one of those fights where it feels like the fight's having you

There was a brief period in graduate school when I still wrote things for free, because I wasn't sure how long I was going to stay in grad school, and whether or not I was going to teach, and academic publications are helpful for getting accepted/retained/hired -- which of course is exactly why those publishers know they don't need to pay. Anyway, this is one such thing - a chapter on My So-Called Life, for Dear Angela. There are other such things out there, but they weren't as easy to find and didn't bear as specifically on television. Maybe at some point I'll post my David Lynch paper, some 20 years old now and the most widely-cited thing I've written.

This was written a decade ago (more than two years before the publication date at that Amazon link - not only does academic writing like this not pay, but the lead times before publication are the longest I've experienced); television criticism and I have both come a long way, and I'd do it better now. (I've published over a million words between now and then, literally; one would hope that I've developed my voice a bit in the process.) But so it goes. At the time, My So-Called Life was almost everyone's go-to example of a "brilliant but canceled" show, one that had left a real mark on our collective psyche but had come and gone in a flash. Although Freaks and Geeks aired about halfway between MSCL's cancellation and the writing of this chapter, my recollection is that it hadn't yet accumulated the same level of retrospective critical adoration -- maybe the teenagers who grew up with it just weren't old enough yet.

---

One Of Those Fights Where It Feels Like The Fight's Having You: 

The "Patty Reading" of My So-Called Life

The pilot episode of My So-Called Life opens with a lie and an audience lied to: the first scene, shot from the point of view of random passers-by, shows teenage Angela and her new friend Rayanne claiming to be twins while asking for spare change. Rayanne compounds the lie, claiming Angela's mother is in a coma. The scene tapers out with Angela's first of many voiceovers, one which relates to the scene but doesn't address it in the way that, say, a Wonder Years voiceover directly comments on the on-screen action:

So I started hanging out with Rayanne Graff. Just for fun. Just cause it seemed like if I didn't, I would die or something. Things were getting to me. Just how people are. How they always expect you to be a certain way, even your best friend.

How people are, how they... expect you to be, is a lens through which we can view the rest of the series. The lens I'm offering here isn't the only lens; it isn't a prescribed view against which all other interpretations suffer; it isn't "true" so much as it's a game. It's a possible take on things, one that adds an extra layer to some scenes, while completely changing the meaning of others:

Imagine MSCL takes place not from Angela's point of view, but from Patty's. Consider the series as a narrative not witnessed by Angela, but rather imagined by Patty, combining the actual events she witnesses with the events she imagines, fears, or believes transpire when she's not around. Consider a mother who has become less and less intimate with her daughter and can literally only imagine what her daughter's so-called life is like. Circumstances give her a handful of facts and clues, which she connects based on her own experiences and anxieties.

Like "what if you told The Great Gatsby from Daisy's point of view" or "how does Fitzgerald use color symbolically," this is a game we can play with MSCL as the board. The rule is simple: any scene without Patty in it (and any voiceover or internal monologue that isn't Patty's) takes place in Patty's imagination, though this does not exclude the possibility that at least some of her imaginings are accurate.

This is a reinterpretation of the series' diegesis: the diegesis of a fictional text consists of those things true for or experienced by the characters, while the non-diegetic material is experienced only by the audience. Music playing on a jukebox is diegetic: the film score is non-diegetic. A character's facial expression is diegetic: the close-up on that face in a reaction shot is non-diegetic. The default interpretation of MSCL, of any TV series, posits a very inclusive diegesis, in which most of what is seen and heard that is not voiceover is experienced by the characters present in the scene, and furthermore that voiceover accurately reflects the character's internal monologue (either in the moment, or in retrospect from some near-future moment). The Patty reading rejects this, and supposes that most of what we see is, in essence, Patty's daydream, experienced only by Patty just as only Calvin experiences his conversations with Hobbes.

Just as the split between diegetic and non-diegetic is, in most cases, one that affects presentation more than plot -- a dramatic sting in the score cues the audience to expect the killer to burst from the closet door but does not cause the killer to do so -- so too the split between diegetic and Patty-diegetic. The difference between MSCL's "real world" and the world as Patty imagines it does not cause dissonance between mother and daughter, or mother and family: it is emblematic, symptomatic, of it.

MSCL easily accepts the shift to half-dreamworld, as even the adjective of the title shifts from the eye-rolling intonation of a teenager to an adult's confession of unreality. This is a show, now, about an imagined life: an imagined Angela who begins the series in the final stage of losing her two best friends (Sharon and Patty herself) as she replaces them with Rayanne and Ricky, just as her father is replaced with the mysterious and almost mythical Jordan Catalano.

The pilot focuses on the changes in Angela's life: her new friends, who are radically different from Sharon and very much the sort of teenagers parents have in mind when they talk about not being able to understand kids today; her new hair color and Patty's reaction to it; and changes in her relationships with her parents. Her father, Graham, can't relate to her as a parent now that she's becoming a young woman -- he barely speaks to her, barely looks at her, insists Patty tell her to wear more than a towel, and is incapable of disciplining her. These are all external, diegetic, things, things Patty is exposed to, things she can use as evidence or symbols of deeper and more complex changes below the surface as she reconstructs Angela's life.

Sharon and Rayanne

The changes in friends, for instance. Because Sharon is the daughter of Patty's best friend, a girl to whom she is a sort of honorary aunt in the manner of parents' friends, Angela's distance from Sharon compounds and underscores her distance from Patty. Sharon is someone Patty understands, even someone over whom she has a sort of authority. Sharon is also the popular, mainstream, seemingly uncomplicated one -- the one Patty may think she understands better than the increasingly gloomy and closed-off Angela. This makes it all the more important that Angela and Sharon's friendship, virtually abandoned by the time the pilot takes place, is slowly renewed over the course of the series, as Sharon becomes closer to the new additions in Angela's social circle (most noticeably Rayanne) and finally as Sharon's father suffers a heart attack.

Rayanne, often positioned as Sharon's opposite, serves as an instigator for Patty to blame for the changes in Angela, from the way she dresses to her new hair color. Rayanne also serves to reassure Patty that she made the right choices in parenting, since Rayanne's mother Amber is the picture perfect example of "parent as best friend" or "parent as litter-mate," a mother who never quite grew up and whose child has had to do so too quickly. (Even outside of her interactions with Angela, maturity and responsibility are clearly high priorities for Patty.) And perhaps most of all, Rayanne is a stand-in for Patty's unnamed college roommate, who died of some substance-related excess -- whether drugs or alcohol, we're never told.

It's Sharon who writes the erotic poem everyone assumes is Rayanne, and sexual experience provides their common ground. The differences between them are less about private behavior than public personae, something important not only to the high school setting but to Patty's examination of Angela's public persona in her search for clues as to her private life.

Sharon's relationship may tell us something else about her role as Patty-surrogate. Sharon's boyfriend Kyle is a typical popular guy who is a proper match for Sharon the typical popular girl, but in Patty's imaginings, Sharon is never particularly happy with him, and public appearance and sex provide the main motives to keep the relationship together. Meanwhile, Sharon's only male confidante seems to be Brian Krakow, dismissed by the women of the show as the school dork. While Patty and Graham went to high school together, Patty was the prom queen while Graham was so far from the popular clique that Patty didn't even remember him until they met later in life. It's possible Patty is imagining a similar arc for Sharon.

