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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Footnotes

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

On the TWOP forums, some people will come out proclaiming that a certain episode of Lost was patently obvious and they saw it all coming. Most of the time, I’m astounded by that. “Nobody could’ve seen all the little details that came out during that episode coming!” But the bookends of this Heroes episode were obviously supposed to come as a shock and failed utterly to do so. And the only reason the little details that came out during the episode weren’t obvious was because I was still under the assumption the writers would try to make the characters actions make sense.

Instead we get an utterly pointless “reveal” that Mohinder received oblique references to the Guantanomutant Brigade’s plan via HRG a few weeks before all this happened (which doesn’t even make sense because Suresh got into HRG’s car to try to escape the commandos earlier this season); and Parkman decided to become really stupid, or at least further express his innate stupidity. I admit, I enjoyed the scene last week where Suresh, Parkman, and Peter took HRG away for nefariously good purposes, but when they continued with that story all we got were a couple lame references to torture and Parkman realising that if Daphne is alive he doesn’t need to be a dick. He still barely knows Daphne. And the life that he initially saw of them living in NYC raising Molly isn’t going to happen since Molly seemed to have disappeared at some point during this season. They still haven’t really given a reason for the appeal of that relationship. I think they wanted to imply that they’d become a long-lived relationship earlier this season with the household squabbles they had before the squad of mutant-ready commandos took them away, but we never saw any of the connective moments before that so it feels hollow to me.

And the torture stuff was even worse, because in the real world torture doesn’t even get accurate results. So Heroes attacks the technique of torturing people for information not because it’s useless and doesn’t even get you useful information, but because it hurts people. And obviously the intense staring that Parkman gave HRG is nothing compared to the psychological warfare that took place inside the torture chambers of the Bush administration. So they fail in two ways.

And for some reason they’re trying to redeem Nathan now, but here’s the thing: this volume started off with him giving the information on the heroes to President Worf. If he’d kept his mouth shut, he wouldn’t have needed to rein in the more extreme hardline members of his anti-hero task force. His intentions are bafflingly stupid.

Heroes failed to redeem itself. After last week’s episode, and the Heroes screed I wrote shortly afterward, I was close to quitting Heroes entirely — which is a pretty big deal given how long I’ve been watching Smallville, a show that peaked a long long time ago and was offensively bad for a few years there — and this episode has done nothing to shift me away from that stance. Naturally, I have to stick it out until at least the end of the season — i.e. Bryan Fuller’s return — but unless the show improves drastically in those last few episodes don’t expect me to still be watching when season four rolls around.

In an attempt to weed out trolls and flame wars they have strict rules about your demeanor. You have to write grammatically correct and full sentences. You can’t attack personally, you need to stick to the subject of the thread and of the forum. You’re also not allowed to write spoilers in the “episode discussion” threads which is great because you can theorize and question without worrying about someone spoiling the show. But these rules and restrictions come at a price.

Every time I come to the forums, I read post after post which criticizes Kate and Jack. They call Kate a cold-blooded selfish bitch and basically do nothing but wish death upon her. They call Jack an idiot and say that he is the worst and most boring character on the show. But Kate is not a selfish bitch; she has a fucked up history, lots of baggage, a fear of commitment, and lots of other things wrong with her. But she feels every minute of that. And throughout the series thus far, she has been incredibly selfless, and willing to help the entire Island community. Jack is sometimes an idiot, but everyone is sometimes. Jack had to live his entire life under the thumb of a father he was unable to please. A father who would criticize him for attempting to help out a kid being bullied. His entire life is guided by that need to fix things; to impress his father. When he flies to Australia to pick up Christian Shephard’s body, he’s doing more than just mourning a father. He’s realizing that he will never earn his father’s love.

I’m not discussing these crucial aspects of their personality because I think that what they do on the show is what I would do or the best thing to do. It is, however, what I think they would do. These characters are not static. Jack tries to fight these urges, Kate tries to fight these urges. Sometimes they succeed and sometimes they don’t. That is at the very core of humanity, and to attack these characters because they are consistent and not merely set pieces through which the plot progresses is idiotic.

