It’s Garry Shandling’s Show was Garry Shandling’s first big break, and it was a weird one. The show was a traditional multi-camera sitcom except that the characters on the show were aware they were on a show, Garry opened every episode with a monologue to the live studio audience and the audience was encouraged from time to time to interact with the cast and the set. In other words, it was not a traditional multi-camera sitcom.

The show broke the fourth wall at every opportunity and shattered virtually every convention of traditional sitcoms, it set a bizarre precedent and its influence on sitcoms can still be felt today. In short, it was one of those gloriously weird ahead-of-its-time shows whose existence we tend to mourn after a pitifully short life in recent years. But It’s Garry Shandling’s Show lasted for four years, first on Showtime and eventually being rebroadcast on a prime time network. I don’t know if it got cancelled at that point or he chose to end it so he could go do something else, but either way four years is a respectable run for a show as strange as this one.

In today’s market there are so many more channels, offering such a wide variety of niche entertainment; weird shows that used to survive by virtue of a lack of competition are now being supplanted by stuff people want to watch. The truth is that most of the time, weird experimental shows have an audience of a few million at the most. A few million is the very peak, and anything less than that is rarely considered viable in our current market — even though with more than one channel per million people, having an audience of that size should be considered quite respectable.

I’m not sure I’ve articulated this before, but I think we’re coming to a point in modern time where the increased access to increasingly targeted material aimed at increasingly narrow niches will make most of that content too economically risky to produce, except in low budget fare produced cheaply perhaps on and for the Internet. This isn’t the end of this sort of content, but we might see networks taking fewer risks and producing blander content hoping to reach the greatest common overlap of audiences. Yes, they already do that, but they still experiment with genre shows, and weird meta-driven comedies, and rich character driven serials. All of that could be shunted away from television to the internet, where everything is cheaper to make.

And make no mistake, as shows budgets get slashed, their ability to tell large stories, the type of stories people want to see from expansive experimental television, will fall away. Sometimes a limited budget can produce beauteous brevity, see The Twilight Zone, but there are some things that simply can’t be done on a small budget. Lost, for example, could not be made on a small budget. A show that explored similar ideas, maybe even with similar characters, could be made but too much of the scale would be lost — the dangers would feel smaller, the climaxes less earned — the show would no longer be Lost.

(It’s possible with the recent success of True Blood and The Walking Dead — and one hopes similar success for Game of Thrones — we will see a renewal of interest in interesting genre storytelling from the cable channels, but even premium cable channels have their limits: HBO cancelled Carnivàle, one of the best and potentially expansive¹ shows they’ve ever made, because of ballooning costs due to the fantasy nature along with it being a period piece, which tends to require larger budgets for the props departments. So don’t expect the cable channels to rescue us from network television mediocrity forever.)

But if the market speaks, there’s not much we can do about it. People will watch what they want to watch. Enjoy the good times while they’re still here. Watch Fringe maybe?

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Footnotes

1. The show was cancelled before the scope of its story was fully widened, but from the rough sketches of the future of the show made available to fans, the story was headed to big places. [↩]

Watching the television bloggers unleash the expected criticism on Rubicon I’m reminded once more that criticism in the television realm still has a long way to go.

A guest-blogger over at Alyssa Rosenberg’s blog wrote about Rubicon echoing the common complaint, that the show is too slow. My issues lie not with her distaste for the pace, but with a tack-on statement that feels very wrong to me:

Rubicon needs some adjustments if it’s going to attract and keep viewers.

I think it’s true that Rubicon will likely draw a meager audience — though the inherent sexiness of conspiracy theories will probably entice a few people who would not otherwise watch a show of its caliber — but I think a better question is, “Is it any good?”

I understand that ratings are what keep shows alive, but I don’t think it’s too much to expect criticism of a show to be based on the merits of the show. Any related punditry about the politics of television renewal is similarly valuable — TV by the Numbers is one of my favourite television blogs — but they are two wholly separate endeavours.

There are certain shows and types of shows that will simply never be a huge success¹. Rubicon is not a common denominator show, and probably wouldn’t get big ratings even if it were the best conspiracy theory show ever made. Critics should be judging it from within that rubric, not aiming to nudge it into another. Movie critics don’t argue that slow cerebral thrillers should have more action sequences, why should television critics?