The reluctant and occasionally tumultuous relationship between Sharon and Rayanne, who likely understand each other better than Angela understands either of them, may be read in a variety of ways. It may represent closure for Patty's relationship with her late roommate, whose name we never even learn. It may, if we see this Rayanne as an aspect of Angela, reflect Sharon and Angela's new friendship as young adult peers, replacing the friendship that was forced upon them by proximity, as so often happens to children whose parents happen to be friends.

Ricky

Unlike Rayanne, Ricky doesn't replace anyone specific. In the Patty reading, he represents both the confusing world of modern teenagers -- should Patty worry about him being in Angela's bedroom? does worrying make her uncool, as though she's denying Ricky's apparent homosexuality, or does not worrying make her heteronormative, by assuming that certain displays indicate certain sexualities? should she ask if Ricky is gay? -- and the jeopardy that Patty so often imagines for Angela. It's Ricky who winds up homeless, Ricky who is the central figure in the "guns in schools" episode that ends with students passing through metal detectors we never see again (perhaps the best "evidence" for the Patty reading). Further, when Mr Katimski, the English teacher who has taken an interest in Ricky and his homelessness, lashes out at the Chases for not making sure Ricky was okay, it's Patty who bursts into tears. Her imagined world, her anxieties and fears, have just intersected with the real world.

As for Katimski himself, he's one of only two teachers who stand out from the crowd of Peanuttian mutterers, the other being the over the top, toothpick-chewing Vic Racine, who may be literally plucked from some movie-of-the-week ripoff of Dead Poets Society. Where Vic comes and goes in a blur of sound and fury, exhorting his students to feel passion and carpe the diem but leaving no long-term effects in his wake, Katimski is the more realistic "magical teacher." Quiet, stammering, and uninspiring in the classroom, he nevertheless can probably be credited with saving Ricky's life, and is instrumental in Angela's reconciliation with Rayanne after Rayanne sleeps with Jordan (notable as one of the few moments of melodrama that we know Patty didn't imagine). It is not a coincidence that the teacher Patty has the most meaningful interaction with is the most realistic as well as the most influential.

Jordan and Graham




Speaking of the sex god jungle king brooding puppy dog of Liberty High, it is impossible to talk about the life of Angela Chase, so-called or otherwise, without talking about Jordan Catalano. The central figure in Angela's life, he is almost invisible to Patty, who pieces him together as the blind men did the elephant. He is untouchable and unknowable, a silhouette who leans like a rock star. He's the neglected underachiever who Slipped Through The Cracks of the System and needs a magic teacher to bring him out of his shell. He's illiterate. He's a user, a bad boy. He's sweet and charming. He's Rhett Butler and James Dean, seen only in slow motion as he passes you in the hall and you hug your books to your chest.

He's impossible, of course. He can't be all these things, and yet the better we get to know him, the more unreal he becomes, a patchwork of all the things a mother might imagine about the boy her angsty, flame-haired daughter likes. When she finally meets him, she even compares him to Tony Pool, a high school crush of hers from "long, long ago." "Like a fairy tale," Angela says, conveniently enough for us.

Jordan replaces Graham as the central male figure of Angela's life, and some of his unknowability reflects Graham's opaqueness to Patty, which fuels her paranoia about his affairs and mood swings. Angela's father is no longer comfortable about her, and the only time they talk without Patty there is to talk about Patty. Graham's portrayal is one that from the start is invested in sexuality, as Angela's voiceover tells us that her breasts have gotten in the way of their relationship, while in the second episode, Patty imagines Graham considering an affair with an unidentified woman (it can't be future business partner Hallie Lowenthal -- younger and redheaded -- because he hasn't met her yet).

These surrogate roles aren't static. In the fourth episode, "Father Figures," Angela is a stand-in for a younger Patty, to whom Graham gives Grateful Dead tickets that Patty has prevented him from using himself; there is an element here both of Graham trying to force his musical tastes on his daughter and of him forcing her, as a Patty surrogate, to partake of the very thing she forbade him. It backfires when Angela scalps the tickets, trading fun for monetary gain just as Patty forced Graham to stay home to prepare for an IRS audit. Patty, meanwhile, deals with her own father's refusal to take responsibility during that audit, or to treat her like an adult.

Juliana Hatfield



The famous Christmas episode, "So-Called Angels," lends itself easily to the Patty reading. Patty's worrying about Ricky -- which is really Patty worrying about Angela -- becomes so great that she imagines a ghost in the form of Juliana Hatfield as a fey homeless girl who eventually reveals that she died after running away from home, having had a fight with her mother. "It was one of those fights where it feels like the fight is having you," she says, quoting word for word Patty's description of a fight with Angela. "So-Called Angels" is the only episode without a voiceover, incidentally. Patty doesn't need to imagine Angela's thoughts here, when she has the dead Angela surrogate to speak to.

Conclusion

The Patty-view of Angela's world necessarily ends with ambiguity and uncertainty. In MSCL's final episode, Angela learns of Brian Krakow's feelings for her (and seems genuinely surprised, though we have to wonder how she could be unaware) and of his ghostwriting of illiterate rock star puppy god Jordan's love letter. She seems to choose Jordan anyway, the homunculus, the empty shell. Does she really? Does she change her mind? Does she choose either of them?

In the end, we don't know, not only because Patty does not know, but she does not give in to the urge to imagine. She won't construct a happy ending for her daughter, nor will she send her down an imagined road to ruin to meet Juliana in the snow. In the end, it's Patty who cancels the series when she accepts that her daughter is not an appendage or character, but a person, with a life that is both unpredictable and unknowable to others.

jabba the hutt jabba the hutt jabba the hutt jabba the hutt

I wasn't sold on Parks and Recreation at first. Even though it was no longer being billed as an Office spinoff by the time it made it to air -- and had shed that idea early in its development anyway -- it certainly seemed like a spiritual spinoff of that show, structured around eye-rolling looks to camera by co-workers humoring a boss whose enthusiasm and ambition consistently exceeded her ability. I liked Amy Poehler, don't get me wrong -- she'd be in my all-time top five SNL performers -- and I was glad to see Chris Pratt, who had been hilarious as Che in the underrated post-Marissa season of The O.C. But there was a certain style of comedy that I didn't really need any more of -- I'd had trouble getting into The Office, too, a show that really never did completely master Michael Scott -- and it was only Caitlin's enjoyment of the show when we first started dating that got me to watch season two.


Of course, before long, Rob Lowe and Adam Scott -- star of one of my favorite shows of all time, Party Down -- joined the cast, and Parks became a show great enough that I would have stuck with it even if it had hit a prolonged slump ... which it never did.

When Parks ended last night, it was not only an extremely satisfying finale to close an excellent final season, it really was the end of an era, or more than one era.

For one thing, unless there's some dippy procedural I'm forgetting, this wraps up a particularly strange period in NBC history, when the former Must-See network aired all kinds of low-rated but beloved shows, and kept renewing them at the last minute because it had failed to develop anything better -- Parenthood, Parks, Community, Chuck, Friday Night Lights. Parenthood's done now, Community has moved on to Yahoo of all the fucking things, and Chuck and FNL are fond memories. Even though Parks isn't actually an Office spinoff, it surely wouldn't have been made if NBC hadn't been seeking a spinoff to a show with middling ratings, in a year when middling was the best they could hope for.

And that timing is important for another reason -- it's not like this was the pet project of Mike Schur, something he'd been carrying in his pocket until he had a chance to pitch it. As recounted here there and everywhere, he and Greg Daniels went looking for inspiration, and they found it in the political climate of 2008-2009. Here on the one hand, you had the Audacity of Hope, Yes We Can, hopey changey stuff, while on the other hand, you had town meetings where people were getting pissed at everything without sense or direction -- "Get Government Out of Medicare." Parks has always dealt with that dichotomy.

