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.
Friday, July 15, 2016
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 :(
Tuesday, May 10, 2016
it's not tv, or hbo
Between multiple trips, a long summer cold (okay, it's not quite summer yet), and a busy work schedule, I haven't had a lot of time for blogging, but there also hasn't been a whole lot new to say about television, I don't think. Still, in that time there have been a few streaming shows to check in on, so let's do that:
I'm still not feeling Daredevil ... in fact, far less so in the second season than in the first, which seems to be the consensus of most of my friends, even most of those who liked first season more than I did. Now, part of this -- especially since the main exceptions here are some diehard Daredevil comics fans -- may be that, as I've said before, Daredevil was never the main focus of my comics fandom. Certainly Frank Miller's run was on my radar, but I got into comics more for the weirdness (Dr Strange, Steranko's SHIELD covers, "imaginary stories" and red Kryptonite) than the grimness). Furthermore, I never liked the Punisher, and I was a regular comics reader when he first achieved his fame and got his first solo series, so I was the demographic that was supposed to like him.
Anyway. So I just haven't finished the second season of Daredevil, and who knows if I will.
Elsewhere on Netflix, Flaked was a big disappointment, a big frustration. Will Arnett is great on Arrested Development and Bojack Horseman, and I actually watched both Up All Night and Running Wilde. But this show ... if you haven't seen any of it, Flaked is about an alcoholic in recovery who is a sort of unofficial community leader in his LA neighborhood despite clearly and consistently acting in his own self-interest all the time.
Arnett developed it with Mitch Hurwitz, but somehow Hurwitz forgot one of the key lessons of Arrested Development, and Arnett forgot one of the key lessons of having been married to Amy Poehler: women are funny too, for Christ's sake. The women in Flaked are plot devices at best, and most of the women who appear don't even manage to have that much of an impact. Both plot and laughs are reserved for the men. I was going to say that none of the women have discernible personalities, but I suppose it's more true -- and more damning -- to say that the stronger and more evident their personality is, the crazier they come across, and the more of a nuisance they are to Arnett's character.
Apart from that, Mrs Lincoln, how was the play?
Arnett's Chip is so unlikable that although the plot developments later in the series do make things much more interesting, they don't do anything to redeem him or make him more interesting, especially since they feed into the above problem. That said, some of the writing is strong enough, and some of the performances strong enough -- especially the fantastic George Basil as Cooler -- that it turns into one of the shows where the flaws just frustrate the shit out of you because the good things make you want to keep watching. This is where the binge-watch is handy, because you can just power through it on a Saturday afternoon and it doesn't feel like a heavy time investment.
When Flaked came out, some column by some fiftysomething -- judging by the photo that runs by his byline, so he may be a sixtysomething if it's not a recent photo -- bitched that it was yet another sitcom about yet another rich young kid, which is eyeroll-inducing since a) Arnett was 45 when the show premiered, b) his character is perpetually broke and lives in a store owned by his ex-father-in-law, c) class conflict between the broke residents of the neighborhood and the wealthy developers who want to tear the store and other buildings down is actually a major theme of the show. I think "rich young kid" was a kind of code for "unmarried person without children, in southern California," especially since the other shows the columnist namechecked were Togetherness (in which only one of the four leads is rich, and he's only rich in the second season), You're The Worst (one of the characters has a nice house, but That's Television For You, the characters are pretty clearly middle class), and Love.
Love is another Netflix show, and it's one of my favorites in a while, though I definitely understand why it wouldn't be for everyone. For one thing, both of the leads are total messes, and each can be a total asshole at times.
Love is about Mickey (the great Gillian Jacobs) and Gus (co-creator Paul Rust), who are both go through break-ups from terrible relationships in the first episode and meet at the end of that episode. It's a long time before they actually go out on a date, though -- several episodes, despite Gus's obvious interest in Mickey. There are various reasons for that, but it immediately sets the show apart as very different from Mad About You or A to Z or something -- this is not about love at first sight.
Like I said, they're both messes. Mickey has drug and alcohol problems. Gus is a "nice guy" with a lot of the baggage that self-identified nice guys can bring to the table -- namely that he's not actually that nice when you come down to it, and can be a bully. They're each pretty judgmental about the other -- and they don't have a whole lot in common. There's definitely something there between them, but at the same time, after a while you're not sure whether you're really rooting for them to get together or not or if it's going to be spectacularly unhealthy.
I'm probably not making a great case for it, but you can't sum up the tone of a thing. For me, the show works terrifically. Each character has just enough likable moments for their flaws to feel like things they can overcome rather than indications that they're simply toxic people. It's a tough balance to hit, and maybe I watch enough TV to appreciate that balance.
Another reason to watch is Claudia O'Doherty as Mickey's new roommate Bertie. I don't know what she's done in the past, but I have to imagine she's going to do a lot in the years to come, because she's hilarious.
Moving on from Netflix to Hulu, we have the weird situation of The Mindy Project.
What the fuck happened here?
This is a show that has never been able to sit still for very long. Cast members have come and gone on a regular basis as the show has been constantly reconceived -- remember when Anna Camp was Mindy's best friend? When Stephen Tobolowsky was introduced midway through first season and written out as soon as second season started? The weird ways Adam Pally has come and gone from the show?
But having Mindy and Danny break up and move on via montage only to start building a plot where a different older and more conservative co-worker shows an interest in Mindy? What on Earth is the point?
If Chris Messina has moved on to another show and Mindy Kaling just really likes the dynamic of Mindy Lahiri with an older and more conservative love interest, there would be less clumsy ways of handling it. The only clumsier way of managing it would be to cast a different Italian-American from New York and have him join the practice and immediately start a bantering love-hate relationship with Mindy.
It's hard to judge the decision to have Danny and Mindy break up separately from the Mindy and Jody plot, given that one transitions almost seamlessly into the other. It's a weird choice even if it's completely one-sided and just winds up being a season of Jody pining after Mindy, just because we've been down this road before.
This has never been a consistent show, but lately my incredulity has just made it difficult to even pay attention to.
PIVOT!
On to Horace and Pete, which isn't on a streaming service but is available straight from Louis CK. This is his ten-episode series that you purchase direct from him for download or streaming, starring him, Steve Buscemi, Edie Falco, Alan Alda, and Jessica Lange, with a bunch of people in the supporting and guest cast.
Louie's entering the show as a drama for the Emmys, which is about right. It definitely has funny moments and moments structured like stand-up comedy, but the latter are the weakest parts, overall. Let's see if I can figure out how to sum this show up. Well, Horace and Pete's is a 100 year old bar in Brooklyn, named for its original owners, a pair of brothers. It's always been owned and run by a Horace and Pete ever since, and when we open, it's being run by Horace the 8th (Louie), Uncle Pete (Alda), and Horace's brother Pete (Buscemi). Pete is an outpatient at a mental hospital, who sees monsters and has violent fits if he doesn't take his medication; until that medication was developed, he was hospitalized for many years. Uncle Pete is a grouchy old racist asshole. Horace is devoted to keeping the bar going because it's a safe space for Pete, who has never lived anywhere else -- their apartment is up the stairs from the bar, and was also their childhood home.
Horace and Pete's sister Sylvia (Edie Falco) wants to sell the bar because Brooklyn real estate is worth so much and they can make a lot more money from selling it than they could make from a lifetime of running the place -- especially since the men are insistent on only serving Budweiser and watered-down liquor, no mixed drinks, with separate pricing for the regulars and the hipsters who come in to drink ironically at a dive bar.
So those are your initial conflicts. And those conflicts, that story, plays out satisfyingly, if also bleakly and incredibly depressingly. The story of the factors I've just described is a good one.
Furthermore, this is a show like nothing else, in that it's shot like a play, complete with an intermission. I know that Amy Sedaris's dialogue in the last episode was improvised -- I don't know how common that was.
The weak parts of Horace and Pete fall largely into two areas:
The stand-up-ish bullshit: the bar is populated by barflies whose chatter about current events is frankly not much different from stand-up rants, but which takes a distinctly conservative meatheaded position. Sure, I'm sure this is true to what you hear at bars like this, but it's not like "women who get abortions are all going to hell, and so are the fetuses" is a part of the conversation that's missing from television. Between this show and Louie, Louis CK stands back and gives these guys the mike without challenging them more often than you'd expect for someone who seems personally to be ... if not a liberal exactly, certainly not a Fox News Republican.
Every episode has a scene of these guys spewing this bullshit, and it just doesn't add anything. I would've started fast-forwarding through it, if the controls on the Roku were better.
Secondly, the characters in general can be very hard to like. They're very well-written and realistically conceived -- I understand why they're assholes and where that assholishness comes from. But watching unpleasant people be unpleasant to each other can be that much more unpleasant when it's realistic, you know? It just adds to the bleakness, especially when Horace and Sylvia both have kids, and you wonder how those kids are going to turn out when they become parents in turn, and when this cycle ends, and how far back it goes.
That said. This is a one of a kind thing in television. There is nothing you can point to and say "well, such and such did it better," because there's nothing else out there that's doing this. The last three or four episodes are powerful television, it's just a bit of a climb getting there.
I'm still not feeling Daredevil ... in fact, far less so in the second season than in the first, which seems to be the consensus of most of my friends, even most of those who liked first season more than I did. Now, part of this -- especially since the main exceptions here are some diehard Daredevil comics fans -- may be that, as I've said before, Daredevil was never the main focus of my comics fandom. Certainly Frank Miller's run was on my radar, but I got into comics more for the weirdness (Dr Strange, Steranko's SHIELD covers, "imaginary stories" and red Kryptonite) than the grimness). Furthermore, I never liked the Punisher, and I was a regular comics reader when he first achieved his fame and got his first solo series, so I was the demographic that was supposed to like him.
Anyway. So I just haven't finished the second season of Daredevil, and who knows if I will.
Elsewhere on Netflix, Flaked was a big disappointment, a big frustration. Will Arnett is great on Arrested Development and Bojack Horseman, and I actually watched both Up All Night and Running Wilde. But this show ... if you haven't seen any of it, Flaked is about an alcoholic in recovery who is a sort of unofficial community leader in his LA neighborhood despite clearly and consistently acting in his own self-interest all the time.
Arnett developed it with Mitch Hurwitz, but somehow Hurwitz forgot one of the key lessons of Arrested Development, and Arnett forgot one of the key lessons of having been married to Amy Poehler: women are funny too, for Christ's sake. The women in Flaked are plot devices at best, and most of the women who appear don't even manage to have that much of an impact. Both plot and laughs are reserved for the men. I was going to say that none of the women have discernible personalities, but I suppose it's more true -- and more damning -- to say that the stronger and more evident their personality is, the crazier they come across, and the more of a nuisance they are to Arnett's character.
Apart from that, Mrs Lincoln, how was the play?
Arnett's Chip is so unlikable that although the plot developments later in the series do make things much more interesting, they don't do anything to redeem him or make him more interesting, especially since they feed into the above problem. That said, some of the writing is strong enough, and some of the performances strong enough -- especially the fantastic George Basil as Cooler -- that it turns into one of the shows where the flaws just frustrate the shit out of you because the good things make you want to keep watching. This is where the binge-watch is handy, because you can just power through it on a Saturday afternoon and it doesn't feel like a heavy time investment.
When Flaked came out, some column by some fiftysomething -- judging by the photo that runs by his byline, so he may be a sixtysomething if it's not a recent photo -- bitched that it was yet another sitcom about yet another rich young kid, which is eyeroll-inducing since a) Arnett was 45 when the show premiered, b) his character is perpetually broke and lives in a store owned by his ex-father-in-law, c) class conflict between the broke residents of the neighborhood and the wealthy developers who want to tear the store and other buildings down is actually a major theme of the show. I think "rich young kid" was a kind of code for "unmarried person without children, in southern California," especially since the other shows the columnist namechecked were Togetherness (in which only one of the four leads is rich, and he's only rich in the second season), You're The Worst (one of the characters has a nice house, but That's Television For You, the characters are pretty clearly middle class), and Love.
Love is another Netflix show, and it's one of my favorites in a while, though I definitely understand why it wouldn't be for everyone. For one thing, both of the leads are total messes, and each can be a total asshole at times.
Love is about Mickey (the great Gillian Jacobs) and Gus (co-creator Paul Rust), who are both go through break-ups from terrible relationships in the first episode and meet at the end of that episode. It's a long time before they actually go out on a date, though -- several episodes, despite Gus's obvious interest in Mickey. There are various reasons for that, but it immediately sets the show apart as very different from Mad About You or A to Z or something -- this is not about love at first sight.
Like I said, they're both messes. Mickey has drug and alcohol problems. Gus is a "nice guy" with a lot of the baggage that self-identified nice guys can bring to the table -- namely that he's not actually that nice when you come down to it, and can be a bully. They're each pretty judgmental about the other -- and they don't have a whole lot in common. There's definitely something there between them, but at the same time, after a while you're not sure whether you're really rooting for them to get together or not or if it's going to be spectacularly unhealthy.
