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

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

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

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

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

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Footnotes

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

There’s a fairly common argument made among Apple fanboys that the difference between Apple and Microsoft is that Microsoft responds to user demands by fulfilling the demand and Apple responds to user demands by fulfilling the underlying demand that the users didn’t even realize they were asking for. It’s a cute way of saying that Apple doesn’t do what you want, it does what you need. On the surface it’s an interesting concept; of course, it’s also one that fails the test of history. No user was asking for the Ribbon UI when Microsoft started integrating it into their interfaces. They came to a decision about the Ribbon UI through extensive user testing but ultimately chose something that they thought answered the underlying needs. Apple doesn’t do user testing. That’s the big difference. Apple doesn’t care about users in the same way, they do things the way they want and expect their user base to follow them or for their new way to lead to new users in numbers that will offset the loss from their existing base. In other words, Apple don’t care, Apple don’t give a shit:

But I’m not here to incite an argument about whether or not Apple cares about their users. I’m more interested in the idea that what a person thinks they want isn’t necessarily what they actually want and how that relates to what’s happening in television right now.

What people who like television want is to pay less and have more control over what and when they watch. Those goals are generally achievable but with caveats that a lot of people don’t really think about. We might want to pay less but that will make our shows cheaper, it will make some shows not exist in the first place.

I’ve already written about the way television works and how the current system of advertising drives most of the financials for the networks, but there’s another side to this equation. The countless cable stations that mostly air syndication repeats that have flooded the market in the past couple decades, the channels that get placed in cable package bundles in annoying distributions that make you purchase five bundles of seven channels each to get the eight channels you really want to watch, are a large part of how cable providers make money as well. Those annoying distribution packages, the ones that force you to buy channels you don’t want or care about to get the ones you do care about, are a way of offsetting costs from expensive channels. This is, as far as I know, a much smaller part of the cost of generating original content, but it still factors into the cost calculus of a lot of the smaller cable channels that do produce original content.

A consequence of making cable options more flexible might be that channels that you really like, that produce shows you really like, stop being bought in generic packages by people who enjoy other channels that you don’t care about. This leads to fewer cable providers supporting that channel and that channel having less money to work with. I’m not necessarily saying this is a good way of socializing the cost of television¹, but this is the way it works now and changing that can have undesirable outcomes. But if you still want to get rid of the annoying lack of flexibility in cable packages² you have to accept the possibility of paying more for some of your preferred viewing. Either that or change your viewing, which brings me to my next point.

Earlier today, Alyssa Rosenberg argued that there should be more shows like Louie. Now I’d love to see more shows like Louie, though if it were the only type of show around — something that would basically have to happen if users get what they currently want³ — I’d have to stop watching television⁴. But Louie is certainly a poster child for a cheap⁵ show that still provides humour and pathos in strong doses, but its system of operation is not one that scales. Louis CK is a true anomaly, and I mean that in the best possible way. He is brilliant and prolific and willing to work cheap; he was offered other show opportunities and turned them down because of the limitations of network input. The only reason his show exists is because he worked for less. The only reason his show exists is because he can construct all these stories and write and film and edit them all on his own. Put simply, Louis CK works harder and better and cheaper than pretty much anyone else, and there aren’t a lot of people with both the inclination and the ability to do the same. Resting our hopes for the future of television on Louie is ultimately foolish.

This race-to-the-bottom mentality of seeking out cheap shows above all reminds me of our current political landscape⁶. Everybody wants the good parts of government, the infrastructure and public resources, without the bad parts, the taxes. Unfortunately, we have to take the good with the bad. It’s true that television can have a different configuration of good and bad, but there will be bad, and I wonder if the people who rail against the backward ways of the cable providers and networks really understand that the new economy they are demanding will fix their existing ills but introduce new ones, ones that are possibly worse. I wonder if they’ve really thought this all through⁷.

