cape fear

One of my first posts on this still-young blog was about superheroes and the general failure of television to compellingly depict them or capture what works about comic books. Since then, the spring season has begun to wrap up and there have been a few significant developments, so it's worth a followup:

The CW-verse

Is there an umbrella term for the CW's DC shows, now that there will be three of them in the fall? They don't seem to share continuity with any of the DC movies or CBS's Supergirl show (I hope I'm wrong about the latter), so "DC TV-verse" doesn't work.

Anyway. Because The Flash crosses over with Arrow a fair bit, I've watched a few more episodes of Arrow, and ... like I said last time round, I just cannot take it seriously. It's like knockoff Nolan. I'm so tired of the idea that "taking superheroes seriously" means making them grim-n-gritty, an idea that was horseshit in the early 90s and is horseshit 20 years later when other media are catching up to comic books.

I know everyone - well, everyone in their forties - fondly remembers Mike Grell's Longbow Hunters, which de-camp-ified Green Arrow and made people stop focusing on ridiculous trick arrows, but just like with Frank Miller's Batman, it worked in part as a palate cleanser from the excesses of camp, and landed at a time when, because of Crisis, no specific view of the character had come into clear focus. There are plenty of ways to do Green Arrow that don't have him grinding his teeth all the fucking time, and the Hard Travellin Heroes stories that focused on Queen's social activism in contrast with Green Lantern the space cop are a perfect example.

Ugh. This Green Arrow would be such a terrible presence on a Justice League. He would just sit in the corner glowering with Batman.

The Flash is much better, thank God. It always got the tone just about right, and the series has become more populated with superheroes and supervillains as the season has gone on, with compelling time travel twists and an excellent villain in the Reverse-Flash. Some of those new superheroes are going off to do the Legends spinoff, so I hope season two continues to create new recurring characters and do the work to make this feel like a show set in a world with superheroes, not just one or two dudes in costumes.

Netflix

Netflix's Marvel experiment -- four solo hero shows followed by a Defenders series teaming them up -- has started. (I gotta say, I wish they were calling it Champions instead of Defenders, because now that they're doing a Dr Strange movie, an ACTUAL Defenders movie with Dr Strange, the Hulk, and -- well, if Fox still has Silver Surfer, then somebody else, maybe even Spider-Man -- would be terrific.)

Man, people went nuts for Daredevil.

I ... like it okay.

I still haven't finished it.

Look, the cast is just right. They assembled the correct pieces. Vincent D'onofrio is especially good as the Kingpin, and Scott Glenn as Stick, but the trio of DD, Foggy, and Karen are a great foundation. There's just a lot of punching.

I mean, yeah, it's an action show, and it's a superhero show where the character doesn't have other offensive powers. But it's a lot of punching. And my attention winds up wandering, and I check my email or I get up to do the dishes or something. It's not 1986 and I'm not watching The A-Team -- punching wears thin after a while.

Is part of the problem that I'm not enough of a Daredevil fan? I don't know. I was a big fan of Frank Miller and Ann Nocenti's runs on the book back in the day, although to recycle a point from Green Arrow -- at the time, part of what I enjoyed about them was how different they were from other superhero comics, and that contrast is no longer in evidence.

But comics-wise, I've always been a bigger fan of the cosmic/weird stuff, along with the Avengers and Spider-Man. Daredevil was probably never in my top ten books at the height of my comics fandom (though also never lower than my top twenty). So maybe I'm just responding at the appropriate level of enthusiasm to a well-made adaptation.

It does play in to my frustration that so many superhero adaptations are just, you know, punching in costumes -- the super powers in evidence here are on about the same level as pulp hero stuff like The Shadow, where I want webshooters and Olympian gods and bio-stings.

The Avengers: Age of Ultron

I won't spoil any specific plot developments. This movie is in that tricky area where it was disappointing while still being good.

The Black Widow criticisms are all absolutely valid, but that's easy for me to say, because I thought she was terribly written in the first Avengers movie. She was moderately better written in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, but that movie contributes to the trend of pairing her off -- as a love interest or at least flirting partner -- with a different character in every movie she shows up in.

