jessica jones and the rest of the best

2015 may be one of the best years in television. Though overall weak in comedy, it nevertheless included the final season of Parks and Recreation, which you can either read as standing in for the series' excellence as a whole, or you can admit that the final season had a lot of weaker moments that were made up for with an excellent finale; spectacular second seasons of Review and Broad City; a strong season of Louie; Mindy and Casual on Hulu; Kimmy Schmidt!; Mom transitioning at some point from "the watchable Chuck Lorre show" to "a show that deals sincerely not only with addiction but with loss, dysfunction, and the one thing sitcoms hardly ever touch, consequences"; some fantastic stuff on Peep Show; genuine explorations of depression in Bojack Horseman and You're the Worst; Aziz Ansari's Netflix comedy Master of None, one of the best shows of the year; and new best family sitcom, Fresh Off the Boat.

And that's in the area where 2015 was weakest. Okay, maybe I need to rephrase "weak in comedy" to "weak in network sitcoms."

In drama, you had the final seasons of Mad Men and Justified (and it might well have been the best season of Justified, or at least the best one without Margo Martindale), a season of Rectify that seems to be pushing us toward the end, an especially daring and emotional season of The Americans -- and any one of these shows could be fairly nominated as The Best Show Ever -- and on top of all that, you have Fargo and The Leftovers, the two most exciting and interesting new shows of last year (or two of the three, depending on how you felt about True Detective), managing to produce second seasons that are leaps and bounds ahead of their premiere seasons.

And then. And then! And then you have Jessica Jones.

I've been much less patient with other superhero shows since watching Jessica Jones. Supergirl is light entertainment at best, and burdening a female character with the baggage of the CW-model superhero show somehow feels even more belittling, especially when -- unlike with The Flash -- this is a character who has had her powers for years. The fact that they had an episode in which a plot point revolved around the trouble she was having keeping her powers in check, when she'd been doing that 24/7 for the decade-plus before the pilot, just made no sense. And even The Flash, which has had time to get its sea legs, just feels second-rate now in comparison.

Jessica Jones, as you've already heard, is the first serious superhero show, the first cable-quality superhero show. Daredevil Schmaredevil.

What made me blog about it, though, other than to just mention it in this "best of 2015" context, was a headline that called her the first female version of the cable drama antihero, which spectacularly misses the point. By cable drama antihero, we mean the protagonists of the recent Golden Age of TV -- Don Draper, Tony Soprano, the asshole protagonists. But The Sopranos is a show about how people don't change, maybe can't change -- arguably you can formulate it even more cynically and say it's a show about how people don't improve. And Mad Men certainly isn't heavily invested in reforming Draper.

Jessica Jones isn't about indulging in being an asshole or celebrating the Heisenbergness of Walter White. Jessica Jones is about trauma and responses to trauma. It has more in common with First Blood or Billy Jack -- or noir antecedents like Out of the Past -- than it does with Mad Men. Like those protagonists, Jessica is prickly, just wants to be left alone -- even though she's not genuinely better off left alone -- and you will regret it if you push her. But she gets better. Because this isn't a male "I can kick everybody's ass in this room" fantasy, either. This isn't about the pleasure of being mean. It's about, to some extent, the reasons for becoming mean.

But it's also not just about Jessica. One of the things I like about iZombie is that even in its first season, it took some risks in having there be real consequences to the usual superhero tropes (like Buffy, iZombie isn't a superhero show, but only in the sense that Liv doesn't have a costumed identity or public reputation; the tropes are otherwise all in play). Jessica Jones, which spends less time on case-of-the-week plots, makes those consequences much more central.

I don't want to spoil much. The supporting cast includes Jessica's friend from childhood, Trish Walker (better known as Patsy Walker to comic book fans); bartender and future Netflix show star Luke Cage; and her various neighbors. Jessica's life and choices, which are haunted by her torment a year ago under the influence of the mind-controlling Purple Man, have a real impact on all of these people. (Trish is played by Rachael Taylor, who was on the awful-looking Crisis last year but who struck Caitlin and me as much more intelligent and interesting than you'd guess based on that show when she guested on some late night talk show we were watching -- probably Ferguson -- and she's good enough here that I'd happily watch her in her own spinoff.)

