The best show on TV comes back tomorrow night on The Sundance Channel, to start its third season. Almost nobody is watching it.
Rectify was created by Ray McKinnon, best known as a character actor who played the reverend in Deadwood, Holly Hunter's suitor in O Brother Where Art Thou, and a handful of other things. He also won an Academy Award, shared with his late wife Lisa Blount and producing partner Walton Goggins (Boyd Crowder on Justified), for their 2001 short film The Accountant. The Bitter Southerner recently posted a great feature on him and on the southernness of Rectify.
Rectify is full of faces almost as familiar as McKinnon's -- Michael O'Neill from The West Wing, Sean Bridgers from Deadwood, J. Smith-Cameron from a lengthy career on stage and screen, including the excellent Margaret -- though it's not the kind of character actor grab bag that something like The Good Wife is. Everyone feels hand-picked for the part -- like it was just a matter of the right show coming along that would shine a spotlight on them. I have my favorites -- even for an overlooked show, I think it's insane Abigail Spencer doesn't have an Emmy nomination -- but there's no one in the cast who doesn't deliver a masterpiece performance at some point in the show's first two seasons.
At the center of it is Aden Young, who plays Daniel Holden.
In the first episode, Daniel is released from prison, where he's been on death row for 19 years -- half his life -- having been convicted of the rape and murder of his high school girlfriend. DNA evidence has now shown he's not the rapist, and the state has to decide whether or not to try him again or drop their case against him.
Daniel is quiet, thoughtful, deliberate in his movements, and -- especially at first -- easily overwhelmed. His adult life has been spent in confinement under constant surveillance. He's returning to the same small town he grew up in, where his father is dead, his mother is remarried, and he now has a stepbrother positioned to take over the family business and a teenage half-brother to whom he's a stranger. His sister Amantha (Spencer) has devoted her life to fighting for his release, working with (and in a relationship with) the lawyer from Daniel's appeal, an advocate from the Innocence Project.
What is Rectify about, though?
It's not about solving the murder of who killed Hanna. That doesn't mean that question isn't addressed or answered, but that it's not what. the show. is about. It's not structured like the "an innocent man has been released from prison - what happens next?" show that most people and all network execs would be imagining at this point in hearing about Rectify. It's not a mystery.
I'm sure there's a thinkpiece out there that sums things up succinctly, but Rectify is about a lot of things. It's about what happens next. It's about Daniel getting used to being out. It's about what it was like for him being in. It's about his family adjusting to him being out - to not quite knowing him the way they did, not knowing how he fits in with them, and in the case of his half-brother and his step-brother's wife, getting to know him for the first time.
It's about the uncertainty: Daniel doesn't remember what happened, so is he even innocent? It's about how the community reacts to Daniel being released when no alternate suspect has been named, and how that affects the state senator who had been Daniel's prosecutor, the new district attorney, the new sheriff, Hanna's family, and the witnesses who testified that they saw Daniel do it.
It's not a mystery except that of course it is, because anything that deals decently and honestly with its portrayal of people deals in mystery.
It may sound somber or bleak, but it can be surreal, it can be funny, it can be touching, it can be uplifting.
It's not just that it's the best show on TV. It's the only show like it on TV. I can't say "if you like ___, you'll love Rectify," because while Rectify is doing something better than anyone else, most of the toys it plays with have not left the box before. Like The Sopranos or The Wire, it's not doing the TV people have done before. It's doing something else.
You want to start at the beginning, so find it on Netflix or watch one of the marathons.
Wednesday, July 8, 2015
Wednesday, July 1, 2015
emmy ballot
There is something about being a fan of a particular medium that makes some of us compulsive list-makers, right? Our desert island discs (Carried to Dust, Everywhere at Once, Challengers, In the Wee Small Hours...) and books (Little Big, House of Leaves, The Talisman, Swamp Thing...), top ten lists every year, and so on. I have to admit, when I first thought of doing this TV blog, one of the things I thought of was Sepinwall's annual "if I had an Emmys ballot" post.
Well, voting for Emmy nominations closed last week. Who would I have nominated?
Comedy
Series
Broad City was the single funniest thing on TV this year. I keep grouping it together with sketch shows in my head, because it's rare that a sitcom not only has such a strong voice, but for that voice to be that of the performers. I mean, Community, Taxi, Arrested Development, those shows have strong voices, but they belong to Harmon, Brooks, and Hurwitz, not anyone on screen. Broad City feels as personal as Key and Peele or Inside Amy Schumer, it just happens to be a sitcom.
Louie is of course the other sitcom for which that's true, though it is even less like a traditional sitcom than Broad City is. This season wasn't as ambitious as last season's multiple multi-episode arcs, but being more low key isn't a bad thing. I really hate the Louie/Pamela relationship, especially at this point in its history, but that doesn't mean it doesn't provide good comedy material.
I might put Transparent here even if all it did was give Judith Light a good role again. But Jill Soloway's show has even more going on than that, and although the transition of Jeffrey Tambor's Maura is the main focus, there's plenty going on in the rest of the family -- all of whom are self-absorbed, obnoxious, and various degrees of broken, which isn't surprising for a show created by a Six Feet Under vet.
The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt seems more like a network show than any other Netflix show does, but only because the work Tina Fey previously did on 30 Rock changed what network sitcoms can feel like. In a world that hadn't already seen 30 Rock, this show might be almost too weird, and maybe that's why NBC passed on it at the last minute. But it's one of the best things to come along in ages -- it's like Fey and her co-creator have realized that what sitcoms like to do is let their performers really ham it up, so they put something together where (just as in 30 Rock) hamming it up somehow works because of who the characters are (a girl recently escaped from a cult, an out of work actor, a wealthy trophy wife) instead of being yet another grating schlub of a husband rolling his eyes at his grating blonde of a momwife.
There are a lot of animated series that deserve at least consideration here. Rick and Morty didn't air last Emmy season, it turns out -- I didn't discover it until late -- but Adventure Time had a very strong season as it delves deeper and deeper into its own mythos and gets weirder and weirder. Bob's Burgers is of course always great. But I think the best thing in this mini-category this year was Netflix's Bojack Horseman, with Will Arnett as the anthropomorphic horse former star of a TGIF-type 90s sitcom. There are so many great things about this darkly funny and sometimes very bleak show, though my favorite is probably Vincent Adultman.
Lead Actress
Although Britta was underused in some of this year's Community episodes, Gillian Jacobs was still the funniest part of more episodes than not. While everyone on the cast has always seemed thoroughly comfortable in their characters, Jacobs really nailed Britta's combination of physical comedy, intellectual pretensions, and lack of self-awareness, bringing one of my all-time favorite TV characters to new heights of greatness. She's a large part of why this was one of the best seasons (despite the missing cast members, only the first two seasons were better).
Both Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson have to be on here for Broad City. And although I'm not going as far as imaginary nominations for guest stars, I'll reiterate that Kelly Ripa was fantastic, and really emblematic of what the guest star Emmy often represents: an actor working outside their usual boundaries and making something excellent happen there.
I'm not sure this was Amy Poehler's funniest season of Parks and Rec, but it was consistently one of the funniest shows on the air and even her weakest season would put her in the top five performances on TV, no question. Besides, there is something so joyful about Leslie Knope that it's always fun to see good things happen for her.
Ellie Kemper anchored The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and made it look easy, though I realize I'm including her at the expense of Julia Louis-Dreyfuss on Veep, Gaby Hoffmann on Transparent, and Constance Wu on Fresh Off the Boat.
Lead Actor
Jeffrey Tambor has had a hell of a career, hasn't he? He's come a long way since The Ropers, but even if Larry Sanders was the thing he was remembered for, that'd be a pretty great career. But then came Arrested Development, and suddenly he was at the center of two all-time great shows. And now a third with Transparent. Somehow you can always find him right there wherever the most innovative and interesting work is happening, and this time, he's anchoring the whole thing.