If you don’t like a certain genre or style or aesthetic, that’s fine. Make that preference clear. If you think a show is moving slowly, say so. Explain how your suggestions would improve the show’s quality. But don’t argue it needs to change in order to increase its ratings.

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Footnotes

1. Exceptions like Lost and The Big Bang Theory, both shows that seem targeted at niches small enough that they have no right to be so successful, are obviously exceptions to the rule. [↩]

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.

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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. [↩]

The most annoying thing about the divide that’s evolved within the Lost community is that the two sides are total opposites. I think the show was absolutely a character-based drama first, but I also think that pretty much all the answers people are talking about the show not answering actually were answered. No, they weren’t spoon-fed into you through explicit statements, but the information is there within the content of the show to answer all the questions you have. Or all the ones I can think of.

I won’t list all the “unanswered” questions I’ve read over the last week or so, but I haven’t found one that wasn’t already answered by the show or completely ridiculous and not worth answering.

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.

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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. [↩]

I get sometimes when people have legitimate criticisms of a show. Even a show as good as Lost, it’s possible to not like at times, maybe because you can think a character’s motivation is weak or maybe for some other wrong¹ reason.

What you can’t do is whine like a petulant child when something you don’t like happens.

Tonight’s episode was absolutely amazing. The story raced along, the characters were all playing in their wheelhouse and their emotions felt true. Nobody behaved out of character². What happened tonight is what had to happen, even if it’s not what you think should have happened or what you would’ve liked to happen.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go cry for a while.

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Footnotes

1. I didn’t say your criticisms were correct. [↩]
2. I want to talk more about why the particular actions that occurred make sense for the characters, but I won’t do that tonight; this post is mostly about venting over the vitriolic hatred some Lost fans are spewing about this episode. [↩]

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.

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.

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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.

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Footnotes

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

This episode seemed like a big drop in quality, especially the initial setup but what’s most shocking is how great this episode is despite being a markedly weaker episode.

I think one of the reasons I initially disliked this episode was because it introduced a new realm of mind-fuckery beyond what the Dollhouse was doing. This is something the show probably should be doing half-way through their second season: building the world, growing it out but keeping the core there, is what smart shows do but given the context of knowing that Dollhouse ends in a few episodes and that this particular Group Think technology will likely not be explored again — not saying it won’t be, but this has the feel of a one-off when compared to the other mythology based stories we’ve been inundated with recently — in the time the show has left.

But it was still a very cool idea, and even more it was a very sci-fi idea, and while Dollhouse is certainly one of the shows on the air right now that’s mostly open about its sci-fi basis it still tends to hide that aspect of itself whenever possible.

So Victor, who maybe I have to start calling Anthony (or maybe Tony), is released from his contract, dropped into the real world, and is quickly scooped up by a group of ex-soldiers looking for new recruits. Turns out they work for Rossum in a private army and are all connected neurally so they share thoughts and eventually lose their own identities to the Group Think.

Boyd and Topher get Echo to help them find Victor, and when they find out about Rossum’s private army they imprint echo with a few more minds with useless skills and imprint Sierra with her original mind, Priya, in the hopes of using her connection with Victor to save him from losing his identity.

Cutting all the interesting but not particularly exciting action sequences out, Echo is driving Tony and Priya away from the super soldiers and decides to let them go because they have their original minds back so they should be free. But before they can get away Topher’s disruptor is used on the three of them. Echo wakes up and DeWitt tells her she’s going to the Attic, along with Victor and Sierra. And that’s where the episode ends.

So despite the initial reaction, there are a few really great things about this episode. I especially appreciated the explication on what happens to released Dolls. We’d already seen Madeline living a fairly pain-free life post-Dollhouse despite her child still having died. It’s made more clear here that these sorts of traumatic events are either erased by Topher or molded to have less of an impact when he re-imprints the ‘original’ personalities back into the Dolls.

That little detail is another sign of the writer’s filling in the blanks while introducing more mysteries, something a second season should always do, but here it’s a little depressing because you can see in the scripts that the writer’s were hoping the show would get picked up. This isn’t the sort of episode you would get from a writer’s room waiting for the axe to drop¹.

Another small note that got played repeatedly in the first season, best exemplified by the first episode Ghost, was that Dolls can atone for the failings and weaknesses of their imprints, that that somehow heals the original. But here, those threads come together in a much more practical manner.