So, when a forum poster attacks Jack for not questioning Kate further about Aaron’s fate and calls Kate a murderer, I respond forcefully with a logical rebuttal. Jack has never seen Kate as a murderer. He has never cared what she did in her past. He knows her. Whether or not he actually knows her, he thinks he does. He trusts her more than anyone else. That’s why he asks her for her support when trying to convince the Oceanic 6 to lie. He loves her so deeply, that he’d give up his freedom and perform surgery on a man he has come to revile so that she could be happy with another man. To think that Kate having murdered someone, no matter how justified or unjustified it was, would sway Jack’s trust of Kate is downright intellectually dishonest.

So, in my response to this practically trollish comment, I called that poster out for making that statement. I asked them if they were really going to use the “Kate is a murderer” line. I followed this up with a calm and correct rebuttal as to why that was a foolish statement. I then followed that up by telling the poster that they should judge the character’s actions by the character, not by what you want the character to be. I held no ill will to that poster, but I sincerely hoped they read that and realized the error in their analysis.

Instead, my message was deleted and I got a warning from a moderator because you are not allowed to discuss other posters on the thread. Which is a foolish rule, because the forum’s users lose any ability to examine the merit of one anothers’ examinations. I’m not saying that we need to be boorish in our critiques but without the analysis of analysis, any improvement of ideas occurs away from the group which results in the group seeing the improvements but not the improvements to the process which led to that. Perhaps, I was too brusque, but my point was valid and even ignoring the direct communication toward the other poster there was still content apropos to the discussion in that post. Deleting it only hurts the collective intelligence of the group.

I understand the need for some level of moderation on forums. Aint it Cool News’ talkbacks have no moderation save some manual processes enacted when a particularly persistent troll writes hundreds of useless messages and harasses the community indiscriminately. Without moderation, most of the internet would devolve into a slew of attacks and slurs. But to delete valid content because it was deemed slightly snippy according to the whims of a moderator is unacceptably, and unecessarily, Draconian.

Most recently the hate has been pushed onto Hiro, and here’s why. The show sucks. It has nothing to do with Hiro, or his current journey. At least not in particular. What’s wrong with Hiro, is what’s wrong with Heroes.

Abuse of Awesomeness

During season one, one of the recurring characters was played by Richard Roundtree. AKA Motherfucking Shaft. So obviously he was playing a badass with awesome powers. Wait, what?

Shit. Well, he’s in a coma but he can wake up and reveal his awesome superpowers and kick all sorts of ass. Wait, what?

Fuck. Well, he’s dead — and it appears the only thing his death accomplished was to get Peter laid — but Hiro is all about the time travel, so Shaft can still show up in the past and be even more awesome because we didn’t see it coming!! Wait, what?

Oh, come on! You bring the guy back so that he can tell Peter that Love Is The Answer?! And what was his power anyways? Talking to the future? That’s a retarded power, and I don’t even think it was him doing it so it’s especially crappy.

And then, following their atrocious treatment of Shaft — not to mention the purposeless character Charles Deveaux’s very existence — they pump up the awesomeness by casting Bruce Boxleitner for a recurring role during season three. Except that he’s in two fucking scenes in total and they were pretty close to useless in the long run. My point is they’ve got a huge problem with follow-through. And not just with their stunt casting. Everybody remembers that most unheinous moment early on in season one of Heroes where time stops for Peter Petrelli and Ninja Hiro From The Future shows up to deliver him a message.

Future Hiro was fucking sweet! He spoke English without the accent; he carried around a katana; and the slimming lines on that leather trench coat really worked for him. He came from five years in the future but now three years later — possibly four given the sporadic time jumps the show does — he’s still a dweeb who talks in broken English and wears the office clothes for the job he hasn’t been to in years at this point. When Lost showed Jack depressed, addicted, and bearded up three years in the future, they followed the fuck through.