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Footnotes

1. As much as I hate Reality Television, I’ve come to accept that without it, there would be many shows that the networks would not be able to afford to make. [↩]
2. This argument also holds for shows that are produced for a specific channel with cheaper shows socializing the cost of the more expensive fare, and is what my earlier piece mostly discussed. [↩]
3. Rosenberg’s piece talks about the stratification of television into super cheap shows like Louie and very expensive affairs subsidized by foreign markets, the latter of which is simply another unsustainable source of funding that will have to be supplanted over time as other nations get the very same options we are having to adjust for now. [↩]
4. Or maybe catch up on the great shows of the past decades that I’ve yet to see. [↩]
5. At $250,000 an episode, it’s basically cheap enough to produce while still making money at the $1 an episode price point that people seem to have decided they won’t go beyond. [↩]
6. Geeze, did I really have to shoehorn politics into this discussion? Looks like. [↩]
7. Spoiler alert: they haven’t. [↩]

Do people actually understand how television is funded? I’m asking this genuinely. I see people commenting online about how ridiculous it is that PVR viewings aren’t accounted for by the Nielsen ratings: first of all, they are they’re just not as highly valued as live viewings; second, the reason they’re not as highly valued is because people watching on PVRs skip commercials. I’m going to say something shockingly obvious just in case there’s someone out there who doesn’t realize it: commercials are the ENTIRE REASON networks care about how many viewers a show gets. They don’t care if you sit down to watch a show, they care that you sit down to watch a show and sit through commercials.

I think I’m one of the few people who has never been bothered by commercials, which means they will not survive as they currently exist, so another method of getting money from the audience needs to be sussed out. And unless people are willing to start paying — and we’re not talking about $0.99 an episode, it would depend on the type of show because one hour dramas and period pieces and sci-fi stuff is more expensive, but given that the biggest shows nowadays pull around 10 million passive viewers, it would probably have to cost somewhere between $5 and $20 per episode to be able to exist from viewer pre-orders — for episodes of a TV show months in advance, with nothing filmed to sell the product even, I don’t see any alternative that will really work.

Buying episodes as they are released is a possible solution, but there are a lot of problems with it. First of all, networks get a lot of the money they need to produce shows from preselling ad time — the reason networks have upfronts is to give the advertisers a sneak peek at what they have airing next year, hoping that the more impressive projects will garner higher ad rates, all of this of course using the previous year’s ratings for any given time slot as the baseline for ad rates — and if we move to a world where the only revenue is from individual episode purchases that revenue stream disappears; second, if the only revenue stream comes from episode purchases/rentals, profits from that would logically be invested into future seasons of those shows, so it’s not at all clear where the money for pilots comes from, and fans of a show would probably complain if their show that “they pay for” suffers budget cuts because nobody watched some other show, which already happens right now, but people don’t connect it as readily; there are other problems related to this, and they’re not that hard to discover if you think about it for a few minutes.

When we talk about adapting to a new online purchasing paradigm, we talk about the music industry and the books industry. Books adapted fairly readily but books have considerably smaller start up costs. I can write a novel in my spare time on a $200 computer. A TV show requires orders of magnitude more capital to put together. An album of music does have a decent investment requirement, though still not anything near what a typical show requires, and the shift to online purchases has effectively killed the album as a piece of art. Musicians still put out albums, but album sales have absolutely plummeted just as singles purchases have skyrocketed, and that’s going to be the unit of work for a musician soon enough. Bands won’t put out albums anymore, they’ll put out songs. They can make money on this I think, but it means a lot of the artistry of putting together an album of music that comes together as a piece greater than its parts will soon be an even more endangered species. This isn’t really possible with television. Some shows can operate without continuity and simply put out episodes as a unit of work, but most shows today offer up some semblance of continuity over the course of a season and throughout the series. If we try to chop up shows into smaller bits in a rush to get people to buy those bits, we will lose one of the strongest aspects of television, the one that I think makes it an incredible medium to work in.