Eleanor Penn is still rattling around in Echo’s head, and she received catharsis thanks to Echo so she is capable and functional as a subset of Echo’s mind. In the case of Eleanor Penn she was already functional though broken, but there could have been worse cases that Echo ‘fixed’ in her weekly missions that lead to useful skills being easily accessible. This is all long-term thinking on the part of the writers, which is great to see but also sad because we know the impending fate of the show.

I like the speed at which the show is pushing forward the narrative this season, but it certainly feels rushed when compared to the first season; Rossum becoming out-and-out evil seems like a third season reveal, maybe even fourth season, which makes me wonder what sorts of things they had planned for the show had it been renewed. The continual re-scoping of the show’s core each season worked wonders for Lost, so it may have been equally successful for Dollhouse, but I guess we’ll never find out now.

I can’t think of much else to say about this episode. It was an above average episode and set up the next one quite nicely. See you then.

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Footnotes

1. Unlike Epitaph One which I’ll talk about in my review of the second episode of the night The Attic. [↩]

The revelations of this episode should have been much more dramatic. But, like all the stunning developments of this season, they lack the proper oomph because I knew they had to happen.

When I reviewed Epitaph One, one of my critiques was that the remote imprinting was impossible given the current system of the Dollhouse; putting Active architecture in place was a complex process, as we saw in the first episode of the show, and if it were to happen something had to change, something beyond a mere remote wipe, and in this episode it did.

It was interesting how it played out, and the twist with DeWitt made the event more than merely going through the motions, but it still felt mostly empty to me.

I don’t think I’ve brought this up except in my tweets but the biggest problem with the jump into the future is that Dollhouse hadn’t earned it yet. When Battlestar Galactica jumped forward, it was daring and ballsy, but it would’ve been a cop-out if they’d done it too early. Similarly, Lost’s flashforward set up a future to be fulfilled in the upcoming season, but it worked because the story was dense enough, the history rich enough, to make those future events significant.

Dollhouse didn’t have the strength of its character’s histories to make the vision of the future impact the viewer, so they took the other route: story. But while Jack’s flashforward was exciting because we saw that people got off the island, it was stronger still because Jack wanted to go back. Character trumps story. Always.

Anyways, I don’t want to overwhelm this review with even more railing against the almost unanimous love of Epitaph One, because the episode was still a great one on its own merits.

Echo is rummaging around the real world, still AWOL from last week’s episodes, when she happens to screw up an already screwed up (possibly illegal though that’s not really clear) immigrant’s life. Meanwhile, at the Dollhouse, DeWitt is getting pressured to find Echo.

Jumping ahead three months, DeWitt is no longer head of her Dollhouse, with her Rossum boss Harding taking over the day-to-day. Other things have changed at the Dollhouse. Topher has been given a mandate to develop a remote wipe technology, under the guise of simplifying the Handler’s life, and Harding seems more open to sending a Doll out on a recklessly dangerous mission, as the sadist client in the first act makes more than clear. After Topher unveils the remote wipe gun he’s developed he secrets DeWitt away to his hideaway room where he reveals he’s been done the remote wipe tech for months but feared what Rossum would do with it.

He saw Bennett working on a similar small project for Rossum when he was in DC in the last episode, and figured out that each Dollhouse is building a component for a larger system: a remote imprinting device. A technique that doesn’t require the Active architecture in the person’s brain before imprinting. In fact, Topher built it. Shortly afterward, DeWitt brings Topher’s designs to Harding, despite Topher’s desire that Rossum never get their hands on such a terrifying power. And so, in a vain attempt to regain good graces with Rossum, DeWitt has assured the apocalypse.

Meanwhile, Echo has been living a strange sort of domestic life with Ballard, who she sought out after screwing up her attempt to help that immigrant, Galena. She’s been working as a nurse, thanks to her ability to recall previous imprints on demand, and eating mac and cheese — none of her clients ever seemed to want a woman who could cook — as Ballard teaches her to use her imprints to their fullest. Echo plans on going back to the Dollhouse when she’s ready, and she thinks she’ll be ready when she can free Galena from prison.

Thanks to her nurse position, she goes to the jail and sets up a fake death for Galena, but the plan goes awry when she wakes from her death a little too quickly. After that, Echo uses her ‘Blue Skies’ persona from early last season, to break herself and Galena out of the jail. Now that Galena is free, Echo and Paul have constructed a new life for her, as Lisa, and then come back to the Dollhouse where DeWitt, drunk on her restored power, banishes her to solitary confinement until she can find out what happened to Echo for those three months. And then the episode is over.