Louis CK is never not going to be on this list, not as long as he's making his show.
Keegan Michael Key and Jordan Peele are consistently funnier than the vast majority of sitcoms out there, and even their goofiest, most ridiculous stuff -- okay, maybe especially that -- always makes me laugh, from "A. A. ron" to "L'Carpetron Dookmarriott" to, well, this.
Did Review actually come out during the just-ended Emmy season, or was it the one before that? Well whatever, I'm going to say Andy Daly here, the lead of Review, a show that might not sound amazing -- fictional TV show host "reviews" real-life experiences like "stealing," "being a racist," and "eating ten pancakes" -- until you see it.
Drama
Series
Mad Men had a fantastic season, albeit one with a rocky start -- I'm still not sold on the necessity of Diane, even as I recognize how she got us from point A to point B (and maybe that's the problem, since who fondly remembers a character as the route from one place in the story to another?) and am ambivalent about a few other aspects. But I think it's probably a show that should leave you feeling that way.
With Mad Men and Breaking Bad done, the best dramas by far are Rectify and The Leftovers, both of which can be slow and thoughtful in novelistic ways, though I recognize that is frustrating for much of the potential audience. It isn't for me. I'd be on board for a Rectify that was twice as slow. These shows are exactly why TV is great these days, because when else would we have a slow-paced show about a man recently released from prison from death row for a murder he isn't sure if he committed or not, or a bleak portrait of families (and communities) gradually falling apart in the wake of a Rapture-like event?
Better Call Saul is way up there, it's just a little harder to call it a drama at times. But that's not a new problem, right? Ally McBeal was nominated for comedy Emmys but felt like apples and oranges against its sitcom competitors, and before that, St Elsewhere got drama awards but was funny at least as often as BCS.
Took me a minute to think of what the fifth nominee should be. The Good Wife had too uneven a season and the nonsense with Archie Panjabi and Julianna Margulies reached its show-affecting peak. Justified had its strongest season since the Bennetts, but still felt like it was treading water at times. The Americans, on the other hand, dealt with some of its strongest material, though I am still having trouble swallowing some of the plot developments (or the lack of certain plot developments occurring, I suppose) where Clark and Martha are concerned.
Lead Actress
Elisabeth Moss is the best actress on television in the 2010s, period. Okay, Connie Britton could give her a run for her money if Nashville gave her material to work with as strong as Friday Night Lights did, but between Mad Men and Top of the Lake, there is just no one else who has done better than Moss in recent years. The final season of Mad Men includes some of the best Peggy moments, especially the final two episodes. I really hope we don't lose Moss to movies. There is a particular joy in seeing the way an actor develops a character over time, one you can only find in television.
Carrie Coon and Amy Brenneman are the strongest performers on The Leftovers, doing very different work that -- like that of Moss and Christina Hendricks on Mad Men, for instance -- is grounded in their shared world. I knew Brenneman was good, of course, but it's great seeing her have something so meaty to work with, while Coon has been a revelation.
Speaking of revelations, Keri Russell somehow keeps getting better and better. Felicity is a pretty underrated show in the first place -- I think it's too easily summed up by its sort of wincey "girl follows crush to college" premise -- and Mission Impossible aside, she didn't have a lot of high-profile movie work in between series. But holy shit is she good on The Americans. If we weren't in such a golden age of drama, it would be no contest, hers would be the best female performance on TV.
Although Orphan Black hasn't stayed as strong as its first season, that's largely because of the rambling plotting. Tatiana Maslany continues to do heroic work in half a dozen roles -- differentiating them by more than just their hairstyle would be hard enough, but she manages to bring nuance to characters who could easily seem straight out of Central Casting, especially soccer mom Alison.
Lead Actor
Look, lots of guys were great this year, and it's a shame Aden Young hasn't already got an Emmy for Rectify, but he'll have time, as will Bob Odenkirk for Better Call Saul. This year has to be Jon Hamm. There is no close second. It has to be Don Draper. Come on. Teach the world to sing.
Supporting performances
I would nominate everyone on Transparent, Mad Men, and Rectify who doesn't qualify as a lead. Sam Elliott is probably an obvious choice for Justified; same with Michael McKean from Better Call Saul. Speaking of which, I was unfamiliar with Rhea Seehorn before BCS, but she's terrific. The whole Togetherness cast has submitted as supporting actors, and they all deserve nominations. Lorraine Toussaint and Uzo Adaba are the obvious choices from Orange is the New Black. Anybody on The New Girl or Parks is Emmy-worthy -- like a lot of the best sitcoms (Taxi, Mary Tyler Moore, Community, Happy Endings), the strength of those shows is their combinations of characters, much more than any one central performance. Zach Woods and T.J. Miller deserve nods for Silicon Valley, too, as does Kether Dononue for You're the Worst.
Well, voting for Emmy nominations closed last week. Who would I have nominated?
Comedy
Series
Broad City was the single funniest thing on TV this year. I keep grouping it together with sketch shows in my head, because it's rare that a sitcom not only has such a strong voice, but for that voice to be that of the performers. I mean, Community, Taxi, Arrested Development, those shows have strong voices, but they belong to Harmon, Brooks, and Hurwitz, not anyone on screen. Broad City feels as personal as Key and Peele or Inside Amy Schumer, it just happens to be a sitcom.
Louie is of course the other sitcom for which that's true, though it is even less like a traditional sitcom than Broad City is. This season wasn't as ambitious as last season's multiple multi-episode arcs, but being more low key isn't a bad thing. I really hate the Louie/Pamela relationship, especially at this point in its history, but that doesn't mean it doesn't provide good comedy material.
I might put Transparent here even if all it did was give Judith Light a good role again. But Jill Soloway's show has even more going on than that, and although the transition of Jeffrey Tambor's Maura is the main focus, there's plenty going on in the rest of the family -- all of whom are self-absorbed, obnoxious, and various degrees of broken, which isn't surprising for a show created by a Six Feet Under vet.
The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt seems more like a network show than any other Netflix show does, but only because the work Tina Fey previously did on 30 Rock changed what network sitcoms can feel like. In a world that hadn't already seen 30 Rock, this show might be almost too weird, and maybe that's why NBC passed on it at the last minute. But it's one of the best things to come along in ages -- it's like Fey and her co-creator have realized that what sitcoms like to do is let their performers really ham it up, so they put something together where (just as in 30 Rock) hamming it up somehow works because of who the characters are (a girl recently escaped from a cult, an out of work actor, a wealthy trophy wife) instead of being yet another grating schlub of a husband rolling his eyes at his grating blonde of a momwife.
There are a lot of animated series that deserve at least consideration here. Rick and Morty didn't air last Emmy season, it turns out -- I didn't discover it until late -- but Adventure Time had a very strong season as it delves deeper and deeper into its own mythos and gets weirder and weirder. Bob's Burgers is of course always great. But I think the best thing in this mini-category this year was Netflix's Bojack Horseman, with Will Arnett as the anthropomorphic horse former star of a TGIF-type 90s sitcom. There are so many great things about this darkly funny and sometimes very bleak show, though my favorite is probably Vincent Adultman.
Lead Actress
Although Britta was underused in some of this year's Community episodes, Gillian Jacobs was still the funniest part of more episodes than not. While everyone on the cast has always seemed thoroughly comfortable in their characters, Jacobs really nailed Britta's combination of physical comedy, intellectual pretensions, and lack of self-awareness, bringing one of my all-time favorite TV characters to new heights of greatness. She's a large part of why this was one of the best seasons (despite the missing cast members, only the first two seasons were better).