I'm probably not making a great case for it, but you can't sum up the tone of a thing. For me, the show works terrifically. Each character has just enough likable moments for their flaws to feel like things they can overcome rather than indications that they're simply toxic people. It's a tough balance to hit, and maybe I watch enough TV to appreciate that balance.
Another reason to watch is Claudia O'Doherty as Mickey's new roommate Bertie. I don't know what she's done in the past, but I have to imagine she's going to do a lot in the years to come, because she's hilarious.
Moving on from Netflix to Hulu, we have the weird situation of The Mindy Project.
What the fuck happened here?
This is a show that has never been able to sit still for very long. Cast members have come and gone on a regular basis as the show has been constantly reconceived -- remember when Anna Camp was Mindy's best friend? When Stephen Tobolowsky was introduced midway through first season and written out as soon as second season started? The weird ways Adam Pally has come and gone from the show?
But having Mindy and Danny break up and move on via montage only to start building a plot where a different older and more conservative co-worker shows an interest in Mindy? What on Earth is the point?
If Chris Messina has moved on to another show and Mindy Kaling just really likes the dynamic of Mindy Lahiri with an older and more conservative love interest, there would be less clumsy ways of handling it. The only clumsier way of managing it would be to cast a different Italian-American from New York and have him join the practice and immediately start a bantering love-hate relationship with Mindy.
It's hard to judge the decision to have Danny and Mindy break up separately from the Mindy and Jody plot, given that one transitions almost seamlessly into the other. It's a weird choice even if it's completely one-sided and just winds up being a season of Jody pining after Mindy, just because we've been down this road before.
This has never been a consistent show, but lately my incredulity has just made it difficult to even pay attention to.
PIVOT!
On to Horace and Pete, which isn't on a streaming service but is available straight from Louis CK. This is his ten-episode series that you purchase direct from him for download or streaming, starring him, Steve Buscemi, Edie Falco, Alan Alda, and Jessica Lange, with a bunch of people in the supporting and guest cast.
Louie's entering the show as a drama for the Emmys, which is about right. It definitely has funny moments and moments structured like stand-up comedy, but the latter are the weakest parts, overall. Let's see if I can figure out how to sum this show up. Well, Horace and Pete's is a 100 year old bar in Brooklyn, named for its original owners, a pair of brothers. It's always been owned and run by a Horace and Pete ever since, and when we open, it's being run by Horace the 8th (Louie), Uncle Pete (Alda), and Horace's brother Pete (Buscemi). Pete is an outpatient at a mental hospital, who sees monsters and has violent fits if he doesn't take his medication; until that medication was developed, he was hospitalized for many years. Uncle Pete is a grouchy old racist asshole. Horace is devoted to keeping the bar going because it's a safe space for Pete, who has never lived anywhere else -- their apartment is up the stairs from the bar, and was also their childhood home.
Horace and Pete's sister Sylvia (Edie Falco) wants to sell the bar because Brooklyn real estate is worth so much and they can make a lot more money from selling it than they could make from a lifetime of running the place -- especially since the men are insistent on only serving Budweiser and watered-down liquor, no mixed drinks, with separate pricing for the regulars and the hipsters who come in to drink ironically at a dive bar.
So those are your initial conflicts. And those conflicts, that story, plays out satisfyingly, if also bleakly and incredibly depressingly. The story of the factors I've just described is a good one.
Furthermore, this is a show like nothing else, in that it's shot like a play, complete with an intermission. I know that Amy Sedaris's dialogue in the last episode was improvised -- I don't know how common that was.
The weak parts of Horace and Pete fall largely into two areas:
The stand-up-ish bullshit: the bar is populated by barflies whose chatter about current events is frankly not much different from stand-up rants, but which takes a distinctly conservative meatheaded position. Sure, I'm sure this is true to what you hear at bars like this, but it's not like "women who get abortions are all going to hell, and so are the fetuses" is a part of the conversation that's missing from television. Between this show and Louie, Louis CK stands back and gives these guys the mike without challenging them more often than you'd expect for someone who seems personally to be ... if not a liberal exactly, certainly not a Fox News Republican.
Every episode has a scene of these guys spewing this bullshit, and it just doesn't add anything. I would've started fast-forwarding through it, if the controls on the Roku were better.
Secondly, the characters in general can be very hard to like. They're very well-written and realistically conceived -- I understand why they're assholes and where that assholishness comes from. But watching unpleasant people be unpleasant to each other can be that much more unpleasant when it's realistic, you know? It just adds to the bleakness, especially when Horace and Sylvia both have kids, and you wonder how those kids are going to turn out when they become parents in turn, and when this cycle ends, and how far back it goes.
That said. This is a one of a kind thing in television. There is nothing you can point to and say "well, such and such did it better," because there's nothing else out there that's doing this. The last three or four episodes are powerful television, it's just a bit of a climb getting there.
Sunday, February 28, 2016
this season in award nominated movies
The Oscars and the Independent Spirit Awards are this weekend (whoops, I did not finish this post before the Spirit Awards), so a quick rundown of my thoughts on the nominated movies I've seen:
Haven't seen: Bridge of Spies, Hateful Eight, Trumbo, Steve Jobs, 45 Years, Straight Outta Compton, The End of the Tour, James White, Mediterranea, Mississippi Grind
The Big Short
Better than I expected. 40% polemic, 40% tutorial, about the housing bubble and subsequent financial crisis and its exploitation. If docu-drama is a thing, is docu-comedy? Adam McKay breaks the fourth wall in damn near every way imaginable in order to keep things moving.
One of the best movies of the year, though? I don't know. I am sick to fucking death of the "movie (sometimes a biopic but not always) about very recent history that you pretty much remember" genre -- Cate Blanchett and Robert Redford in that blatant Oscar-bait Dan Rather movie is a good recent example. They're rarely great movies (or even good stories), they're rarely movies we will revisit fondly ten, twenty, thirty years later.
Do you ever rewatch Primary Colors, for heaven's sake? Or W?
That said, while this is not necessarily a good story in the usual cinematic sense, it's a very interesting use of cinema, and in this case this particular story from recent history is one that's ten years old now and still never really got the attention it deserved. We live in the constant shadow of 9/11 but no one even bothered to properly scapegoat the financial crisis. There is a much more reasonable justification for making this movie than there is the Balloon Boy movie, or the Anthony Wiener movie, or whatever.
Brooklyn
This is wholly Saoirse Ronan's movie -- a well-deserved Best Actress nomination. I hesitate to call it a love story as such, but it's a great and beautiful movie of a sort that is otherwise underrepresented in the Best Picture category this year.
Mad Max: Fury Road
As I think I've written about here before, I was skeptical about a Mad Max movie even once people started praising it, because someone I hadn't heard that it was directed by the original director. Turns out the movie is awesome. I've found that with every year I have less and less patience for action movies. I don't think it's my age (so shut up), I think it's the movies -- I think CGI and the other ways that the filming of action has changed have made them less interesting, and even when I watch Mission Impossible movies or whatever, I have trouble paying attention. They just don't hold my interest.
But this, this worked. This was great.
The Martian
They dropped my favorite joke and I think it's silly to cast pretty boy Matt Damon as a dorky space botanist, but this was both a good adaptation and a good space movie. (It may technically be a "science fiction movie," but classifying it as one seems silly -- you may as well call most Tom Clancy books or James Bond movies science fiction.) However, in a year when people are wondering why the Oscars are so glaringly white, this stands out as needing to justify its place in the room -- sure, it makes sense for the technical awards, but Best Picture? Best Actor? Was this really one of the best stories told this year, one of the best performances on the screen?
Given that even Revenant is based on a true story, is Matt Damon the only Best Actor nominee playing a fictional character? That's just weird.
The Revenant
Birdman was A+ direction, A+ lead performance, B- story for me. And in film, that's okay sometimes. I mean, it's the difference between a great movie and an amazing movie sometimes, but everyone's different, people respond to different things. Some people barely notice the visuals, or mostly notice big explosions and car chases. Me, I have trouble with some Godard movies (though Band of Outsiders is a hall of fame favorite), because I can read about them afterward and understand what was groundbreaking about what he was doing visually, but in the moment of watching, I can't get past how much I dislike his protagonists.
Anyway, what kept striking me about The Revenant was that while the story was engaging enough -- it's a straightforward revenge story, but there's nothing wrong with that -- the visuals were just gorgeous. No shock finding out Inarritu was working with the same DP who worked with Malick on The New World.
Room
Maybe my favorite movie of 2015. Certainly way up there. I read the book after seeing the trailer for the movie, and there are parts they skim over, but I don't think it really matters. It's a movie bound by incredibly strong performances on the part of Brie Larson as a captive woman and Jacob Tremblay as the son she's given birth to in captivity -- performances strong enough that including Joan Allen and Bill Macy in the cast, as great as they are, is just icing on the cake.
Spotlight
Surprisingly good! See my Big Short comments re: what I generally think about "recent history." In this case we're talking about 14-15 years ago, so perhaps right on the cusp between history and recent events -- the same as doing a movie in the 80s about the Vietnam War or the protests about such. There's definitely been enough breathing room, anyway, enough space: since the Boston Globe publicized the scope of the cover-up of sex abuse by priests in the Boston area, similar scandals have been exposed in scores of cities around the world.
Furthermore, in the meantime, so many newspapers have gone through such downsizing that it's difficult to imagine investigative journalism like this taking place -- a staff being given this kind of leeway for this length of time, without the pressure to produce a story right away.
More comments about the movie itself, though. Tom McCarthy has been one of my favorite directors, but his last movie before this, The Cobbler, was startlingly bad. It can't solely be blamed on Adam Sandler -- it wasn't a good movie with a bad star, it was just tonally off and weird. While this movie is a huge improvement, it's hardly a return to form -- there is none of McCarthy's characteristic stamp here, none of his quirky loners or loneliness, apart maybe from the nervous energy of Mark Ruffalo's workaholic reporter. That's not a criticism, just an observation. I'm curious what kind of movie he does next.
Too many white people in the Oscar noms watch: again, like with The Martian, the acting nominations here are questionable.
Carol
Todd Haynes is one of my favorite directors. I think everything he does is just amazing and magical and worth umpteen rewatches. Far From Heaven, Velvet Goldmine, and Mildred Pierce are absolute masterpieces. So I was pretty fucking excited about this movie, even though the leads are actresses I'm always iffy about -- Cate Blanchett because her career seems to be evenly divided between great performances and high-profile stuff that makes me roll my eyes, Rooney Mara because just as my brain was rewriting its Rooney Mara associations to link up with the wonderful Ain't Them Bodies Saints and Side Effects instead of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, they cast her as Tiger Fucking Lily in that Peter Pan movie.
Anyway. There was nothing to be iffy about here. It's one of the masterpieces. Too soon to say if it will be as rewatchable as Far From Heaven et al, but I see no reason to assume it won't be. It's a great love story, a beautiful movie, and the fact that it's not up for Best Director or at least the more expansive Best Picture category is nuts. It's hard not to assume that, unlike Brokeback Mountain or a movie about AIDS or discrimination, it's because in this case, the movie isn't about the tragedies of homosexuality; and unlike The Kids Are All Right et al, there's no friendly straight male character as an audience surrogate. I mean, it would still be an exclusively white movie amid a too-white slate, but the exclusion we're seeing in these nominations isn't only race-based.
Joy
Maybe there are diminishing returns with David O. Russell / Jennifer Lawrence collaborations. This was a good movie, a fun movie, but less memorable than American Hustle (okay, so she only had a supporting role in that), much less Silver Linings Playbook. J Law is still great in it, the story itself just seems surprisingly straightforward for a DOR film.
The Danish Girl
Powerful and sad. Nice to see Alicia Vikander in an acting role after just seeing her in The Man from U.N.C.L.E., which asked so little of her.
Ex Machina
So creepy. What a year for Oscar Isaac and Domhnall Gleeson, who both went on to co-star in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, while Gleeson has supporting roles in both Brooklyn and The Revenant.
Star Wars: The Force Awakens
Only up for a few awards, none of them in the major categories, but let's face it, this is one of my favorite movies of the year. My earliest memories are of Star Wars, and The Empire Strikes Back has especially powerful resonance for me. Furthermore, I'm the kind of speculative fiction writer I am -- with little interest in hard science fiction -- because Star Wars was the first science fiction I was exposed to, I think, and because its popularity led to the rather soft science fiction that was on television when I was growing up (Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers) and drove a lot of my interests in comic books, the subject of a future post. Anyway, Rey and Poe and Finn are all spectacular.
It Follows
It's a toss-up between this and The Babadook for my favorite horror movie since Ju-On. Smart, tense, evocative. Like The Babadook and now The Witch, it got a lot of criticism from horror movie fans -- but there has traditionally been a deep divide between horror movie fans and horror literature fans, and movies like this feel, maybe they're closer to what the latter likes.
