Parabasis

Speed Kills

By Isaac Butler

(updated below)

There are few things I've written on this blog that I'm more ashamed of than this blog post from a year ago about the cancellation of Community and my Uncle-in-Law's death. Basically, to summarize the story: My uncle-in-law died at the same time that Community's creator and show runner Dan Harmon was fired, and, while I loved the show, I found it totally bizarre  that people were lamenting Harmon's exit in the same way my family was lamenting Uncle Bill's death.

 That's an interesting thing to explore, I think. The way we grieve beloved shows and the way we grieve beloved people and how they relate to one another. It's actually territory Community itself has joked about when Troy says he wants to stage his death to look like a suicide protesting the cancellation of Firefly. So. So far so good, I suppose.

But then I took it a step further and declared the entirety of Season 3 a failure with the exception of two episodes. I took it a step further than that and accused the show of containing a poisonous strain of latent homophobia. And then a step further than that and said that Ken Jeong and Jim Rash were never funny.

The reason why I'm ashamed of this post is that it contains some moments of writing that I'm geniunely proud of, but the interesting premise i had-- that fan grieving processes are really fucking weird-- gets totally derailed by rage and transforms into a series of gratuitous attacks on a show that brought me great joy (and which employs an actress I've briefly worked with and genuinely like). It was almost as if I was saying not only is your grief misplaced, but this thing you love isn't worth it, either! 

Honestly, having written it in what amounts to a fugue state, I largely forgot about it until the aforementioned Dan Harmon tweeted about his mother and mentioned the blog post. She apparently sent it to him. Relatively near when it came out. Which is to say, right after he got fired.

He tweeted about this months after the fact, towards the end of 2012. Which happened to be right when my wife and I had decided to rewatch Community in its entirety and had fallen deeply in love with it. It went from a show that I felt had a first season that was good (but a warm up) to a classic second season to a complete disaster of a third to a show that I adored from the get go. While the third season still felt at times uneven, (a) it wasn't to the extent that I thought it was and (b) I didn't mind, because I was getting so much pleasure from the good bits, that the dips didn't really register.

I was wrong, in other words. I was very, very wrong about the show in a very public way. (Seriously, in like 2 hours that post got more hits than anything else I've written including my review of Turn  Off The Dark). And looking back at that post, I wrote about it ways that feel almost deliberately hurtful to people who followed and loved Community, which was a weird thing to do, as I was one of them. 

Harmon himself tweeted that he felt like his show had gotten caught in an argument between a smart guy and God and, other than the smart part, I don't see a lot there i could disagree with. I tweeted an apology to him and said I wanted to write about the show again when I finished rewatching it. Which, I suppose, I am doing now. 

I think about that moment a lot. 

I thought about it when I finally watched the first season of Girls a few months back. I was glad I waited until the hullabaloo around season one had died down, so I could actually watch it, which it seemed almost no one else was doing when it first aired. What I discovered was that (with the exception of race) there wasn't a single critique thrown at that show that the show hadn't already anticipated and dealt with within the show. Girls was, in other words, smarter than almost every single person who wrote about Girls. It just saved a lot of that critique for the second half of the season because it's a carefully constructed and well thought out work of art.

I think about that moment now with the new season of Arrested Development which has garnered the usual amounts of rage that you get when you are a beloved nerd property and don't give people exactly what they expected. I am only a few episodes in. I'm taking my time. The new season is so dense with plot and easter eggs and jokes, it has pushed things so very, very, far that I know it won't work if I marathon it. In fact, I'm not sure I'm willing to form a judgement of it unti I've seen it twice. But I can say this: I admire Mitch Hurwitz's ambition as a story-teller. He has done that thing that you can only really do when you have a dedicated audience, and that's take huge risks and expect people to go with you. It reminds me of Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City (a book that, like this new season of Arrested Development, needs to be experienced more than once) or Talking Heads' Fear of Music or Soderbergh's later work. He's trying to push himself and the show as far as it can go, and if the risk doesn't pay off, at least he took it.

