Alphas and SyFy

First things first: if you’re not watching Alphas you are missing out on a great show. What’s refreshing is that I don’t need to provide any caveats to that. Yes, I’m a science fiction nerd, so I’m more inclined to give these sorts of shows some slack when they underperform. That means I end up watching random mediocre sci-fi because it’s sci-fi. I’m glad to say that in this case, we’ve got a smart sci-fi show that is also genuinely good irrespective of the trappings of its genre.

David Strathairn as Leigh Rosen

The finale of this first season — SyFy has already ordered a second season — aired on Monday and it delivered on the promise of so many previous superhero shows with a finale that is explosive not for its action but for its words. Leigh Rosen, played by an inexplicable David Strathairn1, ends the season with a dramatic action that will spin the story off into exciting and unknown territory that I trust the writers can follow through on. My one fear with the show’s direction is that it might hew to the path of The 4400, whose creator is working in the writer’s room on Alphas, because that show had similar stories to tell, but I think the creative team here is smart enough to resonate with that world without echoing it.

The second thought I wanted to get across here is that the existence of Alphas proves just how ridiculous the people who mock SyFy, or refuse to pronounce the name the way they want, or say the channel’s more interested in putting wrestling on the air than putting out good sci-fi are. This is the sort of show they want to make — technically they want to make this show and have it be a wildly popular and critical hit but let’s not split hairs in this moment of triumph — and when there are people out there who explicitly refuse to watch a show simply because it’s on SyFy, it infuriates me. It infuriated me even before this show was put on the air, but it’s now obviously a stubbornly ignorant position.

Footnotes

  1. I’m so glad he’s doing this show, and I hope that the events of this finale aren’t a way of writing him out of the series barring the occasional guest appearance, but I never would’ve guessed his next move to be a jump to a SyFy series. [↩]

Early Thoughts on Pan Am

Recently, I’ve been putting down fewer and fewer thoughts on my blog. The biggest reason for this is Twitter lets me throw out quick thoughts and then my pent up thoughts tend to dissipate1.

With that out of the way, I guess it’s time to talk about Pan Am, the new period drama about a flight crew aboard a Pan Am plane in the 60′s. I’ll be talking obliquely about certain plot points that aren’t obvious based on the short description above, so if you’re wary of spoilers and have yet to watch the premiere, this is where you stop reading.

Pan Am

I really enjoyed the pilot, a lot more than I ever expected to, even when early summaries started talking about the spy subplots, something that would normally guarantee a positive reaction from me2. The flashbacks were a clever way of moving the action outside the frame of the plane, and continue to prove that flashbacks are awesome sauce. All the characters felt unique in a way that often doesn’t happen this early in a series run.

And from a purely aesthetic perspective, I loved the look of it. Even if Mad Men weren’t well written, acted, and directed the look and feel of the 60′s would make the show enjoyable, and that is if anything more true of Pan Am. The old school stewardess look is fantastic3, and the sheer pleasure the show exudes when showing a plane boarding is escapism in its own right given the current depressing state of air flight. This was a time when flight was a fancy, and the show excels when it’s selling you on the glamour of it all.

Of course, everything is glamourous at this point. The show is selling itself, so its best foot has been put forward. You’ve got sexy women wearing a fetishistic uniform, the intrigue of cold war espionage, and the hints of intrigue in the characters’ pasts. It all comes together to make a show that is incredibly enjoyable. The question that remains is whether or not the show will follow through on its promise, which is what next week will be all about. I know I’ll be there.

Footnotes

  1. A related reason is that posting those smaller thoughts on this blog wouldn’t look right in its current incarnation, something I’m looking into fixing but it ultimately a fair way away [↩]
  2. To be fair, when I did ultimately get to those parts of the story, they were immensely exciting to me. [↩]
  3. Maybe it’s for the best that flight attendants can be of any gender, and they no longer have to wear girdles and fit into specific weight to height ratios, but it made for a very pleasant flight. [↩]

My Thoughts Exactly

This will be the third post about Lost’s finale in a row, and my first post in over a month1, but I found this paragraph hidden inside an X-Files review on the AV Club to so perfectly summarize my thoughts on the answers Lost gave us2:

As Lost was winding toward its conclusion and it became more and more apparent that not all of the series’ big questions were going to be answered, it touched off a bit of fan discussion about just how much needs to be tied up to make a satisfying ending. I realize that my position on these things is a bit unlike most other people who watch this sort of stuff for fun or a living, but, officially, I don’t care. If the story just keeps getting bigger and bigger and more nebulous, fine. Pile mysteries on top of mysteries until the groaning weight of the artifice topples in on itself. So long as the character stuff and the plotting are generally tight on an episode-by-episode level, I kind of LIKE it when things get so big that they seem to encompass all of human existence.