Both Ilana Glazer and Abbi Jacobson have to be on here for Broad City. And although I'm not going as far as imaginary nominations for guest stars, I'll reiterate that Kelly Ripa was fantastic, and really emblematic of what the guest star Emmy often represents: an actor working outside their usual boundaries and making something excellent happen there.
I'm not sure this was Amy Poehler's funniest season of Parks and Rec, but it was consistently one of the funniest shows on the air and even her weakest season would put her in the top five performances on TV, no question. Besides, there is something so joyful about Leslie Knope that it's always fun to see good things happen for her.
Ellie Kemper anchored The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt and made it look easy, though I realize I'm including her at the expense of Julia Louis-Dreyfuss on Veep, Gaby Hoffmann on Transparent, and Constance Wu on Fresh Off the Boat.
Lead Actor
Jeffrey Tambor has had a hell of a career, hasn't he? He's come a long way since The Ropers, but even if Larry Sanders was the thing he was remembered for, that'd be a pretty great career. But then came Arrested Development, and suddenly he was at the center of two all-time great shows. And now a third with Transparent. Somehow you can always find him right there wherever the most innovative and interesting work is happening, and this time, he's anchoring the whole thing.
Louis CK is never not going to be on this list, not as long as he's making his show.
Keegan Michael Key and Jordan Peele are consistently funnier than the vast majority of sitcoms out there, and even their goofiest, most ridiculous stuff -- okay, maybe especially that -- always makes me laugh, from "A. A. ron" to "L'Carpetron Dookmarriott" to, well, this.
Did Review actually come out during the just-ended Emmy season, or was it the one before that? Well whatever, I'm going to say Andy Daly here, the lead of Review, a show that might not sound amazing -- fictional TV show host "reviews" real-life experiences like "stealing," "being a racist," and "eating ten pancakes" -- until you see it.
Drama
Series
Mad Men had a fantastic season, albeit one with a rocky start -- I'm still not sold on the necessity of Diane, even as I recognize how she got us from point A to point B (and maybe that's the problem, since who fondly remembers a character as the route from one place in the story to another?) and am ambivalent about a few other aspects. But I think it's probably a show that should leave you feeling that way.
With Mad Men and Breaking Bad done, the best dramas by far are Rectify and The Leftovers, both of which can be slow and thoughtful in novelistic ways, though I recognize that is frustrating for much of the potential audience. It isn't for me. I'd be on board for a Rectify that was twice as slow. These shows are exactly why TV is great these days, because when else would we have a slow-paced show about a man recently released from prison from death row for a murder he isn't sure if he committed or not, or a bleak portrait of families (and communities) gradually falling apart in the wake of a Rapture-like event?
Better Call Saul is way up there, it's just a little harder to call it a drama at times. But that's not a new problem, right? Ally McBeal was nominated for comedy Emmys but felt like apples and oranges against its sitcom competitors, and before that, St Elsewhere got drama awards but was funny at least as often as BCS.
Took me a minute to think of what the fifth nominee should be. The Good Wife had too uneven a season and the nonsense with Archie Panjabi and Julianna Margulies reached its show-affecting peak. Justified had its strongest season since the Bennetts, but still felt like it was treading water at times. The Americans, on the other hand, dealt with some of its strongest material, though I am still having trouble swallowing some of the plot developments (or the lack of certain plot developments occurring, I suppose) where Clark and Martha are concerned.
Lead Actress
Elisabeth Moss is the best actress on television in the 2010s, period. Okay, Connie Britton could give her a run for her money if Nashville gave her material to work with as strong as Friday Night Lights did, but between Mad Men and Top of the Lake, there is just no one else who has done better than Moss in recent years. The final season of Mad Men includes some of the best Peggy moments, especially the final two episodes. I really hope we don't lose Moss to movies. There is a particular joy in seeing the way an actor develops a character over time, one you can only find in television.
Carrie Coon and Amy Brenneman are the strongest performers on The Leftovers, doing very different work that -- like that of Moss and Christina Hendricks on Mad Men, for instance -- is grounded in their shared world. I knew Brenneman was good, of course, but it's great seeing her have something so meaty to work with, while Coon has been a revelation.
Speaking of revelations, Keri Russell somehow keeps getting better and better. Felicity is a pretty underrated show in the first place -- I think it's too easily summed up by its sort of wincey "girl follows crush to college" premise -- and Mission Impossible aside, she didn't have a lot of high-profile movie work in between series. But holy shit is she good on The Americans. If we weren't in such a golden age of drama, it would be no contest, hers would be the best female performance on TV.
Although Orphan Black hasn't stayed as strong as its first season, that's largely because of the rambling plotting. Tatiana Maslany continues to do heroic work in half a dozen roles -- differentiating them by more than just their hairstyle would be hard enough, but she manages to bring nuance to characters who could easily seem straight out of Central Casting, especially soccer mom Alison.
Lead Actor
Look, lots of guys were great this year, and it's a shame Aden Young hasn't already got an Emmy for Rectify, but he'll have time, as will Bob Odenkirk for Better Call Saul. This year has to be Jon Hamm. There is no close second. It has to be Don Draper. Come on. Teach the world to sing.
Supporting performances
I would nominate everyone on Transparent, Mad Men, and Rectify who doesn't qualify as a lead. Sam Elliott is probably an obvious choice for Justified; same with Michael McKean from Better Call Saul. Speaking of which, I was unfamiliar with Rhea Seehorn before BCS, but she's terrific. The whole Togetherness cast has submitted as supporting actors, and they all deserve nominations. Lorraine Toussaint and Uzo Adaba are the obvious choices from Orange is the New Black. Anybody on The New Girl or Parks is Emmy-worthy -- like a lot of the best sitcoms (Taxi, Mary Tyler Moore, Community, Happy Endings), the strength of those shows is their combinations of characters, much more than any one central performance. Zach Woods and T.J. Miller deserve nods for Silicon Valley, too, as does Kether Dononue for You're the Worst.
Tuesday, June 9, 2015
summer watching
Every blog post about summer TV starts out by reminiscing over when there wasn't any summer TV, right? When apart from the occasional show being burned off -- David Lynch and Mark Frost's On The Air! the unfinished Stephen King series Golden Years! -- it was when you caught up on the shows you didn't usually watch, because there were no DVRs. Even in the late 90s, summer rerun season was key, letting me catch up on this weird "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" show I had just caught a few episodes of.
So okay, that's out of the way.
Obviously summer has changed, but it's still the weaker season overall. Sure, HBO runs some strong stuff, and Mad Men has aired in the summer, but the networks never put their biggest hits on in the summer, and comedy especially is thin on the ground.
Here's what I've checked out lately:
Game of Thrones is having both one of its best and its most problematic season. Catching up to the books has forced the showrunners' hands in some interesting ways, and while I won't get specific in this post, I will say that I love much of it, but the rape is out of control. There are a lot of things to say about the ways fiction uses rape, and how often rape is used to tell a story framed so that it isn't even the victim's story, and there isn't room to get into all of it here. But GOT has been pretty fucking awful in that respect, and I can't blame the people who have jumped ship.
The Dorne storyline is also a huge flaw this season, both for the critical changes from the way it plays out in the book and the fact that the country itself is portrayed so shoddily -- let me direct you to Neil Miller's excellent (and of course spoiler-ridden) post about it, because I can't think of anything to add.
Veep and Silicon Valley are as good or better (in Silicon Valley's case) as they've been in previous seasons, I just don't know what to say about them beyond that.
Hannibal is a show I came to late. We checked out the first few episodes of the first season and I couldn't get into it. It seemed well-acted and everything, sure, but I am so burned out on serial killers. Enough with all the fucking serial killers.