I've talked in other blogs about being a victim of sexual abuse myself, and dealing with that in therapy for years, and while there are key differences between childhood and adulthood trauma -- not to mention the unimaginable trauma of mind control -- many of the experiences of post-event trauma are the same (or at least selected off a shared menu, as it were), and so there was a lot I could relate to here, a lot that made the first few episodes especially -- where it's necessarily to really show where Jessica's headspace is -- hard to get through.

To say that rape and other violence against women is common fodder for TV drama is like saying that many comedy scenes take place in living rooms with only three walls. What is rare, and it is especially shameful and disturbing that it is so rare given just how frequently, how relentlessly, that violence is portrayed, is an actual exploration of the aftermath of that violence.

Not the boyfriend or husband who's motivated by avenging his wife, girlfriend, mother, daughter, or family.

Not the cop who's going to get the son of a bitch who did this, and who maybe keeps thinking about his own wife, girlfriend, mother, or daughter who also died.

Not the advocate or activist or other suit who's like, we gotta do this thing, we gotta fix this thing, we gotta clean up this thing over here, and we gotta do it for Some Lady From Act One! Because That Lady is DEAD!

If you think this isn't important, if you think representation and viewpoint don't matter, if you're fine with every story about violence being about the cop or the boyfriend or the dad who just avenges dead daughters all the time, if you think the young women growing up and sneaking peeks at past-their-bedtime television aren't affected by seeing that the third-hour-of-primetime job they can look forward to when they grow up is Dying And Providing A Serious Man With A Serious Motive, I don't want you to read my blog. I don't have any conversations to have with you. I just checked. I'm all out.

Revenge is not the only way to tell the story of what happens after trauma. It's not even the best way! But letting the woman be the survivor-hero instead of the motive-prop was a fantastic move.

Jessica Jones isn't just about that.

It's also about how exactly one goes about being a crimefighter in a world that has the Avengers but only the movie Avengers -- and the movie Avengers aren't actually superheroes. The movie Avengers are these guys who have come in a couple times to stop weird intergalactic and/or robotic menaces, but they aren't comic book superheroes who actually stop crimes or fight terrorism or ... do superhero shit. They're more like a special special super-special special ops military force. (How are they going to do Civil War when secret identities have been almost completely irrelevant to the franchise thus far? Anyway...)

It's also about the difficulty that a mind-controlling supervillain introduces to the conversation in a world aware that a handful of people like the Hulk and Jessica exist, but not yet jaded to the idea of superpowers (and a world without access to the X-Men intellectual property, so you can't have Professor X come in and testify about mind control either).

It's a show that's able to get into the nuances of a newly superpower-aware world in a way that the movies -- which largely take place thirty stories above the people having these conversations and are full of explosions that drown them out -- never will.

If you're familiar with the comics Jessica Jones is based on, much is changed because much must be. Alias -- no relation to the TV show, how's that for confusing? -- was exactly the kind of comic that you only write, you only publish, because there is a creaky and well-worn Marvel Universe already in place, a universe where you can introduce a character and say "by the way, she used to be an Avenger, and she's good friends with Spider-Woman and Carol Danvers, and some of her cases involve the third Spider-Woman and Speedball and J Jonah Jameson, and also she goes on a date with Ant-Man, the second one," and it all works, and it works even for readers who don't know those characters chapter and verse, because the nature of that particular comics universe is that it doesn't take long to realize it's crowded and it's old. It's like when you start watching General Hospital for the first time, and you don't know anybody or anything, but you don't expect them to slow down and recap it all for you either. You just understand that this density, this dogearedness where you can see the paintings behind the paintings behind the paintings because the canvas has been scraped clean so many times, is part of the show.

The TV show can't do that. It had to lose a lot of what's in the comic. Somehow it lost all that and still got to the heart of what was best about the comic, what was most televisionable about the comic, and then it made that part even better.

Other best things this year! non-television division.

Movie-wise it's sort of pointless to weigh in: most of what will be nominated for the 2015 awards won't play near me either until the new year or ever, after all. I think It Follows and Mad Max were my favorite movies of the year, with an honorable mention for the surprisingly good Unfriended, while Poltergeist and She's Funny That Way were the biggest disappointments. The Visit was well worth seeing in theaters, and Final Girls was very smart. Inside Out lands somewhere in the B minuses as far as Pixar productions go, and seems to cling so closely to their formula that I wonder if they'll ever make another Up or Wall-E, or even another Incredibles.