I think about it too with Mad Men which started-- as many seasons of Mad Men do-- in a way that feels listless and difuse, only to coalesce halfway through the season. And how worried everyone-- including me-- seemed to be that the show would lose its way or bore us. And how, like with Mitch Hurwitz, I admired that Matthew Weiner was willing to risk being self-indulgent if it meant he could experiment with this world he's made. 

Honestly, this moment I'm in-- and I still feel in it-- this moment of not wanting to rush, of wanting to think things through, slow down a bit, feels antithetical to blogging.  It feels antithetical to the culture of the episode review, of the instant reaction, of the constant fandom fear that the work of art you love, that you are making yourself vulnerable to, will betray you and hurt you in some way. Writing a review of a show episode by episode (something I've done on this blog many times) makes about as much sense to me now as writing reviews of individual chapters in Don DeLillo's Underworld.  

This is not a retirement notice. I have every intent of writing more on this blog, more frequently (I hope) now that I have finished graduate school and moved back to New York. I am reviewing two movies next week for Hooded Utilitarian. Yet at the same time, I feel that I've grown into a place that feels out of step with a piece of our culture, and I'm not sure yet how to resolve it. One of the weird things about blogs is that they take these thoughts off the top of our heads and freeze them amber. Of the other weird things is that we can always post the next day, "meh, I changed my mind." Perhaps the weirdest thing is how infrequently we do that. 

UPDATE: Noah Berlatsky, my editor over at Hooded Utilitarian, responds with some helpful advice here. 

Eat Your Heart Out (Sam Thielman on "Community")

By Sam Thielman

(EDITOR'S NOTE: On the occasion of "Community"'s post-Dan-Harmon relaunch, Ad Week's Sam Thielman penned this wonderful appreciation of the first three seasons of the show. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. -- Isaac)

“Community,” at the beginning of its life, wasn’t much more than a weird little number written by Dan Harmon, a guy who’d been fired off “The Sarah Silverman Program,” which he co-created, and who was using his buddy Dino Stamatopoulos as a consulting producer/writer/bit player. To be fair, it is a hell of a pilot—witty; just sentimental enough; filled with clearly delineated characters played by worthwhile actors, one an aging movie star (Chevy Chase) and another a likable “Daily Show” comedian (John Oliver), giving it multigenerational appeal. It makes sense to greenlight it, if you ignore the simmering creative tension on the production side.

“Community” is about seven friends at Greendale Community College in Colorado, where each of them has landed by dint of some terrible mistake. Jeff (Joel McHale) is a lawyer who’s been caught with a fake bachelor’s degree; Britta (Gillian Jacobs) is an ultra-PC anti-everything activist who has realized at 28 that she doesn’t have any skills; Pierce (Chase) is a disagreeable, middle-aged, heedlessly rich septuple divorcé with no friends; Shirley (Yvette Nicole Brown) is a fortysomething housewife abandoned by her husband who wants to sell brownies on the internet; Annie (Alison Brie) is an honor student who had a psychotic break her senior year after getting addicted to Adderall; Troy (Donald Glover) is her former classmate, a football star who ended his sports career in an accidentally-on-purpose “keg flip” mishap; and Abed… Abed (Danny Pudi) suffers from Asperger’s and copes with the world by pretending he’s in a television show. Which, of course, he is.

There’s so much to say about “Community” that most of its evangelists make the mistake of skipping over the obvious: it is hilariously funny. In three seasons, there is not a bad episode, though some are stronger than others. The show’s writing staff is very, very gifted, especially Harmon, Chris McKenna and Megan Ganz, and when the writers craft a rare dud joke, it turns out the cast are both so individually talented and so good with each other that they can make it work on two or three other levels. When the writers and the actors are all hitting their marks together—as is usually the case—it’s stunning. My favorite example of this is near the end of season 1, when Abed has decided that he and Troy (now his best friend) need to have the college experience they’ve seen in movies and TV shows. They walk by the rest of the group to inform them that they’re being hazed by a fraternity they have no hope of pledging. “They’re making us walk around with pretzels in our butts,” Troy explains embarrassedly, “and I put mustard on mine like an idiot.” It’s a great line, but it’s ten times funnier with the combination of Donald Glover’s delivery—the “GOD I locked my keys in the car again” way he explains his decision to put mustard on the pretzel—and the look on Alison Brie’s foregrounded face, as she goes rapidly through what look like the five stages of grief over Troy’s terrible, terrible mistake. That, and the running gag that Troy likes butt stuff.