Exactly.

Footnotes

  1. New job, new projects, blah blah blah, I need to stop being lazy. [↩]
  2. Well, as I’ve said before, I think Lost gave us a lot more answers than most of the fans give it credit for, but the sentiment of this quote is dead on. [↩]

Lost’s Final Message

Watching Lost come to an end was a spectacular event. This show has rocked me each season with its complex storytelling, bizarre mythology, and emotional heft.

The very first episode I saw — I ignored the show at first because ABC’s early marketing made it look really really stupid — was “…In Translation” and I watched it totally unaware of what show it was or any past relations for the character. The episode focused on Sun and Jin, and when it ended I thought it was one of the best hours of television I’d seen in a long time. Following that I went back and watched Lost from the beginning, quickly becoming a die-hard acolyte.

During those early years, I was one of those guys that theorized all the time, I’d discuss with friends my thoughts about what The Dharma Initiative was all about, why there were Egyptian hieroglyphs, and why it was that you couldn’t find the Island.

I don’t know when it happened, though, but somewhere along the way I realized that I could answer most of those questions myself, and it was probably more fun to not get definitive answers. What I really ended up caring about was the characters. I actually don’t really remember caring about characters all that much before Lost; I’m sure I had some understanding of it before Lost, but it was certainly during the time Lost was airing that I grew more and more interested in how characters grow, and how a show can service them rather than the other way around. It’s entirely possible that Lost was the thing that made me realize that television was about more than filling a half-hour with jokes or constructing a clever murder mystery to be unraveled.

And so, Lost ended tonight. And it’s final moments were about — what else? — the characters.

I think it’s easy to criticize Lost for not giving enough answers to its mythology, but it’s also pointless. Those sorts of answers will always be, in some very important ways, arbitrary. We’ve seen this throughout Lost’s run when big questions are answered, two from this season in particular are the explanations for The Rules and The Numbers. This is absolutely intentional on the writers part.

What could possibly be a rational answer for the numbers 4, 8, 15, 16, 23, and 42 constantly showing up in the characters lives? There is none, it’s just something to signify that these people are connected in important ways.

So much of the mythology of Lost is ultimately unimportant; all that matters is that these people were brought to the Island for a reason — to protect it — and the Island is a very special place. Anything else is merely an extension of those two fundamental principles.

It’s less important what these people do than why they do it. Watching Lost, you learn who these people are, and you come to see each of them as a flawed person seeking resolution, seeking redemption, seeking some meaning. Basically, they’re real people.

I think that almost every action a character has performed during the run of this remarkable series had come from them, not from some need from the writer1, and the show has been much stronger for that reason.

Trying to talk about the finale that just aired is essentially impossible. People who haven’t watched the show before will be baffled, and the people who have watched it for years are mostly trapped between two positions: the finale didn’t answer anything, and the finale gave us all the answers we need. These two positions are surprisingly not actually mutually exclusive, they’re just the expression of two different types of fans. Some people are here for the mythology and others are here for the characters.

People are absolutely right that the finale didn’t answer anything. Nobody was sat down and told the history of the Island, nor where the mechanics or the Donkey Wheel explained or the power of The Source. There were no long drawn-out scenes explaining why the Island needs protecting, who created it, why it was special, where it came from or anything even approaching that.

But a lot of us really didn’t care about that. We were much more interested in knowing if Kate will ever declare her love for one of her two lovers2, or what will Jack do now that he’s the new Jacob, or if all the pain and suffering the survivors have gone through really had meaning.

To that second group, we were inundated by answers. Kate finally fessed up to loving Jack, just as they part ways for the rest of their lives. Jack risked the Island in order to finally kill the Man in Black and then heroically sacrificed himself to save the Island, and by implication the world. And yes, all the hardship and pain these people went through, it was worth it; completely ignoring the flashes sideways, which I’ll discuss in a few moments, those people grew from the shallow self-serving people they started as into fully realized people who were part of a community. They all came to be part of a larger whole, and that community is what ultimately gave Jack the strength to sacrifice himself for them, for their memory, and for the world they all left behind when they crashed on that Island.

Aside from that long-term schism, the finale has opened a new idea for fans to be divided on: the flashes sideways3. I’m not entirely sure what people were looking for out of the flashes sideways, I’m not sure what I was looking for. My basic metric was that I wanted them to mean something, I wanted them to matter in some way. I think that the flashes sideways being an ethereal staging ground for the survivors to find each other so they could go off to some sort of afterlife together probably works. Going over the season with that knowledge at hand is probably necessary to really see if everything that happened needed to be there.