But like I said: tons of the good stuff, I won't see until next year. The new Kaufman leaps immediately to mind, but I didn't get round to seeing Mistress America yet either.

Musically, the big surprise for me was that Calexico released a new album and it wasn't my favorite album of the year, unlike Algiers and Carried to Dust. But I choose to see that as reflecting how much I liked my actual favorites -- Glen Hansard's new one, Bop English, the Weepies. It was very very nice to see new albums by Robert Forster and the Dave Rawlings Machine, both of which are fantastic, though I wish the Forster were available on fucking CD, for heaven's sake. Beach Slang had the most exciting rock album in a while, and The Soft Moon stood out in the increasingly crowded field of Moods for Moderns nostalgia.

Another seeming disappointment that wasn't actually disappointing was the new Juliana Hatfield Three album -- a terrific album, it's just that a number of the songs are new recordings of tunes she'd previously recorded for her solo albums or the Minor Alps side project. Still, it's a minor quibble for an artist I've loved since the Blake Babies days, and who has only gotten better in the 21st century.

I have a Spotify playlist, more or less ordered, of my favorite 2015 albums.

There are a lot of ways in which Afterlife with Archie and The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina are the best comics coming out right now ... it's just that they so rarely come out, and I have trouble getting over my frustration with that. Especially when new titles continue to be announced despite the publisher's inability to properly service even these two. Still, on the rare occasion when an issue does surface, it's always fantastic.

Thankfully, Bitch Planet comes out more often and makes me feel a little okay about Kelly Sue DeConnick no longer writing Captain Marvel.

The Marvel line in general is experiencing a creative peak unlike anything I've seen in a long, long time (while, simultaneously, DC has become relentlessly boring apart from the ending of Fables). Dan Slott and Mike Allred's Silver Surfer is my personal favorite, and the just-begun Dr Strange series may equal it, especially if Bachalo remains as artist (other than Sienkiewicz or P Craig Russell, who since Ditko would you rather see doing Dr Strange?), but Ms Marvel, Spider-Woman, and the recently wrapped She-Hulk have all been great, and the Star Wars comics are even good. Even the Black Knight and Red Wolf comics are off to a good start, for heaven's sake.

peep show

There seem to be three main groups of British TV broadcast in the US:

Sci-fi, which means almost entirely Dr Who, with occasional miniseries, Red Dwarf, Hitchhikers, and just enough of a dose of Sapphire and Steel that somebody out there other than me must be a fan

Masterpiece Theater stuff like Downton Abbey

The very mixed bag of sitcoms that run the gamut from Absolutely Fabulous to Are You Being Served to Black Adder to The Office. Maybe the common thread here is that until recent years, the well-known British comedies tended to be very very broad. Looking at you, Mr Bean.

(Why we wind up with the British shows we do, and what relationship this sampling has to the whole of British TV, is something I actually think about a lot and derive a lot of frustration from. It's insane to me that there is a fucking channel called BBC America that shows, like, one or two scripted British shows at a time, plus a couple of talk shows and a lot of cars. Think of how much old British content there is, never aired in the US, that surely could not command all that much money in North American broadcast rights. This is like if the Cartoon Network only showed cartoons on Saturday nights. For that matter, with all this goddamn real estate across the 500-channel programming grid, where are all the other English-language shows that should be relatively easy to acquire, or the foreign-language shows that have already been dubbed or subtitled for other English-speaking markets? Jesus Christ.)

I'm sure it can't be representative, but even apart from that it can be bewildering figuring out why -- beyond rights availability, I guess -- certain shows become unavoidable while others remain obscure. The fact that The Office is so much more well known than Peep Show, for instance, is just nuts. I'm not knocking The Office -- it's just that Peep Show is in some ways the perfect companion piece to it, in its early seasons.

Peep Show's one of those British sitcoms where every season is like six episodes long, so the fact that there are eight seasons shouldn't intimidate you - that's a total viewing time of, what, about the first season of Lost? 

The name refers to the heavy use of point of view shots, especially but not entirely of the two main characters, and if it were an American show, it would probably commit entirely to that gimmick, the way How I Met Your Mother spent ten years getting around to meeting the mother and then stopped. But it isn't, and doesn't. The use of voiceover for the inner thoughts of the two leads serves the same purpose as the interview cutaways in The Office and other faux documentaries, but to different effect, since you don't have to cut away from the scene. 