Thematically, this episode had a few nice touches. The idea of Echo and Paul giving Galena a new identity, to escape her sordid past, is an excellent parallel to the idea of the Dollhouse. Also, Echo’s love for Ballard is another in a long line of developments in Echo’s personal life, one they emphasized this episode when she talked to him about how she’s not Caroline, she’s Echo, and what if Echo shouldn’t be waiting for Caroline to talk her body back. What if Caroline isn’t all she’s cracked up to be? The most interesting development of this episode was that we now have a love triangle between two bodies: Echo loves Paul, but Paul loves Caroline.

Similarly, Topher is continuing his growth, becoming one of the more reliable dramatic pivots the show has. And at the same time, his inventive mind couldn’t help but build the remote imprinting device. He loathed the very idea of that technology, but he built it nonetheless. Topher works as a rough analog of human scientific progress as seen through the eyes of someone afraid of scientific progress. The fact that it mostly works for someone like me who believes in scientific progress, and that “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice,” is a testament to the writers’ ability to create a compelling story.

Overall, Meet Jane Doe was a great episode, only slightly hampered by the ever-looming shadow of Epitaph One. I’ll publish my review of episode 2×08, A Love Supreme, shortly.

One of the strengths of JM Straczynski having planned the five year story of Babylon 5 was that he laid lots of interesting nuggets of foreshadowing into the earlier seasons. Plot devices used in one-off episodes in the early episodes could play a huge part in culminating events years later. It works so well because you likely won’t notice those hints the first time through, and when you return to the show for a second viewing, the relationships and significance of the events lets the foreshadowing impact you with even more force.

But with Dollhouse, every episode this season has me coming back to Epitaph One and finding ways it weakens this season. The remote wipe foreshadowing would have been more powerful if on first viewing this wipe was an innocuous plot device. It still has a power in this form, but it seems at this point a necessary event. There’s a certainty to it. We can’t not have foreshadowing. It feels mechanical now. Admittedly, it was mechanical with shows like Lost and Babylon 5 by virtue of their pre-planned stories, but that mechanism was masked.

Still, even without that masking, the foreshadowing packs a punch: Topher developing the remote wipe technology — though, to be pedantic, this remote wipe technology seems the same as the form used by Alpha last season which, as I stated in my initial review of Epitaph One, only worked on Dolls as the Dollification process was considerably more complex than your standard imprint — ultimately ends the world and breaks his mind. But I still don’t feel it as much as I think I should, because of that mechanic necessity. I get the feeling Epitaph One is going to be a thorn in my side the entire season (or whatever else airs of this season before Fox kills it for atrociously bad ratings, though it’s a good sign that this week’s episode recovered from last week’s all-time ratings low for the show).

I tend to focus on arc discussions in these reviews, but aside from that incredibly oblique unspoken reference to Topher’s future tragedy this episode was virtually entirely self-contained. The only additional ongoing idea was Echo’s ability to repeat catch phrases her clients and/or imprints always seem to have handy. Does every person in the Dollhouse universe have a unique identifiable catch phrase or something? It’s getting a little conspicuous at this point. Perhaps a future essay on the show can explore that avenue.

So that leaves us with a very interesting, but also very self-enclosed, one-off episode. The opening sequence was one of the more effectively chilling the show has managed to pull off, though the psycho-paralyser getting hit by a car seemed like an obvious end to that scene, I was hoping for something more inventive. That said, the events following that were all great. We got a chance to see Ballard use his FBI training, something he rarely used even when he was an FBI agent and reminds us that he’s more than just a weird pseudo-pervert. Echo’s B-plot professorial misconduct fantasy was interesting in a morbid sort of way, which I suppose is the way you should enjoy most Dollhouse episodes seeing as the protagonists of the show are glorified human traffickers. And the main storyline crossed with the B story nicely both on a story level and thematically.

And, once again, Enver Gjokaj cements himself as the most versatile actor in the cast, which is saying something given how talented this cast is. Every actor has had one or two outstanding moments, but Enver keeps delivering like no other. As creepy as he was as the serial doll maker — an interesting role for the antagonist in an episode that foreshadows the wireless doll making technology in the coming apocalypse — when he switched into Kiki he completely transformed. Odd name aside, that guy deserves more than anyone on this show a breakout career once Dollhouse comes to an end.