Well, coincidentally or not, that era's ending too, man. It's 2015. One way or the other we elect another president next year and the Obama years come to an end. Whether we lose the audacity and the hope at the same time, whether having a white president again just calms the crazies down a little, however it plays out, this chapter of history is wrapping up. I've mentioned before that I write history textbooks, and a lot of social and cultural history for reference books -- believe me, the parallel existence of Parks and the Obama presidency (and Leslie Knope's Joe Biden crush) is exactly the kind of thing I write about.

That said, I think Parks was always on its weakest footing when it ripped plots from the headlines -- Pawnee going bankrupt (the second-season plot that brought Adam Scott and Rob Lowe to town) worked well, but things like Pawneeans demanding Leslie's long-form birth certificate always seemed too silly for me (or silly in the wrong way, more to the point), and the kind of thing that'll age poorly when we're re-watching the show on Gryzzlcubes thirty years from now.

The thing is, Parks was so many things. It was never just a show about ludicrous angry people at town meeting. It was a workplace comedy that wasn't quite a workplace comedy -- Schur calls it a project-based comedy in one of those interviews, because the characters originally came together to deal with the pit in Ann Perkins' backyard, and so included more than just co-workers (to be fair, I don't know if this distinction is necessary: Cheers was a workplace comedy in which half the characters didn't work there, after all). People changed jobs, changed positions, ran for office, came and went from accounting firms.

It was a show about one of TV's best couples -- other than Coach and Mrs Coach on Friday Night Lights, I can't think of anyone better than Leslie and Ben, with April and Andy close behind them. Even Ron and Diane would be high up there if Diane had got more screentime.

It was a show that was always way nerdier, and way truer to nerddom, than the fucking Big Bang Theory:

I could go on and on about the ridiculousness of the Big Bang Theory's "nerdiness" and the lazy shorthand it uses to pretend that a pretty conventional sitcom about pretty conventional sitcom characters is about nerdy misfits, but let's focus on the positive and instead remember that Parks gave us a Star Wars filibuster, Ben's treat yo'self Batman costume, multiple Game of Thrones references, the recurring majesty of Cones of Dunshire, and Leslie's obsession with scrapbooking.

One reason that nerdiness fit in so well is because this show was so often about, so often centered by, characters with good intentions (is there anything nerdier?). There is a great Amy Poehler quote in one of Sepinwall's interviews that encapsulates why Parks is so great and why it leaves such a void in the TV schedule now:

So much comedy on television is about the person thinking everything's lame. So much comedy is, "This is stupid, let's get out of here." To lean into someone who had no sense of that was exhilarating, because it felt a little fresh for me, in general. Cynicism and sarcasm weren't tools we got to use. As things went on, every once in a while she would give it to Ron, but for the most part, we didn't have the eye-rolling tool of, "Yeah, this is stupid." When you take that away, you've got to fill it up with something else.

This is one of my favorite things anyone has ever said about their show. Maybe that's one reason the show was able to go for seven seasons without feeling like it'd overstayed its welcome (the time jump between the 6th and 7th season helped, of course). It's amazing to me to think that Parks went for seven seasons and The Office for nine, given that I'd gladly take another two years of Parks, while The Office felt like it droned on for years and years past its prime.

Schur has referred to The Wire in interviews, and it's clear why. Parks isn't just about Leslie, it's about Pawnee -- which is ultimately what would make it hard to write those two years I just wished for, because Leslie's story inevitably takes her away from Pawnee. Most sitcoms show you a very constrained world -- as often as not, a particular slice of New York, but even sitcoms set somewhere else rarely have much sense of place. Look at Newsradio -- the world outside the office is just kind of this generic set of forces that sometimes intrude on work life. Pawnee -- I won't say Pawnee feels real, but Pawnee does feel like a place with a life outside of Leslie Knope and the Parks department. As much as Parks sometimes feels like it's the successor to workplace comedies like Taxi or Mary Tyler Moore, it has as much in common with Green Acres.

The depth of the recurring character bench on this show is crazy. The Tammys are the obvious example, and with good reason, but my favorites are Jean-Ralphio and Mona Lisa Saperstein, who represent the show's cartoonish side at its absolute best. That's one of the things about this show that I'm having trouble putting into words -- the way it finds room for really broad, loud, over the top performances like the Sapersteins, Craig, or Joan Callamezzo without the show itself being really broad and lazy. This isn't King of Queens, with fat jokes and eye rolls punctuated by Jerry Stiller's yelling. Taxi and Mary Tyler Moore come to mind again, actually -- neither of them an especially broad show, but somehow containing room enough for Reverend Jim and Ted Baxter, and written smart enough that letting those broad characters have their space doesn't make the rest of it seem any less real or resonant.

I haven't even touched on the fact that Parks so indulges its writers' love of ridiculous names -- the Lerpiss clan, Perd Hapley, Shauna Malwae-Tweep, Florence Anne Machine, Judge Reinletgo (!), the Wodehousian Eleanor Puntrupple, and the subtle genius of giving Kathryn Hahn the very non-Pawneean name Jennifer Barkley -- that Detlef Schrempf fits right in during his guest appearances.

There are other good shows, but there just aren't other shows that are good like this.

oscars 2015

A quick break from television just to give my thoughts on 2014's movies (those I've seen), since the Academy Awards ceremony remains one of my favorite television events, dumbass red carpet questions and all. 

Probably my most anticipated movie of the year was Noah, which was a tremendous disappointment - interesting visuals, but not enough to make up for so little story and so little character. At least with The Fountain, there was a clear sense of what Aronofsky was trying to do, even if again any sense of believable character was lost in the shuffle (which is why The Wrestler was such an unexpected delight). 

The other big disappointment was They Came Together, a comedy written and directed by, and starring, many of my favorite people. Everything is just played so broad and so big that, as a parody, it's up there with Date Movie and that kind of thing, and as a comedy, it was seriously difficult to force myself to keep watching. I can't believe I'm saying that about something David Wain directed.

The Grand Budapest Hotel fits very nicely in with the post-Darjeeling phase of Wes Anderson's career, the most visually stunning phase. I'll have to see it again to decide if I love it as much as Fantastic Mr Fox, which I think benefits from having so many understated moments compared to the zaniness that punctuates Moonrise Kingdom and Budapest.

Birdman and Boyhood were among the best movies I saw, but in both cases, it felt like elements other than the story itself were what made it great. If you just sit down and tell someone the story, there's not nearly as much going on. And that's okay! That's movies! Showing more, doing more, than the page can convey is not something that is limited to action movies and slapstick. But I'm a storyteller by trade; the story is almost always the thing I respond to most strongly.

That said, the performances holding those movies up - and the direction - are the year's best. I would love to see Michael Keaton win an Oscar.

Interstellar was fun, and I liked how much of it took place on Earth. Wild and Cake both gave meaty material to actresses normally not associated with it, but Wild was far more successful, not because of any deficit in Jennifer Aniston but because her character in Cake just wasn't very likeable, and was so strictly defined by loss and her response to it, whereas Reese Witherspoon had a more varied palette to work with.

The Lego Movie was this year's inexplicably overrated movie, taking over for Frozen from last year. It's not bad. It's certainly competent. But none of it stood out for me. I can understand being grateful to take your kids to a movie that isn't all comedy yelling and poop jokes.