I’m not totally pessimistic. I think we’ll figure out a way to make money off of the type of content television puts out even if the television itself doesn’t survive as is. But I think it’s going to be a rough transition, and too few people really understand the unique complications of the television industry. Put simply, you probably haven’t really thought about this enough, and it’s not as easy as you think it would be.

I came across a piece written by one Brandon Nowalk in which he posits that one hour dramas have lost their sense of humour.

In truth, the two big shows he seems to have a problem with are The Killing and Game of Thrones. The Killing is definitely too serious for its own good, and if it doesn’t improve I’m going to find it hard to return for a second season, but Game of Thrones, while telling a very dark story, still manages moments of levity, at least as many as Rubicon, a show he offers lenience to for its attempts.

But the odd thing is that he’s taking criticism with a specific set of shows and attributing it to the whole of television. What seems to be happening here is that television writers are being afforded the opportunity to tell stories that the old guard of television wouldn’t have allowed. Funny dramas aren’t being replaced, at least not entirely, but there is greater variety now, both in content and tone. There’s nothing wrong with that.

Some people see that this blog is called “Everything Is Amazing” and get confused, because so much of it is intense criticism and downright hating. Well, a part of that is that I genuinely do think that the world is amazing, and it would be foolish to besmirch it by ignoring the bad things within it¹. But one of the more persistent threads in the negative remarks on this blog is that fandom is shitty.

Drew McWeeny wrote an excellent piece today, after a long increasingly aggressive twitter argument with Harry Knowles, head of Ain’t It Cool News, describing why we can’t simply throw all the blame on the studios for the increasingly derivative and lazy film marketplace we find ourselves in. One of the problems, he notes, is that targeting a nerd audience doesn’t seem to work.

There is a fine line between serving an audience and shamelessly pandering to them, and when the studios decide to go whole-hog and pander without hesitation, and the result is box-office failure after box-office failure, the message seems clear: chasing the fanboys isn’t working. They are unreliable, they are ungrateful, and they aren’t turning out for the “sure things” that have been greenlit specifically for them.

This is one of the reasons I find myself unable to visit Ain’t It Cool News anymore. As much as I like nerd-focused films, it seems like they’re never good enough for the online bastions of nerdery. The problem of course being that there is no such thing as ‘nerd-focused films’ because every nerd has their own idiosyncratic and extreme stance on what should happen to their film. Nerds, like too much of society today, are too self-centred to realize or appreciate the amazing things that happen on their behalf².

When a Captain America movie comes out, they trash it because his helmet doesn’t have wings, or when a Thor movie comes out they trash it because one of the characters is played by a Black man. They ignore the quality of the film, the writing, the directing, the performances, in order to feed their pointless minutiae-driven rants.

There’s no real solution to this. There’s a chance we’ll hit some critical mass and nerds will grow up a little bit and the world of film and television will be able to get back to creating good television regardless of nerd-based fan-service, works that can broaden the minds of all viewers not just satisfy the narrow expectations of the “fans.”

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Footnotes

1. Another perspective here is that it’s amazing how bad some things are. [↩]
2. That doesn’t mean that things can’t improve; they undoubtedly can in almost every aspect of life, but that doesn’t mean things are bad. [↩]

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. [↩]

One of my big annoyances with television is the need to periodically inject religious proselytizing into otherwise non-religious characters. I’m an atheist, but that doesn’t mean I dislike religious stories. Some of my favourite television shows have strongly religious messages. I don’t find anything wrong with deeply spiritual characters in the stories I watch. What annoys me is when otherwise agnostic or atheist characters fall into a treacly religious storyline for an episode or two, or turn to God when in a moment of strife. Make a decision. Give your characters some principles.

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. [↩]

Not long ago, I was linked to a Facebook page advertising a prospective science fiction cable network called The Syzygy Network. Notwithstanding the awkward name¹ I’m still wary of introducing another genre specific television channel.