People have been worrying about Dollhouse’s fate quite a bit recently because of the terrible ratings, and some are wondering if the season shouldn’t have started with more stand-alone expository episodes, but looking at the season so far, it’s been doing stand-alone episodes, and they’ve done it better than they did during the first season’s early block of episodes but they’re not being hindered in the way other shows are by a blind adherence to strict episodic storytelling. It’s not afraid to let some moments of the episode impact the future. It should be braver in this respect, I think, with much more serialization and investment in the long running characters, but I feel like it will get there if given the time. Unfortunately, it probably won’t be given the time. I think both the network and the writers are to blame in this respect; the network, for trying to simplify an inherently complex intellectually rich story, and the writers for accepting the task of trying to oversimplify the show rather than fighting with the network.

That said, this season has been very good so far but what little long-term stories they’ve built in these first three episodes has been insufficient to me. They tried the best of both worlds last year and got dwindling ratings as a result. At this point, the show should be taking advantage of the second season pickup and just going wild with all the crazy five-year-plan things Joss Whedon has imagined. When the show got a second season pickup, I didn’t really expect a third. The more I look at it, the more it seems like Fox simply didn’t kill off Dollhouse after the first season so they wouldn’t burn bridges with Joss Whedon or his fanatic followers. So with the likelihood of a third season increasingly dire, the show shoud just go for broke. Let’s hope it tries that in the coming weeks.

Lost broke my brain on Wednesday. In the best way possible. If you’re not watching that show, I don’t know what to say to you.

Last night’s Chuck was a spectacular hour of television, but the moment being touted as a “game-changer” didn’t feel like that to me. The moment of realization at the end of season three of Lost was a game changing one: the entire dynamic of the show was thrown in a drastically different direction. Last night’s Chuck felt more like Lost’s season one finale and season two premiere: we’ve arrived at a pivotal moment in the mythology of the series, and realized that what we have seen thus far was merely prelude. Like the deep endless chasm Jack and Locke stared into, Chuck’s finale left us desperate for more, but things hadn’t really changed. The camera had simply pulled back to reveal that the rope was actually an elephant’s tail. So while the story has grown much grander, its elements are the same, which I would say means it’s not a game-changer; an amazing episode, but not a game-changer.

Admittedly, this could just be my view of what a game-changer is. If you consider the introduction of the Dharma Initiative on Lost a game-changing event, then Chuck’s finale was more definitely a game-changer.

Regardless, this finale proved that Chuck is one of the best shows on TV. It manages to intertwine overarching mythology, spy action, drama, romance, humour, and geeky references better than any other show. And what’s more astounding is that none of these suffer for any other. The characters are fleshed out, they grow and change over time, the Chuck/Sarah romance is always there and develops and evolves with each new circumstance, and the action is more dynamic than most other television shows. Chuck is undoubtedly the best show NBC has right now, and to cancel it now would be more than foolish, it would be tragic.

Many people are spreading the word about the “Save Chuck” campaign, and Alan Sepinwall’s open letter to NBC is stellar. The best advice, however, is the simplest. Watch the show. Buy it on DVD. Contact NBC and voice your support of the show. Chuck is a show worth fighting for. So fight.

A few months ago, a study came out saying that unhappy people watched more television which prompted me to ask if watching TV makes you unhappy and my answer was, of course, no. In fact, I specifically stated that watching TV actually makes me happier overall.

So the recent study that watching TV relieves loneliness was not a surprise to me. In my previous post, I actually predicted it:

Of course, one telling aspect of this study (what you didn’t think I’d turned this post into an opportunity to whine about personal problems did you?) is that it covers 30 years of television and television has only recently become something more than mere escapism. What was once a rare occurrence on television — serialized storytelling and complex relationships — is now a mainstay. Television, in the intervening years, has grown up. It is more than a time filler now. It can and does explore life with equal or greater depth and insight as other more respected media. And in another 30 years, after a generation of people who have grown up with intelligent and thought-provoking television, the data will tell a different tale.