A lot has been made of the show’s condensation of various movie genre formulae into 22-minute comedies—there’s a gangster episode, a heist episode, a Western episode, a few very inventive sci-fi episodes, and so on–but what strikes me more than anything about “Community” is that it appears to have consumed and most of the films of the “Disney Renaissance” (“Beauty and the Beast,” “The Little Mermaid,” “Aladdin”) and metabolized them into something altogether new and weird and excellent. Everyone in this show, after all, would have grown up on those films, and would probably be reaching exactly the moment when they discover that life is not going to turn out like a Disney movie. This—for many young people, I’d hazard—creates something of a quandary. Are your emotions really worth anything if they’re about getting turned down by the cute guy in your Spanish class or fighting with your best friend, and not about monsters and demons and long-lost loves? Is your entire life bathetic by comparison to children’s fiction? 

“Community” solves this problem by keeping the structure and tropes of kids’ movies—the handsome prince, the self-discovery, the triumphs over insurmountable odds—and radically reducing the scale. At one point, Abed teaches the rat in his Environmental Science class to respond to a song—the rat escapes, of course, and Troy won’t help him get it back, because he’s terrified of rats (“I’m not afraid. I choose not be around rats because they are unpopular. Same goes for centipedes and lakes”). Meanwhile, Shirley has trouble with stage fright in her public speaking class, the psychotic Spanish teacher, Senor Chang, enters a crippling depression over failed marriage, and Jeff struggles with whether or not to betray his friends for a good grade in Chang’s class.

None of this, frankly, is that interesting on paper, but the reason “Community” is both a gorgeous, well-wrought, hugely satisfying show and also a borderline flop is that it is zero concept and 100% execution. That is also the reason it will probably get canceled—it just doesn’t sound very good. In practice, it’s not just good, it’s transcendent: Abed has named his rat Fievel, of course, and has taught the rat to respond to the Grammy-winning love theme  from “An American Tail,” so the episode resolves in a montage of Shirley overcoming stage fright, Chang reuniting with his wife, Jeff deciding to help his friends at his own expense, and Abed singing “Somewhere Out There” over the whole thing… with Troy returning to help him just in time to come in on the duet. Against all odds and penetrating every protective layer of irony, it is a heartwarming moment. This is a show that triple-dog-dares you not to take it seriously.

“Community” has the distinction—and this is one of the ways in which it is like “The Simpsons,” to which it is frequently compared—of trying to tell as many different kinds of stories as possible. Sometimes they’re stories about Chang (the incredible Ken Jeong, whose character is no longer a Spanish teacher but is still psychotic), or about the hypercaffeinated Dean Pelton (an equally great Jim Rash), who is described, accurately, in the third season as a “pansexual imp.” Sometimes the episodes swan dive majestically off the deep end and take place in parallel universes or as clip shows of episodes that never happened or even, memorably, as one of the more compelling characters’ claymation hallucinations of the Christmas season.

About that last one—the stop-motion episode occurs halfway through the second season, and it offers a rare window into the show’s direct ancestors. It’s in the credits: one of the writers is Stamatopoulos.

Stamatopoulos will probably be lost to television history as the guy who plays “Starburns,” a student at Greendale who shaves both his sideburns into the shape of a star in an effort to give himself some kind of identity (in this, he fails miserably), but he has another, much greater achievement to his name. Stamatopoulos created “Moral Orel,” arguably the darkest and most twisted show to ever appear on television, seriously, ever. It was a sort of cross between the old United Lutheran Church-produced “Davey and Goliath” claymation shorts and a Todd Solondz movie, taking place in a Christian community called, appropriately, Moralton, which is in the exact center of the U.S. in a state called Statesota. The town’s church is in the exact center of Moralton, which is, naturally, populated by the most unspeakable hypocrites and creeps you can imagine and some you can’t. It’s a comedy about crushing, murderous depression and all the horrible things people do to be happy, and it is consummately worth watching (advice from Moralton’s priest to an unfaithful husband: “Just say two It Wasn’t Mes and three I Blame My Fathers. You’ll be fine”) for as long as you can stand it, which will probably not be long. The show aired on Adult Swim, where Standards and Practices objected to it. Let that sink in: a producer on an NBC sitcom pilot ran into trouble with Standards and Practices on Adult Swim, and the pilot got picked up. It is something that could literally only have happened on blink-and-you-missed-him NBC executive Ben Silverman’s watch. 