For the moment, I’m gobsmacked. I wept through the closing scenes where all the castaways reunited across time and space to essentially die together. I don’t know if it will really work in the long term, but right now I’m more than satisfied. I can’t wait to watch it all again.

Footnotes

  1. Obviously, the layer above that is that these characters were given these traits and character arcs precisely because the writer’s needed those characteristics for future plot points, but that doesn’t negate that their actions, in and of themselves, were internally consistent. [↩]
  2. I know a lot of Lost fans hate Kate fervently, but I like her character a lot and I think her open declaration of Love in tonight’s episode was one of her bravest moments in the series. [↩]
  3. I pluralize that shit like a classy motherfucker. [↩]

Party Down’s Search for Meaning

Party Down is one of those secret shows that is truly impressive but can’t seem to find a real audience. The arc of the first season was very strongly about knowing when to give up your dream, and why that’s not necessarily the worst thing in the world. The second season, based on the most recent episode, Steve Guttenberg’s Birthday, seems to be exploring the idea that dreams never die, and why that’s probably the best thing in the world.

Henry, played by Adam Scott, is an actor who gave up on his career after giving it his all for as long as he thought he could last. Each episode centers around a party or event being catered by Henry’s new employer, a catering company whose employees are mostly people struggling for their first big break in Hollywood.

Along with Henry1 are: Casey, a potential up-and-coming comic; Roman, a hard science fiction writer who feels above anyone and everyone; and Kyle, a pretty-boy actor. In the first season Henry is portrayed as the end result of Hollywood, someone who’s given up on their dreams. But despite this seemingly grim theme, season one is about Henry finding a place for himself without that all-encompassing passion. He finds someone to care for with Casey and finds himself more and more comfortable with being a caterer for the rest of his life, so long as there’s someone there to share it with.

But season one ended with Casey leaving him to follow her dream, to look for that big break somewhere else, him being promoted to manager of a team of caterers, and essentially no passion left in him. It was funny to see, but also tragic. We all look for some meaning in our life, and just as Henry had adjusted to a new meaning, it left to be a stand-up comic on a six-month long Alaskan cruise.

Season two brings us back around six months later and Henry is still recovering from the hurt Casey gave him and the sadness of his humdrum existence. In this episode, Steve “The Gute” Guttenberg happens to have a movie in his DVD collection that Henry had a small role in, which perks Casey’s curiosity. At the same time, The Gute encourages the crew to perform a reading of Roman’s recently rejected script, in the hopes of giving Roman ideas for improvement. These two plots manage to pack in a lot of really great themes and character growth into a few short scenes.

By Casey sneaking off to see Henry’s early work as an actor she realizes that he’s actually a really great actor, one who probably shouldn’t have given up on his dream. Casey’s desire to see Henry follow that dream is probably related to her recent success via a small role in an Apatow movie, but it nonetheless points to that larger idea.

And when Henry performs the improved version of Roman’s script — earnestly performing the material due to Casey goading him into it in order to, in my opinion, see if he can still act as well as he once did — we also learn that he’s actually a great actor. More than that, we see that he obviously misses it.

The question you have to ask now — well, this is a half-hour comedy so I guess you don’t have to do any of this analysis but this is what I live for — is what it is that gives us meaning. In the first season, Henry was looking for it in the people around him, and in love. Now, it’s not so clear that that’s enough.

I know that Adam Scott will have, at best, a limited role in any potential third season of the show, which has probably driven some of my thoughts and speculation about the direction of the season, but it seems to me that a really smart way to end this season would be to have Henry reaffirm his desire to be an actor and go off to pursue that dream. Or if they push that earlier in the season, maybe ending the season with his new big break, the one that will catapult him to real fame (and maybe next season he’ll host a few parties so he can hang with his old catering buddies). But whatever they do, I hope the show continues to explore these sorts of interesting themes in a new season, even without Henry there — though, at the moment, I can’t imagine the show being anywhere near as compelling without him there.

Party Down is a light-comedy centred around real characters and that juxtaposition makes it, like Parks and Recreation, one of those subdued comedies that manages to make you laugh at the same time as they explore romance and life in really important ways.

Footnotes

  1. There are other regular cast members but these particular characters exemplify the themes I’m exploring in this post. [↩]

Comics vs Movies: A Kick-Ass Case Study

I finally got around to watching Kick-Ass and, having had the opportunity to read the comic not long ago, the movie was an enlightening experience1. Spoilers for the movie and the comic follow.