In ongoing superhero stuff, the second Captain America was nearly as good as the first one - they're my two favorite Avengers-related movies - while the second Amazing Spider-Man movie was even more pointless, muddled, and wrongheaded than the first one. I could go on for paragraphs about what the Andrew Garfield version of this franchise gets wrong about both Peter Parker and Gwen Stacy, even apart from how bored we all are with origin stories and the too-many-villains problems that have plagued these movies since Batman Returns. The new X-Men movie, thankfully, was far better than most of the rest.

The superhero standout for me was Guardians of the Galaxy, which I'm pretty sure remains my favorite movie of the year even after Oscar season. It's a little bit Star Wars, if Luke were Indiana Jones and Han a raccoon. It has flaws -- the villains are the least compelling characters, and Gamora is far less interesting and far less powerful than in the comics, which I'm hoping they repair in the sequel rather than make her a generic space love interest. But fuck and damn, James Gunn made a hell of an adventure picture.

Runners-up for favorite movie? The Babadook, by far the best horror movie of the year and the best since, I don't know, You're Next or The Children. The One I Love, a very smart movie with very smart people and a couple of my favorite actors, Mark Duplass and Elisabeth Moss. Obvious Child and The Skeleton Twins, fantastic and intimate ... dramedies, I guess? ... with some of my favorite SNL alumni, and some Oscar nominations wouldn't have been out of place here. Gone Girl and Nightcrawler explored sociopathy from very different places and to different ends.

I believe we're going to watch Inherent Vice or Theory of Everything today, so who knows, one of them may wind up my favorite movie - and I'm not saying much about animated features because I haven't yet seen two that I'm looking forward to (Kaguya and Song of the Sea). Only Lovers Left Alive and Snowpiercer were last year (2013, that is), right? Well, they were excellent too, in any case. It's a TV blog, I'm not going to worry about being encyclopedic.

the deep dark woods

Is Zach Woods the best thing about television right now?

I mean, other than streaming and TCM and Mad Men and Louie?

Yeah, probably.

Like everyone else, I first saw him on The Office, but since he was introduced at the ebb of that show's greatness, it wasn't until 2013 or so that I looked up from whatever I was working on and said, who is this guy? He's in everything right now.

It happens a lot, some actor will suddenly start getting a lot of bit parts, so you see Rachel's date show up as Paul and Jamie's waiter a couple weeks later and a grieving husband on Law and Order a month after that, or what have you. But Zach Woods wasn't just suddenly showing up everywhere. He was suddenly showing up on a lot of medium-to-very awesome shows, and he was killing it.

He's the NSA kid on The Good Wife, first monitoring Alicia's phone calls and then going to her for legal help; I can't find any clips, because that's what I'm saying, Zach Woods isn't even famous enough yet for there to be a shitload of youtube clips of his TV appearances. I'm going to keep saying his full name in the hopes of changing that, see.

It's a classic Good Wife setup, combining the show's interest in unusual legal venues or aspects of law with the ongoing problem of Peter Florick's past and possibly present corruption. The Good Wife deserves a post of its own, because it has the most amazing stable of character actors filling out its recurring roles as judges and opposing counsel, but Zach Woods' casting here fits in perfectly with that.

In contrast he's underused on Veep as Anna Chlumsky's occasionally seen boyfriend, but just being on Veep is kind of an accomplishment given that he's a regular on Silicon Valley, which is paired with it on HBO. I can't embed either of the Silicon Valley clips I was debating between, but that's a good excuse to link to both of them:

Jared versus the driverless car

Very interested, somewhat interested, not interested. Which one? Which one?

Look, if you haven't seen the show -- which was kind of uneven until the finale, but which has a fantastic cast that also includes T.J. Miller, one of my favorite comic actors -- these clips are funny enough on their own, but even funnier in context.

But that's not all! No! Zach Woods ALSO plays Zach Harper on the criminally underrated Playing House, starring real-life BFFs Lennon Parham and Jessica St Clair, with Zach playing Lennon's brother.




This is one of those weird moments in someone's career where part of you hopes they never make it big, because I want to keep seeing Zach Woods in a million different things, you know? Not just in his one highly paid starring role. At the same time, you also want him to succeed enough that he keeps getting cast in everything. Some of us call this the Jere Burns Conundrum.

aftermeth

I first saw Bob Odenkirk on The Ben Stiller Show in 1992, in the middle of that crazy surge of sketch comedy shows, the likes of which we wouldn't see again until, well, this last year or so: in a three or four year period, you had In Living Color, The State, The Edge, The Ben Stiller Show, The Idiot Box, Just Say Julie, and Mr Show, and those are just the ones I remember off the top of my head. (Mad TV came in just as In Living Color ended - I had to look it up to be sure.) These were sketch comedy shows that represented different viewpoints than SNL, which had already come to represent a sort of white, male, often fratty, often diluted mainstream.

The Ben Stiller Show isn't remembered as fondly as Mr Show or The State today, but I think everyone who watched it realized how much talent was on board there (the way those of us who saw Jon Stewart on Short Attention Span Theater realized we'd be seeing him in a bigger venue eventually -- not that anyone could have foreseen this week's outpouring of tributes following the announcement that he's leaving The Daily Show, nor the importance that a show like TDS could have). Janeane Garofalo and Andy Dick rounded out the cast; David Cross and Dino Stamatopoulos had their first writing jobs on the show. It's probably mostly remembered as a starting point -- Garofalo and writer Judd Apatow went on to The Larry Sanders Show, Ben Stiller's film career began with Reality Bites, Andy Dick had a few false starts and then wound up on NewsRadio. And Bob Odenkirk and David Cross, who met on the Stiller Show, went on to create Mr Show.

Its crazy to me how good Mr Show was, given that it premiered just after The State had ended -- and at the time, The State seemed to me like the definitive word on sketch comedy -- and how little overlap the two shows had. (I'm not looking it up, but just assuming they had a writer or two in common, or a guest star in common, or something.) It tells you a lot about the depth of talent available at the time.

I was exactly the right demographic for both shows -- early 20s, colorful hair, Camille Paglia and Douglas Coupland on the bookshelf -- but also exactly the right age that I could have easily missed them, what with not always being home at night and not always having cable. In fact, I missed the last season or two of Mr Show because of not having HBO (I may not have had cable at all - it's all a blur now). Anyway, like The State, or Python, or the occasional Key and Peele skit today - or some of my favorite SNL bits in the last ten years, like "Dear Sister" - Mr Show was fundamentally absurd, a style of comedy that you don't "get" just by telling yourself, oh sure, it's a parody of COPS only they're in the French Revolution.

Like David Cross, Odenkirk became a comedy fixture after Mr Show, doing small to medium parts in a million TV shows, but it felt like everyone who knew his name was a Mr Show fan. It wasn't until Breaking Bad -- and especially, when Breaking Bad suddenly became huge in its final seasons -- that it seemed like the rest of the world finally got to know Bob Odenkirk's name.

Even before Better Call Saul, Odenkirk's Saul Goodman was an outlier in this age of quality TV drama: a supporting character so vivid and interesting that you could easily imagine a Saul show taking place simultaneously with Breaking Bad, and his early appearances on BB as a crossover between the two shows. You could easily replay those early BB appearances from a Saul-centric point of view and imagine what the rest of his day might be like, or how the appearance of Walter White and Jesse Pinkman in his life affected his overall arc. This feeling faded in the later seasons -- as Saul became more integral to Breaking Bad, the sense of him as a secret protagonist of some hidden show in a parallel universe naturally went away.

