summer watching

Every blog post about summer TV starts out by reminiscing over when there wasn't any summer TV, right? When apart from the occasional show being burned off -- David Lynch and Mark Frost's On The Air! the unfinished Stephen King series Golden Years! -- it was when you caught up on the shows you didn't usually watch, because there were no DVRs. Even in the late 90s, summer rerun season was key, letting me catch up on this weird "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" show I had just caught a few episodes of.

So okay, that's out of the way.

Obviously summer has changed, but it's still the weaker season overall. Sure, HBO runs some strong stuff, and Mad Men has aired in the summer, but the networks never put their biggest hits on in the summer, and comedy especially is thin on the ground.

Here's what I've checked out lately:

Game of Thrones is having both one of its best and its most problematic season. Catching up to the books has forced the showrunners' hands in some interesting ways, and while I won't get specific in this post, I will say that I love much of it, but the rape is out of control. There are a lot of things to say about the ways fiction uses rape, and how often rape is used to tell a story framed so that it isn't even the victim's story, and there isn't room to get into all of it here. But GOT has been pretty fucking awful in that respect, and I can't blame the people who have jumped ship.

The Dorne storyline is also a huge flaw this season, both for the critical changes from the way it plays out in the book and the fact that the country itself is portrayed so shoddily -- let me direct you to Neil Miller's excellent (and of course spoiler-ridden) post about it, because I can't think of anything to add.

Veep and Silicon Valley are as good or better (in Silicon Valley's case) as they've been in previous seasons, I just don't know what to say about them beyond that.

Hannibal is a show I came to late. We checked out the first few episodes of the first season and I couldn't get into it. It seemed well-acted and everything, sure, but I am so burned out on serial killers. Enough with all the fucking serial killers.

I still feel that way, but from the end of season one and through season two, the show really transformed -- while, admittedly, still being about serial killers. It's become more weird and imagistic, disturbing without being a gorey rapefest. It's nothing like Bryan Fuller's previous shows, except insofar as it's never lazy.

Halt and Catch Fire has indeed improved in its second season, though two episodes in I am not persuaded that Sepinwall is correct that it's finally a great AMC drama. Cameron is still obnoxious, and although it's not entirely clear to me how much we're supposed to side with her vision, I'm pretty sure we're supposed to be impressed by her commitment to online gaming -- even though the company would have to coast on minimal profits for a decade before that would pay off.

This is one of the things I really hate about the difficulty that writers, as a group, have writing about smart people. Taking a character in a period show and demonstrating their genius through their commitment to some idea that we in the present know eventually becomes a big hit is, at best, fucking lazy. It worked when John Astin did it on Brisco County Jr but that's a comedy, for heaven's sake. In a case like this, it just makes everyone look dumb: online gaming isn't a big money idea in the mid-80s and the actual smart people realized that. It would be like launching a company providing services to electric car owners or something now - the market just isn't big enough yet, can't be big enough yet.

Think about Don Draper. How terrible would Mad Men be if a season culminated in him introducing McDonald's Monopoly or if he spent all his time trying to convince people that a television channel devoted to shopping from home was the wave of the future?

That said: increasing Donna's presence has been a tremendous improvement, and Joe has not bothered me at all this year, although at the moment it's sort of hard to see why he's actually on the show. It's a flawed show, but maybe the bleeding has stopped.

I really wanted to like Aquarius but I don't think I could even tell you anything about what happens in the two episodes I've seen. I like David Duchovny but he's made weird choices in his post-X-Files work, and while on paper this show sounds like it has a lot of potential, it's just ... forgettable.

Wayward Pines. A Secret Service agent investigating the disappearance of other agents winds up in a weird town he can't escape from. Based on books I haven't read, and apparently promising answers to the whole thing, this just comes across like a bland retread of The Prisoner - the ultimate "where am I, what is going on, and who is in on it?" show, which gave few answers but managed to be engaging and rewarding in every episode. This show has been a trudge. Somehow The Prisoner never left me wondering, what do all these townspeople do with their days when we're not watching them?, a feat its ripoffs never manage. (I was a big Prisoner fan, right down to the DC comics sequel and the GURPS supplement.)