The movie version of this complicated and interesting comic book character has always been sorely underwritten, and I don't think she was even accidentally underwritten, I think she was created as a cipher who would be available for whatever plot needs became manifest, given that they needed her to appear in a dozen or so movies, filling slightly different needs. They purposefully chose a character without powers -- and therefore without additional special effects budget requirements -- to bridge these many Avengers-verse movies, and paid little attention to her beyond her plot-serving uses. I know the ScarJo version of the character has a devoted following, but I don't pretend to understand why.

She's not the only character who seems to serve the plot more than her own needs, here -- Tony Stark is very important to the movie but for the first time comes across as a character with little existence beyond his plot-use. There are times when the same almost seems true of Thor, but Chris Hemsworth is really underrated in his Marvel work, and ably does more with less.

The new characters are largely good; Scarlet Witch and the Vision are terrific, and I would love to see them in their own movie.

The movie is way too long, and at least some of that bloat is pretty transparently caused by the movie's need to serve multiple masters, which does not bode well for the next Cap or the next Avengers movies (though I am glad Whedon is off the train by then).

Another reason it's too long is that some of the action scenes are way too long and, really, not very interesting. I'm glad a lot of the action minutes are spent saving bystanders, but so many of them are devoted to smashing buildings and Michael Bay shit like that, and it's just boring.

Bonus: iZombie

Okay, it's not a superhero show, and although it's a comic book show, it's a very loose adaptation from what I understand (I haven't read it).

But it handles so many superhero tropes so well, and it's about a character with a secret identity, who is hiding from her loved ones the fact that she developed new powers following a traumatic accident, and that she uses those powers to solve murders and fight bad guys with the same powers as hers. One of the people she's hiding her secrets from is her ex-fiance. So I mean. It's a superhero show.

And it's such a good one.

I don't want to spoil anything. The premise, if you can't piece it together from my Mad Libs, is that Olivia Moore became a zombie after a wild party on a yacht went berzerko, and she took a job as a medical examiner in order to fill her need to eat brains -- without which she gradually becomes dumber and more aggressive, more like the zombies of the movies. (The need to eat brains to stave off zombie-mind is also used to good effect in Marvel Zombies - there you go, another superhero connection!) When she eats brains, she occasionally gains skills or other traits of the deceased for a temporary period, which provides the juice for the "case of the week" plots, as she solves murders and whatnot by drawing on the victims' memories and abilities.

Meanwhile, another zombie is amassing power by turning people into zombies and making them dependent on him to supply their food; Liv's social worker ex stumbles onto this without knowing what he's stumbled onto, when he investigates a rash of missing kids.

There are a lot of things the show does well. It starts out feeling like Veronica Mars, which makes sense -- this is a Rob Thomas show, with a snarky blonde solving crimes. But over the course of the first season, it develops its own identity, and it's doing things shows of this stripe have often veered away from doing: most significantly, Liv's decision to keep her secrets hidden from her ex and others has had real consequences beyond Lois being mad at Clark or Mary Jane dumping Peter. The ethics of the double life are really called into question -- and really, this aspect was there even in the pilot, given that Liv only breaks up with Major because she knows she has these secrets to keep, instead of trying to maintain a relationship and a secret life. It just wasn't clear from the pilot that this dilemma was going to become so important to the show. (To be fair, The Flash has done a better than usual job dealing with the secret life dilemma, too. But it has also given Barry Allen an almost nonexistent social life outside of his work as The Flash, so that the matter of secret-keeping is much more narrowly focused.)

Anyway, it's one of my favorite new shows, and deserves more attention.

mad men, mad men, mad men, mad men

Mad Men is one of the reasons I started this blog. One of the interesting things about it is that while a lot of the Everyone Agrees These Are The Best shows of this century have suffered or prospered according to their finale, I'm comfortable calling Mad Men one of the all-time best dramas regardless of how the final season goes. It isn't Lost, it isn't Breaking Bad or Battlestar Galactica -- unless it ends with Dick Whitman being publicly revealed, it's hard to imagine how it could be constructed as having told a single narrative. There aren't episodes that will seem shitty or inexplicable in hindsight once a finale "reveals all," like with Lost.