Bone Tomahawk
On the one hand, this was a fun, inventive, well-acted and exceptionally well-paced horror-western -- the sort where you don't really know it's even a horror-western until towards the end. On the other, I am still bothered by the choice to make the bad guys Native American cannibals straight out of 19th century dime novels or 20th century pulps, and briefly including a civilized "good Indian" who condemns them just seems like the token action you take to protect yourself from accusations of racism while indulging in the desire to play with what are still racist story tropes.
Love and Mercy
I've already mentioned I usually have no use for biopics -- as much as I like Bryan Cranston, I have no plans to watch Trumbo, and I have less than zero interest in the Steve Jobs movie. I was vaguely aware this movie -- about Beach Boy Brian Wilson at two different times (played by Paul Dano and John Cusack) -- existed, but it wasn't really on my radar until its Independent Spirit Award nominations. It's really quite good, not only because of those two performances but Elizabeth Banks, as the Cadillac saleswoman who goes out on a date with older Brian Wilson and discovers the weirdly controlling entourage (led by psychotherapist Paul Giamatti) that surrounds him.
Inside Out
I thought the hype for this was really overblown. Not as much as some recent animated movies -- I think the out of proportion response to Toy Story 3, The Lego Movie, and Frozen, all of which were just okay, means I know too many parents who are just grateful that a movie they took their kids too wasn't as fucking awful as the Ice Age shit, or more broadly that there are way too many terrible animated features out there. But if you were to list the Pixar movies top to bottom, it'd be smack in the middle.
Anomalisa
Another contender for my favorite movie of the year. Like Haynes and McCarthy, Charlie Kaufman is consistently one of my favorite filmmakers. This isn't Eternal Sunshine Charlie Kaufman, this is closer to Synecdoche New York Charlie Kaufman -- which makes sense, since that's the only other movie he's both written and directed. Like Synecdoche, some people are going to hate it and others will find it impenetrable or dull. It's a stop-motion animated film with three actors: David Thewlis as Michael, Tom Noonan as nearly the entire world, and Jennifer Jason Leigh as Lisa, a seemingly mysterious woman Michael suddenly hears in a hotel and is fascinated by because, well, unlike everyone else in the world, she isn't voiced by Tom Noonan.
Spoilers of sorts in the next paragraph.
I've seen reviews that say this movie doesn't have a twist, and I understand how they mean that -- he isn't "dead the whole time," it isn't Dark City or the Matrix -- but this is a story about loneliness, about a man who is a successful author of customer service books ("treat everyone as an individual") but who is surrounded by a world in which everyone including his wife and son seem identical to him. The twist, such as it is, is that the loneliness turns out to be the product of his own unpleasantness and dickheadedness, his own inability to appreciate other people, not a hell someone or something else has consigned him to. In this story that's still a substantial twist -- but compared to splashier movies it's definitely a minor key story.
Shorts
You know the Oscar-nominated shorts are available On Demand and on iTunes, as well as in a limited number of theaters, right? The specifics have varied every year. In the past, the live-action, animated, and documentary shorts were three separate packages. This year, the live-action and SOME of the animated shorts (no "Sanjay's Super Team," no "We Can't Live Without Cosmos") were all in one package, and the documentaries weren't available. Not sure if that differed in theaters.
As a huge Don Hertzfeldt fan, I have to go with "World of Tomorrow" for the best animated short, although I'm thrilled that the legendary Richard Williams -- director of the unfinished masterpiece The Thief and the Cobbler, animation director on Who Framed Roger Rabbit, animator of the title sequences for What's New Pussycat and A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum -- has a nominated short, the six-minute "Prologue" to his loose adaptation of Lysistrata. He's been working on it for twelve years and intends a ninety minute film; Williams is 82.
Among the live-action shorts it's hard to pick, though "Shok" and "Stutterer" will probably stay with me the most.
Haven't seen: Bridge of Spies, Hateful Eight, Trumbo, Steve Jobs, 45 Years, Straight Outta Compton, The End of the Tour, James White, Mediterranea, Mississippi Grind
The Big Short
Better than I expected. 40% polemic, 40% tutorial, about the housing bubble and subsequent financial crisis and its exploitation. If docu-drama is a thing, is docu-comedy? Adam McKay breaks the fourth wall in damn near every way imaginable in order to keep things moving.
One of the best movies of the year, though? I don't know. I am sick to fucking death of the "movie (sometimes a biopic but not always) about very recent history that you pretty much remember" genre -- Cate Blanchett and Robert Redford in that blatant Oscar-bait Dan Rather movie is a good recent example. They're rarely great movies (or even good stories), they're rarely movies we will revisit fondly ten, twenty, thirty years later.
Do you ever rewatch Primary Colors, for heaven's sake? Or W?
That said, while this is not necessarily a good story in the usual cinematic sense, it's a very interesting use of cinema, and in this case this particular story from recent history is one that's ten years old now and still never really got the attention it deserved. We live in the constant shadow of 9/11 but no one even bothered to properly scapegoat the financial crisis. There is a much more reasonable justification for making this movie than there is the Balloon Boy movie, or the Anthony Wiener movie, or whatever.
Brooklyn
This is wholly Saoirse Ronan's movie -- a well-deserved Best Actress nomination. I hesitate to call it a love story as such, but it's a great and beautiful movie of a sort that is otherwise underrepresented in the Best Picture category this year.
Mad Max: Fury Road
As I think I've written about here before, I was skeptical about a Mad Max movie even once people started praising it, because someone I hadn't heard that it was directed by the original director. Turns out the movie is awesome. I've found that with every year I have less and less patience for action movies. I don't think it's my age (so shut up), I think it's the movies -- I think CGI and the other ways that the filming of action has changed have made them less interesting, and even when I watch Mission Impossible movies or whatever, I have trouble paying attention. They just don't hold my interest.
But this, this worked. This was great.
The Martian
They dropped my favorite joke and I think it's silly to cast pretty boy Matt Damon as a dorky space botanist, but this was both a good adaptation and a good space movie. (It may technically be a "science fiction movie," but classifying it as one seems silly -- you may as well call most Tom Clancy books or James Bond movies science fiction.) However, in a year when people are wondering why the Oscars are so glaringly white, this stands out as needing to justify its place in the room -- sure, it makes sense for the technical awards, but Best Picture? Best Actor? Was this really one of the best stories told this year, one of the best performances on the screen?
Given that even Revenant is based on a true story, is Matt Damon the only Best Actor nominee playing a fictional character? That's just weird.
The Revenant
Birdman was A+ direction, A+ lead performance, B- story for me. And in film, that's okay sometimes. I mean, it's the difference between a great movie and an amazing movie sometimes, but everyone's different, people respond to different things. Some people barely notice the visuals, or mostly notice big explosions and car chases. Me, I have trouble with some Godard movies (though Band of Outsiders is a hall of fame favorite), because I can read about them afterward and understand what was groundbreaking about what he was doing visually, but in the moment of watching, I can't get past how much I dislike his protagonists.
Anyway, what kept striking me about The Revenant was that while the story was engaging enough -- it's a straightforward revenge story, but there's nothing wrong with that -- the visuals were just gorgeous. No shock finding out Inarritu was working with the same DP who worked with Malick on The New World.
Room
Maybe my favorite movie of 2015. Certainly way up there. I read the book after seeing the trailer for the movie, and there are parts they skim over, but I don't think it really matters. It's a movie bound by incredibly strong performances on the part of Brie Larson as a captive woman and Jacob Tremblay as the son she's given birth to in captivity -- performances strong enough that including Joan Allen and Bill Macy in the cast, as great as they are, is just icing on the cake.
Spotlight
Surprisingly good! See my Big Short comments re: what I generally think about "recent history." In this case we're talking about 14-15 years ago, so perhaps right on the cusp between history and recent events -- the same as doing a movie in the 80s about the Vietnam War or the protests about such. There's definitely been enough breathing room, anyway, enough space: since the Boston Globe publicized the scope of the cover-up of sex abuse by priests in the Boston area, similar scandals have been exposed in scores of cities around the world.
Furthermore, in the meantime, so many newspapers have gone through such downsizing that it's difficult to imagine investigative journalism like this taking place -- a staff being given this kind of leeway for this length of time, without the pressure to produce a story right away.
More comments about the movie itself, though. Tom McCarthy has been one of my favorite directors, but his last movie before this, The Cobbler, was startlingly bad. It can't solely be blamed on Adam Sandler -- it wasn't a good movie with a bad star, it was just tonally off and weird. While this movie is a huge improvement, it's hardly a return to form -- there is none of McCarthy's characteristic stamp here, none of his quirky loners or loneliness, apart maybe from the nervous energy of Mark Ruffalo's workaholic reporter. That's not a criticism, just an observation. I'm curious what kind of movie he does next.
Too many white people in the Oscar noms watch: again, like with The Martian, the acting nominations here are questionable.
Carol
Todd Haynes is one of my favorite directors. I think everything he does is just amazing and magical and worth umpteen rewatches. Far From Heaven, Velvet Goldmine, and Mildred Pierce are absolute masterpieces. So I was pretty fucking excited about this movie, even though the leads are actresses I'm always iffy about -- Cate Blanchett because her career seems to be evenly divided between great performances and high-profile stuff that makes me roll my eyes, Rooney Mara because just as my brain was rewriting its Rooney Mara associations to link up with the wonderful Ain't Them Bodies Saints and Side Effects instead of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, they cast her as Tiger Fucking Lily in that Peter Pan movie.
Anyway. There was nothing to be iffy about here. It's one of the masterpieces. Too soon to say if it will be as rewatchable as Far From Heaven et al, but I see no reason to assume it won't be. It's a great love story, a beautiful movie, and the fact that it's not up for Best Director or at least the more expansive Best Picture category is nuts. It's hard not to assume that, unlike Brokeback Mountain or a movie about AIDS or discrimination, it's because in this case, the movie isn't about the tragedies of homosexuality; and unlike The Kids Are All Right et al, there's no friendly straight male character as an audience surrogate. I mean, it would still be an exclusively white movie amid a too-white slate, but the exclusion we're seeing in these nominations isn't only race-based.
Joy
Maybe there are diminishing returns with David O. Russell / Jennifer Lawrence collaborations. This was a good movie, a fun movie, but less memorable than American Hustle (okay, so she only had a supporting role in that), much less Silver Linings Playbook. J Law is still great in it, the story itself just seems surprisingly straightforward for a DOR film.
The Danish Girl
Powerful and sad. Nice to see Alicia Vikander in an acting role after just seeing her in The Man from U.N.C.L.E., which asked so little of her.
Ex Machina
So creepy. What a year for Oscar Isaac and Domhnall Gleeson, who both went on to co-star in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, while Gleeson has supporting roles in both Brooklyn and The Revenant.
Star Wars: The Force Awakens
Only up for a few awards, none of them in the major categories, but let's face it, this is one of my favorite movies of the year. My earliest memories are of Star Wars, and The Empire Strikes Back has especially powerful resonance for me. Furthermore, I'm the kind of speculative fiction writer I am -- with little interest in hard science fiction -- because Star Wars was the first science fiction I was exposed to, I think, and because its popularity led to the rather soft science fiction that was on television when I was growing up (Battlestar Galactica, Buck Rogers) and drove a lot of my interests in comic books, the subject of a future post. Anyway, Rey and Poe and Finn are all spectacular.
It Follows
It's a toss-up between this and The Babadook for my favorite horror movie since Ju-On. Smart, tense, evocative. Like The Babadook and now The Witch, it got a lot of criticism from horror movie fans -- but there has traditionally been a deep divide between horror movie fans and horror literature fans, and movies like this feel, maybe they're closer to what the latter likes.
Bone Tomahawk
On the one hand, this was a fun, inventive, well-acted and exceptionally well-paced horror-western -- the sort where you don't really know it's even a horror-western until towards the end. On the other, I am still bothered by the choice to make the bad guys Native American cannibals straight out of 19th century dime novels or 20th century pulps, and briefly including a civilized "good Indian" who condemns them just seems like the token action you take to protect yourself from accusations of racism while indulging in the desire to play with what are still racist story tropes.
Love and Mercy
I've already mentioned I usually have no use for biopics -- as much as I like Bryan Cranston, I have no plans to watch Trumbo, and I have less than zero interest in the Steve Jobs movie. I was vaguely aware this movie -- about Beach Boy Brian Wilson at two different times (played by Paul Dano and John Cusack) -- existed, but it wasn't really on my radar until its Independent Spirit Award nominations. It's really quite good, not only because of those two performances but Elizabeth Banks, as the Cadillac saleswoman who goes out on a date with older Brian Wilson and discovers the weirdly controlling entourage (led by psychotherapist Paul Giamatti) that surrounds him.