But think of how few characters among Breaking Bad's fellow dramas could so easily be imagined as protagonist of their own shows. Even when Frasier was spun off from Cheers -- more or less an ensemble comedy -- back in the day, they had to find a new context to put him in, and ignore his established backstory, in order to make it work. It wasn't just "here's more of Frasier, minus the parts of his life he spends in a bar."

The Wire lends itself most easily to this question, of course -- there was a Tommy Carcetti miniseries planned at one point, and it's easy to imagine the ongoing story of the stevedores, a Cutty-centric spinoff, a Bunny Colvin version of Parenthood, what have you. That's the nature of the show. But try imagining a character from Mad Men, The Sopranos, even Deadwood being given their own show that isn't in some sense a rejiggered continuation of the original show. Any character I pick, it feels like Frasier -- it feels like lifting this character up and removing them to some other venue to tell a story that, really, could have just as easily been told about a brand-new character. AfterMASH. Beverly Hills Buntz. Joey.

I think that's one reason Better Call Saul has been so highly anticipated, and why the premiere rated so highly: Saul Goodman already felt like a character who had his own show we weren't watching. He already felt that alive and that interesting, without needing to give him a fussy brother and a dad who doesn't understand him. Better Call Saul, if it's done right, is a story that can only be told with this preexisting character.

You know what it reminds me of, more than anything on TV? John Constantine. Constantine showed up as a supporting character on Alan Moore's fantastic run on the Swamp Thing comic book, sort of a Ben Kenobi with a Han Solo heart, there to guide Alec Holland to his destiny but not necessarily for Holland's own good. It wasn't until several years later that he got his own series, Hellblazer, and while we got to know other facets of Constantine through that series, none of it felt like it was at odds with what we knew of him in Swamp Thing. It just felt like we had backtracked and chosen to keep following John's story instead of Alec's.

Yes, the Saul we're getting in this first season isn't the Saul we know, yet. He's not even called Saul. But this is clearly the Albuquerque of Breaking Bad. This is clearly that same world, just a different segment of it, a decade earlier, from a different perspective. If it's a prequel, it's not a prequel in the same sense as The Phantom Menace et al -- this doesn't feel like a narrative that is primarily meant to explain how we got to the first few minutes of Breaking Bad, or even to Saul's first appearance on Breaking Bad. It doesn't feel like an explanation at all, and I think that's going to be one of its strengths.

With only two episodes, it's hard to say much about the show so far. It has a mix of darkness and humor like Breaking Bad often did, without the self-destructive megalomania of Walter White at its center. That alone is compelling. Taking somebody like Saul/Jimmy and having him take care of an older brother like Chuck, that's immensely compelling, and immediately makes you ask what happens to Chuck in the intervening years (perhaps like Chuck Cunningham, people just forget about him and stop bringing him up), what the rest of their family is like, etc.

I'm certainly on board.

super super underwear nor any drop to drink

Smallville ran for ten years before ending not long ago. Today we've got Arrow, The Flash, Agents of SHIELD, Agent Carter of SHIELD, Gotham, and Constantine, with Supergirl, Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Daredevil, Iron Fist, Powers, and a reboot of Heroes on the way, and God knows what else in development. There's a crazy number of superhero shows on TV right now. Like with the Lord of the Rings movies, the (upcoming) Star Wars sequels, the Spider-Man movies, it's the kind of thing that would've seemed too good to be true if you'd told me about it in the 80s. Unlike most of those things, though, maybe it really is too good to be true -- most of these shows are not very good.

My one concern with this entry is that I don't want this blog to just be a collection of things I don't like, you know? There is plenty on television that is either awful or, at least, Not My Kind of Thing. I don't think it's worth my time to talk about that television, nor your time to read about it.

So why do I feel like I want to write about superhero shows when I think they're largely mediocre? I guess because I love the genre. I guess because I'm invested. And that's a different feeling about mediocrity, a different experience of mediocrity, than the mediocrity of House or Two and a Half Men.

I don't know for sure if comics or television provided my first introduction to superheroes. There were, actually, a lot of superhero shows on TV when I was a kid, if you count the reruns and the cartoons: Lynda Carter as Wonder Woman, Adam West as Batman, The Courtship of Eddie's Father's Bill Bixby in The Incredible Hulk, the original Spider-Man cartoon, the Superfriends and related DC superhero cartoons, and the often-forgotten live-action Spider-Man show with Nicholas Hammond:


I was particularly a fan of Spider-Man and Batman, which I think is as much an effect of the era as of the innate qualities of those characters: there may have been few real classics being produced in superhero TV in the 60s and 70s, but the best of what was made always had Spider-Man or Batman in it. It probably helps that, although Spider-Man has actual super powers and Batman doesn't, they were both street-level heroes who didn't seem out of place fighting gangs and bank robbers (or "supervillains" in the form of bank robbers with outlandish costumes). Superman is a hard sell on television because he's so fucking powerful, how do you challenge him week in and week out, without a movie-level budget?

Comics-wise, I started with hand-me-downs and borrowed comics from older friends, like Jason, who was a few years older than me and had the cabin next to ours up at the lake. Jason had a bunch of DC comics that he'd bring up every summer, including a ton of Superman comics (and Superman Family, Lois Lane, Jimmy Olsen, etc) with that era's focus on imaginary stories, red kryptonite-induced transformations, and the many other colors of kryptonite (the below list isn't even complete).

That Marvel Team-Up issue below is the first Marvel comic I owned. Both these comics highlight some pretty stark differences between comic book superheroes and the TV superheroes at the time. TV superheroes lived in a much, much more normal world than the "real" Marvel or DC universes. In most shows, the protagonist was the only superhero in the world (the cartoons were the exception here), and often there weren't even any supervillains with actual powers - maybe you'd have a mummy now and then, or a commie robot or something. But forget about Spider-Man fighting Dr Octopus, or teaming up with the Invisible Girl.

The Incredible Hulk was one of the most successful of these shows -- one of the few to go more than a season or two -- and it's a pretty good example of how "superheroes" were approached. As everyone knows, the Incredible Hulk was just The Fugitive with a new skin: David Banner ("Bruce" was too gay for TV) was on the run because of havoc caused by his alter ego, The Hulk, and pursuing a cure to his condition, while being pursued in turn by investigative journalist McGee, who is determined to prove the Hulk exists. Like with the Fugitive or the A-Team, this builds some dramatic tension into every episode, because the main character has to stay on the move to stay safe; like those shows, it avoids worldbuilding or significant character development, because every episode the action has moved to a different dot on the blue highways, with a different guest cast and a different dilemma to be solved in an hour.

Until the X-Files popularized the "monster of the week" episode, this was the basic form that adventure shows took, whether their protagonists were superheroes, fugitive surgeons framed for murder, talking cars and their drivers, or an alien and his half-alien son. Like the rest of TV, in the days before VCRs and a post-broadcast market, most shows leaned pretty heavily on a formula, and continuity didn't change much, except occasionally in season premieres (often to tinker with the formula or cast, quickly setting up a new formula rather than an alternative to formula).