And yeah, I'll get to Lost's finale in another post, or maybe even will have done already before this post goes up.

I can't even tell you how many times I've seen Mad Men. I stopped buying the DVDs at some point - despite my love of audio commentary and preference for owning physical media - once we had Netflix streaming and a Roku and all that, and AMC runs marathons fairly often. I'm sure I've seen the first season at least seven or eight times, and there are undoubtedly episodes I've watched a dozen times. And I've rewatched it all in writing this post.

Episode by episode thoughts after the break.

what I'm watching

I have a very long Mad Men post and a shorter post about Galavant and Bunheads, but neither is ready to fire, so I thought I'd make a general catch-up post since there have been a lot of post-worthy events lately.

The Last Man on Earth

Boy did this go from intriguing to total shit in about forty minutes. The first half of the premiere made a fairly compelling case for "how exactly would you make a sitcom about the last person on Earth," only to introduce the last woman on Earth (and in subsequent episodes, yet more survivors). The longer this series goes on, the more it resembles some extreme form of the According to Jim/King of Queens model of Doofus Husband, Nagging Wife, a sitcom genre we should be streets ahead of by now. Phil is just fucking awful. Carol is only slightly better, and in large part because I feel bad for how terribly the show treats her. Both are one-note characters, and it's an old, tired note. Together they're a sad trombone, is what I'm saying.

Even when a second man turns up -- played by the terrific Mel Rodriguez, veteran of lamented one-and-dones Enlisted and Running Wilde -- Phil's only reaction is how this affects his sex life as the heretofore last Y-chromosome on Earth. He can't even bothered to muster up any equally shallow responses, like hey, here's someone else who can do some of the manual labor I'm shirking, or hey, here's a guy who might actually be my friend so I don't have to talk to basketballs.

What a huge disappointment. I'm sticking with it in the hopes that another twist puts us back on course, as I know a lot of people are, but I expected better from the creative team and from Will Forte.

The Americans and Justified

How fucking good is Keri Russell on The Americans? There aren't many shows I was more looking forward to than this, and it has not disappointed. K-Russ is aces, and this may be her strongest season. I'd be ready to assume hers will be the best performance of the year in the Actress - Drama category, if I weren't expecting great things for Elisabeth Moss in Mad Men's final round.

Another Emmy contender is Joelle Carter on Justified. The series has struggled since the end of the second season -- the Bennett family's season -- to come up with an antagonist as compelling as Mags, which has made a lot of subsequent seasons uneven, but knowing this is the last season freed them up to focus on the show's backbone: the relationships among Raylan, Boyd, and Ava. Sure, everything and everybody else serves only as a distraction from that backbone, but because it's the final season and we're expecting it to all come to a head instead of Raylan and Boyd continuing to postpone their last draw, distraction isn't a bad thing.

This is the part of the season where I start worrying for the cast. Will Joelle Carter wind up the wife on some southern-fried variant of the Doofus Husband, Nagging Wife sitcom? Will she be some Disney kid's mom on some ABC Family show? Please somebody give this woman another cable drama role.

Jere Burns has a role in Steve and Nancy Carrell's Angie Tribeca, starring Rashida Jones, which sounds good - I don't know how big a role, of course. I've been a JB fan since Max Headroom and especially Dear John (and subsequently in Something So Right, Good Morning Miami, etc etc).

The Flash

Things are shaping up, but I hate the idea of Golden Glider's power being a gun that turns people into gold. Stay home, turn golf balls into gold, and sell them and buy better powers.

Community

Something has seemed a little tonally off - I don't know how much of the writing staff made the leap to Yahoo, but it could easily just be the lack of Troy and Shirley - but every second of Gillian Jacobs this season has been amazing. Britta seems a little weirder now.