Inside Out
I thought the hype for this was really overblown. Not as much as some recent animated movies -- I think the out of proportion response to Toy Story 3, The Lego Movie, and Frozen, all of which were just okay, means I know too many parents who are just grateful that a movie they took their kids too wasn't as fucking awful as the Ice Age shit, or more broadly that there are way too many terrible animated features out there. But if you were to list the Pixar movies top to bottom, it'd be smack in the middle.
Anomalisa
Another contender for my favorite movie of the year. Like Haynes and McCarthy, Charlie Kaufman is consistently one of my favorite filmmakers. This isn't Eternal Sunshine Charlie Kaufman, this is closer to Synecdoche New York Charlie Kaufman -- which makes sense, since that's the only other movie he's both written and directed. Like Synecdoche, some people are going to hate it and others will find it impenetrable or dull. It's a stop-motion animated film with three actors: David Thewlis as Michael, Tom Noonan as nearly the entire world, and Jennifer Jason Leigh as Lisa, a seemingly mysterious woman Michael suddenly hears in a hotel and is fascinated by because, well, unlike everyone else in the world, she isn't voiced by Tom Noonan.
Spoilers of sorts in the next paragraph.
I've seen reviews that say this movie doesn't have a twist, and I understand how they mean that -- he isn't "dead the whole time," it isn't Dark City or the Matrix -- but this is a story about loneliness, about a man who is a successful author of customer service books ("treat everyone as an individual") but who is surrounded by a world in which everyone including his wife and son seem identical to him. The twist, such as it is, is that the loneliness turns out to be the product of his own unpleasantness and dickheadedness, his own inability to appreciate other people, not a hell someone or something else has consigned him to. In this story that's still a substantial twist -- but compared to splashier movies it's definitely a minor key story.
Shorts
You know the Oscar-nominated shorts are available On Demand and on iTunes, as well as in a limited number of theaters, right? The specifics have varied every year. In the past, the live-action, animated, and documentary shorts were three separate packages. This year, the live-action and SOME of the animated shorts (no "Sanjay's Super Team," no "We Can't Live Without Cosmos") were all in one package, and the documentaries weren't available. Not sure if that differed in theaters.
As a huge Don Hertzfeldt fan, I have to go with "World of Tomorrow" for the best animated short, although I'm thrilled that the legendary Richard Williams -- director of the unfinished masterpiece The Thief and the Cobbler, animation director on Who Framed Roger Rabbit, animator of the title sequences for What's New Pussycat and A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum -- has a nominated short, the six-minute "Prologue" to his loose adaptation of Lysistrata. He's been working on it for twelve years and intends a ninety minute film; Williams is 82.
Among the live-action shorts it's hard to pick, though "Shok" and "Stutterer" will probably stay with me the most.
Tuesday, February 9, 2016
crazy ex-girlfriend
I feel like at least once an episode, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend wins me over again.
And maybe it's like, because it feels like it needs to, because of the title and the premise: after running into her junior high summer camp boyfriend (a relationship she's never gotten over), Rebecca impulsively quits her job in New York to move to his small hometown in California in the hopes of reconnecting with him ("it's a lot more nuanced than that," the title song insists), before realizing that a) he's in a serious relationship and b) this is a crazy plan. P.S. like Galavant, this is a musical comedy.
But for instance, in the latest episode, the inciting incident is Rebecca accidentally sending a text ABOUT Josh (the junior high summer camp boyfriend) TO Josh instead of Paula, her new best friend / co-worker at the small law firm in town. We've seen this basic premise a million times, long before text messages, and so the show immediately skips over one of the usual beats -- instead of a lot of dancing around during the important business meeting when this happens, Paula calls a halt to the meeting, tells everyone what happened, and they drop everything to brainstorm the best solution.
"Tell him it's opposite day!"
"We could say you were hacked."
etc.
Naturally they all break into song.
She winds up with a police escort on her way to get to his phone before either he or his girlfriend (who knows Rebecca's into him but can't get Josh to believe her) can see the text.
That's exactly what I mean. A lot of the situations in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend are familiar, but the show and creator-star Rachel Bloom play with that familiarity. Just as Galavant pokes fun at the tropes of its genre, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend pokes at the tropes of romantic comedies and modern dating -- though I'm going to stop comparing the two there.
The second time in this particular episode when I was won over again? Paula's explaining Rebecca's whole deal to her husband, Scott, and their conversation happens to be the lyrics to the show's theme song. It's goofy, but it works, which is kind of the show in a nutshell.
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend isn't exactly about a crazy ex-girlfriend, not least because Rebecca and Josh "dated" at summer camp when they were kids. Furthermore, it's clear that Rebecca's unhappiness in the pilot went deeper than relationship issues. She hasn't worked out why she's been dissatisfied, but despite her professional success, the last time she can remember being happy is when she was at summer camp dating Josh. On some level, the show is more about Rebecca dealing with the fact that she has been living an unhappy life, and dealing with the consequences of the fact that she finally took radical action to improve that life -- action that is hard to explain to anyone else, and hard for anyone to interpret as anything other than stalking Josh.
On the other hand, Rebecca refuses to give up on her infatuation with Josh, spending the first half of the season denying it to anyone who asks and finally confessing to Paula that yes, she really is obsessed with him. Even though Josh's girlfriend is pretty terrible, it's sort of hard to root for Josh and Paula getting together -- not just because Josh has a good friend who briefly dates Rebecca and is a better match for her, but because Rebecca can't speak for more than thirty seconds without saying something that Josh needs explained. Maybe they were on the same level when they were 14, but they're not dealing from the same deck of cards today.
The show does not sum up well, and there are people who will just never get past the title or premise, but it's increasingly remarkable, a show with a real voice. Rachel Bloom is a genuine talent, and I don't know what this show looks like in its third or fourth season, but I hope it gets there.
And maybe it's like, because it feels like it needs to, because of the title and the premise: after running into her junior high summer camp boyfriend (a relationship she's never gotten over), Rebecca impulsively quits her job in New York to move to his small hometown in California in the hopes of reconnecting with him ("it's a lot more nuanced than that," the title song insists), before realizing that a) he's in a serious relationship and b) this is a crazy plan. P.S. like Galavant, this is a musical comedy.
But for instance, in the latest episode, the inciting incident is Rebecca accidentally sending a text ABOUT Josh (the junior high summer camp boyfriend) TO Josh instead of Paula, her new best friend / co-worker at the small law firm in town. We've seen this basic premise a million times, long before text messages, and so the show immediately skips over one of the usual beats -- instead of a lot of dancing around during the important business meeting when this happens, Paula calls a halt to the meeting, tells everyone what happened, and they drop everything to brainstorm the best solution.
"Tell him it's opposite day!"
"We could say you were hacked."
etc.
Naturally they all break into song.
She winds up with a police escort on her way to get to his phone before either he or his girlfriend (who knows Rebecca's into him but can't get Josh to believe her) can see the text.
That's exactly what I mean. A lot of the situations in Crazy Ex-Girlfriend are familiar, but the show and creator-star Rachel Bloom play with that familiarity. Just as Galavant pokes fun at the tropes of its genre, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend pokes at the tropes of romantic comedies and modern dating -- though I'm going to stop comparing the two there.
The second time in this particular episode when I was won over again? Paula's explaining Rebecca's whole deal to her husband, Scott, and their conversation happens to be the lyrics to the show's theme song. It's goofy, but it works, which is kind of the show in a nutshell.
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend isn't exactly about a crazy ex-girlfriend, not least because Rebecca and Josh "dated" at summer camp when they were kids. Furthermore, it's clear that Rebecca's unhappiness in the pilot went deeper than relationship issues. She hasn't worked out why she's been dissatisfied, but despite her professional success, the last time she can remember being happy is when she was at summer camp dating Josh. On some level, the show is more about Rebecca dealing with the fact that she has been living an unhappy life, and dealing with the consequences of the fact that she finally took radical action to improve that life -- action that is hard to explain to anyone else, and hard for anyone to interpret as anything other than stalking Josh.
On the other hand, Rebecca refuses to give up on her infatuation with Josh, spending the first half of the season denying it to anyone who asks and finally confessing to Paula that yes, she really is obsessed with him. Even though Josh's girlfriend is pretty terrible, it's sort of hard to root for Josh and Paula getting together -- not just because Josh has a good friend who briefly dates Rebecca and is a better match for her, but because Rebecca can't speak for more than thirty seconds without saying something that Josh needs explained. Maybe they were on the same level when they were 14, but they're not dealing from the same deck of cards today.
The show does not sum up well, and there are people who will just never get past the title or premise, but it's increasingly remarkable, a show with a real voice. Rachel Bloom is a genuine talent, and I don't know what this show looks like in its third or fourth season, but I hope it gets there.
Saturday, February 6, 2016
midwinter check-in
I mentioned Galavant earlier; this winter, early spring, whatever this season is in this post-season realm of post-television television, it became the comedy I most looked forward to. I'm not sure if second season is necessarily better than the first -- they're hard to compare -- so much as that more of a spotlight is given to my favorite character, Timothy Omundson's King Richard. While Karen David's Isabella was essentially the deuteragonist of the first season, her role was somewhat reduced in second season -- my only complaint -- with Richard assuming that role, and Galavant and Richard's quest often taking the form of a buddy comedy in the same way that Galavant and Isabella's in first season followed the trope of the guy who falls for his platonic female friend while trying to impress/win back/rescue his putative love interest.
Even apart from the music itself, it's a very smart and clever show, very playful and sometimes arch, right down to Kylie Minogue playing the Queen of the Enchanted Forest, which turns out to be a gay bar. Please let that be a recurring role.
But as good as everyone else is, Richard is the highlight. Richard is amazing. Richard is one of my favorite characters in TV comedy.
Speaking of which -- the other show I find myself looking forward to every week is New Girl, which I would not have believed when it premiered. I openly scorned this show in its first season, having absolutely hated the pilot. When Jake Johnson started showing up in movies I liked, it pissed me off that he was stuck in a shitty show like New Girl. But I would catch pieces of episodes because we didn't have a DVR yet and it was paired with some other show I watched -- Mindy Project, maybe? -- and in time I started watching for Max Greenfield's Schmidt. And before long I was just watching, period, and tolerating Zooey Deschanel's Jess. And since then, either Jess has become less of an obnoxiously precious pixie or I've become used to her, I don't know. Greenfield and Johnson were my main reasons to watch, but, video-game style, the writers have unlocked the secrets to the comedy of everybody else over time, and my favorite scenes are often classic Winston and Cece mess-arounds. It was never that Lamorne Morris and Hannah Simone weren't funny, just that the writers couldn't figure out how to write Winston consistently -- and then sort of made that the point -- and Cece's role as Jess's best friend or Schmidt's crush sometimes made her more plot device than character. Those problems seem to be in the past.
It's not on the level of Happy Endings, Community, or Parks and Rec, don't get me wrong -- nothing at that level seems to be on the schedule right now. Although as far as shows that have the potential to get there, The Grinder turned out to be a hell of a lot funnier than I expected it to be. I don't really understand the Arrested Development comparisons I've seen some people make -- I think you need to rewatch Arrested Development if you think any show can be compared to it -- but:
a) the cast is so fucking solid, and it says a lot about Mary Elizabeth Ellis (the Waitress on Always Sunny) and Natalie Morales (The Middleman, Trophy Wife) that they fit in fine with veterans like Rob Lowe, Fred Savage (who is doing really great work here), and William Devane. Timothy Olyphant's recurring role as himself contributes so much both to the show and to Rob Lowe's character that part of me kind of hopes Tim-O doesn't get his own show and becomes a regular here? I knew he could be funny, but he is perfectly cast here.
b) the show is just meta enough without being a parody, a satire, a send-up, whatever. Actor who played lawyer on not-at-all believable TV show moves back home after his show ends, joins the family law firm in non-lawyer capacity, overshadows his hard-working brother by treating every case like one of his episodes. It's like ... what that Disney movie Bolt was supposed to be. And of course, every episode starts with the family watching an episode of the show-within-a-show.
Everyone is good, and the writing is solid, but the show is absolutely dependent on Rob Lowe's ability to sell his character, and he pulls it off. The Emmys ignored him on Parks, but maybe this will change things.
Meanwhile, off in superhero-world, Supergirl continues to improve, although it also continues to borrow more and more elements from Superman -- having already made Jimmy (James) Olsen part of the cast, they've now had a Toyman episode, introduced Bizarro (and it's Bizarro Supergirl, not Bizarro Superman), and written Max Lord as just a Lex Luthor who hits on Kara's sister instead of on Lois Lane.
Legends of Tomorrow has a boring name but a fun premise -- superheroes and supervillains culled from the Flash and Arrow shows are gathered by Rip Hunter to bounce around in time trying to stop immortal bad dude Vandal Savage. Wentworth Miller's Captain Cold and Caity Lotz's Canary are the standouts here, though I love that Rory from Dr Who is playing a Time Lord now -- but man, the fatal flaw of the show is that the guy playing Vandal Savage is just not good!