I still feel that way, but from the end of season one and through season two, the show really transformed -- while, admittedly, still being about serial killers. It's become more weird and imagistic, disturbing without being a gorey rapefest. It's nothing like Bryan Fuller's previous shows, except insofar as it's never lazy.
Halt and Catch Fire has indeed improved in its second season, though two episodes in I am not persuaded that Sepinwall is correct that it's finally a great AMC drama. Cameron is still obnoxious, and although it's not entirely clear to me how much we're supposed to side with her vision, I'm pretty sure we're supposed to be impressed by her commitment to online gaming -- even though the company would have to coast on minimal profits for a decade before that would pay off.
This is one of the things I really hate about the difficulty that writers, as a group, have writing about smart people. Taking a character in a period show and demonstrating their genius through their commitment to some idea that we in the present know eventually becomes a big hit is, at best, fucking lazy. It worked when John Astin did it on Brisco County Jr but that's a comedy, for heaven's sake. In a case like this, it just makes everyone look dumb: online gaming isn't a big money idea in the mid-80s and the actual smart people realized that. It would be like launching a company providing services to electric car owners or something now - the market just isn't big enough yet, can't be big enough yet.
Think about Don Draper. How terrible would Mad Men be if a season culminated in him introducing McDonald's Monopoly or if he spent all his time trying to convince people that a television channel devoted to shopping from home was the wave of the future?
That said: increasing Donna's presence has been a tremendous improvement, and Joe has not bothered me at all this year, although at the moment it's sort of hard to see why he's actually on the show. It's a flawed show, but maybe the bleeding has stopped.
I really wanted to like Aquarius but I don't think I could even tell you anything about what happens in the two episodes I've seen. I like David Duchovny but he's made weird choices in his post-X-Files work, and while on paper this show sounds like it has a lot of potential, it's just ... forgettable.
Wayward Pines. A Secret Service agent investigating the disappearance of other agents winds up in a weird town he can't escape from. Based on books I haven't read, and apparently promising answers to the whole thing, this just comes across like a bland retread of The Prisoner - the ultimate "where am I, what is going on, and who is in on it?" show, which gave few answers but managed to be engaging and rewarding in every episode. This show has been a trudge. Somehow The Prisoner never left me wondering, what do all these townspeople do with their days when we're not watching them?, a feat its ripoffs never manage. (I was a big Prisoner fan, right down to the DC comics sequel and the GURPS supplement.)
The Whispers is the more promising Mysterious Shit Going Down show, though I'm not sure by how much. If nothing else, the show is more watchable, because it isn't full of people doing weird stilted acting while they pretend nothing's going on. Lily Rabe is in it, which is great, but so is Milo Ventimiglia. I need more episodes to decide what to think of this one, but unlike most of the other new summer shows, at least I'm interested in seeing those episodes.
UnReal has turned out to be the surprise new show of the summer, from fucking Lifetime of all things. It's a Serious Cable Drama that fits Lifetime the way Mad Men fit AMC: just as AMC's brand was invested in nostalgia, the past, and serious drama, Lifetime's brand is invested in melodrama, both strong female characters and crazy ones, and reality shows like The Bachelor. UnReal revolves around a Bachelor-type show called Everlasting, run by exec producer Constance Zimmer (a longtime favorite of mine since Good Morning Miami), who has brought back field producer Shiri Appleby (Roswell) despite her breakdown in a previous season.
There are so many things this show does right:
First, it attacks its subject matter but doesn't parody it. Hotwives notwithstanding, reality shows are poor material for parody, because they're already so broad and ridiculous.
I don't give a shit about reality shows, so thankfully there are other things it does right too -- but that first one is still very important.
Second, Shiri Appleby is kind of the show's Don Draper, to continue the Mad Men analogy. Not because of a Dick Whitman-like past -- the backstory to her breakdown seems to be pretty straightforward, actually -- but because she is very good at what she does, and what she does isn't very pretty. That's been a subplot playing out through Serious TV for a while -- Walter White discovers he's not just a good drug cook, he's a great drug dealer, for instance -- and even apart from the moral greyness, there's always a joy in seeing a character be convincingly good at something. (Again, this is my problem with Halt and Catch Fire.) Appleby's producer is brought in to manufacture drama, to pit contestants against each other and create the narrative of the show-within-the-show. It's shitty business, but the show understands the skill involved, and understands how to portray it.
Third, she's not a villain. She's clearly conflicted about this shit. That said, this show ... brings to mind all the old Mad Men and Sopranos complaints about nobody on those shows being likable. It's a show about people manipulating women and pitting them against each other -- women who are often pretty awful to begin with, but some of whom may be genuine. (None of them stands out for me so far, but neither did Pete's entourage - Ken, Kinsey, Harry - at this point in Mad Men. There is a tall "southern" contestant whose southern accent is just awful, but that is typical of television, unfortunately.)
I used to say that it was more important for me that characters be real than that they be likable. Then I saw Girls, which certainly seems plenty real and which I can't stand watching more than a couple minutes of. So I don't have a pithy explanation of where I stand on likability, empathy, and sympathy. I loved Breaking Bad even when I didn't want Walt to win, and I love rooting for Saul the sleazy lawyer now, and I loved the Sopranos even though Tony became more and more of an asshole with time. I have a sense for why those things are true, which isn't worth getting into when I'm supposed to be talking about UnReal, but the point is that I can't tell yet how it will all work for this show.
So okay, that's out of the way.
Obviously summer has changed, but it's still the weaker season overall. Sure, HBO runs some strong stuff, and Mad Men has aired in the summer, but the networks never put their biggest hits on in the summer, and comedy especially is thin on the ground.
Here's what I've checked out lately:
Game of Thrones is having both one of its best and its most problematic season. Catching up to the books has forced the showrunners' hands in some interesting ways, and while I won't get specific in this post, I will say that I love much of it, but the rape is out of control. There are a lot of things to say about the ways fiction uses rape, and how often rape is used to tell a story framed so that it isn't even the victim's story, and there isn't room to get into all of it here. But GOT has been pretty fucking awful in that respect, and I can't blame the people who have jumped ship.
The Dorne storyline is also a huge flaw this season, both for the critical changes from the way it plays out in the book and the fact that the country itself is portrayed so shoddily -- let me direct you to Neil Miller's excellent (and of course spoiler-ridden) post about it, because I can't think of anything to add.
Veep and Silicon Valley are as good or better (in Silicon Valley's case) as they've been in previous seasons, I just don't know what to say about them beyond that.
Hannibal is a show I came to late. We checked out the first few episodes of the first season and I couldn't get into it. It seemed well-acted and everything, sure, but I am so burned out on serial killers. Enough with all the fucking serial killers.
I still feel that way, but from the end of season one and through season two, the show really transformed -- while, admittedly, still being about serial killers. It's become more weird and imagistic, disturbing without being a gorey rapefest. It's nothing like Bryan Fuller's previous shows, except insofar as it's never lazy.
Halt and Catch Fire has indeed improved in its second season, though two episodes in I am not persuaded that Sepinwall is correct that it's finally a great AMC drama. Cameron is still obnoxious, and although it's not entirely clear to me how much we're supposed to side with her vision, I'm pretty sure we're supposed to be impressed by her commitment to online gaming -- even though the company would have to coast on minimal profits for a decade before that would pay off.
This is one of the things I really hate about the difficulty that writers, as a group, have writing about smart people. Taking a character in a period show and demonstrating their genius through their commitment to some idea that we in the present know eventually becomes a big hit is, at best, fucking lazy. It worked when John Astin did it on Brisco County Jr but that's a comedy, for heaven's sake. In a case like this, it just makes everyone look dumb: online gaming isn't a big money idea in the mid-80s and the actual smart people realized that. It would be like launching a company providing services to electric car owners or something now - the market just isn't big enough yet, can't be big enough yet.