Broad City

I can't believe I'm saying this, but I hope Kelly Ripa is nominated for an Emmy. Broad City was one of the best shows so far this year, and Ripa's episode is one of those absolutely perfect episodes that immediately goes to the TV Hall of Fame.

iZombie

Off to a pretty swell start. Right from the first few minutes it's more engaging than the superhero shows, and that Rob Thomas sense of fun is there front and center. Couldn't be more pleased with this.

crisis on parallel blogs

Caitlin pointed out that one of the aspects of Parks I left uncovered is the prevalence of food in the show: Tom's chicky chicky parm parm, Ron and Leslie bonding over breakfast food, Sweetums and Paunch Burger, Ben's calzone obsession, Andy's Skittle sandwich, Ron and Chris's burger cook-off, etc. It's a pretty ridiculous thing for me to forget, all things considered!

At this point, this blog is only being read by people who know me, which means you know I started out with a cooking blog. There's clearly some overlap here.

As much as I am a defender of television, one unfortunate thing remains true: if you love a particular thing that originates outside television, you will almost always find that television's version of it is awful.

Science fiction: sci fi TV is almost universally terrible, and even when it's entertaining, it's often not very good as science fiction. Sci fi TV shows routinely get basic science embarrassingly wrong, prove ignorant of the handling of common tropes in non-televised science fiction and so recapitulate the worst cliches, and more often than not, ignore the consequences of whatever bits and pieces of science fiction that they've incorporated into their otherwise bog-standard story. The major American exceptions are the X-Files, Fringe, and Battlestar Galactica, and even then, the Battlestar Galactica finale functions pretty terribly as science fiction, whatever you think of it purely on the story level.

History: I am a professional historian. The History Channel is fucking terrible. It's not just that it's so fixated on a few small slices of history and rarely ventures outside them, it's that it so often gets things wrong. My first history textbook writing job, I got it by pointing out a simple truth - the company was recruiting fiction writers to work on a project for them (it made sense for the project), and I pointed out that fiction writers, by the nature of their work, begin with a premise or a framework and then do the research that supports that premise. As a fiction writer who happened to also have a Master's in history, I could be trusted to be familiar with neutral and unbiased research, and knew how to evaluate the trustworthiness of sources.

The History Channel is like my strawman fiction writer in this respect. It creates a narrative first, and then finds historians to provide the sound bites to support it. A special on "historians talk about the real Biblical Exodus" is one real-life example: consensus among ancient historians is that there was no Exodus, but consensus was ignored, and various less-likely scenarios discussed without any weighting or explanation of the evidence. Sometimes, watching the History Channel, you get the impression that all historians do is sit around thinking about what history might have been like, and then writing down their guesses.

Science: The Discovery Channel is nearly as bad as the History Channel, except when rebroadcasting BBC productions. Thankfully, Nova and Nature exist, over on PBS.

Etc. etc.

When it comes to food and cooking ... well, obviously most cooking shows are not very good. In particular they're not very good as instruction. On the other hand, there's so fucking much out there now that there's still more good stuff today than there's ever been in the past, even if the ratio of good to bad is pretty low.

So why not, let's go down the list.

Travel porn

I'm sure there was an earlier antecedent -- maybe the Frugal Gourmet went to France or something? -- but the food/cooking genre's modern travel porn show originates with A Cook's Tour, Anthony Bourdain's first show, on the Food Network. It was released in conjunction with his memoir of the same name, on the strength of his first memoir, Kitchen Confidential -- which later became a brief-lived-but-good (not quite "brilliant but canceled") sitcom with a post-Alias Bradley Cooper as "Jack Bourdain," with Nicholas Brendon, John Francis Daley, Jaime King, John Cho, and Erinn Hayes in the supporting cast.





This is the only video I'm including in this post, because for the last week or two, Blogger has been doing this weird thing where every time I add a video to a post, it removes the previous video I had added. That MSCL post took forever.