I've just looked him up, he's a Danish actor, and maybe in his native language he's a better actor, but here he's a) too campy to take seriously and b) this may be like ... voic-ist or something ... but his voice is simply too high-pitched for him to be a compelling evil immortal mastermind. It's a comic book show. There are conventions to be followed. Maybe if he were a better actor he could pull it off or if the writing were great it wouldn't matter, but in the show as it stands, it matters. Dude is just not convincing me that he's a threat to a box of kittens, much less to this time machine full of superfolks.
In other dramas, I really hope this turns out to be the final season of The Good Wife. As you may have heard, the showrunner-creators are leaving one way or the other (remaining as uninvolved producers) but CBS wants to sally forth if they can get the actors to stay. Between Peter's bid for the presidency, Alicia's solo venture, Eli telling Alicia about that thing that time ... this feels like a proper final season. This feels like time. I love the show, I love Eli Gold, I love Diane Lockhart, I think they did a great job adding the improbably named Cush Jumbo to the cast, and I love all these crazy judges and opposing attorneys, but it's time to either move on or make a spinoff starring the fantastic Carrie Preston.
I've been altogether deeply disappointed by Sleepy Hollow, a show I vocally championed in its first two seasons, this year. It simply doesn't feel like the same show, and I let it languish on the DVR until it feels like we have to watch it.
American Crime Story: The People vs. O.J. is only one episode in, but it seems like it might be ... really good? Caitlin had to convince me this would be worth watching, but she was right. Maybe it helps that the show actually originated outside of Ry-Murpland and was brought into the fold after development had begun, I don't know. I guess it explains why Evan Peters isn't playing Kato Kaelin, anyway.
The Sci-Fi Channel, which I think is now called Syfy or SyFy or sYfY or essWHYeffWHY or some fucking thing, has adapted Lev Grossman's Magicians series, which is an interesting thing. I had some issues with the books, and I have some issues with the show, but it turns out they are not even the same issues!
Nevermind the issues with the books, by and large -- the biggest one was that I didn't like the main character, Quentin, very much. So far that is mitigated somewhat in the show by rearranging the presentation of the story a bit so that we get Julia's story at the same time as Quentin's instead of hearing about it later in flashback.
The Magicians is like an adult version of Harry Potter meets Narnia: magic is real but, as in those books, hardly anyone realizes it, and as in the Potterverse, its proper use is taught at special schools. The first book begins with Quentin finding out about and attending Brakebills, one such school -- unlike Harry Potter, this is a college, not a boarding school for berobed tots, so you have drunken sorcery and whatnot going on. Which is great! It's fun!
And that's my main issue with the show right there: it moves FAST. In the books, the "meets Narnia" part doesn't happen right away, but the show introduces the Narnia analogue of Fillory immediately and is rushing toward it. It seems to me that if you have the television rights to "the grown-up version of a Harry Potter type school for college kids, where they drink and screw and stuff," and there are only three books in the series, the most marketable thing to do is to linger at the school for as long as possible. Spend at least a season showing us what normal life at a college learning magic is like, because surely that is fascinating and challenging and dramatic on its own, right?
But the show doesn't seem interested in doing that, and it feels like dramatic potential squandered.
It's doing a decent job of what it is interested in -- calling it the best Sci Fi Channel show since Battlestar Galactica is faint praise, but nevertheless -- with the other key problem being that the most interesting female role, Alice, has been either underwritten, badly miscast, or both. I think it's a little of both, because I can't imagine anyone who hasn't read the books watching this and thinking of her as the most interesting of these women. Again, it's a shame -- squandered potential, because the book version is a great character, and this is only slightly made up for by the fact that they are doing better by Julia (so far).
Even apart from the music itself, it's a very smart and clever show, very playful and sometimes arch, right down to Kylie Minogue playing the Queen of the Enchanted Forest, which turns out to be a gay bar. Please let that be a recurring role.
But as good as everyone else is, Richard is the highlight. Richard is amazing. Richard is one of my favorite characters in TV comedy.
Speaking of which -- the other show I find myself looking forward to every week is New Girl, which I would not have believed when it premiered. I openly scorned this show in its first season, having absolutely hated the pilot. When Jake Johnson started showing up in movies I liked, it pissed me off that he was stuck in a shitty show like New Girl. But I would catch pieces of episodes because we didn't have a DVR yet and it was paired with some other show I watched -- Mindy Project, maybe? -- and in time I started watching for Max Greenfield's Schmidt. And before long I was just watching, period, and tolerating Zooey Deschanel's Jess. And since then, either Jess has become less of an obnoxiously precious pixie or I've become used to her, I don't know. Greenfield and Johnson were my main reasons to watch, but, video-game style, the writers have unlocked the secrets to the comedy of everybody else over time, and my favorite scenes are often classic Winston and Cece mess-arounds. It was never that Lamorne Morris and Hannah Simone weren't funny, just that the writers couldn't figure out how to write Winston consistently -- and then sort of made that the point -- and Cece's role as Jess's best friend or Schmidt's crush sometimes made her more plot device than character. Those problems seem to be in the past.
It's not on the level of Happy Endings, Community, or Parks and Rec, don't get me wrong -- nothing at that level seems to be on the schedule right now. Although as far as shows that have the potential to get there, The Grinder turned out to be a hell of a lot funnier than I expected it to be. I don't really understand the Arrested Development comparisons I've seen some people make -- I think you need to rewatch Arrested Development if you think any show can be compared to it -- but:
a) the cast is so fucking solid, and it says a lot about Mary Elizabeth Ellis (the Waitress on Always Sunny) and Natalie Morales (The Middleman, Trophy Wife) that they fit in fine with veterans like Rob Lowe, Fred Savage (who is doing really great work here), and William Devane. Timothy Olyphant's recurring role as himself contributes so much both to the show and to Rob Lowe's character that part of me kind of hopes Tim-O doesn't get his own show and becomes a regular here? I knew he could be funny, but he is perfectly cast here.
b) the show is just meta enough without being a parody, a satire, a send-up, whatever. Actor who played lawyer on not-at-all believable TV show moves back home after his show ends, joins the family law firm in non-lawyer capacity, overshadows his hard-working brother by treating every case like one of his episodes. It's like ... what that Disney movie Bolt was supposed to be. And of course, every episode starts with the family watching an episode of the show-within-a-show.
Everyone is good, and the writing is solid, but the show is absolutely dependent on Rob Lowe's ability to sell his character, and he pulls it off. The Emmys ignored him on Parks, but maybe this will change things.
Meanwhile, off in superhero-world, Supergirl continues to improve, although it also continues to borrow more and more elements from Superman -- having already made Jimmy (James) Olsen part of the cast, they've now had a Toyman episode, introduced Bizarro (and it's Bizarro Supergirl, not Bizarro Superman), and written Max Lord as just a Lex Luthor who hits on Kara's sister instead of on Lois Lane.
Legends of Tomorrow has a boring name but a fun premise -- superheroes and supervillains culled from the Flash and Arrow shows are gathered by Rip Hunter to bounce around in time trying to stop immortal bad dude Vandal Savage. Wentworth Miller's Captain Cold and Caity Lotz's Canary are the standouts here, though I love that Rory from Dr Who is playing a Time Lord now -- but man, the fatal flaw of the show is that the guy playing Vandal Savage is just not good!
I've just looked him up, he's a Danish actor, and maybe in his native language he's a better actor, but here he's a) too campy to take seriously and b) this may be like ... voic-ist or something ... but his voice is simply too high-pitched for him to be a compelling evil immortal mastermind. It's a comic book show. There are conventions to be followed. Maybe if he were a better actor he could pull it off or if the writing were great it wouldn't matter, but in the show as it stands, it matters. Dude is just not convincing me that he's a threat to a box of kittens, much less to this time machine full of superfolks.
In other dramas, I really hope this turns out to be the final season of The Good Wife. As you may have heard, the showrunner-creators are leaving one way or the other (remaining as uninvolved producers) but CBS wants to sally forth if they can get the actors to stay. Between Peter's bid for the presidency, Alicia's solo venture, Eli telling Alicia about that thing that time ... this feels like a proper final season. This feels like time. I love the show, I love Eli Gold, I love Diane Lockhart, I think they did a great job adding the improbably named Cush Jumbo to the cast, and I love all these crazy judges and opposing attorneys, but it's time to either move on or make a spinoff starring the fantastic Carrie Preston.
I've been altogether deeply disappointed by Sleepy Hollow, a show I vocally championed in its first two seasons, this year. It simply doesn't feel like the same show, and I let it languish on the DVR until it feels like we have to watch it.
American Crime Story: The People vs. O.J. is only one episode in, but it seems like it might be ... really good? Caitlin had to convince me this would be worth watching, but she was right. Maybe it helps that the show actually originated outside of Ry-Murpland and was brought into the fold after development had begun, I don't know. I guess it explains why Evan Peters isn't playing Kato Kaelin, anyway.
The Sci-Fi Channel, which I think is now called Syfy or SyFy or sYfY or essWHYeffWHY or some fucking thing, has adapted Lev Grossman's Magicians series, which is an interesting thing. I had some issues with the books, and I have some issues with the show, but it turns out they are not even the same issues!
Nevermind the issues with the books, by and large -- the biggest one was that I didn't like the main character, Quentin, very much. So far that is mitigated somewhat in the show by rearranging the presentation of the story a bit so that we get Julia's story at the same time as Quentin's instead of hearing about it later in flashback.
The Magicians is like an adult version of Harry Potter meets Narnia: magic is real but, as in those books, hardly anyone realizes it, and as in the Potterverse, its proper use is taught at special schools. The first book begins with Quentin finding out about and attending Brakebills, one such school -- unlike Harry Potter, this is a college, not a boarding school for berobed tots, so you have drunken sorcery and whatnot going on. Which is great! It's fun!
And that's my main issue with the show right there: it moves FAST. In the books, the "meets Narnia" part doesn't happen right away, but the show introduces the Narnia analogue of Fillory immediately and is rushing toward it. It seems to me that if you have the television rights to "the grown-up version of a Harry Potter type school for college kids, where they drink and screw and stuff," and there are only three books in the series, the most marketable thing to do is to linger at the school for as long as possible. Spend at least a season showing us what normal life at a college learning magic is like, because surely that is fascinating and challenging and dramatic on its own, right?
But the show doesn't seem interested in doing that, and it feels like dramatic potential squandered.
It's doing a decent job of what it is interested in -- calling it the best Sci Fi Channel show since Battlestar Galactica is faint praise, but nevertheless -- with the other key problem being that the most interesting female role, Alice, has been either underwritten, badly miscast, or both. I think it's a little of both, because I can't imagine anyone who hasn't read the books watching this and thinking of her as the most interesting of these women. Again, it's a shame -- squandered potential, because the book version is a great character, and this is only slightly made up for by the fact that they are doing better by Julia (so far).
Tuesday, January 26, 2016
thirtysomething and othersomethings
I recently binge-watched the entirety of Thirtysomething on Hulu, shortly after being disappointed by Casual and the second season of Transparent -- both of which I think I can fairly call its descendants.
I'd seen some of Thirtysomething when it first aired in the late 80s and early 90s, and again when it reaired on basic cable in the mid-90s, but that means it'd been a minimum of 20 years since I'd seen any of it, and that particular 20 years is a lot of television history. A lot of television history that the show had a pretty deep impact on, as it turns out. Hill Street Blues, St Elsewhere (especially after its first couple seasons), and Thirtysomething -- those were the shows that over the course of the 1980s first started leaning heavily on viewer attention span. While Wiseguy was strongly serialized, it basically functioned like a series of miniseries with an occasional standalone episode as a palate cleanser. These other three shows were different -- any given episode might have a couple self-contained plots as well as serving ongoing plots that might be leftover from the previous episode, might take three or four episodes to resolve, might play out over the course of the whole season.
Hill Street Blues was a cop show. There had been plenty of cop shows before, which doesn't diminish Hill Street's importance any: it's a mammoth show, and without it or something else doing its work, there'd be no NYPD Blue, no Wire, no Shield. It created the modern police drama.
St Elsewhere was a hospital show. There had been plenty of hospital shows before.
But Thirtysomething ... Thirtysomething wasn't a workplace show, it wasn't a comedy, it wasn't a soap opera. The closest predecessor I'm familiar with is Family, the 1970s drama both Aaron Spelling and Mike Nichols worked on, but Family had more in common with its immediate successors like Eight is Enough -- and later watered-down (though I suppose, objectively more successful) versions like 7th Heaven -- in that the focus was, like with many sitcoms, primarily on a single family household, with the innovation being to tell their story as an hour-long show rather than a 25-minute sitcom.