Discontinuity

Retcons are a staple of the comic-book world from which Heroes steals its ideas draws inspiration, but in the comic world, retcons typically come about because of universe altering events or because the story is being reimagined for a new generation. But changing the dynamics of the foundations of your characters doesn’t make a lot of sense.

In the series premiere, Angela Petrelli is arrested for shoplifting socks because she “wants to feel alive.” Presumably because the six months she’s lived without the love of her life, Arthur Petrelli, have left her feeling alone and empty; without her better half. No wait, she poisoned him and was planning on killing him even further just to make sure he was dead before her son walked in mid-homicide. It’s these emotional discontinuities that really kill Heroes.

Does Peter ever think about Simone Deveaux? Or the Irish chick he erased from existence? Does Hiro think about Charlie? Do any of these characters think about the consequences of their actions, or the pains in their past? I don’t see any of that in the performances or in the writing.

The characters perform as the plot requires. Their emotions exist to serve the plot. Their powers shift to drive the plot. Everything about the show is hollow and meaningless. You can change the pronouns of the last four sentences to refer to Hiro and the statements would stand, but the show, and how it treats its characters is the real problem.

The lines they chose for that commercial were cliched, hackneyed, and emotionless. And I do mean emotionless. I was amazed at the utter lack of conviction from the characters speaking. I was convinced that no matter what I had heard of this new show ‘Medium’ these commercials had to be a joke. Either a parody making fun of the show or the show itself was an elabourate hoax design to get a few laughs from the horrible commercials.

So since then, Medium has managed to become a reliable not-quite-hit-but-still-fairly-popular-in-the-ratings show for NBC, a network with little to no real successes in the last five years. I’m not quite sure why, but there it is, chugging along.

Anyways, recently I noticed some of the writers on Aint It Cool News offering support for Medium, not the kind of support they would give for something like Battlestar Galactica or Lost, but support nonetheless. Tonight since I was watching President Obama’s Press Conference and then Heroes after that, and Medium was coming on after Heroes and this episode of Medium had Sam Trammell (from True Blood) guest starring I figured I’d watch a bit of the show. See what I was missing.

Not. Freaking. Much.

Let me lay out the opening scene for you. A guy and a girl are having network TV sex, that is they’re fully clothed but they’re moaning suggestively, and the guy decided he wants to choke a bitch. She indicates numerous times that he should let up on the choking, because as awesome as oxygen-deprived orgasms are they’re only awesome when you’re not dead. And I should reiterate that this was not awesome cable TV sex where it’s rough and wild. This was slow-thrusting, gentle-and-intimate network TV sex. And yet in the “throes of passion,” he managed to not hear her numerous calls for help until she was dead and he had come.

When he was done, he shook her a little telling her that the game was over, except in a broken phrasing that seemed like it would’ve come from a five year old, and then realized that (gasp!) she was dead. What an unfortunate accident! Oh well, time to dispose of the corpse…

So he drags her off to the nearby ditch and tosses her in. Well, what man hasn’t accidentally killed his date during erotic asphyxiation? He heads back to his car but then — Hark! — he hears her breathing in the ditch. She’s alive! Oh this unfortunate accident will no longer haunt him! Years later, they’ll regale their family with the hilarious-in-hindsight anecdote. Oh wait, no. He picks up a rock and finishes her off… WTF?!?!

That was just the opening scene. I was already amazed at how stupid this show was but it had so much more stupid to offer.

Here’s the thing about procedurals. They all have a basic schema. The crime/medical mystery/whatever occurs in the teaser, and then through intelligence, investigation, and ingenuity the mystery is solved and the story is wrapped up in 44 minutes or so. What Medium does is slightly different¹. The main character, Allison Dubois, get psychic visions of crimes while she sleeps and she can also talk to ghosts that are just hanging around waiting for their murders to be solved or whatever it is that ghosts do. So on Medium, she sees the crime — who did it, who died, where it happened — at the very beginning of the episode. What happens after that has nothing to do with the solving of a murder. She doesn’t have any particular investigative genius, she just gets the answers delivered to her without any effort. (Also, what little I saw of her family’s really stupid B-storyline was really stupid. I hardly paid attention to it because it was really fucking stupid so I’m not going to put any more words to it.)