The Whispers is the more promising Mysterious Shit Going Down show, though I'm not sure by how much. If nothing else, the show is more watchable, because it isn't full of people doing weird stilted acting while they pretend nothing's going on. Lily Rabe is in it, which is great, but so is Milo Ventimiglia. I need more episodes to decide what to think of this one, but unlike most of the other new summer shows, at least I'm interested in seeing those episodes.

UnReal has turned out to be the surprise new show of the summer, from fucking Lifetime of all things. It's a Serious Cable Drama that fits Lifetime the way Mad Men fit AMC: just as AMC's brand was invested in nostalgia, the past, and serious drama, Lifetime's brand is invested in melodrama, both strong female characters and crazy ones, and reality shows like The Bachelor. UnReal revolves around a Bachelor-type show called Everlasting, run by exec producer Constance Zimmer (a longtime favorite of mine since Good Morning Miami), who has brought back field producer Shiri Appleby (Roswell) despite her breakdown in a previous season.

There are so many things this show does right:

First, it attacks its subject matter but doesn't parody it. Hotwives notwithstanding, reality shows are poor material for parody, because they're already so broad and ridiculous.

I don't give a shit about reality shows, so thankfully there are other things it does right too -- but that first one is still very important.

Second, Shiri Appleby is kind of the show's Don Draper, to continue the Mad Men analogy. Not because of a Dick Whitman-like past -- the backstory to her breakdown seems to be pretty straightforward, actually -- but because she is very good at what she does, and what she does isn't very pretty. That's been a subplot playing out through Serious TV for a while -- Walter White discovers he's not just a good drug cook, he's a great drug dealer, for instance -- and even apart from the moral greyness, there's always a joy in seeing a character be convincingly good at something. (Again, this is my problem with Halt and Catch Fire.) Appleby's producer is brought in to manufacture drama, to pit contestants against each other and create the narrative of the show-within-the-show. It's shitty business, but the show understands the skill involved, and understands how to portray it.

Third, she's not a villain. She's clearly conflicted about this shit. That said, this show ... brings to mind all the old Mad Men and Sopranos complaints about nobody on those shows being likable. It's a show about people manipulating women and pitting them against each other -- women who are often pretty awful to begin with, but some of whom may be genuine. (None of them stands out for me so far, but neither did Pete's entourage - Ken, Kinsey, Harry - at this point in Mad Men. There is a tall "southern" contestant whose southern accent is just awful, but that is typical of television, unfortunately.)

I used to say that it was more important for me that characters be real than that they be likable. Then I saw Girls, which certainly seems plenty real and which I can't stand watching more than a couple minutes of. So I don't have a pithy explanation of where I stand on likability, empathy, and sympathy. I loved Breaking Bad even when I didn't want Walt to win, and I love rooting for Saul the sleazy lawyer now, and I loved the Sopranos even though Tony became more and more of an asshole with time. I have a sense for why those things are true, which isn't worth getting into when I'm supposed to be talking about UnReal, but the point is that I can't tell yet how it will all work for this show.

bang splat equal at dollar underscore

AMC's computer industry period drama Halt and Catch Fire returns tomorrow for its second season, which Alan Sepinwall -- who I think is far and away the most important TV critic -- assures is significantly better than the first season.

In anticipation of that, my brief thoughts on that first season --

The initial premise is that business suit wildcard Joe (the normally great Lee Pace) and computer dude Gordon team up, along with punky college dropout Cameron, to ripoff the IBM PC by reverse engineering it (like Compaq did in real life).

My father has been in the personal computer industry for nearly as long as there's been one, having left his PhD program in the 60s in order to found a computer company with two of his friends. By the early 1980s, when this show takes place, I was around and certainly well aware of computers (my Christmas wishlists included the early "notebook computers" and 300-baud modems). And that's kind of my biggest problem with the show.

It's like when you're watching a western, and somehow none of the white people are ever racist unless they're bad guys. Except in this case, the history of the early personal computer industry is obscure enough that most of the audience isn't going to be tripped up, most of the time. But it's not history for me, you know? I can't help that so much of the show seems unreal to me.