The adventure shows disappeared over time. Okay, it's not a genre with clearly defined boundaries, but I think of it as a 60-minute light drama in which every episode finds the protagonist(s) righting a wrong - whether fighting a monster, stopping an assassination, helping a family-owned farm stop the evil corporation from buying it out, whatever - while staying distinct from the police procedural. The 80s version of the genre was as influenced by The Dukes of Hazzard and Wonder Woman as by The Fugitive. I think it's easy to forget just how big this was. Look at 1987-1988:

Sundays: Werewolf and Supercarrier

Mondays: MacGyver

Wednesdays: Highway to Heaven

Fridays: The Highwayman

Saturdays: Once a Hero

That's six shows in an era of three and a half networks (Fox only had programming two nights a week, like the cable channels today), but I'm leaving out the detective shows, which sort of straddled the tonal line between adventure shows and cop shows: Spenser for Hire, Murder She Wrote, Magnum P.I., Sonny Spoon, Jake and the Fatman, J.J. Starbuck, The Law and Harry McGraw, Simon and Simon, Private Eye, and the when-it-was-good-it-was-very-very-good Moonlighting. 

Speaking of Moonlighting, Lois and Clark is a pretty great example of what's wrong with superhero TV, insofar as it followed the pattern of reassuring the viewer (and other decision-makers) by making a show that was a light and unchallenging version of a proven success, with a few costumes thrown in. It did give us this, though:

The early superhero TV shows often shot themselves in the foot by reinventing their superhero characters and risking the alienation of comic book fans. TV's Banner isn't exposed to gamma radiation -- traumatized by his inability to prevent his wife dying in a car accident, he studies the phenomenon of people calling on unexpected reserves of strength in crises and experiments on himself, turning himself into the Hulk. Which really makes no more sense than gamma radiation, but no gamma means no Rick Jones (as well as robbing the show of an easy way to introduce supervillains), one of the Marvel Universe's more enduring characters.

Probably the most egregious examples of reinventing the comic book character are Shazam, in which Captain Marvel's origin drops the wizard Shazam and has CM traveling the country in a Winnebago ...


... and even more inexplicably, Hanna Barbera's cartoon version of The Thing, in which the Fantastic Four don't even show up and Benjy Grimm is a teenager who transforms into The Thing with magic rings, an even more substantial change than the Hulk's.



I actually really loved the Thing cartoon as a kid! But it bore almost no resemblance to the comic book.

Thing is, I love the superhero genre. I still read comics, though fewer of them (Captain Marvel, Silver Surfer, and Star-Lord are among my favorites in years). I have a superhero novel in progress, inspired largely by the Marvel comics of the 70s and those Superman imaginary stories I grew up with. The mediocrity of superhero TV shows is more of a nuisance to me than that of police procedurals or Quirky Detectives.

There are two ... axes, I guess, of mediocrity to talk about here. First, most of these shows just aren't very engaging - whatever the flaws or virtues of their take on the superhero-specific elements, they're just not especially well-written or -acted. Second, those superhero-specific elements themselves are often handled in the dullest way possible.

Second point first. Like I said, in most superhero shows, the protagonist is the only super-powered being in the whole damn world. Smallville changed that, but for the most part it stuck to the slightly broader version: the source of the protagonist's powers is the only source of super powers in the whole damn world. I certainly didn't watch all of Smallville, but apart from the occasional guest appearance of Aquaman or whatever, most of the superbeings were either fellow Kryptonians or got their powers from "meteor rock."

You know what was great about the X-Files? It wasn't just about UFOs. It wasn't just about vampires. It was about UFOs and vampires and alien abductions and werewolves and prehistoric mites and cockroach robots and clones and mutant contortionists. Even Buffy the Vampire Slayer didn't limit herself to vampires -- or to the idea that everything supernatural in Sunnydale came from the Hellmouth or shared a common origin with the Slayer.

Interesting worlds are messy and complicated. Somehow the kids who grew up with Superfriends -- with a Kryptonian, Gotham's mystery man, the prince of Atlantis, a space cop with a magic ring, an Amazonian warrior, and Apache Chief fighting robots, aliens, and Solomon Grundy -- grew up and decided that a TV show where more than one thing is different from the real world would just be too confusing.

But look, take away the messiness from the superhero genre and you don't leave much. This is the genre of Secret Wars, Earth-1 and Earth-2, Spider-clones (and Spider-Man beating himself up over the death of Gwen Stacy, even in an era when most comics resisted major changes to their status quos), Steve Ditko art, Jack Kirby dots, the Cosmic Cube, Dr Doom's dabbling in magic and his mother's cursed soul, Reed Richards' time-traveling absentee father, Mantis becoming the Celestial Madonna, Wally West becoming the new Flash, the Swamp Thing's travels through time and space, don't even ask me to sum up Spider-Woman's backstory or explain who the Scarlet Witch and Quicksilver's parents are, and geez, THE VISION, an android created using the body of a different android and the brainwaves of a dead superhero. As crazy as people think something like Game of Thrones or True Blood is, Marvel comics put them to shame. Any dozen issues of Thor before the 1990s would be sufficient to put them to shame.

That's what's GREAT about them. People don't like soap operas DESPITE the evil twins and amnesia and betrayals. Nobody watched the first season of Desperate Housewives thinking, boy, this would be great if not for the blackmail plot and the narration by the ghost of the dead friend with a secret. But so many superhero shows are put together as though the audience is expected to tolerate the superpowers and costume, while mostly being interested in some lukewarm love triangle and a couple of half-baked mysteries.

That brings me back to the first point. The main problem with superhero shows, I think, is one that plagues science fiction shows in general -- speculative fiction shows in general, if you like:

Almost every science fiction show is worse than the non-science fiction show it most closely resembles.

Maybe that's why Battlestar Galactica is so good - it doesn't really resemble any non-sf shows. It's impossible to imagine what the show would be, without its Cylons and spaceships and mythic trappings.

Most superhero shows aren't shows about superheroes so much as they're shows starring superheroes. They could as easily be shows about detectives or fugitive surgeons.

Agents of SHIELD isn't so much a superhero show, I suppose, as a show set in a superhero-adjacent world, but that gives it even less excuse for being such a piss-poor spy show. Yes, second season improved on the first, but if not for the Whedon or Marvel brand names, I don't see how in a million years it would have gotten a second season -- somehow, post-Alias, post-Chuck, post-Rubicon, post-Americans, it landed on television as a spy show that reads like it's made by people who don't like or watch spy shows, a spy show no more complicated or inspired than one that could have come out in the 80s. It brought nothing new to the table except the appeal of Clark Gregg, who deserved a better showcase.

And just like that Marvel brand name undoubtedly was sufficient for the show to be renewed, other superhero shows always seem to be put together as though -- even though the writers avoid the superhero genre's conventions and messiness as much as possible -- the fact that a superhero is present is supposed to be enough to attract our interest. Science fiction shows have been doing that for ages - a few robots or aliens cover up the sub-standard acting or reliance on formula, and the fans gobble it up often enough that it pays off.

Even Agent Carter, which as a miniseries doesn't need to depend on formula plots to kill time, and which is significantly better than Agents of SHIELD, is pretty awful if you gauge it as a period show (someone even coughs into their elbow, for Christ's sake). As a period show, it reads like it's made by people who read the back cover blurbs of a couple books about the period and decided that the most important difference other than the fashion was that since the main character is a woman, sexism needs to be front and center. Not realistic or well-written sexism. Just a bunch of buffoons constantly needling Carter for being a lady. Nevermind that the really insidious fact of the sexism of the period - or sexism now - is that very intelligent, competent, skilled, kind, and gracious men are just as capable of being sexist assholes as the rest are.