A Cook's Tour was pretty fantastic, especially for the time (15 years ago now!). We've gotten used to a dozen shows whose hosts travel to Vietnam, Portugal, and Morocco to try traditional or unusual dishes, but it's an enormous step forward in using television to help people understand food, rather than just using cumin and olives to "make that burger Moroccan." Bourdain's demeanor -- not entirely the polar opposite of the sunny game show host type we usually get on travel shows -- helped too. A Cook's Tour only lasted two seasons, and Bourdain moved on to a Travel Channel show, No Reservations, which was substantially similar. At times his schtick wore thin, but by then we had so many other options.

Bizarre Foods, with Andrew Zimmern, is the best of the rest. I avoided it for a long time because of the name -- I hate the xenophobia that accompanies so much internet coverage of unusual or ethnic dishes, the "oh my God, can you believe people eat that?" But Zimmern really enjoys most of what he samples, and is at least interested in the stuff that turns out not to be to his taste. He's a food adventurer, not just pointing and laughing. Sadly, the show must have gone through some budget cuts -- the original globe-trotting Bizarre Foods was replaced by Bizarre Foods America, a number of repackaged clips shows, and now Bizarre Foods Destinations, a half-hour show.

The Esquire Network's -- yes, there's an Esquire Network -- The Getaway is a real mixed bag. Each episode, a celebrity host jaunts off to somewhere they like, and the show is about half food, half shopping/attractions. Maybe 70:30. Needless to say, some celebrities are foodies -- or whatever word you prefer -- and some aren't. I DVR the show but don't always finish the episode. Chrissy Teigen, Aziz Ansari, Jose Andres, and Rashida Jones have been high points, while Adam Pally's episode was like watching a bunch of fratbros be fratbros.

Booze Traveler is surprisingly good. I didn't expect it to be -- so much of the Travel Channel is insubstantial fluff -- but the host, Jack Maxwell, seems to actually know what he's talking about, and asks the right questions. It's also not just a "wooo, now let's get drunk in THIS city!" show. That said, it's still just travel porn -- you can't do much with this.

Restaurant porn

Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives was the Food Network's answer to a show the Travel Channel used to do, the name of which I've long forgotten -- it was the standard "host goes to city X, visits restaurant Y to talk to you about their interesting specialty of the house" show, but DDD brought Bourdain-like branding to the mix rather than encourage the host's blandness and let the food take center stage. The results are mixed, obviously. Guy Fieri looks like a cartoon. A cartoon of an energy drink mascot or maybe something from a Mountain Dew and Doritos commercial in the 90s.

But the concept of hitting holes-in-the-wall, of putting barbecue and tacos on the same level as steakhouses and fine dining, is a terrific one, and suited the zeitgeist as this weird foodie/chowhound/whatever movement of the last decade and a half gained steam. And the places I've been to that have been featured on DDD have all been great. You just have to close your ears when he's talking -- not just because of how loud and obnoxious he so often is, but because what he has to say rarely seems necessary, and is frequently just plain wrong.

Hamburger America was a particular favorite of mine that ran on the Travel Channel, if I remember right. George Motz hit the road to cover some of the same burger joints in his classic book of the same name.

I almost don't want to bring up Bite This with Nadia G. Caitlin and I love it -- I mean, it's one of our favorite shows -- and I've never seen anyone else bring it up. It's on the Cooking Channel, which isn't exactly high-profile (it's one of the channels that isn't in HD for us, for instance). I've occasionally seen Nadia herself mentioned derisively on message boards by people who still want all cooking shows to be the cook-along-as-you-watch kind. Anyway, like Fieri, Nadia definitely has a schtick and a larger than life presence, and if you don't find her funny, don't bother with the show. But she knows her shit.

