, but premiered to critical shrugs, went on hiatus, changed showrunners, improved considerably ... but saw little change in the ratings. The idea is probably that a low-rated show does more harm than good to the brand, I suppose, but I wish they would stick with it and just try to make it better.
Honestly, I still think the best way to do a Muppets TV show is to just do it like the original Muppet Show -- a variety show, even though that's anachronistic now. Go ahead and include jokes about it being anachronistic. Anything else has always just felt a little forced.
Galavant is going to sting. Like I said, yes, it's a surprise it got a second season, but it was such a good second season, and as I've said before, Tim Omundson has been doing Emmy-level work on this show in both seasons -- and the show did an excellent job transforming him from scene-stealing villain to deuteragonist to capitalize on that. I hope his next job makes the maximum use of his talents, but the problem with these little gems of shows is that so often they fit people into niches that let them shine in ways that other shows just don't, and instead he'll wind up playing somebody's dorky husband or something.
ABC also cancelled Nashville, which has had ongoing showrunner problems and became ever soapier after first season -- something they were apparently going to rectify by bringing on the thirtysomething creators, of all people, as showrunners in the event of a renewal. On the one hand I am saddened that we won't get to see that, because what a very strange match that would be. On the other hand, this frees the thirtysomething guys up for another project.
Speaking of freeing people up, CBS cancelled the awfully titled CSI: Cyber, so perhaps Patricia Arquette can do something better and James van der Beek can rustle together a reunion of everyone's favorite show ... I'm talking, of course, of Don't Trust the Bitch in Apt. 23.
Fox cancelled ALL of their first-season comedy shows: some stupid fucking Seth MacFarlane thing which who the fuck cares about because fuck Seth MacFarlane, Cooper Dooper's Guide to Something, Grandfathered, and The Grinder.
Grandfathered was cute, but never essential for me. Every episode always had a few too many lazy jokes, and it felt like pieces were always being moved around while the show found itself. Still, I think it could have found itself in time.
The Grinder, though. This was something I had only moderate interest in at first, based primarily on the cast -- Rob Lowe's newly discovered comedic chops thanks to Parks, the return of Fred Savage, Mary Elizabeth Ellis, the underused and underrated Natalie Morales, William Devane, this is a fucking great cast long before you get to the insanity and delight of Tim Olyphant playing himself in the middle of the season. It quickly became one of the funniest, smartest, meta-est shows on TV -- though Natalie Morales remained underused, and any episode that really leaned on her did so by making her a love interest prop, which is my only real complaint about the show -- and sometimes you'd stop mid-laugh and go, are they really making that joke? Not in a Two and a Half Men, oh that's so dirty, kind of way -- more the Arrested Development third season, oh that's so fourth-wall-breaking, kind of way.
The Grinder rests :(
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