Tonally, this movie took a lot of the more cynical moments of the comic and softened them. I don’t know if the movie needed to remove all of those little touches, but there are some that probably had to be made. For example, in the comic Big Daddy and Hit Girl’s mob crusade is a total sham; Hit Girl’s mother is not dead, Big Daddy wasn’t a cop or a hit man or anything like that, Big Daddy was an accountant-by-day comic nerd-by-night who used his comic collection to fund his crusade and essentially brainwashed his kid into becoming a ruthless assassin in order to have fun. It’s an interesting deconstruction of the superhero mythos, but a tad depressing and almost anti-comics in sentiment for a comic book movie.

Another thing the movie brightened up was Dave’s romance. In the movie, as in the comic, Dave pretends to be gay to get close to this girl, Katie, who wants a gay best friend. The movie differs broadly here as well. In the comic, Katie is more explicitly using Dave and never demonstrates much interest in him; when he reveals that he’s not gay and in fact is basically in love with her, she beats the shit out of him and then gets her boyfriend to beat more shit out of him.

The movie fleshes Katie out more, she becomes interested in Dave over time expressing regret that he’s gay, and even becomes a comic book fan; when he reveals to her that he’s not gay — he also reveals that he’s Kick-Ass to her, which makes the way she takes it somewhat more realistic, and also heightens the drama during the later action pieces — she’s briefly pissed but quickly warms to him, both emotionally and physically. Basically, they fuck a lot2, and though the ease with which she takes his confession doesn’t read as believably as I’d like, the relationship works in the big picture.

Basically, what Matthew Vaughn did when writing the screenplay was extract large chunks of Mark Millar’s misogyny, nihilism, and misanthropy. Obviously, there’s a degree to which this was done to make the movie more marketable, but I think even more than that the plot changes were done because the original comic lacked heart. The movie, much more than the comic, wants to be about more than just being a super-hero because it’s cool. Maybe it should’ve been uncompromising and brutal and accused the audience of being sociopaths for ever dreaming about being a super-hero but that movie almost certainly would’ve sucked.

Beyond the changes that occurred in the general plot, one thing that changed pretty drastically in terms of the way the story was told was the lack of flashbacks. Comic books operate similar to serialized television in most ways, and one aspect in particular is the cliffhanger ending; when a comic ends on a cliffhanger — like, say, Hit Girl and Big Daddy demolishing a bunch of drug dealers and running off into the night — the next issue can be devoted to explaining these new characters, their back story, and why they’re doing what they’re doing. The big reveal of the new amazing character, emerging complete from the shadows, it’s one of the cornerstones of comics and so it’s not surprising that Kick-Ass used it a couple times.

In Kick-Ass, it’s used first to fill in the back story of Hit Girl and Big Daddy3 and then later on to reveal that Red Mist was working with the Mob to set a trap for Hit Girl and Big Daddy. This style is great because it lets certain events come at you unexpectedly; in the film both of these things are integrated into the linear plot4 and so they feel slightly deflated. Granted, a good story should stay a good story regardless of any storytelling temporal tricks you plan, but that doesn’t mean those tricks can’t enhance the story.

The compressed story lines required for film are at times a crucible from which a tighter story is extracted, but in the process it’s easy to lose something.

Seeing as I’m here, I’ll write a brief paragraph about the fight scenes in Kick-Ass5. Hit Girl killing countless mob goons was a sight to behold, but I think that the best fight scene in the movie, hands down, is the one where Big Daddy destroys that group of goons at the lumber factory and then sets it all on fire. Every movement in that scene feels so visceral, the way Big Daddy trundles relentlessly through the gunfire felt so much more genuine than the highly choreographed (albeit impressive) fights with Hit Girl.

Ultimately, I think the film is stronger than the comic, both because of the changes to the basic plot and in spite of the loss of certain comic book storytelling traits. You should go see it if you haven’t already, though if you’ve read this entire post but haven’t seen the movie, well I kinda fucked that plan up for you, didn’t I?

Footnotes

  1. It was also a very entertaining movie, but I’ll be damned if I’m going to resort to that lame pun everyone seems to be bandying about. And no, the title of this post is not an example of said pun it’s— oh look over there, a squirrel! [↩]
  2. And I’m totally willing to admit I giggled with glee when she said she wanted to fuck Kick-Ass and then promptly made up an excuse to go fuck Dave. [↩]
  3. Well, the first version of the back story, the ending reveals that the first version was a fiction thought up by Big Daddy. [↩]
  4. Aside from a comic book animation sequence that gives a little more history to Big Daddy. [↩]
  5. I’m still not going to use that pun, though [↩]

How’d Chuck Do?

Not long ago, I expressed worry about Chuck’s future now that the will-they/won’t-they romance has been resolved. With one episode down and five to go, I think the writers are on the right path.