That problem ties in with a less personal problem, which is the characters. Far and away the best is Donna, Gordon's wife, played by Kerry Bishe from the bizarrely well-cast final season of Scrubs (which also included Dave Franco and future comedy legend Eliza Coupe). Donna might be the brightest of the bunch, and one of the show's strengths is that it lets us realize this early on. Gordon and Donna had tried and failed to go into business for themselves, and now he has the more ambitious job so that she has time to tend the kids, though everyone's circumstances have changed -- for the narratively better -- by the end of the season. Perhaps because she is least central to the plot, Donna is also the most fully realized and nuanced character.

See, the other three -- especially Joe and Cameron -- are an unfortunate collection of Serious Cable Drama tics and cliches, without much consistency. Joe is an erratic wildcard. He's a wildcard, man! He might punch you or screw somebody he shouldn't screw! Whoooa. And Cameron, punky punkity punk punk Cameron, she doesn't design computers according to your RULES, man. Computers want to be FREE, man. She's a VISIONARY, man.

Cameron is an absolutely fucking shitty visionary. For most of the first season I can't stand Cameron.

This is the biggest area where my own experience of the computer industry becomes a stumbling block, but it's not Inside Baseball shit that's getting in my way. Anyone who was alive and using computers in the early 80s would have the same problem: Cameron never once sounds like a real computer person from the 20th century.

Joe is always vague about computers. He's realized the growth potential of the industry, but he's not someone who's going to put a system together in his garage. Gordon is practical enough that most of what he says sounds fine to my ear.

But Cameron is meant to be a visionary, and instead of making her sound like actual real-life visionaries from the computer industry, many of whom are still alive today or have written books, they make her sound like a 21st century audience member who is wandering around 1983 and pointing at computers and saying "we shouldn't make computers like this, we should make them do what they do in 2015." Some of the things that she throws tantrums about are features that were absolutely being discussed in the 80s, but in a "someday we'll be able to do this" kind of way, features that would require several technological revolutions to make possible. They aren't things you could just sit down with a couple people in your company and develop. They took the work of hundreds or thousands of people over many years.

That's my other problem. I'm a historian by training, and one of the most irritating fallacies is the idea that the way history turned out was the way it had to turn out -- the idea, in this case, that the computers we have now are an inevitable consequence of the computers of 1983: that there is a single path the development of the personal computer can take, and it will always transpire the same way. If history did work that way, foreseeing the future development of anything would just require being a little bit smart. No big whoop. You just think about something for a little bit, and it will become obvious to you which changes and improvements will be introduced in the future. Perhaps you'll be off on the timing -- there are funding considerations, after all -- but the broad shapes will be obvious.

Right?

No, not fucking right. There's a whole cottage industry of futurists and they're never fucking right. Pick up any issue of Mondo 2000 for heaven's sake, or an early issue of Wired, and tell me where our grape-sized watermelons are, because I'm pretty sure they were supposed to be the hottest new food of 1995. Futurists are awful at what they do because what they do is not a thing that can actually be done well.

That said, Mad Men may very well get a great deal wrong about advertising in the 1960s. Certainly some people have said so. Does it only not matter to me because it's not my personal experience being contradicted, or because the show had enough else to offer?

I genuinely think the latter. Cameron's insistence on the way computers need to be is a huge part of her inconsistently written character. It's not just a tic, and I often get the feeling that we're supposed to be on her side -- or at least recognize her genius. The ads for season two, for instance, have her demanding online gaming. In 1983. I was playing games online in 1993, a full decade after the show takes place, and as far as they had come in that time, they were:

a) nothing a gamer of today would recognize as a video game (they were entirely text-based)

b) apart from the MUDs and MUSHes that only a very small number of people with internet access could play, most of them were turn-based, and were barely more than adaptations of the play-by-mail games that most of you have never heard of.

Looking forward to a future of online gaming in 1983 is one thing, but trying to get a business off the ground that promises to service flying cars when everyone else is saving up for their first Model T doesn't make you a genius or a visionary. And it definitely doesn't help Cameron's case any when the writers so often make her petulant or frustrated at having to deal with how computers actually are in 1983. It just makes her seem like someone who doesn't actually want to work in the computer industry.

Sepinwall says it'll get better. He's right that there was a significant improvement at the end of the season. We'll see.