So, I gave it a shot. I watched almost a full episode. It wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be. But it was still much much worse than anything else I watch. It sucked then. It sucks now. Avoid it if you can.

Footnotes

1. I am, admittedly, basing this off of a single episode but if any episode is this terribly plotted then they fucking deserve it.

The stories centred around a family that took in a John Doe youth who has a mysterious past and no bellybutton. As Kyle learns how to live — making friends, respecting elders, all that stuff — the kids watching can get reinforcement for the virtues of good behaviour. But the characters are never saccharine, they’re not perfect little angels, and everything doesn’t always work out for them. The parents talk to their kids about their problems and when sex starts to rear its head into their increasingly complicated life it’s played realistically from both the children and the adults.

Well-written characters and intelligent plots are hard enough to come by in youth-oriented television in the world of Raven and Hanah Montana and Zack and Cody but then the show starts layering in sci-fi elements and that’s when it gets interesting for me. Kyle has no bellybutton. To a sci-fi geek like me that’s fairly self explanatory: he’s someone born from an artificial womb, which means he’s either a genetic experiment or a clone. But the show takes its time in exploring Kyle’s history and what he could be.

As the history deepens and the sci-fi elements go from implied to explicit, the show has seen declining ratings — something I hope doesn’t happen with this new season of Lost and its much more explicit sci-fi elements — and as the characters grow up the stories become more mature which could cause some hesitation from more conservative parents, but the show’s core messages remain the same. Or rather it did.

Last night, I screwed up on the PVR set up when I went to record How I Met Your Mother and inadvertantly recorded Two and a Half Men. It suffices to say I was less than pleased. I went down to watch HIMYM, about twenty minutes into the episode, and saw no wonderul red light on my PVR. And screwing up on the PVR, or the PVR screwing me over, is not the atypical event, but rather what immediately followed it: I sat down and started watching the show.

Often, when I sit down to watch a show my dad will drift in and out of the room, he’ll pay attention for a couple minutes and then head off somewhere else, or even strike up a conversation with me when he knows he should at least wait until the commercial. Last night was the first time I ever “drifted in” to a tv show when it was a new episode. This isn’t the same as flipping to Space and seeing Picard digging a trench on Risa and sticking around for the rest. This is flicking to ABC and seeing John Locke igniting a stick of dynamite and, having missed what came before deciding “eh, what the fuck” and watching from there.

Granted, How I Met Your Mother isn’t quite as continuity reliant as Lost or some of my other favourite shows, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter. I still haven’t seen the first two-thirds of that episode. Normally, I’d download the episode that night and watch it shortly after, but that night I sat my ass down and said “eh, what the fuck.” This won’t become a typical behaviour on my part if only because it felt so weird, even in the moment, to not know what had come before but the fact that it happened at all is a sign of my age. Or at least that I’m becoming more like my father, and who the hell knows which is the worse of those.

There are few shows that excite me as much as The Office and with good reason. Not only is the show that perfect combination of dry hidden humour and outright slapstick, but it has one of the most compelling and engrossing romantic stories to ever grace television. Squee is usually meant to refer to the excited squeal that fangirls make, but I squee. The genius of this show is that the romance between Pam and Jim, ranging from a simmer to a full boil over the last four years, has never been the butt of the joke.

On any other sitcom, the people the writer’s want you to cheer for have stupid and unrealistic situations thrown at them with Hilarious Consequences and the pratfalls that ensue when one of them tries to hide their feelings are usually the heart of the show for many years. Ross and Rachel started off as a series of jokes and it wasn’t until they were together that the show developed any serious attachment to the relationship as a relationship and not as the source of humourous situations. Similarly, with Monica and Chandler the relationship began as a drunken one night stand and subsequent series of sexual escapades leading to an ultimately fulfilling relationship.