It didn’t quite take 30 years for TV to shift the data, but my point remains. One of the reasons I enjoy television more than I do movies is that the longer form of storytelling allows stronger connections to the characters. This goes beyond a need for social connectedness, though this study shows that this is clearly a factor, and into the ability of television to ask deeper and more fundamental questions than film.

Movies often seem grander in some respects, but I think that most of that view comes from film’s greater opportunity, not greater ability, to ask these sorts of questions. In two hours, a lot of ideas can be examined but they cannot be explored to any real depth. In addition, in two hours characters can be examined, but they will most likely not change in any appreciable amount. But television dramas have characters that change drastically. A movie could attempt such changes, but it would be seen as absurd by critics; in two hours, for those sorts of changes to occur would break the audiences willing suspension of disbelief.

In addition, movies require a real dramatic thrust and driving action, and so the framing of the characters always relies on that structure, unless you’re doing a very indie film with no expectation of heavy distribution. Television, on the other hand, can explore multiple characters by virtue of their long-term status. In a movie that tells the same high level story as Lost or Kyle XY or other character dramas, you might get some amount of time devoted to side characters, but nowhere near the attention to detail that television offers; with television, you can truly get immersed in a world.

It’s that immersive quality that makes television more capable of not only examining a world and its inhabitants but also touching you with the answers it uncovers.

Three years ago I noticed a bunch of CDs on sale on amazon.ca for 99 cents each. I already had an order that needed a few more dollars to get free shipping and I love music, so I added a few for the sake of curiousity. A few weeks later the order arrived and I immediately started going through the CDs I purchased. The first I opened up to listen to was The Earth is Not a Cold Dead Place by Explosions in the Sky. Immediately, I knew that I had discovered something amazing. Hidden in this seeming pile of refuse was an album that from its first echoed notes took hold of me and drew me in to a world I had never experienced previously and left me wanting more.

Eight months ago, I walked into a low capacity hall at San Diego Comic-Con for an early morning panel about an upcoming show from NBC called Kings. After a short discussion of the basic premise of the show — an alternate history drama set in a monarchy named Gilboa inspired by the biblical tale of David and Goliath — they screened the first twenty minutes of the pilot episode, and I experienced that same enraptured envelopment into a brand new world that that amazing album had beset upon me. Now, eight months after that initial burst of interest followed by a relative dearth of new information, Kings has finally premiered and my first impression has only been enriched by the complexities I once imagined were possible now made manifest by the remainder of this amazing premiere.

Over at Ain’t It Cool News, they’ve compiled snippets of the many reviews of this show. Some of them are fairly positive, but it seems as though most of them chide the show for having cheesy aspects, or soap opera trappings, comparing it to shows like Dynasty and Dallas. I’m not sure why any show that manages to tell a serious story is immediately a soap opera. Is Battlestar Galactica a soap opera because of its intense dour depiction of life? Of course not. It’s merely a show willing to deal with things seriously, as is Kings. To call the show a soap opera is to call Deadwood, or other such character drama, a soap opera: it’s not disingenuous to do so, but it belittles the show to use such a pejorative. All of the criticisms, though, are not unfounded. But the good, and more importantly the potential for good, more than outweighs what little there is to legitimately criticise.

The main story of the premiere, and likely of the rest of the series, is of David, played by Christopher Egan. Taking his name from the biblical slingshot-wielder, the show begins with David living the rural life as King Silas of Gilboa — Ian McShane in a typically brilliant performance — unveils the shiny new capital, Shiloh, built upon the ashes of the cities destroyed by the years of war that ravaged Gilboa before Silas united the lands in the unification War, a costly conflict that left David fatherless with a disenfranchised mother.

Before the inaugural speech is over, tensions are rising with the neighbour nation Gath and two years later the war carries on with David now at the front lines. When the survivors of an ambushed squad are taken hostage by Gath, David defies the orders and, crossing the front lines, rescues the hostages, including the King’s son. This rescue is no small feat given that the front lines of the war are lined by Gath ‘Goliath’ tanks, a menacing visage to all Gilboan soldiers. And so David returns as the hero who slayed a Goliath and saved the King’s son. That’s the first twenty minutes wrapped up in a few sentences. There’s much more there, but I find that the more I like a show the more I want to detail every nuance of the scene (which is why I rarely write about Lost; I don’t want to end up writing 15,000 words per episode) so I’ll leave the rest to the viewer to relish. I will say however, that those twenty minutes are the best and most effective exercise in world building I’ve ever seen.