Every time Abed meets his evil twin in his imagination, every time we see Chang talking about his day to his new wife the mannequin leg, every time Annie throws a tantrum so horrible that Jeff tells her she’s acting like a little schoolgirl (“and not in a sexy way!”), you get the sense that Stamatopoulos is, if not behind those moments necessarily, amping them up in some way. It is comedy made by and for broken people.

A lot has been said about the show’s heart; it’s all very true. What’s also true, and less reassuring from a devotee’s perspective but somehow very comforting indeed in aesthetic terms, is that there’s a willingness among these writers to tear that heart out and eat it in front of the audience just to prove they’re not full of shit. It’s a quality only the very best TV comedies - “Seinfeld,” “Da Ali G Show,” “Arrested Development,” “Futurama” - have in any real measure, and it’s what gives me hope that the show will not merely survive without getting canceled, but will thrive. Stamatopoulos, along with Harmon, is gone from the program as of the end of the last season. Much as I love both of them, I don’t think their absence from the show will be fatal. I do think it will be nicer, gentler, and less troubling, and maybe that’s an unforgivable tragedy, but maybe it’s not. 

You’d have to have been pretty blind to the show’s progress over the last three seasons not to see that it was on a deeply serious, potentially fatal trajectory, largely at Harmon’s behest. Granted, that’s part of the show’s genius: the climactic final episode of season 1 appeared to leave absolutely no room for the writing team to move, and yet the second season is arguably the show’s strongest because Harmon manages to set up a dichotomy—will Jeff and Britta or won’t they?—and then totally ignores it for the rest of the show to no ill effect. As he raises the stakes in season 3 and the show gets crazier and crazier, however, it’s hard for him to keep it grounded in emotions that the audience might on some level share with the characters, and wherever Harmon was going to eventually end up might not necessarily have been a better place than whatever neutering effect the show’s fans—me among them—feel NBC will have on it. Here’s the thing, though: at least whatever Harmon ended up doing would have been unusual.

So if we’re going to mourn—and having seen the first two totally acceptable episodes, I think we are, a little bit—it’s probably not the show we should be crying for, but the mean, angry, hurt, unhappy part of it; that maybe-it’s-not-really-a-joke  that perfectly mirrors the smoldering pain good comedy quenches. Oddly, it’s an agony that just radiates off the show’s main character, Jeff, and it seems appropriate to close with a few of the very best lines in the series—a moment that cuts so close to the bone it makes you gasp a little bit. He’s at dinner with Abed, who’s acting friendly and relatable and indicates that he’d like to have an adult conversation, and so, right before it turns out that the whole setup is merely Abed’s riff on “My Dinner With Andre,” Jeff hits him with this: “…And I said, ‘No, that’s a girl’s costume!’  And my mom said, ‘It’s fine!  Indian boys have long hair and braids, too!’  There was only 45 minutes left to trick-or-treat, so what could I do?  I put the damn thing on, and I went door-to-door.  And everyone was going, ‘Oh, what a pretty little girl.’  And by the third house…I stopped correcting them.  I mean, why draw attention to it?  And, honestly, once the shame and the fear wore off…I was just glad they thought I was pretty.”

Laugh, you bastards.