So far, at least, the show seems quite content to let Chuck and Sarah just be happy while being spies. And rightly so! It seems odd to me that no show that I can recall aside from the American version of The Office has had the long-term romance solidify and continue telling stories. Emotional connections are perhaps harder to establish with fictional characters when a romance isn’t one of the balls in the air, but conversely, storytelling is not merely the act of introducing sadness to people’s lives.

This isn’t to say that they need to be a perfect couple forever from here on out, but at the very least they have avoided for the time being the trap of the quick and implausible relationship collapse. I can’t wait to see how the rest of this season plays out1.

Footnotes

  1. Oh, also, the season’s winding down, the ratings are still unremarkable, and the show continues to be one of the best shows on right now. In conclusion… Start Watching Chuck, Dammit! [↩]

Spartacus: Blood and Sand — Season One Review

Spartacus: Blood and Sand finished off their first season a couple nights ago and while I had early reservations, mostly related to the gratuitousness of the nudity and violence, the season came together in a really satisfying way. The violence is still ridiculous at times, the nudity and sexuality is often overdone, but the characters survive through those faults. It shouldn’t be a surprise that the show is strongly written, seeing as its creator is Steven S. DeKnight, a veteran of a number of quality television shows. Even more than that, the show was blessed with having Daniel Knauf, creator of one of the best television shows ever made, as a consulting producer.

But I think it’s safe to say that Spartacus snuck up on people with its quality; it’s left me interested in the second season, and pondering where the characters will go before their preordained end. On a related note, it seems as though the show’s name has been retconned as Spartacus, with a season subtitle of Blood and Sand, to allow for the second season to shift out of the gladiatorial ring with the new subtitle Vengeance. So I look forward to Spartacus: Vengeance, though I do hope the show is more willing to forgo the over-the-top violence and sexuality1 now that it’s found strong characters to base the show around.

Footnotes

  1. The more recent episodes have come with a disclaimer telling viewers the violence and sexuality is there to portray a realistic representation of Ancient Rome, but HBO’s Rome didn’t whitewash the dingier parts of Ancient Rome without having such profuse and omnipresent nudity and violence, so some of it is clearly there for the sake of grabbing attention, and it’s that aspect of the show that I think could go away fairly easily. [↩]

Making it Boring

I just now watched the first episode of a new series from the guys that made Entourage, How to Make it in America, and the thing that was most remarkable about it was how listless the episode was as a whole and how that reflects on one of the potential pitfalls of the way subscription television channels like HBO produce their shows.

How to Make it in America sort of stumbles through its first episode, meekly establishing character relationships and not doing much in terms of plot. Another recent HBO show to behave this way for the first half of its season was Bored to Death, which eventually made its way toward an interesting story, so I don’t doubt that How to Make it in America could become interesting before the season is out, but the problem is that these shows aren’t using the guaranteed full season to heighten the drama, but instead as an excuse to not start strong.

Network television has many flaws, but pilot episodes are not among them. Grabbing the audience quickly was never the problem, it was maintaining that audience, and the show’s quality, as the season progressed.

Now, obviously, not every story leaps from the gate, but I also think it’s reasonable to expect a television show to produce compelling episodes that service the overall arc while retaining value when viewed independently. I guess what I’m trying to get across here is that there’s a difference between a slow burn and wasting time, and an increasing number of shows on HBO and its ilk are relying on the confusion between the two to evade tight storytelling.

30 Rock [4x13] Anna Howard Shaw Day

Tonight’s NBC comedies were so good, I thought I’d write about them. I love all these shows so much, and yet that rarely gets an outlet here. Let’s change that.

Kenneth wearing a bag

30 Rock was the weakest half-hour of NBC’s two hour comedy block. That’s less a knock on 30 Rock than it is praising the other shows. In fact, this was also one of the best episodes of 30 Rock this year, which also means it’s one of the best of the last two years.

The addition of Elizabeth Banks went over much better than the addition of Julianne Moore. The fact that she didn’t have to do a bad Boston accent helped with that, but Banks seems a better fit to the show, with a stronger history in comedy. I hope she’s back for a few more episodes before the inevitably send her packing.

Jenna’s subplot is slightly more entertaining than usual, but only slightly. It’s surprisingly hard to lampoon an absurd celebrity self-centered actor without it getting dull and repetitive fairly quickly.

Liz’s search for someone to pick her up from oral surgery was a fun way of exploring Valentine’s Day, though they went a little too on the nose with the multiple explicit comparisons to the search for a Valentine’s Day date.

But I’m willing to ignore any and all issues I have with that particular plot because of the closing scene with all of Liz’s ex-boyfriends as Jamaican nurses. I think I could watch that forever.

Good cap to the night, and a sign that maybe the writer’s have found their groove again.