The difference between Thirtysomething and Family is all in the name. Family is about a family. Thirtysomething is about, well, thirtysomethings (a term the series popularized) -- two couples, each of whom have young kids who are never old enough to be characters in their own right, and three friends who are single when the series begins.
Thirtysomething's strength is exactly what its detractors didn't like about it: it's a show about young grown-ups whose challenges are not particularly unusual. That is, it's not one of the workplace genres -- it's not a cop, lawyer, doctor, or detective show -- and it's not a soap opera. Over the course of the whole four seasons, there are some deaths and break-ups and betrayals, but fewer than in any handful of episodes of Dynasty. Even a recent show like Parenthood stretched credulity, both with things like Kristina's ill-advised and unlikely run for office and in terms of "how many dramatic events can occur in the same family over the course of a few years?", compared to Thirtysomething's commitment to realism.
And there's the rub: if you don't have murders to solve or lives to save, if you don't at least have the heavy workplace drama of Mad Men week in and week out, what do you do to fill your time, without making your show either soap opera -- evil twins, everyone cheating on everyone with everyone else, unlikely plot developments at every turn -- or melodrama (by which I mean, in this case, over the top emotional hand-wringing over everything in order to make the small seem large)?
Well, the show was accused of being melodramatic more than once, but that just meant people weren't paying attention. That time was filled the same way it's filled in real life: sometimes characters complain about things that are small. They aren't small to them. They aren't small to us when they happen to us. But they're small by television standards. Michael has forgotten to put his laundry in the hamper for days on end and Hope is tired of reminding him. They have a young child and he has a busy job and they're both distracted, but Hope is tired of being the one to pick up the slack just by virtue of being the one who stays at home. It's an argument about a small thing, eventually an argument about many small things, one they acknowledge is about small things, but it's also an argument about lifestyle choices -- Michael's decision to open a small firm with his friend Elliott, which means working longer and less predictable hours instead of having a dependable 9-5 schedule the way he could if he had remained a cog in the machine at a larger company; Hope and Michael's decision to have a baby at this particular time in their lives; the minor inconveniences of the fixer-upper of a house they bought, and the fact that Michael's income is right at that level where they can afford to fix those inconveniences, but not all at once, and not without being more careful with their spending than they thought they'd have to be at this point in their lives and careers.
The show has time to unspool all of this because this isn't a subplot about two people in a lawyer show or a Cylon show. It's not just there to add some color so you can keep track of which CSI is which. It's what the show is actually about. It's a show about regular people.
It's definitely a show about regular people who are predominantly white and upper middle class, although I'm not sure it's any worse in those respects than most of television in the late 80s -- or now, for that matter.
You can't talk about Thirtysomething separately from its era, of course. One reason it was interesting rewatching it is because I was younger than the characters when it first aired, and older now -- though they were younger than my parents. That's another important signal in the title. Thirtysomethings in the late 80s were the tail end of the Baby Boom, whereas my parents were born at the very beginning of the Boom. My father's childhood was represented on Leave it to Beaver, not the Wonder Years, and while my parents missed out on the hippies and the Summer of Love because they were married, employed, college graduates starting a family by then, the Thirtysomething characters missed out because they were still kids. They started college in the 70s, not the 60s, and although they were still peace activists, I suspect it's important to these characters' struggles with individual and group identity that their activism took place later -- that the 80s was very invested in celebrating the activism of the 60s, of Steven and Elyse Keaton, while forgetting about the decade in between.
I think I want to talk about everything else character by character, or anyway group by group, rather than season by season.
Michael and Hope Steadman.
It blew my mind finding out that Ken Olin (Michael) is married to Patricia Wettig, who plays not Hope (Mel Harris) but Nancy, his business partner's wife. And they've been married since years before the show!
Anyway, Michael and Hope are the central couple of the show, with a baby daughter. He's in advertising -- running his own agency with Elliot at the start of the show -- she's a stay at home mom with mixed feelings about putting her writing career on hold. They have their arguments, but they're also the most stable part of the show, the show's center.
Consistently one of the most intriguing parts of the show for me is the fact that, although the show is, yes, overwhelmingly white, it's also one of the few TV shows to prominently feature an interfaith couple where the difference in religion is not just a part of the backstory that has been resolved at some unstated point in the past, but continues to be a source of friction and confusion. Michael is Jewish, Hope is Presbyterian, and there's so much more to it than that: Hope has deep sentimental attachment to her Christmas rituals, while Michael has always been ambivalent about his Jewishness, at least the spiritual and religious aspects of it, so historically, in the years of their relationship before the series begins, he has given in to her on everything. They celebrate Christmas together, they eat ham and other pork, and Hope has basically just gotten used to the idea that Michael's Jewishness is only a label on a family tree, something that has no impact on her or her children. She's never had to be the one to make adjustments, though she probably doesn't see it that way, and so every time she's asked to make adjustments now, it feels unfair to her -- where was this five years ago, ten years ago? Why now, all of a sudden?
But now that Michael has a child and is planning more, he's thinking more about his faith and his identity. It starts with his reservations over Christmas -- now that he has a house and a family, when Hope puts up Christmas decorations, it's his family celebrating Christmas, not him celebrating Christmas with Hope's family the way he had thought of it in the past. He's not a visitor to the holiday anymore. This is a very different thing. Hope isn't especially understanding about this -- though to be fair, thoughout the series Michael has a lot of difficulty articulating his feelings about why these things bother him.
It becomes a much bigger deal later, when they have a son and the issue of circumcision comes up -- not exactly unusual for Presbyterians in America, but Hope's not crazy about the idea, especially the idea of a bris, and pushes Michael to explain to her why it's so important. What the show doesn't explicitly address, but implicitly makes clear, is that Hope has adopted the attitude of many Americans: that mainline Protestant denominations like Presbyterianism are "normal," default, unmarked American religion, and it's deviation from that path -- like Michael's Jewishness -- that has to be justified. Celebrating Christmas is "normal" -- it's being uncomfortable with Christmas that requires an explanation.
I'm making her sound bitchier than she is, in part because I'm talking about multiple stories over the course of four years as though it's all one conversation. A lot of it has to do with her response to the fact that Michael is so silent or inarticulate on these things -- but (in this viewer's opinion) she should see that he's struggling and should try harder to help him with that instead of taking advantage of it to preserve her own family's way of doing things.
It's a shame that Mel Harris hasn't had a high-profile career since Something So Right, the post-Thirtysomething blended family sitcom she did with Jere Burns. Mind you, this is something I can say about everybody on the show. It's a phenomenal cast, especially for the 80s -- the kind of cast you'd expect on a cable show today.
Elliot and Nancy Weston
Elliot (Timothy Busfield) is Michael's business partner. Nancy's an artist and stay at home mom to their two kids, both of whom are older than Michael and Hope's daughter -- I think Elliot and Nancy may be a couple years older than Michael and Hope, which would fit one of the ongoing subplots in the show of Michael having always been slightly more successful, or successful earlier, than Elliot. While the first episode establishes the Steadmans as our stable center, it also immediately establishes the Westons as falling apart -- Elliot confides in Michael that he's had an affair in the past, and it seems to come up because he wants to have more (that is, he's not in love with any specific woman apart from his wife, he just wants to fool around in general), and the most difficult part of watching the first season is the slow pace at which the Weston marriage falls apart. This is old school network drama, remember: twenty-something episodes, not cable's 10 to 13. And pre-DVRs, pre-DVD, etc., major plot points like Elliot and Nancy considering a separation, going to counseling, and so on had to be hit again and again -- because it isn't a subplot the way it would be on a cop show, it can't just be mentioned in dialogue, so their unhappiness has to be demonstrated for us over and over.
Again, that's often how it happens in real life, and it's not as repetitive as it sounds, actually. There's a Rashomon-ish episode in which an uncomfortable dinner with the Steadmans and the Westons is replayed from multiple perspectives, leaving us unsure who said what in which tone of voice, which is exactly the kind of approach to television that seems so anachronistic in something from 30 years ago, because it requires you to sit your butt and actually watch it.
But one reason I opened this blog post with talking about Thirtysomething heirs like Casual and Transparent -- and I'd add Togetherness, I think, among current shows -- is that they all share that common goal of realism, and of depicting "real people" rather than people (however ordinary) in unusually interesting lines of work (at least as depicted on television) like murder-solving and trial-lawyering. Each of the modern shows, in contrast with Thirtysomething, uses an inciting incident to either bring the cast together or as an excuse to introduce them -- Maura's coming out to her family in Transparent's case, a break-up in the case of Casual and Togetherness.
And each tends to regularly dwell on everyone being unbelievably shitty to each other.
In Transparent's case I put up with how awful most of the characters are for a couple of reasons -- because of how interesting Maura's story is (and though it may be unfair to wonder this given that the family is at least partly based on Jill Soloway's, I wondered if part of the point was that before realizing who she needed to be to be happy, Maura wasn't able to properly parent her children, so they all turned out shitty), partly because hooray Judith Light being back on TV, partly because I have so much love for the actors themselves. Season two was less focused, made Maura less the center, and I found myself actually resenting the fact that otherwise interesting plot premises that I would have welcomed on some other show were being wasted on characters I had grown to loathe. (Transparent has quickly become guilty of the Parenthood problem of "how much of this drama can happen in the same nuclear family?" as well.)
In Casual's case, I would have been much happier with a show in which we saw fewer, or no, scenes without Michaela Watkins in them -- don't give her daughter and brother their own independent plots, make them supporting characters in her story. I can't stand her daughter, I'm indifferent at best to her brother, and as much as I love Eliza Coupe, she was part of the show's dumbest plotline. Which, again, involved everyone being terrible to each other.
Togetherness is the best of these three, I think, and I don't know how much of that is my preexisting affection for not only the Duplass brothers but all of the cast members -- it's a show tailor-made for me in a lot of ways. But it still has a lot of moments that frustrate me and that feel like they're there principally because having the characters mistreat each other is the easiest way to generate believable drama.
This is a significant storytelling challenge: staying realistic, staying focused on life outside of the "typical TV show jobs" (cop, lawyer, etc) and workplace scenarios, holding interest over a long period of time, and making the characters likeable without making them unrelatable. Above, we've already talked about avoiding the soap opera tropes. When you think these things through, there's a reason why television drama tends to fall into the genres it does -- and even when you go outside those genres, there's a reason it tends to fall into specific dramatic patterns of People Who Do Jobs That Involve Solving a Puzzle While The Clock Is Ticking and People Whose Jobs Involve Unpredictable Dangers That Test Their Mettle and so on. When something shakes things up even a little -- Breaking Bad and Mad Men are two great examples, the former because the status quo of the series changes so often and so radically, the latter because it is so hard to classify in the terms I've been using -- it really stands out. And there are plenty of very good shows that don't shake it up.
So, Thirtysomething does fall victim to the Modern Bickering Family problem, but primarily with Elliot and Nancy -- which means it's not central in most episodes, and not present in all episodes or all seasons. Most of the time, like I said, the fights are about smaller things, and no one's being awful about it, which is where the accusations of whining come from.
I don't mean to imply there is nothing good to say about Elliot and Nancy, either! Nancy has a great arc over time about her return to work as an artist, first teaching and later illustrating. She's also a great foil in a lot of important scenes involving the other women, precisely because she doesn't have the close relationships with them that they have with each other, so every conversation doesn't become a rehash of something that happened in high school.
Melissa, Gary, Ellyn
Melissa, played by the fantastic Melanie Mayron, is Michael's cousin, a freelance photographer. She's the quirky Bohemian artist type, a single woman whose singleness is at first portrayed mainly in terms of how hung up she is on Michael's best friend Gary. They dated and broke up a few years before the series begins but it's made clear neither got over the other, and implied that Gary's fear of commitment was the only real reason they broke up. Eventually (whether or not we can ever say she moves on), her singleness is the source for more plots than just moping about Gary -- maybe the writers were originally planning on having Mel and Gary get together, and gave up on that, I don't know -- and Melanie Mayron herself has described Melissa as a precursor to Ally McBeal, which I think is about right. A more grounded and self-aware Ally McBeal, but it's there.
It's hard to describe Melissa, in part because she's not as central to the show as the couples are, so she goes through a number of different situations over the course of the series, and in part because words like "quirky" convey so little. She's idiosyncratic, she's funny but often deeply sad, she's insecure because of her experiences with Gary and the age at which she's still single (she and Ellyn have a conversation at one point in which they bluntly discuss the fact that single women their age are expected to occasionally date married men because there aren't enough age-appropriate single men available, and that it's just how things go, being a single woman of a certain age).
I'm not doing her justice, really - she's one of my favorite characters in TV. There's a great episode late in the series (with Brooke Adams and Colleen Camp) where Melissa goes to Hollywood to shadow a sitcom actress on set and take photos of her for an accompanying article, and the actress is playing a tough young single lady, so keeps stealing mannerisms and clothing items from Melissa to try to "make it real." The deconstruction of Melissa's outward character -- who, meanwhile, winds up hired to rewrite some of the dialogue toward the same end -- just reinforces that she's more than this system of tics, even if that's how so much of the world responds to her.