I’m Canadian so I get Space not SyFy; because of that, I haven’t experienced the tonal shift that SyFy is attempting, but when you read news about the channel picking up broadcast rights for WWE events and creating reality TV shows it’s easy to understand the audience frustration. But I don’t think a new channel will do anything but delay the inevitable. Capitalism being what it is, Mission Creep is always going to happen with niche television stations. It’s better to accept the changes while fighting for your particular interests to still be considered rather than run off and start your own channel. Maybe it’s the issues I have with The Tea Party and its cultural warriors — creating their own party because their already backwards party wasn’t backwards enough — but I think this sort of fragmentation is a bad thing.

I hate to reference the discussion among sane(r) conservatives regarding epistemic closure² but it has a certain relevance to the discussion; granted, a large group of people getting their political news from a single biased source isn’t quite the same as nerds wanting a genre-focused television channel, but that doesn’t change the broader implications embedded in that isolation.

One of the biggest problems inherent in niche television channels is ghettoification. By creating a channel dedicated to generating science fiction, you make it that much easier for larger networks to give up on science fiction for good, leaving that sort of content in the closed off ghetto of niche television. Television viewers will think less of content that can’t survive the ‘free market’ of network television, where broad appeal supposedly determines success.

I think there’s precedent for this in novels; no one thought less of HG Wells for writing science fiction, because the genre didn’t really exist, yet now when prominent authors write novels that are obviously science fiction they as work as hard as they can to deny it³.

When you look at the history of science fiction on television, there were a lot of fantastic shows that made their way through the traditional network model. And they had budgets that expressed that. The Syzygy Network is already stating they cannot produce any original content for the first five years of operation, and after that any original content they produce will doubtless be made with as frugal a budget as possible, something of a detriment in a genre dedicated to exploring the edges of possibility⁴.

I might simply be tilting at windmills here. General practitioners are becoming less common, replaced by specialists dedicating their lives to one particular subject. As Matt Ridley explains in his brilliant TED Talk, no one person knows how to make most of the products we rely on every day. The global scale is expanding faster than ever, but the individual remains mostly locked into a much narrower scope. The more there is to know, the more individuals must focus on a single field; the more there is to watch, the more people must make active decisions about the content they consume.

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Footnotes

1. One of my first thoughts upon reading the name was to jump right to famously horrific train wreck of a film, Zyzzyx Rd, known for having one of the smallest box offices ever: a grand total of $20. [↩]
2. The number of times that phrase was repeated in political blogs was maddening. [↩]
3. I myself am guilty of this thinking on occasion. When I talk about Infinite Jest, I tend not to describe it as a science fiction novel, despite it carrying many of the fundamental attributes of science fiction, because it feels like it’s more than “just” a science fiction novel. [↩]
4. I’m not saying science fiction requires astronomical budgets, but certain types of science fiction are vastly aided by them. [↩]

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. [↩]

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Footnotes

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

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. [↩]

A huge chunk of television lives on the will-they-won’t-they romance, and most shows never consummate that relationship, keeping the romantic tension omnipresent but never too explicit.

A recent addition to this group of series is Doctor Who. Two of the last three companions have had romantic feelings toward The Doctor¹ and the most recent companion, Amy Pond, has continued the trend with gusto. Which is where the angry fans get involved.

Many² fans are angry that every companion since Russell T Davies rebooted the show has been a potential paramour; I think it’s probably less than ideal if every companion is like this, but at the same time I’m much more interested in how it works for each individual case and I think the way they’ve handled Amy Pond’s infatuation with The Doctor has so far been pitch perfect.

But going a step farther, I think the new dynamic that has been established since the show returned is a more realistic one. A brilliant, intelligent man brings you around through time on fantastic adventures; do you expect anyone to not fall in love with the guy?

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Footnotes

1. Some people claim that even Donna Noble had romantic tension with The Doctor; maybe I just hate Donna Noble too much to see that. [↩]
2. I know that’s a weasel word, and I’m not linking to any specific critiques, but I don’t feel like looking them up; they’re out there. [↩]