Some nice things in this episode:

  • Despite their overuse of the card, Liz’s complete obliviousness to existence of front clasp bras was pretty great.
  • ‘My stepson is my cyber-husband’
  • What was up with that weird pause over the Julia Roberts line? Was that a jab at side-swipe comedy?
  • http://jdlutz.com/karen/proof/
  • ‘Prime Minister Wen wants a weak Yuan, do we?’
  • ‘We’ll be right back after this ad aimed at the elderly.’
  • ‘It’s one of those kids from Glee isn’t it?!’
  • ‘One time, I ran over an old lady in Arizona and just kept driving!’
  • ‘She was on Maxim’s ‘I’d Rape That’ 100′
  • ‘Otherwise known as Jane Sadwoman.’
  • ‘Don Cheadle on a bed of rice!’

The Office [6x15] Manager and Salesmen

Tonight’s NBC comedies were so good, I thought I’d write about them. I love all these shows so much, and yet that rarely gets an outlet here. Let’s change that.

Dogs sniffing Andy's crotch

As I just said in my post about tonight’s episode of Parks and Recreation, The Office lives through the eccentricities of their characters. They keep the characters well-grounded but everyone’s a little… more than you’d expect in real life.

Tonight’s episode was more grounded than usual in that its main plot was about a real world eventuality of acquisitions like the one the office experienced recently. Specifically, the redundancy that is the co-manager position. Basically, one of them needs to go back to Sales. Luckily for whoever that is, Sabre has no cap on commissions. Jim and Michael are both famously good salesmen either of whom could make more money in Sales so we end up with a fun situation where they’re both fighting to be demoted.

It’s great though how quickly Michael falls out of love with the idea of doing the actual work of becoming a salesman again. It took less than a day without an assistant and a big desk and the snacks for Michael to stop caring about the boost in his paycheque.

That storyline is fun, but most of the comedy actually comes from the more extreme absurdities of the office’s staff. And really, that mostly comes down to Erin and Andy, both of whom are so strange that you a) can’t wait to see them as a couple and b) can’t help but think they’re more real than any of the other people on the show. That said, as bizarre as those two are, I can’t help but root for them.

The Office is past its prime, but thanks to the time the writers invested into the characters early on it’s still one of the best comedies on television right now.

Some nice things in this episode:

  • The Olympics cold-open was great.
  • Words to live by: ‘I have this thing about men cutting or threatening to cut my throat. Don’t try to cut my throat.’
  • Erin and Andy’s traffic jam riff was an example of one of those great moments the show does that are so much like something you would do but seem so bizarre when someone else does it.
  • Dwight and Ryan’s evil cabal is great. As are the Lord of the Rings references.
  • I was almost certain that Dwight hadn’t actually seen Saw until he mentioned legs getting cut off.
  • Erin’s smile of pride over Andy’s crotch getting thoroughly sniffed by those massive dogs.
  • Erin doesn’t know Peanuts? Again, so weird it has to be real.
  • ‘I can’t even go near a cigarette now without thinking of a penis. And vice versa.’
  • Oscar’s reading an old issue of The Atlantic, I think the December issue.
  • Apparently, The Office has an unspoken rule of not casting known faces for guest spots until this Kathy Bates guest spot, but I think it works since she’s playing a larger than life character.
  • ‘It’s not because of the smell, I’m just expecting a nosebleed.’
  • I feel like Pam’s reaction to Andy saying his office-mates are his closest friends, is a little much. It’s not like she’s got a bustling social life outside of the office.

Parks and Recreation [2x16] Galentine’s Day

Tonight’s NBC comedies were so good, I thought I’d write about them. I love all these shows so much, and yet that rarely gets an outlet here. Let’s change that.

Parks and Recreation has been so much better this year on every level that it’s not surprising it’s not a rating winner, but if this season gets any word of mouth at all, those ratings should start shooting up.

Since this episode was all about Valentine’s Day, it makes sense that it was all about romances.

Ann and Mark’s relationship was a bit of a shock at first but it’s grown on me, primarily because it’s never been the main story of any episode. And it makes it a lot easier to like Mark, who was a bit of a cad and a bunch of a douche last season. It doesn’t seem like this relationship is destined to be long-lived, though. Ann’s comments during her talking head scene sharply demonstrated that a really normal relationship can also mean a really uninteresting relationship. Nonetheless, this little relationship has done quite a bit of heavy lifting by making Mark more likable and by bringing Ann closer to the office environment.

Leslie and Justin’s relationship had a great path and the way it ended, while keeping Justin totally likable, was kind of scary for its intelligence. From the first time we saw Justin he’d been a storyteller, and making that the key thing that makes Leslie realize they’re not right for each other is one of those story touches that less capable shows would screw up.