Breaking Bad, Morality and the Workings of Narrative (Spoilers)

By Isaac Butler

Before this post gets down to business, I would just like to register a brief frustration: I had a much longer blog post about this week's Breaking Bad planned for ya'll and then, well, Starlee Kllie went and wrote it. Seriously, it's like she had some kind of brain-ray that took everything I was going to say about the show and turned it into a really great piece for Capital New York. She even registered my feelings about Mike's (mistaken) characterization of Walt's tenure with Fring. Sigh.  So read that if you want a detailed conversation about this week's ep. it's really good. There's also this recap from Lindsay Bayerstein which is well done as well. I also ended up having to pay Lindsay a dollar because she won a "Death Pool" as to who would get die first this season. 

I want to talk about something else, something that Kline touches on at the beginning of her piece:

It took this long in a season’s worth of his acting reprehensible for her to get there. I imagine it is the same for a lot of people. I’m not even sure I’m there yet, although for reasons that don’t have much to do with the man anymore. It’s the nature of narrative. I want Walt to live, even to win if he must, because I don’t want the story to end.

So the task "Breaking Bad" has set for itself is to straddle this line. It has to keep making Walter worse and worse, until every last one of us wants him dead while continuing to (presumably) keep him alive for another nine episodes in a way that feels solid and true to the plot and not in any way artificial. Because the minute we sense that they’re sparing his life for just the sake of the timeline, this delicate puzzle we’ve been assembling will collapse.

This is true but also work diving into a bit more, because it begs the question, the overriding question of Breaking Bad: What are we supposed to want to have happen? 

I'll give you an example from this week's episode.  Walt is in Hank's office.  He has to remove the two monitoring devices he has planted there: a bug behind a picture frame and some kind of transmitter in his computer.  Walt cries Hank out of the room and then goes and gets them.  We the viewers feel tense in this moment. We are in suspense. Our heart rates increase, we maybe clench our fists.  Later, Hank comes in and hands Walt the coffee. Walt sees the bank surveilance. Walt overhears Hank and Gomez talking. And the tension ratchets up again.

So here, again is my question: Why does it ratchet up? And why were we tense in the first place? We should at this point want Walt to fail.  We should want Hank to catch him, we should be, instead of tense, hopeful. But we aren't.

We aren't for two reasons, I think. The first is that what is happening here is a nearly automatic, reflexive response to how suspense narratives work. We have been trained our entire lives as viewers to respond to these moments with tension, and there's a high level of technical engineering that goes into this sequence. The writers, for exmaple, have inserted a "ticking clock"-- Person A must accomplish Task B before Person C returns-- which gives a scene urgency regardless of its content. There's propulsive, percussive music that increases the tension etc.  We're simply conditioned to respond to these cues with tension.

The second reason is that we want the show to continue and Walt is the show's protagonist. The show cannot continue for long once Walter is caught or killed. And even though we know there are nine more episodes to go, part of the skill of Breaking Bad is getting us to forget this external reality for just as long as it takes to make us tense.

I do not think, in other words, that we are bad people for being tense here. But part of what's so damn smart about Breaking Bad is that the writers clearly know how easily manipulated audiences are and try to use this in interesting ways. And there's no better example of that the train heist episode, which is like the 99% pure blue crystal distillation of how the show works. We start with a group of people arguing about whether or not to murder an innocent woman. Then we have an awesome-- and completely satisfying-- classic train heighst.  Then it's punctuated by a reminder to the audience of what this is all about, causing us to cast our minds backwards and reexamine how satisfying we found the whole heist-trope-thing in the first place.

I remain curious, then, as to why people are upset about Mike dying. Seriously.  The same people who on twitter and in blogs are celebrating the show's moral compass and then also in mourning for the cold-bloodiest character on the whole show. The guy has been a criminal and killer for decades. His body count has to be higher than Walt's. In the first episode he was threatening to kill a single mother and then had to be begged to leave the body out for her daughter to find it. Despite all of Mike's protestations to the contrary, the falling out between Walt and Fring is actually (if you rewatch the episodes) largely not Walter's fault, and Mike has, from the get-go, seemingly wanted to kill him. 