Think about Don Draper. How terrible would Mad Men be if a season culminated in him introducing McDonald's Monopoly or if he spent all his time trying to convince people that a television channel devoted to shopping from home was the wave of the future?
That said: increasing Donna's presence has been a tremendous improvement, and Joe has not bothered me at all this year, although at the moment it's sort of hard to see why he's actually on the show. It's a flawed show, but maybe the bleeding has stopped.
I really wanted to like Aquarius but I don't think I could even tell you anything about what happens in the two episodes I've seen. I like David Duchovny but he's made weird choices in his post-X-Files work, and while on paper this show sounds like it has a lot of potential, it's just ... forgettable.
Wayward Pines. A Secret Service agent investigating the disappearance of other agents winds up in a weird town he can't escape from. Based on books I haven't read, and apparently promising answers to the whole thing, this just comes across like a bland retread of The Prisoner - the ultimate "where am I, what is going on, and who is in on it?" show, which gave few answers but managed to be engaging and rewarding in every episode. This show has been a trudge. Somehow The Prisoner never left me wondering, what do all these townspeople do with their days when we're not watching them?, a feat its ripoffs never manage. (I was a big Prisoner fan, right down to the DC comics sequel and the GURPS supplement.)
The Whispers is the more promising Mysterious Shit Going Down show, though I'm not sure by how much. If nothing else, the show is more watchable, because it isn't full of people doing weird stilted acting while they pretend nothing's going on. Lily Rabe is in it, which is great, but so is Milo Ventimiglia. I need more episodes to decide what to think of this one, but unlike most of the other new summer shows, at least I'm interested in seeing those episodes.
UnReal has turned out to be the surprise new show of the summer, from fucking Lifetime of all things. It's a Serious Cable Drama that fits Lifetime the way Mad Men fit AMC: just as AMC's brand was invested in nostalgia, the past, and serious drama, Lifetime's brand is invested in melodrama, both strong female characters and crazy ones, and reality shows like The Bachelor. UnReal revolves around a Bachelor-type show called Everlasting, run by exec producer Constance Zimmer (a longtime favorite of mine since Good Morning Miami), who has brought back field producer Shiri Appleby (Roswell) despite her breakdown in a previous season.
There are so many things this show does right:
First, it attacks its subject matter but doesn't parody it. Hotwives notwithstanding, reality shows are poor material for parody, because they're already so broad and ridiculous.
I don't give a shit about reality shows, so thankfully there are other things it does right too -- but that first one is still very important.
Second, Shiri Appleby is kind of the show's Don Draper, to continue the Mad Men analogy. Not because of a Dick Whitman-like past -- the backstory to her breakdown seems to be pretty straightforward, actually -- but because she is very good at what she does, and what she does isn't very pretty. That's been a subplot playing out through Serious TV for a while -- Walter White discovers he's not just a good drug cook, he's a great drug dealer, for instance -- and even apart from the moral greyness, there's always a joy in seeing a character be convincingly good at something. (Again, this is my problem with Halt and Catch Fire.) Appleby's producer is brought in to manufacture drama, to pit contestants against each other and create the narrative of the show-within-the-show. It's shitty business, but the show understands the skill involved, and understands how to portray it.
Third, she's not a villain. She's clearly conflicted about this shit. That said, this show ... brings to mind all the old Mad Men and Sopranos complaints about nobody on those shows being likable. It's a show about people manipulating women and pitting them against each other -- women who are often pretty awful to begin with, but some of whom may be genuine. (None of them stands out for me so far, but neither did Pete's entourage - Ken, Kinsey, Harry - at this point in Mad Men. There is a tall "southern" contestant whose southern accent is just awful, but that is typical of television, unfortunately.)
I used to say that it was more important for me that characters be real than that they be likable. Then I saw Girls, which certainly seems plenty real and which I can't stand watching more than a couple minutes of. So I don't have a pithy explanation of where I stand on likability, empathy, and sympathy. I loved Breaking Bad even when I didn't want Walt to win, and I love rooting for Saul the sleazy lawyer now, and I loved the Sopranos even though Tony became more and more of an asshole with time. I have a sense for why those things are true, which isn't worth getting into when I'm supposed to be talking about UnReal, but the point is that I can't tell yet how it will all work for this show.
Monday, June 1, 2015
it's not tv, it's... no, it's tv, fucking everything is tv now
So first we had HBO, which after broadcasting a handful of original series over the years -- most of which were standard fare that capitalized on the network's capacity for nudity and swearing -- suddenly landed on The Larry Sanders Show, the first one to garner really serious acclaim. Within a few years it had added Oz and The Sopranos, and suddenly this was a thing: HBO is in the Serious TV game. Keep in mind, even broadcast networks have only ever dallied in the Serious TV game. It's been sort of like the pro bono work that rat bastards do on the side.
But HBO started to turn Serious TV into a large part of its brand identity. Maybe they looked at the shorter and shorter delays between movies' theatrical releases and their showing up on Blockbuster shelves, and maybe they even realized how much shorter those delays would become once DVDs arrived. Maybe they understood that movies couldn't always be the reason to subscribe to the Home Box Office, is what I'm saying. But maybe they just got lucky.
Anyway, Showtime eventually followed, and today it's just assumed that a premium cable channel will have a handful of original series that can hold up to or surpass the quality and budgets of what you find on broadcast television.
Then FX premiered The Shield, during the last years of NYPD Blue, picking up the Serious Cop Show baton. It's a slow burner of a show that only a decade later can seem, if not dated per se, at least ordinary, because the violent antihero has become a drama staple.
Now FX was in the Serious TV game, and AMC followed with Mad Men, and although most other basic cable channels are still pretty early in the Developing Serious TV timeline, they contribute over half of the more than 300 scripted series that air each year. Some networks have forgone the Serious TV game in favor of more commercial programming -- MTV comes to mind here -- but the point is that broadcast's share has been eaten away by basic cable now, not just premium cable.
And then Netflix picked up Orange is the New Black, the House of Cards remake, and Arrested Development, followed by the rapid launch of a real network's worth of shows; Hulu picked up The Mindy Project; Amazon streamed Transparent; Yahoo Screen picked up Community after NBC failed to.
Fucking everything is a TV channel now.
This is the year that really hit home. The third season of House of Cards has aired, and although it's the weakest to date, it's still a sign of the new power of streaming services. The third season of Orange is the New Black starts soon, and God knows I am looking forward to Netflix's Wet Hot American Summer. On top of that -- still just talking about Netflix here -- Bloodline and The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt have wound up being two of my favorite series of the year.
All of that by way of introducing some quick coverage of the state of streaming TV this year.
Netflix
Like I said, House of Cards was a disappointment. I think Robin Wright is the best thing about the show -- not that Kevin Spacey isn't fun -- but this season just didn't feel very compelling, and that's only part because of the wealth of choices we have to watch these days.
Bloodline, though, features a cast of actors I absolutely love -- Coach, Lindsay Weir, Sam Shepard, Sissy Spacek, Jacinda from the Real World for pete's sake! and some guys I wasn't really familiar with before -- in a dark drama by the creators of Damages, a show I haven't watched much of. Yet.
I have a soft spot for Suspenseful Narratives About Families With Secrets, so this definitely hit my target.
The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, originally developed for NBC which passed on it after the first season was already produced, turned out to be one of the two or three best new shows of the 2014-15 season. I'm sure if you have Netflix you've seen it by now. Created by Tina Fey and Robert Carlock, it has a lot of the sensibility of 30 Rock -- right down to Jane Krakowski in a similarly self-involved role -- but is centered around the optimism and naivete of Kimmy, who has recently been rescued from a cult. It's a hard show to sum up, and interestingly it really feels like a cable/streaming show -- it's a 13 episode season, with a well-defined beginning, middle, and end. Titus Burgess is clearly the newcomer of the year, and it's fantastic to have Carol Kane on the air again. Or on the stream. Whatever.