Gary Shepherd (Peter Horton and his long hair) is Michael's old college roommate, now an English professor who picks women up in hardware stores and on campus. For Melissa and Ellyn, singleness is a burden, something society judges them for, a sacrifice Ellyn has made for their career. For Gary, it's a lifestyle choice -- dating younger women with few expectations, avoiding the commitments of more serious relationships in the same way that he's using an academic career to avoid the 9-5 grind of a corporate one. He does grow up over the course of the series, though I don't know what message it sends that he also goes from being happy all the time to becoming more ponderous and distracted.
Ellyn is Hope's best friend from childhood (when we get flashbacks to them as kids, it's eerie what a good job they do casting teens who look and sound so much like them, enough so that if it were a modern show I would suspect they were just processing the adult actresses' voices), played by Polly Draper. Yet another terrific actress, whom you may have seen recently in Obvious Child, and if not, you ought to go rent it. Or stream it, I guess. That's how it is now. Go stream it.
At first, Ellyn and Gary seem to serve similar purposes in that each shows how different one of the Steadmans is from their closest friend. Michael is the former activist turned advertiser -- and not just advertiser, but running his own shop -- and family man, while Gary is the unattached prof who bicycles everywhere and still has the long hair he had in college. Hope is the homemaker dealing with the insane amount of attention a baby needs, while Ellyn is the career woman who, when the series opens, barely has the patience to have lunch with Hope because she's not crazy about being around the baby and is kind of pissed that Hope is spending all of her time with it instead of just hiring a babysitter so that they can go have their girls' lunches like always.
But both grow out of their roles. Hope needs someone to talk to who knows her as often as she needs someone to talk to who doesn't know her well (Nancy), and Ellyn gets fleshed out in those scenes simply because that's what good writing does, and it's interesting to see over time that even though she and Melissa both have similar self-deprecating senses of humor about their singleness, they're otherwise immensely different (though of course we wind up with a story about them both interested in the same man). On the one hand, Ellyn is more selfish than Melissa; on the other she's also more willing to settle, whereas Melissa sometimes seems like she'd spend her life alone rather than with the wrong guy (this may be because Melissa has a Gary in her past, and Ellyn doesn't).
Miles Drentell
Although there are a lot of important secondary characters -- I am leaving out Susannah, for instance, and not even mentioning key appearances over the years by pre-Murphy Brown Faith Ford, pre-Raymond Patricia Heaton, pre-Law and Order Mariska Hargitay, Lynne Thigpen, Terry Kinney, Kellie Martin, Stanley Tucci, Barbara Barrie, Shirley Knight, Paul Dooley, Talia Balsam, Dana Delany, Richard Masur, Charles Rocket, Patricia Arquette, a teenage Brad Pitt! -- Miles deserves special mention.
Eventually Michael and Elliot's agency can't stay afloat. Miles is a legend in the industry, and they first meet him while trying to get him to farm work out to them; he doesn't bite. In a subsequent season they end up working for his agency, where Miles grooms Michael to be his possible replacement, while barely concealing his disdain for Elliot.
It's a character who is introduced at an unbelievably slow pace. Maybe they weren't even intending to use him the way they did, but just loved the performance in his early appearances and so tailored the later seasons accordingly. Where most of the series is about home life, once Miles is introduced, we have our first melodramatic elements -- solely in the workplace, as Miles represents the high-powered corporate world, with its hostile takeovers, corporate espionage, and professional manipulators reading Sun Tzu.
It probably sounds like it shouldn't work, especially in this show, but the show is never centered in the workplace (though the Michael plots become more work-focused later in the series, this is balanced out by some heavy family-centric episodes) and certainly isn't a full-fledged Mad Men predecessor, in terms of showing us the ins and outs of an advertising agency and how ruthless the business can be, or simultaneously how meaningful the work -- though it takes a step in that direction.
Miles is almost a shamanic figure -- he's fascinated by Michael to a degree that is hard to explain without Miles knowing that Michael is the protagonist, but it works because David Clennon sells the idea that Miles can just sniff out talent and character.
In Sum
We owe much to cable television and HBO, of course. HBO's ability to rerun episodes all the time, to marathon previous seasons in anticipation of upcoming seasons, that was key to its ability to launch shows like Oz, The Sopranos, and The Wire. Those shows in turn demonstrated a desire on the public's part for more serious drama, and a willingness to sit through a season without needing everything resolved at the end of each episode -- and for that matter, a willingness to see a season end without having all of its loose ends tied up. But The Sopranos launched at about the same time TiVo did, and DVDs came not long after, and so that particular stretch of the path to the Golden Age was paved by the promise of rewatchability.
More than a decade earlier, when 2 out of 5 American households didn't even have a VCR, Thirtysomething offered serious dramatic television that required just as much of the viewer, with more than twice as many episodes per season as any HBO show -- and unlike HBO, they had sponsors and affiliates to answer to. They somehow enlisted amazing actors in an age when there was no prestige attached to doing television projects and a very real divide between television acting and movie acting. Episodes were directed by Claudia Weill (the documentarian and director of Girlfriends and It's My Turn), future action movie director Rob Cohen, Gary Sinise, and most of the cast members (Ken Olin, Peter Horton, Timothy Busfield, Melanie Mayron, and Mel Harris all directed multiple episodes), among others. The creators, Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz, went on to create Once and Again (which brought back Miles Drentell) and, perhaps most famously for my generation, produced My So-Called Life, created by Thirtysomething staff writer Winnie Holzman.
I'd seen some of Thirtysomething when it first aired in the late 80s and early 90s, and again when it reaired on basic cable in the mid-90s, but that means it'd been a minimum of 20 years since I'd seen any of it, and that particular 20 years is a lot of television history. A lot of television history that the show had a pretty deep impact on, as it turns out. Hill Street Blues, St Elsewhere (especially after its first couple seasons), and Thirtysomething -- those were the shows that over the course of the 1980s first started leaning heavily on viewer attention span. While Wiseguy was strongly serialized, it basically functioned like a series of miniseries with an occasional standalone episode as a palate cleanser. These other three shows were different -- any given episode might have a couple self-contained plots as well as serving ongoing plots that might be leftover from the previous episode, might take three or four episodes to resolve, might play out over the course of the whole season.
Hill Street Blues was a cop show. There had been plenty of cop shows before, which doesn't diminish Hill Street's importance any: it's a mammoth show, and without it or something else doing its work, there'd be no NYPD Blue, no Wire, no Shield. It created the modern police drama.
St Elsewhere was a hospital show. There had been plenty of hospital shows before.
But Thirtysomething ... Thirtysomething wasn't a workplace show, it wasn't a comedy, it wasn't a soap opera. The closest predecessor I'm familiar with is Family, the 1970s drama both Aaron Spelling and Mike Nichols worked on, but Family had more in common with its immediate successors like Eight is Enough -- and later watered-down (though I suppose, objectively more successful) versions like 7th Heaven -- in that the focus was, like with many sitcoms, primarily on a single family household, with the innovation being to tell their story as an hour-long show rather than a 25-minute sitcom.
The difference between Thirtysomething and Family is all in the name. Family is about a family. Thirtysomething is about, well, thirtysomethings (a term the series popularized) -- two couples, each of whom have young kids who are never old enough to be characters in their own right, and three friends who are single when the series begins.
Thirtysomething's strength is exactly what its detractors didn't like about it: it's a show about young grown-ups whose challenges are not particularly unusual. That is, it's not one of the workplace genres -- it's not a cop, lawyer, doctor, or detective show -- and it's not a soap opera. Over the course of the whole four seasons, there are some deaths and break-ups and betrayals, but fewer than in any handful of episodes of Dynasty. Even a recent show like Parenthood stretched credulity, both with things like Kristina's ill-advised and unlikely run for office and in terms of "how many dramatic events can occur in the same family over the course of a few years?", compared to Thirtysomething's commitment to realism.
And there's the rub: if you don't have murders to solve or lives to save, if you don't at least have the heavy workplace drama of Mad Men week in and week out, what do you do to fill your time, without making your show either soap opera -- evil twins, everyone cheating on everyone with everyone else, unlikely plot developments at every turn -- or melodrama (by which I mean, in this case, over the top emotional hand-wringing over everything in order to make the small seem large)?
Well, the show was accused of being melodramatic more than once, but that just meant people weren't paying attention. That time was filled the same way it's filled in real life: sometimes characters complain about things that are small. They aren't small to them. They aren't small to us when they happen to us. But they're small by television standards. Michael has forgotten to put his laundry in the hamper for days on end and Hope is tired of reminding him. They have a young child and he has a busy job and they're both distracted, but Hope is tired of being the one to pick up the slack just by virtue of being the one who stays at home. It's an argument about a small thing, eventually an argument about many small things, one they acknowledge is about small things, but it's also an argument about lifestyle choices -- Michael's decision to open a small firm with his friend Elliott, which means working longer and less predictable hours instead of having a dependable 9-5 schedule the way he could if he had remained a cog in the machine at a larger company; Hope and Michael's decision to have a baby at this particular time in their lives; the minor inconveniences of the fixer-upper of a house they bought, and the fact that Michael's income is right at that level where they can afford to fix those inconveniences, but not all at once, and not without being more careful with their spending than they thought they'd have to be at this point in their lives and careers.
The show has time to unspool all of this because this isn't a subplot about two people in a lawyer show or a Cylon show. It's not just there to add some color so you can keep track of which CSI is which. It's what the show is actually about. It's a show about regular people.
It's definitely a show about regular people who are predominantly white and upper middle class, although I'm not sure it's any worse in those respects than most of television in the late 80s -- or now, for that matter.
You can't talk about Thirtysomething separately from its era, of course. One reason it was interesting rewatching it is because I was younger than the characters when it first aired, and older now -- though they were younger than my parents. That's another important signal in the title. Thirtysomethings in the late 80s were the tail end of the Baby Boom, whereas my parents were born at the very beginning of the Boom. My father's childhood was represented on Leave it to Beaver, not the Wonder Years, and while my parents missed out on the hippies and the Summer of Love because they were married, employed, college graduates starting a family by then, the Thirtysomething characters missed out because they were still kids. They started college in the 70s, not the 60s, and although they were still peace activists, I suspect it's important to these characters' struggles with individual and group identity that their activism took place later -- that the 80s was very invested in celebrating the activism of the 60s, of Steven and Elyse Keaton, while forgetting about the decade in between.
I think I want to talk about everything else character by character, or anyway group by group, rather than season by season.
Michael and Hope Steadman.
It blew my mind finding out that Ken Olin (Michael) is married to Patricia Wettig, who plays not Hope (Mel Harris) but Nancy, his business partner's wife. And they've been married since years before the show!
Anyway, Michael and Hope are the central couple of the show, with a baby daughter. He's in advertising -- running his own agency with Elliot at the start of the show -- she's a stay at home mom with mixed feelings about putting her writing career on hold. They have their arguments, but they're also the most stable part of the show, the show's center.
Consistently one of the most intriguing parts of the show for me is the fact that, although the show is, yes, overwhelmingly white, it's also one of the few TV shows to prominently feature an interfaith couple where the difference in religion is not just a part of the backstory that has been resolved at some unstated point in the past, but continues to be a source of friction and confusion. Michael is Jewish, Hope is Presbyterian, and there's so much more to it than that: Hope has deep sentimental attachment to her Christmas rituals, while Michael has always been ambivalent about his Jewishness, at least the spiritual and religious aspects of it, so historically, in the years of their relationship before the series begins, he has given in to her on everything. They celebrate Christmas together, they eat ham and other pork, and Hope has basically just gotten used to the idea that Michael's Jewishness is only a label on a family tree, something that has no impact on her or her children. She's never had to be the one to make adjustments, though she probably doesn't see it that way, and so every time she's asked to make adjustments now, it feels unfair to her -- where was this five years ago, ten years ago? Why now, all of a sudden?
But now that Michael has a child and is planning more, he's thinking more about his faith and his identity. It starts with his reservations over Christmas -- now that he has a house and a family, when Hope puts up Christmas decorations, it's his family celebrating Christmas, not him celebrating Christmas with Hope's family the way he had thought of it in the past. He's not a visitor to the holiday anymore. This is a very different thing. Hope isn't especially understanding about this -- though to be fair, thoughout the series Michael has a lot of difficulty articulating his feelings about why these things bother him.
It becomes a much bigger deal later, when they have a son and the issue of circumcision comes up -- not exactly unusual for Presbyterians in America, but Hope's not crazy about the idea, especially the idea of a bris, and pushes Michael to explain to her why it's so important. What the show doesn't explicitly address, but implicitly makes clear, is that Hope has adopted the attitude of many Americans: that mainline Protestant denominations like Presbyterianism are "normal," default, unmarked American religion, and it's deviation from that path -- like Michael's Jewishness -- that has to be justified. Celebrating Christmas is "normal" -- it's being uncomfortable with Christmas that requires an explanation.