Again, we're dealing with another narrative function here, that of the "fan favorite character."  And I think what Breaking Bad has taught us time and again is that a properly contained, properly constructed, skillfully pulled off narrative can triumph over our own moral sense like a magnet pulling our compass in the wrong direction. And it is in this meta-way, in the way that it self-consciously uses the tools of storytelling to pervert our good sense, that the show is profound. For as anyone who has looked at the interrelationship of art and politics, or  propaganda efforts behind totalitarian regimes, or the history of anti-semitism can tell you, a good story can be a very, very dangerous thing indeed. 

Breaking Bad is hardly the first television show to enter this territory. Indeed, as we live in the age of the Charming Male Sociopath protagonist, many shows are working this grain. But few of them do it self-consiously the way Breaking Bad does. One of its main predecessors is, of course, The Sopranos. But in the case of The Sopranos, I got the sense over time that the writers, having figured out that it was fairly easy to manipulate people into having sympathy for their sociopathic lead, felt contempt for us for liking the show in the first place and decided to just make it clear that they were better than us over and over again. 

The question moving forward is how much deeper into this trench the show can dig. You could still have some (limited) sympathy for Walt in seasons three and four. Sure, he had indirectly caused a plane crash that killed a over a hundred innocent people, but the events at the end of Season Three are caused by his attempts to save Jessie's life and his actions in Four are explicitly undertaken to save him and his family from Gus, who is presented as definitely the worser of two evils. But in this season, the writers have taken away the futzy incompetence that was our last plank of Walt-based sympathy and they've kept driving him further and further towards the darkness. The next nine episodes, then, will be an experiment to see how much sympathy for the devil is in fact required to make the architecture of narrative function properly. 

TV Land

by 99 Seats

So. I'm here. I'm alive. I'm coming around the bend on my 7th week in Los Angeles. It's been an interesting journey. I don't know if I've mentioned it, but I started a tumblr about it, from a more personal perspective here. It's mostly pictures and quick hits and "L.A. is like this, NYC is like that" kind of stuff. Me processing suddenly living somewhere else.

But I haven't forgotten about you all. I do plan to tell you about theatre out here...once I figure it out myself. I'm seeing my first show here in L.A. this Friday. One thing I've noticed is that there is a LOT of theatre. Or at least a lot of theatres. Seriously. The rap that L.A. gets is that it's 27 suburbs in search of a city. Well, each of those suburbs has one or two theatres in it. There are a few clusters of theatres, but it seems like on every main drag, there's a theatre or two. I can not vouch for the quality. But then again, I can't vouch for the quality of every small theatre in New York. Once I get more into it, I'll let you all know.

Theatre, however, is a sideshow in this town and everyone acknowledges it. It lives in the shadow of the film/TV industry. Actually, right now, it seems like most everything out here lives in the shadow of the TV industry. I've talked with a lot of people since coming out here, some are friends I haven't seen in a while, some were recommended by friends and colleagues. Nearly all are looking at or currently working in TV. It's become the 500-pound gorilla out here. As others have noted, we seem to be in a golden age for television. Particularly driven by the very high quality in writing. Plus the economics for a young writer are in television's favor. For movies, right now, there are really two bandwidths: cheap movies and big budget movies. When you add in the loss of control of your story, TV is way more attractive.

Now, I know that a large segment of the readers of this blog are, shall we say, less interested in television. (At least I assume they still read this blog.) I've never been among them (obviously). But there's an interesting artifact about the way theatre people view television. Several people I've met with have asked what shows I like. I can get through that okay, despite being vaguely sheepish about the shows I watch religiously: Fringe, Happy Endings, Community, Justified are all at the top of my list. Yes, yes, I know, I know, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, etc. I haven't gotten to those yet. I will. I'm good with the shows I like. Then I was asked a question that stumped me: Why?

That should be easy. I'm a smart, thoughtful person. I'm also an artist, so I'm aware of the conscious and subconscious intentions of artists. Television may be part commerce, but it's also art, created by artists. It does something. It's about something. And if I'm making sure I'm home to watch it, even in the era of DVR, if I'm making new friends watch it, the way I press Zadie Smith's White Teeth into their hands, it's saying something to me. But we're so used to thinking about television as entertainment, as being shallow, that, at first blush, when I'm asked, I get ready to answer in terms of craft, style, technique. Not in terms of the deeper point of art.