Grace and Frankie is a fairly traditional modern sitcom in most respects, except that the premise -- Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin's husbands, Martin Sheen and Sam Waterhouse, leave their wives for each other, and the women try to get their lives together -- would piss off some of the red states. It's a solid show with well-above average actors.
Amazon
Amazon is a weird one to keep track of, because they launch a crapload of pilots, wait to see which ones are the most popular, greenlight those, and then take forever to get around to launching the series. (Once in a while something goes straight to series, like the as yet untitled Woody Allen series.)
Transparent, which hit the streams last September, is fantastic, and probably the best new show of the 2014-15 season. Jeffrey Tambor plays a man who, having secretly dressed as a woman for years, finally tells his family that he's decided to transition. Jill Soloway, a writer and producer on Six Feet Under, showrunner of The United States of Tara, and director of the disappointing Afternoon Delight, was inspired by her own parent's coming out as transgender. It's a perfect premise for a show because, as Tambor explains everything to his adult kids, he walks the audience through what's going on as well.
Less like a sitcom and more like an indie movie told in small doses, Transparent is fantastic, funny, sometimes frustrating in the good way -- where you're frustrated with the characters, not the narrative -- and probably other F-words. Thank God it was renewed for a second season. Hurry up and air it. Stream it. Whatever.
Yahoo Screen
How are we even talking about Yahoo Screen? What even is Yahoo Screen? Its interface, at least on the Roku, is awful.
Community is how. After NBC failed to renew it for a sixth season, Yahoo said fuck no, "six seasons and a movie, dammit!", and picked it up. Yvette Nicole Brown left for personal reasons, Chevy Chase and Donald Glover had already left, and after filling in for a year, Jonathan Banks left too. Two new cast members joined -- showkiller Paget Brewster and Keith "not David Keith" David.
Let's stop and point out that Keith David was on The Cape, that Abed's obsession with The Cape and his insistence that it would last for "six seasons and a movie" is what led to the phrase "six seasons and a movie" that has become emblematic of Community fans' faith and determination, and that even though a cast member from The Cape is now in the sixth season and presumably a movie, there have been no references to The Cape this season!
Whether because of the cast turnover or a similar creative turnover -- I assume not all the same writers and directors are involved, but I don't know for sure -- Community has felt different this year. There have been a couple of weak episodes, but for the most part I don't mean different in a bad way. It's often just weirder.
"Basic Crisis Room Decorum" is the best example. Both the third episode of the season and the 100th episode of the series, it's one of the ten, maybe even one of the five, best episodes of Community of all time -- not because of the A-plot, in which City College premieres an attack ad because Greendale let a dog graduate, but because of weird jokes that don't translate well to print, like a drunken Britta shitting her pants and later hallucinating a music video by 90s college rock band Natalie Is Freezing.
Sometimes the show seems a little off tonally. Abed especially just seems ... different, maybe simply because Troy isn't around, or maybe because there aren't many new angles from which to approach his meta thing, without it seeming forced. Maybe it's this simple: in contrast with earlier seasons, where all-time-great episodes like "Critical Film Studies" (the "My Dinner with Abed" one) were driven by Abed or by the interplay between Abed and either Jeff or Troy, Abed hasn't been my favorite thing about any episode so far this season. That's not a liability or anything, it's just a change. On the other hand, Gillian Jacobs has been doing Emmy-quality work, which is all the more remarkable given that somehow after six years she's finding new things to do with this character. The introduction of Britta's parents has been terrific too, and if we say fuck the hashtag and storm forward with a season seven, I would love to see them show up more frequently.
(In retrospect, I guess Abed's importance actually peaked as long ago as season two, which included not only "Critical Film Studies" but "Abed's Uncontrollable Christmas" and "Paradigms of Human Memory.")
Despite the fact that The New Yorker ran an article on its casting, I haven't heard anybody talking about Other Space, Paul Feig's sitcom on Yahoo Screen. The marketing line seems to be "it's The Office, in space," but it's so, so much weirder than that.
It's clearly not a high budget series -- outside of Joel Hodgson and Trace Beaulieu from MST3K (who I mistook for the stars of the show before I saw it), it's a cluster of sorta-kinda familiar faces, like that guy from those phone commercials and that girl from those other phone commercials, But it's funny and weird and does a great job finding the comic potential in familiar space show concepts -- ground you figure has already been well-trod by Red Dwarf, but if there's room for a zillion Star Treks, there's room for a few funny Star Trek parodies.
There are so many other streaming shows and platforms I'm not even talking about, because there's too much to watch. I haven't even watched Powers, for instance, because although I have a Playstation and am a fan of the comic book, I don't have Playstation Plus and don't feel like paying for a TV show when we're already paying for cable and two streaming services (three if you count Amazon Prime).
But HBO started to turn Serious TV into a large part of its brand identity. Maybe they looked at the shorter and shorter delays between movies' theatrical releases and their showing up on Blockbuster shelves, and maybe they even realized how much shorter those delays would become once DVDs arrived. Maybe they understood that movies couldn't always be the reason to subscribe to the Home Box Office, is what I'm saying. But maybe they just got lucky.
Anyway, Showtime eventually followed, and today it's just assumed that a premium cable channel will have a handful of original series that can hold up to or surpass the quality and budgets of what you find on broadcast television.
Then FX premiered The Shield, during the last years of NYPD Blue, picking up the Serious Cop Show baton. It's a slow burner of a show that only a decade later can seem, if not dated per se, at least ordinary, because the violent antihero has become a drama staple.
Now FX was in the Serious TV game, and AMC followed with Mad Men, and although most other basic cable channels are still pretty early in the Developing Serious TV timeline, they contribute over half of the more than 300 scripted series that air each year. Some networks have forgone the Serious TV game in favor of more commercial programming -- MTV comes to mind here -- but the point is that broadcast's share has been eaten away by basic cable now, not just premium cable.
And then Netflix picked up Orange is the New Black, the House of Cards remake, and Arrested Development, followed by the rapid launch of a real network's worth of shows; Hulu picked up The Mindy Project; Amazon streamed Transparent; Yahoo Screen picked up Community after NBC failed to.
Fucking everything is a TV channel now.
This is the year that really hit home. The third season of House of Cards has aired, and although it's the weakest to date, it's still a sign of the new power of streaming services. The third season of Orange is the New Black starts soon, and God knows I am looking forward to Netflix's Wet Hot American Summer. On top of that -- still just talking about Netflix here -- Bloodline and The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt have wound up being two of my favorite series of the year.
All of that by way of introducing some quick coverage of the state of streaming TV this year.
Netflix
Like I said, House of Cards was a disappointment. I think Robin Wright is the best thing about the show -- not that Kevin Spacey isn't fun -- but this season just didn't feel very compelling, and that's only part because of the wealth of choices we have to watch these days.
Bloodline, though, features a cast of actors I absolutely love -- Coach, Lindsay Weir, Sam Shepard, Sissy Spacek, Jacinda from the Real World for pete's sake! and some guys I wasn't really familiar with before -- in a dark drama by the creators of Damages, a show I haven't watched much of. Yet.
I have a soft spot for Suspenseful Narratives About Families With Secrets, so this definitely hit my target.
The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, originally developed for NBC which passed on it after the first season was already produced, turned out to be one of the two or three best new shows of the 2014-15 season. I'm sure if you have Netflix you've seen it by now. Created by Tina Fey and Robert Carlock, it has a lot of the sensibility of 30 Rock -- right down to Jane Krakowski in a similarly self-involved role -- but is centered around the optimism and naivete of Kimmy, who has recently been rescued from a cult. It's a hard show to sum up, and interestingly it really feels like a cable/streaming show -- it's a 13 episode season, with a well-defined beginning, middle, and end. Titus Burgess is clearly the newcomer of the year, and it's fantastic to have Carol Kane on the air again. Or on the stream. Whatever.