Tom’s awkward attempts to woo his ex-wife are sweet and very fitting a person as bizarre as Tom Haverford. They didn’t end well, but they continued the work of making Tom empathetic after a season of him mostly being the weirdo. What makes this show interesting is that they’re putting the work in to make all their characters relatable and realistic. Not that The Office is a grab-bag of slapstick tomfoolery but its main comic sources are drawn a bit broader than real life; Parks and Recreation hopes to mine the world of humour and pathos that exists on the other edge of the line, skirting realism in a way that you would think would make the comedy harder to come by, but this show makes it look easy.

April smiling wryly

One of the most impressive developments of this season is the stealth romance of April and Andy. The undefined age difference aside, their flirtations — and Andy’s obliviousness to it all — are one of the more romantic story lines they’ve weaved into this season while still remaining wildly funny. And of course, it’s led to whole new avenues for April. She’s still basically that deadpan sardonic ironic apathetic chick, but the glimmer in her eye when she dotes on Andy is opening her up to the world beyond the ’15 layers of irony’ her boyfriend (and his boyfriend) revel in.

Some nice things in this episode:

  • ‘It makes The Notebook look like Saw 5.’
  • ‘I’m gonna call him poo-pa.’
  • Leslie: ‘Think of it this way: these songs are exactly like the songs you usually except instead of modern rock, they’re old jazzy standards from the 40′s.’
    Andy: ‘OK, yeah, you got a point.’
  • ‘I never had a chance to get a girl a cliched Valentine’s Day gift before so… I got you all of them.’
  • Mark in a tuxedo and red bow tie. Adorbs.
  • A timely joke: ‘Stay away from John Mayer.’
  • ‘I’m gonna throw up real quick and then we can leave!’
  • The people on the show seem to be acknowledging the camera a little more in the recent episodes, I like it so far I just hope they don’t over-do it.
  • ‘Uhh… I mean, that sucked, didn’t it?’
  • Guitarist: ‘Maybe if you sang it like Louis Armstrong.’
    Andy: ‘Maybe yeah, I mean here’s the thing though… who is that?’
  • ‘If I’m not mistaken, that was the old lady version of flashing.’
  • Andy is too quotable.

Community [1x16] Communication Studies

Tonight’s NBC comedies were so good, I thought I’d write about them. I love all these shows so much, and yet that rarely gets an outlet here. Let’s change that.

Community explored the politics of the drunk dial tonight. Britta’s slick veneer of disinterest in Jeff was shattered by the power of alcohol. As easy as it would be for the show to use a moment like this to ruin Jeff’s existing relationship, with his hot former statistics professor1, while advancing the Will-They-Won’t-They narrative, maybe even getting another kiss out of the potential couple, Community doesn’t hit those sorts of lobs.

Community has shown itself to be a shrewd observer of the classic tropes of television. Even when it follows these tropes, it subverts them as it did expertly in this episode. With some sharp writing, it managed to strengthen Jeff’s current relationship and deepen Jeff and Britta’s friendship while keeping the door open for a genuine romance further down the road. Also, they got Britta into this dress.

Britta, being outrageously hot.

Chevy Chase in a pantsuit was nice too I guess.

So far this year, Community’s been remarkably consistent for a new series. I can’t think of a demonstrably weak episode and none of the characters feel like the unwanted step-children of the writers. Earlier this week Dan Harmon, creator of Community, tweeted:

I’d start phoning it in if it weren’t for the fear that nobody would know the difference.

To which I say, if he were phoning it in we’d know. Oh, how we’d know.

Some nice things in this episode:

  • Annie clapping along with Senor Chang’s Spanish chicken dance.
  • Abed’s inability to recall television minutiae while hungover.
  • Britta in that dress. I mean, wow.
  • ‘Wassup’
  • BCI
  • ‘I’m Abed, I never watch TV.’
  • Cupid Being. Not only blind, but dizzy and belligerent.
  • ‘He’s a young The Asian Guy from Lost’
  • ‘One Papa John’s commercial, and he thinks he’s Christian Bale.’
  • The Breakfast Club montage homage would have gone completely over my head if I hadn’t watch this video earlier this week.
  • Troy’s got mad Booty Quake skills.

Footnotes

  1. It has to be said that the women on this show are, quite possibly, too hot. [↩]

Dollhouse [1x13] Epitaph Two: Return

I haven’t read any other opinions about the Dollhouse finale yet, but I can guess they’ll be mostly positive, perhaps even effusive. And seeing as my opinions are anything but that I didn’t see the point in comparing my thoughts with what the rest of the online community has to say.

This was the biggest disappointment I’ve ever experienced I think — OK that’s a little harsh, but it’s definitely a weak ending to a show that was deserving of better. This show had its flaws but throughout its run I managed to find points of enjoyment. I found none of those things in this completely uncompelling hour of television.