As I pursue this "new" line of work (it's still dramatic writing, but of a very different order), I'm realizing that I have to think more deeply about the work I'm doing and why. What are the stories I want to tell and why. Sometimes, as a playwright, we can fudge some of that. We can talk in big ways, use our over-educated minds to explain things away and keep the raw emotions at bay. Out here, for all of the crap, all of the commerce, I'm looking at digging deeper. But, you know, with jokes.

The Adolescence Issue: The Case For Hannah Horvath And Bella Swan

By Monika Bartyzel

(We close out the adolescence issue with this great essay by M. Bartyzel on what our expectations are of our young protagonists and what this says about us.  

Monika Bartyzel is a freelance writer and creator of Girls on Film, a weekly look at femme-centric film news and concerns, currently residing at Movies.com. Her work has appeared in the likes of The Atlantic, Moviefone, Collider, Splice Today, Hooded Utilitarian, Toronto Screenshots, and the now-defunct Cinematical, where she was a lead writer and assignment editor.)

Children’s literature has a very specific purpose: It’s a creative form of instruction. Little tykes sit down and learn about objects, sounds, and letters. They learn good and bad ways of interaction, and are taught how to poop. Even their wildest fantasies hold some lesson – respect your elders, do your chores, and of course, don’t cry wolf.

Adult literature, on the other hand, runs the gamut of experience. If I close my eyes and reach out to my book shelf, I might pull a book about race, time-traveling, performance art, pen pal romance, extra-terrestrial rock stars, feminism, World War II, gastroenterologists, shipwrecked sailors, crime… Though we might learn through the experience, education is not a priority (in fiction). Entertainment and/or art is key. A book might simply take us into another world, or it might delight in the careful placement of every single letter, word, sentence, and paragraph.

The idea applies to other forms of media as well. Children’s songs and films seek to please the eyes and ears whilst teaching a lesson, and alternatively, adult entertainment mixes fluff and thought on the whim of the creator. Once we’re set up in the world, adult media allows us to choose whether we want to be educated and/or entertained.

Young Adult fare, however, is the creative limbo resting between the extremes. On a basic level, editor Cheryl Klein’s summation is apt: “A YA novel is centrally interested in the experience and growth of its teenage protagonist(s), whose dramatized choices, actions, and concerns drive the story, and it is narrated with relative immediacy to that teenage perspective.”

Outside of structural restraints, the function of YA is muddied.  We chastise much of it and its silliness – especially when adults begin to admire it (Harry Potter, Twilight). We also place wildly high expectations upon it. Young people, who have been instructed in the ways of the world, are now on a long quest to discover themselves. We expect their reading to help them discover positive role models and continue learning about life. We fear the irresistible pulp fare and the impact it might have. The form is further complicated by sex; YA is generally seen as a creative haven for young women, therefore feminist concerns are always applied.

In recent years, these concerns have led to a cacophonous roar against problematically popular protagonists. It started with one Bella Swan, a girl so swept up in lust and love with her sparkly vampire boyfriend that she let it run her life. Her saga is so fervently polarizing that the world was quickly split in two – the Twi-hards gushing undying adoration and the Twi-nots condemning her. Just as the roar began to subside, Hannah Horvath arrived, Lena Dunham’s identity-confused heroine in Girls (admittedly a bit outside YA, but invoking a similar spirit due to Hannah’s immaturity). Once again the lines were drawn to define two camps – the fans who instantly related to Hannah’s idiosyncratic life and the detractors who believe she “and her friends are a bunch of racist fucking untalented hipster assholes.”

These heroines haven’t just invoked stern criticism; they’ve courted downright damnation. Their problematic, imperfect selves have hit an apparent soft-spot in the media psyche with their mere existence. Two aspects seem to be at play. First and foremost, these are young women bearing the weight of historically shallow female characterizations that feminism is trying to fight against. Secondly, they’re uber-awkward characters that bite their thumb at the struggling heroines who always manage to be at least partially idyllic. (Think Rory Gilmore and her financial hardships matched with top-notch smarts and an uncanny ability to flawlessly banter, or Katniss Everdeen who must play in The Hunger Games, but is inhumanly skilled at archery and wildly charismatic.)