Talent show horseshit

Competition shows are pretty rough going. Arguably the top of the heap in the reality genre, this is still close to calling them the sweetest-smelling turds. Like everybody within a certain age range, I went nuts over Iron Chef when it first broadcast in the early days of the Food Network, and I've occasionally tuned in to the American version, if only for the always entertaining Mark Dacascos (Mani from Brotherhood of the Wolf!) and the terrific Cat Cora. But Iron Chef is clearly a different thing from the rest of these American Idol type shows, where a group of cooks competes over the course of a season in challenges ranging from the reasonable to the ridiculous.

That said, I've seen every season of Top Chef and have strong feelings about many of them -- Carla was robbed, Nick was a tool, and the Kristin/Brooke finale is probably the peak of the show. The most recent season was marred by the unbelievable terribleness of Aaron, but somewhat redeemed by the overall excellence of the final five.

However, as has been written about in a number of places, the overall quality of Top Chef has gone down in recent years. The caliber of contestant seems to be lower, whether because certain key chefs aren't letting their staff participate or because there are so many fucking shows out there and the barrel has been scraped. Eric Ripert, Emeril Lagasse (who has demonstrated his competence and intelligence a number of times on Top Chef, making you forget how bigger than life his brand had become for a few years), and even Tony Bourdain have been less involved. The change in recent seasons in which, in some episodes, the judges comment on contestants' food immediately rather than making them wait for judges' table didn't improve the format any. This may be a franchise that needs to be put to bed for a few years.

I never thought I would watch a Gordon Ramsay show -- the aggro yelling is not something I need in my life -- but I've watched two of the three seasons of Masterchef Junior and they were kind of delightful. Do not read internet comments about them. Seeing people on cooking message boards go on about how fat an eleven year old is, or refer to another preteen contestant as faggy ... well, maybe this is the demographic Ramsay pulls in.

Instructional stuff

This used to be the only kind of cooking show there was, man. I grew up watching Julia, the Frugal Gourmet, Martin Yan, and Graham Kerr, and when I was in college, Emeril still had his first show -- the pretaped one without an audience, where he was much more toned-down. I learned a lot from those shows, at a time when it was a hell of a lot harder to learn about cooking from the internet.

And there's certainly a lot of these shows still out there. Aside from Avec Eric, with the masterful Eric Ripert, I'm interested in almost none of them. I honestly can't tell if this is a reflection of their quality or not. For one thing, I've been cooking to some degree or another for thirty years now, and have cooked the overwhelming majority of the meals I've eaten for the last twenty-four. I have cooked pigs heads and goats heads and bonded chicken skin to steak with transglutaminase and clarified cucumber juice for cocktails and steeped green walnuts in vodka for nocino. I've cured and hung my own country ham, I've made Monterey jack cheese with ramps, I've candied fingerlimes and I have a bag of jaboticaba in the freezer. I maybe don't have a lot to learn from most cooking shows anymore.

But I know at some point I stopped watching them because I stopped feeling like the makers of the show had any belief that I was going to replicate the cooking I was watching. They started to feel like a sort of performative food porn, more like the behind the scenes featurettes on a movie's DVD release than like something instructional that actually expected my participation.

I mean, it's not a coincidence that as this interest in "cooking" has grown over the course of this yet-young century, so too have the number of stores selling pre-cut vegetables, pre-marinated meats, and frozen meals separated into assemble-it-yourself pouches that for some reason cost more than the frozen meals that come already assembled. There is a lot of cooking theater out there, a lot of noise from people who only cook once a month but make a big fucking deal about it when they do, which is a significant move away from cooking as a normal adult life skill and towards a fetishism that, even as a food blogger, I am uncomfortable with.

Oddballs

Mind of a Chef is probably the best food-related TV show, and it really doesn't fit any of these categories. Maybe it's the heir to the instructional shows, in a way -- instead of showing you how to put a recipe together, the idea is to get into how a given chef approaches food and the restaurant business, and where inspiration for a recipe can come from. That's the sort of thing that's much more useful and meaningful than recipes: learning to think about food is like learning fluency in a language instead of just memorizing a handful of vocabulary words.

I'm partial to the Sean Brock half-season since he's a chef who's such an influence on me, but the most recent half-season with Magnus Nilsson was terrific.

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.