This premiere has already established that, while this is an alternate history with kingdoms where America once reigned, this world only diverges from ours in the last two centuries. David’s love of classical piano, and more importantly his playing of a piece by Liszt, underscore an implicit history that will certainly get explored as the series continues. How did the world of Liszt change such that not America but Gilboa and Gath were formed? Hopefully, the writers already know the answer.

Perhaps as impressive as the world building is the character building, with every character having complexity and ambiguities which can be developed and exploited over time. The King’s wife, for example, is a quiet but manipulative woman who publicly expresses a distaste for politics while privately and silently ensuring her family’s skeletons stay in their respective closets. Similarly, his son portrays himself a womanizer to the paparazzi to keep up appearances, despite his homosexuality. His desire for power is clear but he is neither the villain nor the brat in this story. At least not yet.

The King’s brother-in-law, the head of a large corporation, Crossgen, which has bankrolled Silas’ rule for years is the most villainous character introduced thus far. His need for war to ensure quarterly profits impel him to push Silas to war despite peace being offered. It’s not until David, once again defying the will of the King, bravely reaches out to their faceless enemy, as the Goliaths stare him down, and brings about renewed peace talks, that his lust for war is sated. Even then, his plots and machinations continue apace to replace the King and continue the profitable war.

David is the archetypal hero. He is a farm-boy turned war hero who doesn’t understand nor desire the world into which he’s been thrown. He quickly falls for the King’s daughter, herself a passionate supporter of improving the nation’s health care much to the King’s dismay. His star rises precipitously, first due the the rescue of the hostages, then later from his part in the reestablishment of peace talks with Gath.

And of course, King Silas himself, around whom all this intrigue revolves, is one of the great draws of this show. Ian McShane, playing a character as conniving as Al Swearengen in a world much more civilized yet just as brutal as Deadwood, is a breath of fresh air in an otherwise stale network television environment. Silas is a complicated man, a melange of numerous regal stereotypes. His opening speech, and most likely every speech after that, describes a story from the founding days of Gilboa when a flock of butterflies came upon him and perched upon his head in a ring as if they were a living crown. A sign from God. And yet, he has none of the trappings of the typical religiously driven leaders of our time: he knows full-well that evolution is a truth, and devotes a family breakfast to the topic; he accepts his son’s homosexuality as a part of his nature; he is an eloquent leader, who uses his words for both good and ill; he is a brilliant tactician whose military experience lent itself to the political travails of a King. Of course, his religiosity is tempered by his desire for power, and when the Reverend Samuels disowns Silas near the end of the premiere he is more than willing to abandon God. But despite these two conflicting aspects of his larger-than-life personality, beneath it all is a long dormant desire for a quieter life. He is a tragic yet terrifying hero, one we know will eventually fall away for David to rise.

The two weak points of the premiere are the wartime scenes and the relationship between David and the King’s daughter. That Gath would hold hostages just past the front lines of battle, even temporarily, strain credulity. In addition, David’s impassioned speech to Gath asking for compassion and common ground would have likely ended with David brutally destroyed by the numerous tanks trained on him throughout the speech. But I take both of these points in stride because a) this is a different world, with different alliances and territories, strategies and tactics could be slightly different b) David held a white cloth stained in his brother’s blood as he delivered his speech; had Gath fired upon a white flag, there surely would have been international repercussions and c) it is David’s destiny to become King — the final scene where the butterflies land atop his head to signal his coming reign is a sure sign of that — and so I’m willing to accept a few well-timed mistakes on his enemies’ parts; many of the most successful kings and emperors of the past have had such luck in the ascension to power.

The other weak part, the love story, is weak because it happened too easily. There’s no real conflict there, they both seem to already be smitten with each other and in a relationship. I was hoping for it to take a while for their bond to grow before all that happened, but this is a minor quibble as the show could easily still get those things done over the course of the season by introducing conflict. It’s also very daring that the show took what appears to be the only romantic relationship on the show and resolved it so quickly. It’s like if the writers of The Office got Jim and Pam together in the first episode. So I’m willing to believe, for now, that they’ve thought about this and are subverting the stereotypes again for effect.