I'm making her sound bitchier than she is, in part because I'm talking about multiple stories over the course of four years as though it's all one conversation. A lot of it has to do with her response to the fact that Michael is so silent or inarticulate on these things -- but (in this viewer's opinion) she should see that he's struggling and should try harder to help him with that instead of taking advantage of it to preserve her own family's way of doing things.
It's a shame that Mel Harris hasn't had a high-profile career since Something So Right, the post-Thirtysomething blended family sitcom she did with Jere Burns. Mind you, this is something I can say about everybody on the show. It's a phenomenal cast, especially for the 80s -- the kind of cast you'd expect on a cable show today.
Elliot and Nancy Weston
Elliot (Timothy Busfield) is Michael's business partner. Nancy's an artist and stay at home mom to their two kids, both of whom are older than Michael and Hope's daughter -- I think Elliot and Nancy may be a couple years older than Michael and Hope, which would fit one of the ongoing subplots in the show of Michael having always been slightly more successful, or successful earlier, than Elliot. While the first episode establishes the Steadmans as our stable center, it also immediately establishes the Westons as falling apart -- Elliot confides in Michael that he's had an affair in the past, and it seems to come up because he wants to have more (that is, he's not in love with any specific woman apart from his wife, he just wants to fool around in general), and the most difficult part of watching the first season is the slow pace at which the Weston marriage falls apart. This is old school network drama, remember: twenty-something episodes, not cable's 10 to 13. And pre-DVRs, pre-DVD, etc., major plot points like Elliot and Nancy considering a separation, going to counseling, and so on had to be hit again and again -- because it isn't a subplot the way it would be on a cop show, it can't just be mentioned in dialogue, so their unhappiness has to be demonstrated for us over and over.
Again, that's often how it happens in real life, and it's not as repetitive as it sounds, actually. There's a Rashomon-ish episode in which an uncomfortable dinner with the Steadmans and the Westons is replayed from multiple perspectives, leaving us unsure who said what in which tone of voice, which is exactly the kind of approach to television that seems so anachronistic in something from 30 years ago, because it requires you to sit your butt and actually watch it.
But one reason I opened this blog post with talking about Thirtysomething heirs like Casual and Transparent -- and I'd add Togetherness, I think, among current shows -- is that they all share that common goal of realism, and of depicting "real people" rather than people (however ordinary) in unusually interesting lines of work (at least as depicted on television) like murder-solving and trial-lawyering. Each of the modern shows, in contrast with Thirtysomething, uses an inciting incident to either bring the cast together or as an excuse to introduce them -- Maura's coming out to her family in Transparent's case, a break-up in the case of Casual and Togetherness.
And each tends to regularly dwell on everyone being unbelievably shitty to each other.
In Transparent's case I put up with how awful most of the characters are for a couple of reasons -- because of how interesting Maura's story is (and though it may be unfair to wonder this given that the family is at least partly based on Jill Soloway's, I wondered if part of the point was that before realizing who she needed to be to be happy, Maura wasn't able to properly parent her children, so they all turned out shitty), partly because hooray Judith Light being back on TV, partly because I have so much love for the actors themselves. Season two was less focused, made Maura less the center, and I found myself actually resenting the fact that otherwise interesting plot premises that I would have welcomed on some other show were being wasted on characters I had grown to loathe. (Transparent has quickly become guilty of the Parenthood problem of "how much of this drama can happen in the same nuclear family?" as well.)
In Casual's case, I would have been much happier with a show in which we saw fewer, or no, scenes without Michaela Watkins in them -- don't give her daughter and brother their own independent plots, make them supporting characters in her story. I can't stand her daughter, I'm indifferent at best to her brother, and as much as I love Eliza Coupe, she was part of the show's dumbest plotline. Which, again, involved everyone being terrible to each other.
Togetherness is the best of these three, I think, and I don't know how much of that is my preexisting affection for not only the Duplass brothers but all of the cast members -- it's a show tailor-made for me in a lot of ways. But it still has a lot of moments that frustrate me and that feel like they're there principally because having the characters mistreat each other is the easiest way to generate believable drama.
This is a significant storytelling challenge: staying realistic, staying focused on life outside of the "typical TV show jobs" (cop, lawyer, etc) and workplace scenarios, holding interest over a long period of time, and making the characters likeable without making them unrelatable. Above, we've already talked about avoiding the soap opera tropes. When you think these things through, there's a reason why television drama tends to fall into the genres it does -- and even when you go outside those genres, there's a reason it tends to fall into specific dramatic patterns of People Who Do Jobs That Involve Solving a Puzzle While The Clock Is Ticking and People Whose Jobs Involve Unpredictable Dangers That Test Their Mettle and so on. When something shakes things up even a little -- Breaking Bad and Mad Men are two great examples, the former because the status quo of the series changes so often and so radically, the latter because it is so hard to classify in the terms I've been using -- it really stands out. And there are plenty of very good shows that don't shake it up.
So, Thirtysomething does fall victim to the Modern Bickering Family problem, but primarily with Elliot and Nancy -- which means it's not central in most episodes, and not present in all episodes or all seasons. Most of the time, like I said, the fights are about smaller things, and no one's being awful about it, which is where the accusations of whining come from.
I don't mean to imply there is nothing good to say about Elliot and Nancy, either! Nancy has a great arc over time about her return to work as an artist, first teaching and later illustrating. She's also a great foil in a lot of important scenes involving the other women, precisely because she doesn't have the close relationships with them that they have with each other, so every conversation doesn't become a rehash of something that happened in high school.
Melissa, Gary, Ellyn
Melissa, played by the fantastic Melanie Mayron, is Michael's cousin, a freelance photographer. She's the quirky Bohemian artist type, a single woman whose singleness is at first portrayed mainly in terms of how hung up she is on Michael's best friend Gary. They dated and broke up a few years before the series begins but it's made clear neither got over the other, and implied that Gary's fear of commitment was the only real reason they broke up. Eventually (whether or not we can ever say she moves on), her singleness is the source for more plots than just moping about Gary -- maybe the writers were originally planning on having Mel and Gary get together, and gave up on that, I don't know -- and Melanie Mayron herself has described Melissa as a precursor to Ally McBeal, which I think is about right. A more grounded and self-aware Ally McBeal, but it's there.
It's hard to describe Melissa, in part because she's not as central to the show as the couples are, so she goes through a number of different situations over the course of the series, and in part because words like "quirky" convey so little. She's idiosyncratic, she's funny but often deeply sad, she's insecure because of her experiences with Gary and the age at which she's still single (she and Ellyn have a conversation at one point in which they bluntly discuss the fact that single women their age are expected to occasionally date married men because there aren't enough age-appropriate single men available, and that it's just how things go, being a single woman of a certain age).
I'm not doing her justice, really - she's one of my favorite characters in TV. There's a great episode late in the series (with Brooke Adams and Colleen Camp) where Melissa goes to Hollywood to shadow a sitcom actress on set and take photos of her for an accompanying article, and the actress is playing a tough young single lady, so keeps stealing mannerisms and clothing items from Melissa to try to "make it real." The deconstruction of Melissa's outward character -- who, meanwhile, winds up hired to rewrite some of the dialogue toward the same end -- just reinforces that she's more than this system of tics, even if that's how so much of the world responds to her.
Gary Shepherd (Peter Horton and his long hair) is Michael's old college roommate, now an English professor who picks women up in hardware stores and on campus. For Melissa and Ellyn, singleness is a burden, something society judges them for, a sacrifice Ellyn has made for their career. For Gary, it's a lifestyle choice -- dating younger women with few expectations, avoiding the commitments of more serious relationships in the same way that he's using an academic career to avoid the 9-5 grind of a corporate one. He does grow up over the course of the series, though I don't know what message it sends that he also goes from being happy all the time to becoming more ponderous and distracted.
Ellyn is Hope's best friend from childhood (when we get flashbacks to them as kids, it's eerie what a good job they do casting teens who look and sound so much like them, enough so that if it were a modern show I would suspect they were just processing the adult actresses' voices), played by Polly Draper. Yet another terrific actress, whom you may have seen recently in Obvious Child, and if not, you ought to go rent it. Or stream it, I guess. That's how it is now. Go stream it.
At first, Ellyn and Gary seem to serve similar purposes in that each shows how different one of the Steadmans is from their closest friend. Michael is the former activist turned advertiser -- and not just advertiser, but running his own shop -- and family man, while Gary is the unattached prof who bicycles everywhere and still has the long hair he had in college. Hope is the homemaker dealing with the insane amount of attention a baby needs, while Ellyn is the career woman who, when the series opens, barely has the patience to have lunch with Hope because she's not crazy about being around the baby and is kind of pissed that Hope is spending all of her time with it instead of just hiring a babysitter so that they can go have their girls' lunches like always.
But both grow out of their roles. Hope needs someone to talk to who knows her as often as she needs someone to talk to who doesn't know her well (Nancy), and Ellyn gets fleshed out in those scenes simply because that's what good writing does, and it's interesting to see over time that even though she and Melissa both have similar self-deprecating senses of humor about their singleness, they're otherwise immensely different (though of course we wind up with a story about them both interested in the same man). On the one hand, Ellyn is more selfish than Melissa; on the other she's also more willing to settle, whereas Melissa sometimes seems like she'd spend her life alone rather than with the wrong guy (this may be because Melissa has a Gary in her past, and Ellyn doesn't).
Miles Drentell
Although there are a lot of important secondary characters -- I am leaving out Susannah, for instance, and not even mentioning key appearances over the years by pre-Murphy Brown Faith Ford, pre-Raymond Patricia Heaton, pre-Law and Order Mariska Hargitay, Lynne Thigpen, Terry Kinney, Kellie Martin, Stanley Tucci, Barbara Barrie, Shirley Knight, Paul Dooley, Talia Balsam, Dana Delany, Richard Masur, Charles Rocket, Patricia Arquette, a teenage Brad Pitt! -- Miles deserves special mention.
Eventually Michael and Elliot's agency can't stay afloat. Miles is a legend in the industry, and they first meet him while trying to get him to farm work out to them; he doesn't bite. In a subsequent season they end up working for his agency, where Miles grooms Michael to be his possible replacement, while barely concealing his disdain for Elliot.
It's a character who is introduced at an unbelievably slow pace. Maybe they weren't even intending to use him the way they did, but just loved the performance in his early appearances and so tailored the later seasons accordingly. Where most of the series is about home life, once Miles is introduced, we have our first melodramatic elements -- solely in the workplace, as Miles represents the high-powered corporate world, with its hostile takeovers, corporate espionage, and professional manipulators reading Sun Tzu.
It probably sounds like it shouldn't work, especially in this show, but the show is never centered in the workplace (though the Michael plots become more work-focused later in the series, this is balanced out by some heavy family-centric episodes) and certainly isn't a full-fledged Mad Men predecessor, in terms of showing us the ins and outs of an advertising agency and how ruthless the business can be, or simultaneously how meaningful the work -- though it takes a step in that direction.
Miles is almost a shamanic figure -- he's fascinated by Michael to a degree that is hard to explain without Miles knowing that Michael is the protagonist, but it works because David Clennon sells the idea that Miles can just sniff out talent and character.
In Sum
We owe much to cable television and HBO, of course. HBO's ability to rerun episodes all the time, to marathon previous seasons in anticipation of upcoming seasons, that was key to its ability to launch shows like Oz, The Sopranos, and The Wire. Those shows in turn demonstrated a desire on the public's part for more serious drama, and a willingness to sit through a season without needing everything resolved at the end of each episode -- and for that matter, a willingness to see a season end without having all of its loose ends tied up. But The Sopranos launched at about the same time TiVo did, and DVDs came not long after, and so that particular stretch of the path to the Golden Age was paved by the promise of rewatchability.
More than a decade earlier, when 2 out of 5 American households didn't even have a VCR, Thirtysomething offered serious dramatic television that required just as much of the viewer, with more than twice as many episodes per season as any HBO show -- and unlike HBO, they had sponsors and affiliates to answer to. They somehow enlisted amazing actors in an age when there was no prestige attached to doing television projects and a very real divide between television acting and movie acting. Episodes were directed by Claudia Weill (the documentarian and director of Girlfriends and It's My Turn), future action movie director Rob Cohen, Gary Sinise, and most of the cast members (Ken Olin, Peter Horton, Timothy Busfield, Melanie Mayron, and Mel Harris all directed multiple episodes), among others. The creators, Ed Zwick and Marshall Herskovitz, went on to create Once and Again (which brought back Miles Drentell) and, perhaps most famously for my generation, produced My So-Called Life, created by Thirtysomething staff writer Winnie Holzman.
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