There's a long tradition of terrible people in comedy, obviously, whether as a single member in the cast (Ralph Kramden's a blowhard who abuses everyone around him, Larry David spends most of Curb trying to find the path that indulges his self-centeredness while mitigating its consequences) or, in the post-Seinfeld world, all of the main characters. Sometimes it's a source of a show's brilliance, like with Arrested Development, where Michael Bluth constantly congratulates himself for being better than the rest of his family but is a mediocre and self-serving negligent father who is only able to feel good about himself because of just how much worse the people surrounding him are; sometimes it makes a show just about unwatchable for me, like with Everybody Loves Raymond, King of Queens, or that spate of 2000s comedies about couples bonding over what terrible parents they were. 

There's a more subtle sort of everyone is awful, too, which both versions of The Office capture. It's a mediocre kind of awfulness -- one the US version didn't dwell on very long, but gave you enough glimpses of to realize (until the final lackluster seasons) that, you know what, Jim is kind of a dick who is so sure that he's better than his mediocre job that he constantly belittles Dwight (who the show makes sure we realize is a genuinely good salesman) in large part because Dwight has the gall to care about the job. 

One of the things that weakens the U.S. Office is that it doesn't really fully admit Jim's dickishness or the general mediocrity of the whole bunch -- in part because it can't, not when it has 100 or more episodes to fill and a once-great network to save, and it needs to be likable. So instead we get these increasingly rosy glasses forced on us as we watch these grey tones play out, and this has a lot to do with why the show started to grate even before Michael left.

Enter Peep Show.

Like Jim, Mark Corrigan (David Mitchell) is an office drone at some fucking business that does some fucking thing that we don't need to care about and has no inherent interest (Peep Show never lampoons the meaningless of the business the way The Office does, but that's a whole nother tangent). Like Jim, he has a thing for one of his co-workers, Sophie. Unlike Pam, Sophie isn't taken -- Mark is just timid, anxious, constantly self-questioning (with good reason, admittedly), and has a rival in the form of alpha workmate Jeff.

Everything plays out the way you think ...

... insofar as, you know, Mark and Sophie flirt, and almost get together but don't, and almost get together but don't, and then do get together ...

... and here's the thing. Sophie is fucking awful.

Mark is fucking awful.

They are not fucking awful in ways that are good for or enjoyable to each other. Neither actually likes each other at all by the time they're truly together, which makes for some of the funniest scenes in the series.

I don't mean they're awful like the Always Sunny people, like oh, they've found each other, they can be awful together, I mean they are just really unpleasant to be around, and self-serving and self-absorbed, and each is manipulative but not really all that good at being manipulative so it doesn't come off as being charming or anything, and neither really cares about very much except for Mark's obsession with history (and fascism) and with being respected, and whatever it is that drives Sophie.

And this is all fantastic!

Meanwhile Jeremy (Robert Webb) is Mark's roommate and best friend since college. He's a would-be musician who's been sponging off Mark, but it's clear how badly Mark needs him, and in how many different ways -- the friendship is handled better than in most sitcoms that revolve around A Couple Of Bros, but of course it helps that both of them are absolutely terrible people, that each knows how terrible the other is, that each is accustomed to the other's terribleness, and that they have basically come to terms with this. At one point Jeremy tells himself that he's Mark's "the one," and he's not wrong -- he's the only person Mark can be himself with without being rejected, and vice versa. It's the glue of the series, and what connects many otherwise unrelated plots (though Peep Show has a gift, as with Arrested Development or Seinfeld, for tying disparate elements together, often when one self-serving character sabotages another). 

I've barely scratched the surface of a series that features rampant drug use, each lead's occasional homosexual meanderings, elaborate lies that never work out, etc. It's on both Netflix and Hulu and it's one of the all-time great comedies.

returning tv fall 2015

The season's been going for a bit now and the big shows are back - good time to check in.

Sleepy Hollow and Homeland seem to be dealing with similar problems: redefining, to one degree or another, what the show is about in the wake of previous plots being resolved. In Homeland's case this is something they've been struggling with ever since Damian Lewis left, and in some people's view, ever since the first season ended. You're never going to recapture the magic of "is this guy a terrorist?" And arguably, you shouldn't have tried to.