Never has a comedy dealt with unrequited love so earnestly. And from the beginning, the humour comes from elsewhere. The humour is the way they react to the mad world we share with them. The humour is the absurdities of the workplace that we all experience, whether we’re software developers or paper salesmen. The humour is never that Pam is engaged to a lazy man who doesn’t appreciate or understand the woman he’s managed to ensnare. What is the core of most sitcoms, an overweight man with a smart and beautiful woman, is handled with the gravity of the real world. And the show doesn’t suffer for it but rather it succeeds because it never laughs at the people in it. (I’m sure some of you think that the show laughs at Michael Scott but I don’t think you watch the show carefully enough.)

This show might not be the funniest show out there, though this premiere was the funniest thing I’ve seen in a long time, but it is one of the best shows right now. It’s better than funnier shows because the laughs come puncuated by a story that many have experienced before and the rest wish they had. It’s better than more dramatic shows because it doesn’t have to rely on introducing drama to its world, forsaking the characters for the sake of the show.

I guess what I’m trying to get at here is that I really liked the premiere. Every note hit perfectly.

Holly’s geekiness and her hidden yet patently obvious affection towards Michael is opening up Michael as a person. Somehow, this episode made what would normally be a cringe inducing scene, when Michael encourages the whole office to judge Kelly by her physical appearance, into a slightly charming almost effective comment on eating healthy and accepting people’s appearances. And Jim’s advice during the finale of last year seems to have paid off because Michael is steadfast in the friend zone with Holly. Maybe it’ll take him five years and an engagement for him to tell her how he feels too.

Angela’s ongoing illicit yet amazingly drab affair with Dwight was hilarious, but the show was smart enough to show Angela regretting it and devoting herself Andy… at least until Andy decided that not having his college (he went to Cornell don’t you know) acapella groupas the wedding band was a “deal breaker.”

The second biggest surprise was Ryan returning to the Office. I half expected him to be in Jail for at least a portion of the season, but it appears some community service and a stern firing of was enough to set him straight. So now he’s back working reception, and quietly plotting revenge against pretty much everybody.

Being now spoiler free, I had no idea what was going to happen this year — though The Office is pretty good at keeping its secrets; last year I went into the premiere knowing remarkably little given how much I knew about Lost, a show known for its secrecy regarding future stories — so all of these moment were delightful and funny and all around awesome. But none of them could have prepared me for that final scene. Toby’s back! I’m kidding obviously. As much as I love Toby and am sure he’ll make it back to the Office at some point, the scene that made my day, night, week, and month was that penultimate scene in the rain. It was simple and powerful and managed to avoid all of the cliches by playing it as realistically as every other moment in that relationship. Oh and it made me squee. I’d missed that.

When Prison Break started, I didn’t start watching because I wanted to watch a bad show. I thought the idea behind the show was intriguing and, let’s be honest, an engineer playing superhero isn’t a common occurrence. The first season was great for its first half and good for the rest. But after that the show got worse. Some people ridiculed the second season because they were no longer in prison, so the name no longer applied. But that’s a facetious argument at best. The people on Lost aren’t all lost, either physically or emotionally, that doesn’t mean the show’s name should be changed.

But that doesn’t mean the show didn’t get ridiculous. And yet, as the show degenerated rather than giving up on the show I continued to watch but with glee over the absurdities found in every new moment. By that point, half the fun of any given episode was reading the recaps over at television without pity, where not a single logical flaw or absurdity is forgiven.

The real problem here is that other entertainment media don’t seem to have this problem with “guilty pleasures.” Reality TV made the term necessary in the television world because no other medium has such bottom-of-the-barrel-scraping trash. Plan Nine from Outer Space is not seen as a “guilty pleasure” but rather it’s loved and revered for being one of the most unintentionally terrible and incompetent movies ever made.