If you pay attention to my complaints, you may not be surprised that my favorite superhero show right now is The Flash, who lives in a world that actually has other super-powered beings in it. Time travel even features in the plot! It's a far cry from perfect -- I don't watch every episode, and it's not good enough to bump into the "stuff I watch with Caitlin" priority tier -- but it's a good deal better than Arrow, for instance, which I just can't take seriously despite having given it several tries, or the awful stink of SHIELD. (Gotham started out promising, but is already hamstrung by the problems introduced by its premise -- how does it plan to fill five or six years when it's having this much trouble in its first season?)

The show that gets everything right is Batman: The Brave and the Bold, which happens to be a cartoon. It might be tangential enough to merit its own post except that talking about it in this one gives me an opportunity to focus on the positive.




Airing from 2008 to 2011 on the Cartoon Network and available on DVD and Netflix now, Batman: The Brave and the Bold was the perfect way to do a Batman cartoon without mimicking the Art Deco cartoon of the 90s. Like the Silver Age comic for which it's named, each cartoon features Batman teaming up with another hero -- usually more than one, since the cold open at the beginning is usually a separate adventure. (In fact, the cold opens feature some of the show's most brilliant storytelling, managing to conjure up so much in so little time.) The cold opens sometimes tied in to later main episode storylines -- Equinox and Starro recur as villains in the first two seasons, for instance.

Why is it that the live-action shows feel like everything needs to be introduced in drips and dabs, slowly getting us used to the shocking idea of super-powers, when cartoons are happy to drop you right into the middle of things and sometimes never explain the backstory. Certainly BTBB doesn't give you an origin story for each and every one of its superheroes and supervillains, which is seemingly unthinkable for the writers of the live-action shows. Look at the list of characters, for heaven's sake! And although it's ostensibly a kids' show, it's full of nods and references they'd never get -- Kevin Conroy, voice of the 90s cartoon Batman, voicing the Batman of an alien planet; the appearance of Baby Plas, Plastic Man's son from his early 80s cartoon; cameo appearances by supervillains from the 60s Batman TV show. Over the course of the show, we get parallel universes, aliens, multiple generations of superheroes like The Flash or Blue Beetle, Dick Grayson as both Robin and Nightwing, time travel, a musical episode, and more Green Lanterns than you can shake a stick at.

It's a perfect model for how a live-action show should be done, especially something continuity-heavy like the X-Men. Even a Dr Strange show would benefit from dropping us into the tenth year of Stephen's stint as Sorcerer Supreme and revealing his origin over flashbacks in the cold opens of the first season, let's say. Throw Dormammu, Clea and Umar, Baron Mordo, and Nightmare at us all at once. Make references to Strange's former membership in the Defenders, and have the Silver Surfer or the Black Knight show up for help once in a while. We can handle it, I promise.

As an aside, although I decided only to focus on comic book adaptations here rather than original superhero shows like Heroes, there are two British shows of the latter category worth drawing attention to, both of which are available on Hulu: Misfits and No Heroics. Misfits is the more dramatic and goes on for more seasons, though it also gets gradually less engaging as half the cast leaves; it's of the "something happens and suddenly there are superpowers" genre, while No Heroics is a sitcom set in a superhero-filled world.

one, two, three, go

I saw someone on Facebook refer to television as a "passive, non-cognitive activity," and it was the dumbest fucking thing I'd read all week. If watching television is passive, so is listening to music. So is looking at a painting. So is going to the theater. Just because it's something you can do fresh out of the box, without needing to be taught a skill like reading, doesn't mean it doesn't invite, encourage, or benefit from engagement. If you're a passive television-watcher, that foolishness has nobody's stink on it but your own.

A couple days later, in response to news about Fox picking up a new series, another Facebook user referred to the myth that Fox never gives shows a chance, and cancels everything good -- one of those myths that makes me bang your head against the wall and, God help me, actually feel bad for Fox, because the reality is that in the period this myth developed, Fox regularly aired series other networks would never have touched. But the "Fox kills shows" myth survives because of a myopia endemic to fan communities, which is the subject of a rant that I should probably postpone forever.

Rolling your eyes at things people say on the internet is the worst reason to add content to the internet.

I will find better reasons.

ONE REASON

This is the best time to be a TV fan (whatever that means). Whether or not we're still in the Golden Age of television dramas, we still have that television -- an unbelievable amount of television, in total -- available to us. We took this for granted with remarkable alacrity. Between my girlfriend and myself, we have complete series sets of Twin Peaks, Breaking Bad, Friends, the Wire, the Sopranos, Wiseguy, Sports Night, The State, The Mighty Boosh, the X-Files, Sapphire and Steel, and Mary Hartman Mary Hartman -- I'm sure I'm forgetting some -- and only a couple of those sets cost a significant amount of money, and it's still crazy to me that these sets are even available to be owned. But nevermind DVD and Blu-Ray -- beyond that, we have a ridiculous breadth of shows available streaming on Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon Prime, not to mention the free, subscription, and pay On Demand options through our cable company.

There is SO MUCH TELEVISION.

Almost twenty years ago I taught a course on television criticism, frankly a kind of self-righteous defense of "television is better than you realize, y'all dinks," and the biggest challenge at the time was finding ways to talk about television without knowing for sure that my students had seen it or could see it. Twin Peaks and The Singing Detective were available on videocassette, but not easy to find -- this was in that long, long age of scarcity, see, before you could find absolutely everything for purchase or piracy on the internet -- and talking about Hill Street Blues, Mary Tyler Moore, Soap, Mary Hartman Mary Hartman, St Elsewhere, and Family pretty much required summarizing series and episodes for students who weren't familiar with them.

This was a pain in the ass, and you know, it probably wasn't a very good course, my best intentions notwithstanding. Being a pop culture major in the early 90s was different, sort of the way being a comics reader in the 80s was different than it is now -- it was one of those things that seemed to demand explanation any time you brought it up, whereas now I think everyone has got over the novelty of "OMG the college kids are taking classes on Game of Thrones!!" We were immersed in a certain kind of sticky, elastic, drippy defensiveness, some of which may still cling today, though the environment for which it evolved has largely been displaced through the mainstreaming of geekery. This ties in with that fan community rant I said I wasn't going to get into.

Point being, the hardest part of putting that course together then would continue to be hard now, but for the opposite reason: with virtually everything available now -- an availability so near-complete that it's always a little surprising when you can't find something that only a few years ago it would never occur to you would be out there -- how would I whittle the syllabus down? How many hours of television would I insist my students watch? What assumptions would I make about what they'd already seen?

What, in fact, is the common ground when nothing needs to be watched live anymore and forty year old shows are no less accessible than last week's episodes? Television used to be the weather: everybody who wasn't sheltered got the same kind of wet.

TWO REASONS (ah ah ah)

I'm part of Generation X, which grew up on the reruns of the generations before. For decades, a number of shows -- probably most prominently, Gilligan's Island, The Brady Bunch, and I Love Lucy -- were on the air every week if not every day, while kids' shows like Batman, Spider-Man, and the Superfriends were rerun over and over for successive waves of kids. There was a common ground, a common frame of reference, a common language. Friends makes jokes about Three's Company, a show that'd been off the air for a decade when Friends premiered -- and at least into the late 90s, Dragnet and Gilligan's Island were still staple references for sitcoms and comedians.