I don't think there's anyone who would disagree that that first season was the best. At this point my concern is less whether they'll have a season as good as the first one again, and more whether there is a compelling reason for there to still be a Homeland TV show -- especially one with the recognizable elements of Carrie, Saul, and somebody not believing Carrie about something. I realize this show comes to us from the makers of 24, which reran the tape way too many times on a very narrow concept, but ... that's kind of my point. So far, this season hasn't done anything to persuade me that we needed to keep Homeland around.

Sleepy Hollow's situation is a little different, since there's a new showrunner and I have to assume that the change in showrunners was the result of network dissatisfaction with something. But some weird choices have been made. While Katrina's transition to villain last season was clumsy, it's even clumsier to so transparently replace her with one character for each niche she occupied: Betsy Ross as Ichabod-love-interest, Pandora as evil-witch-antagonist. It's just one of those show changes where the seams REALLY show.

On top of that, we've lost John Noble and Orlando Jones, both of whom were under-used in second season but still terrific. Jones was a large part of what made the show great.

So yeah, here too I'm skeptical that this is working. I'm very conscious of the fact that I'm watching because of the first couple seasons, and although season two was all over the place, the first season had hit a very compelling stride with a very specific mix of madness. I don't know if Kurtzman and Orci are still involved or if, like with Fringe, this is a show that is going to sway in very different directions depending on the showrunner at the helm.

Then there are shows that were able to make some minor changes without it throwing everything out of whack. Eddie Huang decided he didn't want to provide voiceovers any longer for Fresh Off the Boat, the sitcom very loosely based on his childhood. At times this makes young Eddie no longer seem like the protagonist in the show, and it would be a shame if they shifted to an ensemble piece. As much as Constance Wu is the best thing about the show -- Emmys, I keep telling you, Emmys -- the show occupies the intersection between two sitcom trends: the look-at-my-childhood sitcom and the look-at-this-family sitcom. Without the focus on Eddie, you lose the focus on 90s hip hop which is the only reason for this show to be a period piece.

The returning shows I was most anticipating this season have all turned out to be interesting:

iZombie may not be a premium-level drama like the other two, but it's one of my favorite network shows, and an interesting show in the Rob Thomas filmog. On the one hand, structurally it's most similar to Veronica Mars, which is maybe also his best show (hard to pick between it and Party Down since they're so different). The lead character solves crimes on an episodic basis, while also having a personal stake in a larger mystery that looms over things. On the other hand, while Veronica wrapped everything up at the end of season one, the supernatural nature of iZombie lets them do something more interesting. Season one ended with Liv coming to a better understanding of why she's a zombie and what's going on (along with other major developments, ho ho), but instead of resolving anything, that just opened things up for further exploration of the mythology in season two.

I don't know that that can be sustained forever -- even dealing with mythology at a greatly slowed rate, the X-Files tangled themselves up pretty famously -- but it makes for a more confident season two than you might otherwise suspect. There have been some inevitable tonal changes thanks to the other developments -- more characters know Liv's secrets now, bad guys are badding it up in different ways, etc. -- but the most noticeable difference has been that the brains Liv eats seem to be affecting her much more than in first season.

This is something I hope they don't give into. The frat boy episode was funny, but it felt like Liv was way more affected by frat boy brains than she had been by computer geek brains, adrenaline junkie brains, etc. I don't remember many episodes where the effects of the brains-of-the-week were so evident in every scene, especially with Liv being so unable to push them down. That could get old. We'll see.

The Leftovers made the unexpected but not at all implausible decision to uproot the main cast and relocate them to a Texas town where no Departures were experienced. So far, in two episodes -- the first told from the perspective of the new cast members native to Jarden, the second covering some of the same ground from that of our Mapleton expats -- there have been more questions raised than anything else, but that's not a complaint. Just when the show feels a little less bleak, we realize Kevin has attempted to kill himself while sleepwalking, and Jarden's secrets are probably going to turn out to be very dark indeed.

But it works. It's not for everyone -- short of Looking, it's probably the most "not for everyone" show on pay cable -- but it is an amazing thing, and the addition of Kevin Carroll and Regina King to this already excellent cast bodes well.

Fargo is in a different boat than any of these other shows. It's essentially an anthology series, although in this case, second season is telling a story involving one of the major supporting characters from first season. It's amazing how confident a single episode feels, even as it seems to throw the kitchen sink at us: a cast of characters already huge before anything has even really happened, a crime scene absolutely worthy of the Coens even before the possibility of aliens is introduced, and a pretty fucking great performance by Kirsten Dunst that somehow stands out despite everything else going on. (The other standout performance in the season premiere: Ann Cusack as the judge.)