Grace and Frankie is a fairly traditional modern sitcom in most respects, except that the premise -- Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin's husbands, Martin Sheen and Sam Waterhouse, leave their wives for each other, and the women try to get their lives together -- would piss off some of the red states. It's a solid show with well-above average actors.
Amazon
Amazon is a weird one to keep track of, because they launch a crapload of pilots, wait to see which ones are the most popular, greenlight those, and then take forever to get around to launching the series. (Once in a while something goes straight to series, like the as yet untitled Woody Allen series.)
Transparent, which hit the streams last September, is fantastic, and probably the best new show of the 2014-15 season. Jeffrey Tambor plays a man who, having secretly dressed as a woman for years, finally tells his family that he's decided to transition. Jill Soloway, a writer and producer on Six Feet Under, showrunner of The United States of Tara, and director of the disappointing Afternoon Delight, was inspired by her own parent's coming out as transgender. It's a perfect premise for a show because, as Tambor explains everything to his adult kids, he walks the audience through what's going on as well.
Less like a sitcom and more like an indie movie told in small doses, Transparent is fantastic, funny, sometimes frustrating in the good way -- where you're frustrated with the characters, not the narrative -- and probably other F-words. Thank God it was renewed for a second season. Hurry up and air it. Stream it. Whatever.
Yahoo Screen
How are we even talking about Yahoo Screen? What even is Yahoo Screen? Its interface, at least on the Roku, is awful.
Community is how. After NBC failed to renew it for a sixth season, Yahoo said fuck no, "six seasons and a movie, dammit!", and picked it up. Yvette Nicole Brown left for personal reasons, Chevy Chase and Donald Glover had already left, and after filling in for a year, Jonathan Banks left too. Two new cast members joined -- showkiller Paget Brewster and Keith "not David Keith" David.
Let's stop and point out that Keith David was on The Cape, that Abed's obsession with The Cape and his insistence that it would last for "six seasons and a movie" is what led to the phrase "six seasons and a movie" that has become emblematic of Community fans' faith and determination, and that even though a cast member from The Cape is now in the sixth season and presumably a movie, there have been no references to The Cape this season!
Whether because of the cast turnover or a similar creative turnover -- I assume not all the same writers and directors are involved, but I don't know for sure -- Community has felt different this year. There have been a couple of weak episodes, but for the most part I don't mean different in a bad way. It's often just weirder.
"Basic Crisis Room Decorum" is the best example. Both the third episode of the season and the 100th episode of the series, it's one of the ten, maybe even one of the five, best episodes of Community of all time -- not because of the A-plot, in which City College premieres an attack ad because Greendale let a dog graduate, but because of weird jokes that don't translate well to print, like a drunken Britta shitting her pants and later hallucinating a music video by 90s college rock band Natalie Is Freezing.
Sometimes the show seems a little off tonally. Abed especially just seems ... different, maybe simply because Troy isn't around, or maybe because there aren't many new angles from which to approach his meta thing, without it seeming forced. Maybe it's this simple: in contrast with earlier seasons, where all-time-great episodes like "Critical Film Studies" (the "My Dinner with Abed" one) were driven by Abed or by the interplay between Abed and either Jeff or Troy, Abed hasn't been my favorite thing about any episode so far this season. That's not a liability or anything, it's just a change. On the other hand, Gillian Jacobs has been doing Emmy-quality work, which is all the more remarkable given that somehow after six years she's finding new things to do with this character. The introduction of Britta's parents has been terrific too, and if we say fuck the hashtag and storm forward with a season seven, I would love to see them show up more frequently.
(In retrospect, I guess Abed's importance actually peaked as long ago as season two, which included not only "Critical Film Studies" but "Abed's Uncontrollable Christmas" and "Paradigms of Human Memory.")
Despite the fact that The New Yorker ran an article on its casting, I haven't heard anybody talking about Other Space, Paul Feig's sitcom on Yahoo Screen. The marketing line seems to be "it's The Office, in space," but it's so, so much weirder than that.
It's clearly not a high budget series -- outside of Joel Hodgson and Trace Beaulieu from MST3K (who I mistook for the stars of the show before I saw it), it's a cluster of sorta-kinda familiar faces, like that guy from those phone commercials and that girl from those other phone commercials, But it's funny and weird and does a great job finding the comic potential in familiar space show concepts -- ground you figure has already been well-trod by Red Dwarf, but if there's room for a zillion Star Treks, there's room for a few funny Star Trek parodies.
There are so many other streaming shows and platforms I'm not even talking about, because there's too much to watch. I haven't even watched Powers, for instance, because although I have a Playstation and am a fan of the comic book, I don't have Playstation Plus and don't feel like paying for a TV show when we're already paying for cable and two streaming services (three if you count Amazon Prime).
Saturday, May 30, 2015
bang splat equal at dollar underscore
AMC's computer industry period drama Halt and Catch Fire returns tomorrow for its second season, which Alan Sepinwall -- who I think is far and away the most important TV critic -- assures is significantly better than the first season.
In anticipation of that, my brief thoughts on that first season --
The initial premise is that business suit wildcard Joe (the normally great Lee Pace) and computer dude Gordon team up, along with punky college dropout Cameron, to ripoff the IBM PC by reverse engineering it (like Compaq did in real life).
My father has been in the personal computer industry for nearly as long as there's been one, having left his PhD program in the 60s in order to found a computer company with two of his friends. By the early 1980s, when this show takes place, I was around and certainly well aware of computers (my Christmas wishlists included the early "notebook computers" and 300-baud modems). And that's kind of my biggest problem with the show.
It's like when you're watching a western, and somehow none of the white people are ever racist unless they're bad guys. Except in this case, the history of the early personal computer industry is obscure enough that most of the audience isn't going to be tripped up, most of the time. But it's not history for me, you know? I can't help that so much of the show seems unreal to me.
That problem ties in with a less personal problem, which is the characters. Far and away the best is Donna, Gordon's wife, played by Kerry Bishe from the bizarrely well-cast final season of Scrubs (which also included Dave Franco and future comedy legend Eliza Coupe). Donna might be the brightest of the bunch, and one of the show's strengths is that it lets us realize this early on. Gordon and Donna had tried and failed to go into business for themselves, and now he has the more ambitious job so that she has time to tend the kids, though everyone's circumstances have changed -- for the narratively better -- by the end of the season. Perhaps because she is least central to the plot, Donna is also the most fully realized and nuanced character.
See, the other three -- especially Joe and Cameron -- are an unfortunate collection of Serious Cable Drama tics and cliches, without much consistency. Joe is an erratic wildcard. He's a wildcard, man! He might punch you or screw somebody he shouldn't screw! Whoooa. And Cameron, punky punkity punk punk Cameron, she doesn't design computers according to your RULES, man. Computers want to be FREE, man. She's a VISIONARY, man.
Cameron is an absolutely fucking shitty visionary. For most of the first season I can't stand Cameron.
This is the biggest area where my own experience of the computer industry becomes a stumbling block, but it's not Inside Baseball shit that's getting in my way. Anyone who was alive and using computers in the early 80s would have the same problem: Cameron never once sounds like a real computer person from the 20th century.
Joe is always vague about computers. He's realized the growth potential of the industry, but he's not someone who's going to put a system together in his garage. Gordon is practical enough that most of what he says sounds fine to my ear.