Topher saved the world. Well sort of. I mean there’s still a massive gap1 in the memory of everyone who was imprinted, and the few people who managed to avoid being turned into a dumb-show or a butcher and have struggled through the years unaware of what caused this apocalyptic period to either occur or to cease.

And just like any Whedon show, it needlessly killed off main characters. The problem with Whedon is he always kills these characters off in such a glib manner that it loses any emotional resonance. He tried to make Paul’s death have a greater meaning by using it to make Echo realize that she should have been nicer to him, so she imprints herself with a Paul wedge that was luckily on hand. And they can be together forever. Whatever. Their romantic relationship was always weekly and meekly defined, and ending it in this way only would have worked if the audience cared, which they didn’t.

And Topher killed himself with his de-Dolling bomb. Not really much to say about any of that. Topher was crazy, then I guess he wasn’t, and then he built the magical device that can undo everything in like five minutes. Oh, and then he blew himself up. He has a saddish goodbye with DeWitt who really doesn’t try very hard at all to stop him from his kamikaze mission. And he reminds the audience that he liked Bennett, but aside from that he was pretty much just a mess all episode. The one nice touch was blowing up his mind-bomb in DeWitt’s old office, destroying the “To Remember” collage on the wall as he erased the last ten years2 from the world.

Granted, all of this might have been better handled if the post-apocalyptic storyline were spread over several episodes. Some of this might feel more natural, but a lot of it would remain arbitrary and flawed in many ways.

Now that it’s over, I sincerely think anyone looking into Dollhouse as a show shouldn’t even waste their time with the ‘Epitaph’ episodes. They provide very little to the actual substance of the show, a show that was much better at exploring questions of identity than it was at questions about abusing technology.

Goodbye Dollhouse. I’m sorry to see you go. Especially in this way.

Footnotes

  1. The timeline’s a little vague on when the apocalypse happened. The earlier implication was that it happened not long after last week’s episode. And this episode bears that out in some ways — Harding has burned through numerous bodies through sloth and gluttony — but it seems unlikely that Felicia Day’s character was in university when the apocalypse started and could still be so youthful a decade later. Or that the small child Caroline inhabited would have been imprinted so recently that she has basically her age’s level of development and intelligence when her original personality is restored. [↩]
  2. Again, the timeline’s vague, but I’m going from how I see it, and that’s at most one year after the events of Dollhouse’s penultimate episode [↩]

Mixed Messages?

I’ve always been told that the excessive violence and disregard for human lives exhibited in the gladiatorial ring of Ancient Rome was one of the signs that their society was decaying. The blood lust from the crowd had become so extreme and perverse that society slowly collapsed from the weight of it.

I think that some of that is Christian moralizing1, but there’s something to be said for certain levels of decency and morality keeping a group of people from collapsing into an anarchic wasteland. And when you get to the point that thousands are gathering to watch people murder each other, it’s safe to say your society probably isn’t on the upswing.

So when I sat down to watch the pilot episode of Spartacus: Blood and Sand, the new drama from Starz set in ancient Rome and centred around a Thracian gladiator slave named Spartacus, I was a little confused as to the message it wanted to send.

The show’s battle scenes are filmed in a very stylized manner, with blood spewing everywhere and slow motion used to freeze it in the air. It’s basically the style 300 used but, if at all possible, brought to an even crazier extreme.

As the final battle of the pilot plays out, Spartacus battles four other gladiators, the crowd cheers on his murderous spree practically salivating over the blood spilled on the sand of the battlefield, and I couldn’t help but think this was a commentary on the audience itself, people who sit back and cheer on these sorts of gore-infused battles. But at the same time, I think I’m giving the show too much credit. Maybe the show is just very brazenly targeting a known audience through explicit and extreme ultra-violent television.

I think I’ll give it a few episodes before I make a final decision on that, though. The pilot was written by Steven S DeKnight, a writer whose work is usually smarter than that, so depending on how it plays out in subsequent episodes, the show could be using the violence purely to draw male demographics, or to cast aspersions on society for being drawn to this sort of violence, or maybe even a bit of both.

Footnotes

  1. Similar arguments have been cast at atheists for being the cause for the glorification of violence that is seen in modern society. I tend to think that the moral brigade over at the MPAA which blocks many excellent films from a broader audience for the use of bland curse words or exhibiting human romance — tell me how the hell Once got an R rating — but letting what some would call extreme violence make its way into PG and PG-13 films on a regular basis is more of a culprit than the growing secular movement of people who manage to live with a moral code not dictated to them via existential threats of eternal damnation. [↩]