So let’s make this clear; there’s no such thing as a guilty pleasure. There are simply things we like (and often love) in spite of their flaws. Would you call your brother a guilty pleasure because he has an addiction? Would you call your wife a guilty pleasure because she cracks her knuckles? Humans are passionate creatures who love and hate for reasons ranging from the sublime to the petty. It’s one of the reasons hatred and bigotry exists, and its one of the reasons adultery and polygamy exist. It is a core aspect of our humanity. Ignorance may be bliss but calling our less noble loves and passions “guilty pleasures” belittles them and simultaneously gives them power over us. Looking at the uglier aspects of our psyche, even when manifested as the enjoyment of bad television, is necessary to self-improvement.

Awareness of our surroundings through highly attuned senses and through opportunistic pattern recognition led us to the top of the Darwinian food chain. But now our society exists outside of those confines and so beyond this awareness we require self-awareness: an understanding of our internal flaws. Whether we succumb to or rage against them, our flaws drive us as much as anything else. Ignoring them is as smart as ignoring the oncoming wolf or lion 10,000 years ago.

So, am I pushing the point too hard? Guily pleasures don’t exist. Love comes in many forms and is formed by many things. Being aware of that is a good thing and ignoring it or pretending it isn’t true by calling things guilty pleasures is a bad thing. It weakens you and makes certain your ongoing ignorance of yourself.

I won’t describe it here, but it’s something that Lost fans will get pretty riled up about. In fact, I would have loved to go into the new season next year without knowing about it at all. I miss those days of shock and revelation from the first couple seasons. with each new year my love of Lost grew so each new year I sought out more and more spoilers to satiate my desires. But this year I wanted none of it. As tantalizing and pleasing as those spoilers were in earlier years, they ultimately took away some of the pleasure from the show itself.

And that’s exactly why I wanted to go into next season completely unaware of any of the coming twists. Up until now, I had done that (excluding one major spoiler about the premiere which I curse ever having read no matter how accidental) and this casting announcement once again opens up the floodgates.

But I’ll continue my abstinence, at least until we get closer and spoilers are unavoidable, and maybe it’ll be worth it. Stay tuned, fellow Lostophiles.

But all told, this week was pretty awesome. Of course, the real meat of this awesome sandwich was Y’s last issue and Lost’s premiere. As much as it sucks to see a long-term story you’ve come to look forward to go away, all stories need to end. That’s why Y was such a bittersweet experience. The final issue was more of an epilogue, recapping sixty years of the new world of inordinately few males. It highlighted the greatest hits of Yorick’s remaining life. There are some reasonably shocking moments, but all in all the story ends with a conscientious, relaxed whimper.

Lost goes in a different direction. The show blasts out of the gate and lays on the awesome in heaping dollops. From the flashforwards to the freighter people to the splitting of the losties, everything follows from the finale of last year and sets up the rest of the season. I say it sets up the rest of the season, but from what I’ve heard this season moves very fast, so many of the threads introduced over the course of this episode may be mostly resolved within the next few episodes, naturally leaving more unraveled threads to play with.

And yes, I purposefully used the word awesome way too many times in this post. I’ve always been bad at describing my opinions on recent events. I typically need some level of hindsight before I can articulate well enough to get my point across, so I’ve decided to avoid that quagmire entirely by using a simplistic adjective to demonstrate my general state. I feel that this may be yet another awesome step in my progress to developing my writing ability through accepting of existing un-awesome limitations. So… this week was pretty freaking awesome.

The show doesn’t have the corny or cheesy mentality that drives a lot of Buffy, so its stories can be much darker and the show immediately takes itself much more seriously. Not that Buffy didn’t become a really serious, and sometimes very depressing, show in its later years, but Angel started off with the mentality of showing the real world. This show isn’t meant to be a supernatural allegory for adolescence, it deals with the nuanced evils in the world like the evils of apathy and of banality.