You do not have to rewind the clock very far to find a point at which we would not believe this is the kind of show you could get starring Ted Danson, Jean Smart, Brad Garrett, and Kirsten Dunst -- nor, of course, is it starring them in the same sense it would have been at that particular midnight. I have a really good feeling about where things are going, even while I'm kind of thinking I'm not going to have any idea what's going on until the end.

red oaks

Red Oaks is the latest Amazon Prime series, and interesting not only in its own right but because Amazon still hasn't yet developed much of a brand identity. You have the indie movie feel of Transparent and Red Oaks, the serious alternate history drama of the forthcoming Man in the High Castle, and the awful grumpy-cable-man drama of Hand of God, for instance. Right now I guess they're probably just throwing things at the wall and seeing what people watch, without worrying about consistency across the brand.

When I say "indie movie" vis-a-vis Red Oaks, I don't mean to lump it in with Transparent, which is very different in tone. You could call both of them dramedies, but the drama in Red Oaks is very light, as is the comedy. I was expecting something broader -- either something more like Caddyshack or a send-up of 80s movie tropes. But there isn't a hint of satire in the show, even in the "body swap" episode which, true to its title, has two of the characters swap bodies for the day, Freaky Friday style.

Red Oaks is about a college kid, David -- the kid from Richard Ayoade's excellent Submarine -- who's working as a tennis pro at the local country club in the summer of 1985, while putting off registering for classes because he neither wants to continue with the accounting major his father expects him to pursue, nor confront his father and make this clear. Richard Kind (Mad About You/Spin City) and Jennifer Grey play his parents; Paul Reiser, the president of the club. That alone was enough to get me in the door, and they're all great - Reiser is especially convincing as an entitled prick (as is Josh Meyers as the douchey photographer constantly threatening to steal David's girlfriend away).

If I list plot points, or if you watch the pilot to get the lay of the land, it's going to sound flat and predictable and obvious. David and his girlfriend want different things from the next few years of their lives, and spending most of each day apart from each other due to their jobs gives them ample opportunity to be around other people who may be more compatible or more interesting. David's father has had a heart attack that has resulted in underscoring his insistence on making practical choices -- study accounting because if something happens to me you may have to take care of your mother, and accounting is a reliable field, the subtext seems to say. Meanwhile, David's parents are having problems, and his best friend at the club is obsessed with the lifeguard who's dating a jock whose band has a song called "Sex Flu."

But while it's not a masterpiece or anything, the whole is greater than the sum of those parts, perhaps mainly because of tone: because it isn't satire, it doesn't have the challenge of maintaining satire's edge over a sustained period of time, nor of serving the dual and usually conflicting needs of satire and story. Because it isn't a zany comedy, it doesn't get its characters into impossible to resolve situations every episode. It's funny, but with a light touch; it's drama, but not melodrama. It takes place 30 years ago, but it doesn't slam that home with constant shots of pink legwarmers or "Van Halen will never break up" jokes, and you'd be hard-pressed to call it nostalgic in the manner of The Wonder Years (or even The Goldbergs).

The lack of voiceover helps: we have no idea who David has become in 2015, or how he would look back on these events. Does his girlfriend Karen eventually seem like a minor footnote in his love life, or is this the story of how he and his future wife worked their shit out? A voiceover would probably give it away.

Honestly, the show I am most inclined to compare it to is The O.C., and I'm reluctant to make that comparison because a) if you haven't seen The O.C., your impression of what you think I mean is probably very different from what I mean; b) even if you have seen the show, what you and I mean by The O.C. may be two different things depending on how you feel about Marissa Cooper or the final season; c) the comedy of The O.C. was much broader than Red Oaks', and the drama was more melodramatic.

It's ten half-hour episodes that you can watch in a weekend afternoon; they're not urgent but they're pleasant, smarter than most sitcoms, with very little filler or wasted time.

lost

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

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

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

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

And so on.

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

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

Let's get to some details.

fall 2015

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

might as well dance

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

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

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

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



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

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

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

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

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



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



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

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

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

King Richard: Perhaps they're up your butt.

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




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

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

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