But Cameron is meant to be a visionary, and instead of making her sound like actual real-life visionaries from the computer industry, many of whom are still alive today or have written books, they make her sound like a 21st century audience member who is wandering around 1983 and pointing at computers and saying "we shouldn't make computers like this, we should make them do what they do in 2015." Some of the things that she throws tantrums about are features that were absolutely being discussed in the 80s, but in a "someday we'll be able to do this" kind of way, features that would require several technological revolutions to make possible. They aren't things you could just sit down with a couple people in your company and develop. They took the work of hundreds or thousands of people over many years.
That's my other problem. I'm a historian by training, and one of the most irritating fallacies is the idea that the way history turned out was the way it had to turn out -- the idea, in this case, that the computers we have now are an inevitable consequence of the computers of 1983: that there is a single path the development of the personal computer can take, and it will always transpire the same way. If history did work that way, foreseeing the future development of anything would just require being a little bit smart. No big whoop. You just think about something for a little bit, and it will become obvious to you which changes and improvements will be introduced in the future. Perhaps you'll be off on the timing -- there are funding considerations, after all -- but the broad shapes will be obvious.
Right?
No, not fucking right. There's a whole cottage industry of futurists and they're never fucking right. Pick up any issue of Mondo 2000 for heaven's sake, or an early issue of Wired, and tell me where our grape-sized watermelons are, because I'm pretty sure they were supposed to be the hottest new food of 1995. Futurists are awful at what they do because what they do is not a thing that can actually be done well.
That said, Mad Men may very well get a great deal wrong about advertising in the 1960s. Certainly some people have said so. Does it only not matter to me because it's not my personal experience being contradicted, or because the show had enough else to offer?
I genuinely think the latter. Cameron's insistence on the way computers need to be is a huge part of her inconsistently written character. It's not just a tic, and I often get the feeling that we're supposed to be on her side -- or at least recognize her genius. The ads for season two, for instance, have her demanding online gaming. In 1983. I was playing games online in 1993, a full decade after the show takes place, and as far as they had come in that time, they were:
a) nothing a gamer of today would recognize as a video game (they were entirely text-based)
b) apart from the MUDs and MUSHes that only a very small number of people with internet access could play, most of them were turn-based, and were barely more than adaptations of the play-by-mail games that most of you have never heard of.
Looking forward to a future of online gaming in 1983 is one thing, but trying to get a business off the ground that promises to service flying cars when everyone else is saving up for their first Model T doesn't make you a genius or a visionary. And it definitely doesn't help Cameron's case any when the writers so often make her petulant or frustrated at having to deal with how computers actually are in 1983. It just makes her seem like someone who doesn't actually want to work in the computer industry.
Sepinwall says it'll get better. He's right that there was a significant improvement at the end of the season. We'll see.
In anticipation of that, my brief thoughts on that first season --
The initial premise is that business suit wildcard Joe (the normally great Lee Pace) and computer dude Gordon team up, along with punky college dropout Cameron, to ripoff the IBM PC by reverse engineering it (like Compaq did in real life).
My father has been in the personal computer industry for nearly as long as there's been one, having left his PhD program in the 60s in order to found a computer company with two of his friends. By the early 1980s, when this show takes place, I was around and certainly well aware of computers (my Christmas wishlists included the early "notebook computers" and 300-baud modems). And that's kind of my biggest problem with the show.
It's like when you're watching a western, and somehow none of the white people are ever racist unless they're bad guys. Except in this case, the history of the early personal computer industry is obscure enough that most of the audience isn't going to be tripped up, most of the time. But it's not history for me, you know? I can't help that so much of the show seems unreal to me.
That problem ties in with a less personal problem, which is the characters. Far and away the best is Donna, Gordon's wife, played by Kerry Bishe from the bizarrely well-cast final season of Scrubs (which also included Dave Franco and future comedy legend Eliza Coupe). Donna might be the brightest of the bunch, and one of the show's strengths is that it lets us realize this early on. Gordon and Donna had tried and failed to go into business for themselves, and now he has the more ambitious job so that she has time to tend the kids, though everyone's circumstances have changed -- for the narratively better -- by the end of the season. Perhaps because she is least central to the plot, Donna is also the most fully realized and nuanced character.
See, the other three -- especially Joe and Cameron -- are an unfortunate collection of Serious Cable Drama tics and cliches, without much consistency. Joe is an erratic wildcard. He's a wildcard, man! He might punch you or screw somebody he shouldn't screw! Whoooa. And Cameron, punky punkity punk punk Cameron, she doesn't design computers according to your RULES, man. Computers want to be FREE, man. She's a VISIONARY, man.
Cameron is an absolutely fucking shitty visionary. For most of the first season I can't stand Cameron.
This is the biggest area where my own experience of the computer industry becomes a stumbling block, but it's not Inside Baseball shit that's getting in my way. Anyone who was alive and using computers in the early 80s would have the same problem: Cameron never once sounds like a real computer person from the 20th century.
Joe is always vague about computers. He's realized the growth potential of the industry, but he's not someone who's going to put a system together in his garage. Gordon is practical enough that most of what he says sounds fine to my ear.
But Cameron is meant to be a visionary, and instead of making her sound like actual real-life visionaries from the computer industry, many of whom are still alive today or have written books, they make her sound like a 21st century audience member who is wandering around 1983 and pointing at computers and saying "we shouldn't make computers like this, we should make them do what they do in 2015." Some of the things that she throws tantrums about are features that were absolutely being discussed in the 80s, but in a "someday we'll be able to do this" kind of way, features that would require several technological revolutions to make possible. They aren't things you could just sit down with a couple people in your company and develop. They took the work of hundreds or thousands of people over many years.
That's my other problem. I'm a historian by training, and one of the most irritating fallacies is the idea that the way history turned out was the way it had to turn out -- the idea, in this case, that the computers we have now are an inevitable consequence of the computers of 1983: that there is a single path the development of the personal computer can take, and it will always transpire the same way. If history did work that way, foreseeing the future development of anything would just require being a little bit smart. No big whoop. You just think about something for a little bit, and it will become obvious to you which changes and improvements will be introduced in the future. Perhaps you'll be off on the timing -- there are funding considerations, after all -- but the broad shapes will be obvious.
Right?
No, not fucking right. There's a whole cottage industry of futurists and they're never fucking right. Pick up any issue of Mondo 2000 for heaven's sake, or an early issue of Wired, and tell me where our grape-sized watermelons are, because I'm pretty sure they were supposed to be the hottest new food of 1995. Futurists are awful at what they do because what they do is not a thing that can actually be done well.
That said, Mad Men may very well get a great deal wrong about advertising in the 1960s. Certainly some people have said so. Does it only not matter to me because it's not my personal experience being contradicted, or because the show had enough else to offer?
I genuinely think the latter. Cameron's insistence on the way computers need to be is a huge part of her inconsistently written character. It's not just a tic, and I often get the feeling that we're supposed to be on her side -- or at least recognize her genius. The ads for season two, for instance, have her demanding online gaming. In 1983. I was playing games online in 1993, a full decade after the show takes place, and as far as they had come in that time, they were:
a) nothing a gamer of today would recognize as a video game (they were entirely text-based)
b) apart from the MUDs and MUSHes that only a very small number of people with internet access could play, most of them were turn-based, and were barely more than adaptations of the play-by-mail games that most of you have never heard of.
Looking forward to a future of online gaming in 1983 is one thing, but trying to get a business off the ground that promises to service flying cars when everyone else is saving up for their first Model T doesn't make you a genius or a visionary. And it definitely doesn't help Cameron's case any when the writers so often make her petulant or frustrated at having to deal with how computers actually are in 1983. It just makes her seem like someone who doesn't actually want to work in the computer industry.
Sepinwall says it'll get better. He's right that there was a significant improvement at the end of the season. We'll see.
Wednesday, May 20, 2015
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.
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.
Wednesday, May 13, 2015
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.
Episode by episode thoughts after the break.
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