It’s been a couple days now and the ratings have been tallied and they’re atrocious. Kings had a horrible opening. Kings has already finished filming for the season and I used to think that networks wouldn’t cancel a show with complete episodes ready to air, but Firefly and Daybreak shattered that misconception, so I have to hope that the word of mouth on Kings spreads fast and the ratings improve week-over-week, because this show is a real adventure. It’s an adventure in storytelling, it’s an adventure in world-building, and perhaps most importantly it’s an adventure in broadcasting. It’s the sort of high concept high drama story that’s been relegated to cable television in recent years, and yet here it is on a Big Three network (admittedly the smallest of the Big Three). If Kings becomes a ratings success, as it deserves to be, it could be a catalyst for the networks to reinvigorate the increasingly conservative and middling television they produce.

I loved the premiere. I’m  deeply impressed with the show so far. It’s an achievement in storytelling, and I’m sure the subsequent episodes will be as good if not better.

Well, the idea of an episode where Echo plays a backup singer/secret bodyguard wasn’t immediately appealing to me, the show managed to ask a few interesting questions and keep me entertained during those scenes while furthering the mythology of the show. The real accomplishment was, of course, having legitimately good original pop songs. When Chuck had its rockstar-in-trouble episode a couple weeks ago they had to fake it but this show busted a full-fledged dance number out to kick off the hour.

The superstar-gone-crazy storyline isn’t entirely original, but because this is Dollhouse you get a chance to compare the assembly-line construction of pop stars the industry operates on  – there’s even a line about Rayna, the pop star in trouble, having stalkers since “singing for the Mouse” a clear reference to the Disney Mousketeers and their continual stream of stars — with the programming the Dollhouse gives to its Actives. Of course, there are obvious advantages to a story such as this…

Meanwhile, in the Dollhouse story-line a new aspect of the Active’s programming was revealed in this episode: Actives are given a persona, the identity they’re portraying, and a parameter, the underlying requirements of the mission. Echo’s persona is a singer, but her parameter is to protect Rayna at all costs. It’s an interesting addition to the mythos that opens up lots of possibilities regarding the inconsistent programming of the subconscious and conscious minds of the Actives.

The story definitely goes over-the-top with the diva personality — the exasperated line “Is somebody eating a mint?!” comes to mind — but I suppose it helps in establishing that she’s crazy. Echo’s solution to the Rayna’s suicidal tendencies is simple: bring her close to death so she can realize it’s not that appealing. But it breaks from her mission parameter in a 3 Laws of Robotics sort of way, which is interesting but a cause of consternation. Because of Echo’s improvisation there’s talk of an Attic, where inactive Actives go to sleep forever, which harkens to the boxing of Cylon models on BSG. But in the end she saves Rayna from herself. She also seemingly remembering her earlier interactions with Sierra at the Dollhouse during the mission; even stranger, Echo and Sierra seemed to remember each other when back at the Dollhouse. Things are moving quickly here, and Echo’s awakening will surely be a “game-changing” event in Dollhouse should the show survive long enough to feel its effects.

On a related note, I have to say I was really impressed by the performance from Dichen Lachman, the actress playing Sierra. Her captivity scenes were very good. She played the fear very realistically. Kudos to her. I just hope she doesn’t play an Australian persona too often; I know she’s already Australian so there’s no need to work on an accent but the landscape of American television is becoming inundated by Australian actors playing American roles which on occasion have to pretend to be Australian. Not that it’s a bad thing when they’re all as gorgeous as Yvonne Strahovski, Dichen Lachman, and Alex O’Loughlin.

And finally, Ballard’s Russian mob informant is revealed to actually be a Dollhouse Active presumably on a mission to get Ballard killed. It’s not a huge surprise, again because of the press photos showing that actor as an Active, but it’s a new development and the reveals thus far only skim the surface of what Viktor’s mission actually is and what the Dollhouse has in store for Ballard. At first glance, the information given to Ballard was to set him up to be killed by the mob, but who’s to say what the real intention was. Ballard’s plots are all so minor and insubstantial right now, it’s hard to put any effort into examining them, but I’m sure as the show progresses he’ll get closer to the Dollhouse and more integrated with the rest of the show’s stories.

The show’s improving. This week’s episode wasn’t as good as last week’s for the same reason the pilot was a little lackluster: the main story wasn’t that enthralling. But the show is getting better. The characterizations are getting richer, the long-term stories are getting layered in wonderfully, and the dialogue is getting smoother and Joss-ier. So freaking watch it, because the ratings are not good people.