In the coming episodes, the show will grow, and, while it won’t reach its apex until its later seasons, these early episodes show a show ready to deal with the big ideas. Also, this is the first time I’ve watched the Buffy and Angel episodes interleaved since they aired that way lo those many years ago so it’s great to experience all those fun little cross-references anew.

Xander was still a douche when it comes to Angel but it was considerably more sedated than in previous seasons so it didn’t bother me nearly as much. So much happened in this season with all of our main characters growing up in some way or another. Xander finally managed to find a place in the world and accept his place in the Scooby gang. Willow grew into the wiccan arts, a story thread that will continue to build for the rest of the series. Even Cordelia is given moments of real growth. But beyond that, this season was about how things change. Not always for the better, but things change. And as Whistler said in the season two finale “the big moments are gonna come. You can’t help that. It’s what you do afterwards that counts. That’s when you find out who you are.”

And one thing I have to say about the Faith storyline is this: it’s what the writers of Lost wanted for Michelle Rodriguez. They didn’t get it because they made the character too unlikeable too fast, but because Faith started off as a more vivacious version of Buffy, and was slowly revealed as a deeply troubled person we feel for her much more. I only mention Lost because as I was rewatching the Faith arc it reminded me so much of Ana Lucia that I felt it deserved comparison.

This season was about self-discovery which, unsurprisingly, is something that normal students must go through as they prepare to either enter the real world or head into post-secondary education. Either choice is scary and leads to a much more complicated and dangerous world, and the tone of future seasons only represents the realities of our world transposed to the realities of theirs. They made it through high school and next season… things fall apart. Not only is the former gang schizmed across two shows but the trials they are put through change them all in drastic ways. I can’t wait.

I really wish that there were some people out there who would respect people’s desire to read a book without holing themselves up to avoid people spoiling it for them! Unfortunately, everybody seems to gain an inordinate amount of pleasure from these heights of douchebaggery. I don’t care if I read these spoilers because I’ve never read a single page of Harry Potter nor have I seen any of the movies but I can understand not wanting to be spoiled. When the super-sized spoilers for the Lost season finale came around a couple months back I ducked away. I didn’t want to know what happened because the mystery and the ultimate reveal is worth the wait. Do some people overract to being spoiled? Absolutely. But should you ruin it for the moderate readers who don’t want to be spoiled? But did you want to be told the twist to Fight Club or The Usual Suspects before you watched it?

Maybe I am unnecessarily exaggerating. Maybe this is only the increasingly immature voice of the digg mob with their five-year-old mind set. But I can’t explain it. Do these people have no restraint? No desire for suspense? No respect for the creator’s wishes? No respect for your fellow human being? Has the internet so completely destroyed your moral core by its anonymity? Or is it that the internet abolished any patience you may have once had through endless spoiler websites? Whatever the cause, I know that saying this will do nothing to change the mind of the degenerate spoiling assholes out there. But maybe, just maybe, some of the people out there simply following for the sake of the joke will consider that purposefully ruining a story these people have dedicated thousands of pages of reading time to might not be something you want to do.

Relationships are a tenuous beast. Even more tenuous is the transition from friendship to relationship. With friends, you find yourself with nicknames all the time; sometimes it’s a personality trait personified, other times it’s your last name, it could be anything. Whatever your friends choose for your nickname, it will come back to haunt you if you have any romantic plans for the future. These names are not terms of endearment and if that transition ever occurs you’re stuck. Do you stick with the nickname? Do you switch over to their real name? Or a term of endearment like “honey” or “sweetie?”

That’s the real reason Libby was killed. Not because of the DUI, not because of the CBS sitcom. What would Hurley call her? Libby? Elizabeth? Snookums? Would Libby start calling him Hugo? Or Big Bear? I don’t think any of it would’ve worked out. And what would happen? Viewer division! Who would back who? Madness would ensue! So that’s the real reason that Libby was killed. Don’t believe me? Well, that’s good because this was all a bunch of nonsense and gibbering heavily laced with sarcasm. In fact, I created a Sarcasm category for my blog just for this post.