These days, despite having access to All The Television, it can be hard to find reruns older than Seinfeld or Friends unless you turn to a channel devoted to them - MeTV, Cosi, and so on. But even though you can still technically watch the Brady Bunch every weekend on those channels, it's not the same as watching the Brady Bunch in the 20th century, because it's less and less likely that you're watching because "nothing else is on." We grew up with three networks and a handful of UHF stations, and until cable became ubiquitous, not everyone even got all three networks -- even as an adult, I've lived places where reception of one or two of the major networks was too poor to bother with.

People knew Gilligan's Island and the Brady Bunch not because these were the best shows across several decades but because they were available. They might be the only thing on when you can't sleep at 3am. They might be the only show that isn't boring to kids that's on during the day when you're home sick and you've had all the PBS you can take. They might be on one of the UHF stations when the networks are showing the news. That's ultimately what these reruns were, for many years - the alternatives to other things, the fallbacks. After after VCRs, we still needed fallbacks.

There are SO MANY channels now, though, and reruns of sitcoms have disappeared in favor of extensive daytime talk shows, court shows, and so on, while infomercials fill those 3am slots. As much as you would think a million channels leads to a billion reruns, every channel seems to produce its own content -- the popularity of cheap-as-shit reality TV has helped make that possible -- and rerun it over and over again.

That plethora of channels also means the viewing audience is more fractured, something people have written plenty about: it's one reason ratings aren't as high, and can never again be as high, as they used to be, something that I don't think the industry has finished adjusting to. When there were three networks, the most popular show at any given time was obviously going to get huge numbers compared to today, when there are five broadcast networks, a number of basic cable networks producing shows at at least the same level of quality and production values as the networks, a couple premium channels like HBO and Showtime with their own shows, and of course the endless glut of minor cable channels that at least nibble away at the shares of the bigger ones. Sports fans have more sports to watch. Reality show or procedural addicts need never watch anything else. Etc. There are fewer and fewer shows that you can comfortably assume "most people" are familiar with.

Lack of a common framework, or changes in where the pieces of the common framework come from, is something I've thought a LOT about, which isn't to say I have any conclusions about it. But perhaps a blog is a good place to think out loud, see.

THREE REASONS

Lately I've been obsessed with traditional pop or whatever you want to call it -- an obsession that grew out of my love of Frank Sinatra and spilled over into Dick Haymes, Nancy Wilson, Hoagy Carmichael, etc. It's a pretty big change from my usual musical choices and for the most part it's not an interest that's relevant here. But it gets me thinking about the idea of the Great American Songbook: the canon of songs from the middle of the 20th century by composers like Irving Berlin, Rodgers and Hart, and Cole Porter. These are songs that are almost surely familiar to you, regardless of whether you and I have heard the same people sing them: Over the Rainbow, Georgia on My Mind, Puttin on the Ritz, Let's Face the Music and Dance, Fly Me to the Moon, I've Got You Under My Skin, The Lady is a Tramp, Ain't Misbehavin ...

When you put an Ella Fitzgerald album on, you don't get het up that you've already heard this song on your Peggy Lee album. You're not bothered that Hoagy Carmichael and Mel Torme sing some of the same songs, and you may not even prefer one to the other. What defines a Hoagy Carmichael album is very different from what defines a Pixies album, in other words. All the work of differentiation and personalization is being done in a different part of the map than I'm used to.

What this has to do with TV is it's a way of thinking about tropes and genre conventions. The bottle episode. The misunderstanding as a result of overhearing part of a conversation. The will they or won't they. Obviously the TVtropes site has been zealous in cataloguing these things, but a catalogue isn't a conversation. I'm interested in paying attention to when these conventions are used skillfully, and when it's just hackery, and where the difference comes from -- why is this guy's version timeless, but that guy's version is lounge-lizard cheese?

So there are some decent enough reasons.

WHAT'S THE DEAL WITH THIS GUY?

The deal with me is I'm a writer with a neglected cooking blog (after a while I just reached the point where there were fewer new things to say about cooking). I'm not a writer for or about television - I've published maybe forty, fifty thousand words about TV from a cultural history standpoint, in bits and pieces for textbooks and encyclopedias, but that's it.

My girlfriend Caitlin suggested that I start a blog about TV. We talk about it a lot, not just in terms of what we've been watching lately but the historical trends that interest us -- the way that television in the 70s was less conservative, and the Moral Majority put such a fear of God into the networks in the 80s that in 2015 we've barely caught up to where we were, for instance. I work at home, so I watch more TV than she does, sometimes checking out new shows to decide whether or not to recommend them as things we watch together when she gets home after her commute.

I knew immediately what I didn't want to do: a "this is what I watched last night" blog. There are a couple of good ones - Alan Sepinwall is the gold standard, of course, and Mo Ryan is quite good. There are also a lot of awful ones, even among the professional sites. I think it takes a special knack to have something to say every week about the same shows, even if you're selective in what you blog about. (Sepinwall is really the Roger Ebert of the genre, and part of his skill is knowing what to cover and what not to cover.) I don't want the tail to wag the dog: I don't want to find myself watching something in order to blog about it.

At the same time there is an awful lot going on right now that I certainly have thoughts about. Just some obvious examples, as they occurred to me after Caitlin's suggestion --

The retirement of Craig Ferguson and David Letterman, and the general decline of late-night television even as it's exploded to include ever increasing numbers of white men;

The final season of Mad Men, a strong contender for best series of all time, and the way that Mad Men seems to have shed viewers (or at least hype) over time, as opposed to the way Breaking Bad suddenly became a phenomenon at its end;

Community's probably-final season on Yahoo, of all things;

The explosion of superhero shows across all broadcast networks, Netflix, and even the freaking Playstation;

Better Call Saul starts soon, which is a fascinating idea independent of whether or not the show succeeds;

Lord, I am tired of all these serial killer shows, how do these shows' settings even have so many serial killers, is "death by serial killer" the most frequent cause of death?;

The Sci Fi Channel's recent commitment to "good TV," and my lifelong frustration that science fiction shows are almost always awful, even the ones that go on for years.

I'm so tired of snark, irony, and hate-watching, so none of that will play a part here.

So what I seem to be suggesting to myself is an occasional series of long posts, rather than a blog that is especially concerned with the present moment.

As far as my tastes, and whether they're close enough to yours that you should have any investment in what I say about TV, my favorites are probably not too far from the canon. Rectify, The Wire, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Friday Night Lights, Louie, Mary Tyler Moore, Taxi, Twin Peaks, The State, Community, Battlestar Galactica, Pulling, Gavin and Stacey, Peep Show, Eight is Enough, Mad About You, Family Ties, Parks, Curb, brief-lived wonders like Freaks and Geeks, Rubicon, Party Down, and Happy Endings, flawed greats like American Gothic and Wiseguy ... I'm also a little obsessed with Friends (I have the first season of Joey on DVD).


I love the utter ridiculousness of the Saturday morning cartoons of yore, and my love for animation in general is a whole nother thing. In theory I love the ridiculousness of 80s adventure shows like Automan or Knight Rider, but in practice I can't watch them for long.

I'm sick of the "oaf husband/long-suffering wife" sitcom, a la According to Jim, King of Queens, and so far about half of the episodes of Black-ish.

I love Bryan Fuller's whimsical shows but have had more trouble getting into Hannibal.

I hate the final seasons of Buffy and Lost, was fine with the ending of the Sopranos, had deep misgivings about the ending of Battlestar Galactica.

I don't like procedurals, whether medical, legal, or police, and I especially hate quirky or mentally ill people solving crimes while being all quirky or mentally ill. I do love The Good Wife, though.