The whole brouhaha reminds me of my own youth. For years I had free literary reign. My parents loved that I loved reading and let me amass a small mountain of first children’s reads and then young adult fare. But then I discovered Fear Street, and subsequently, Christopher Pike. Horror/crime/mystery/otherworldly menaces were my literary crack. I began to love vampires and the vamp/werewolf drama that came long before Twilight – L.J. Smith’s The Vampire Diaries (an entirely different beast than the show and the current sequels).

Presumably due to fears that I’d turn into a deranged killer or occult conspiracy theorist, my intake started to be highly regulated. My beloved pulp was restricted and mandatorily peppered with classics that bored my escapist-yearning self to tears, as well as fictional tales set during historical circumstances. (Of course, the Sunflower series of romantic histories led me directly into the arms of Danielle Steele, which wasn’t exactly a great literary leap forward. [Damn you, Message from Nam.])

However, even restricted, there was a freedom in my fandom. No one was mocking my love of Stefan Salvatore, or the absolutely ridiculous things Elena would do for her love. My whims and heroines weren’t repeatedly labeled moronic, and I loved my novel escapes. Incidentally, I grew up to be an English grad who spends much of her time writing about feminist issues in film and loving essays by Henry Miller and authors like Joan Didion, Graham Greene, and Voltaire – a far cry from vampires, murderers, and ghosts.

While my parents’ concern was understandable, what I took out of the books wasn’t a critical reading of the text, but the parts that resonated. I read all of Agatha Christie’s work, but all that sticks out is the charisma of Tuppence Beresford and how an old spinster (Miss Marple) could live a wildly entertaining life on her own. I remember the best heroines and little of the questionable material and questionable literary merit (of which there was much), because that’s what I was subconsciously drawn to and looking for.

As I once wrote about Twilight: “Reading The Twilight Saga is like revisiting your old diaries rife with catty rants and condemnations, emotional explosions and angst, where what was once live-or-die is now embarrassingly hormonal. Bella is an unencumbered look into an adolescent mind that’s not over-polished.” No, she’s not a stellar role model young girls should model themselves after – in any way. She’s too introverted, too easily swept into romance, too disinterested in the world that exists for her outside of Edward. But she’s is relatable.

Bella isn’t completely devoid as some Twi-nots describe her. She’s a sarcastic girl who escapes into classic novels and caring for her parents because she feels out of step with the world – so clumsy and accident-prone that she feels like an alien in her own body – an extreme manifestation of the awkwardness of the teen body. She likes a cute boy, obsesses on his minute qualities, and is so thrown by his adoration that she doesn’t trust it. The novels are her inner monologue, essentially her “diary” of romantic teenage obsession.

There’s a truth to Bella. She might make terrible choices, but they ring true for many young women – as evidenced by the books’ wild popularity, the many fan-centric accounts, and by my own remembrances of teen life. Bella’s depression in New Moon is often cited as one of the most damning aspects to her personality, which certainly throws her out of the running for strong role model, but also points to a very real phenomenon. Kids get depressed by circumstances adults find ridiculous. Many need counseling, medication, and other forms of aid to hopefully get through it, if they don’t decide to take their lives instead. If we consider how fervently we’d mourn, hurt, or obsess over something in our teens that was ultimately inconsequential, we can’t deny that losing a boyfriend who had saved your life, multiple times, would be traumatic.

As a role model, the condemnation fits. As a teen girl with wildly fluctuating hormones, who is trying to find her place in the world, the condemnation becomes problematic. By condemning her, what are we saying to the massive group of young women who relate to her? Twi-hards feel a very visceral attachment to the novels, a result of what many describe as Stephenie Meyer’s uncanny ability to invoke the essence of young desire. I can’t help but wonder if there’s a part of this vitriolic backlash that stems from embarrassment – a disinterest in recognizing (or admitting) how ridiculous we all were during our YA limbo.

Girls’ Hannah certainly plucks at the awkward, embarrassing parts of life. Lena Dunham unabashedly reveals every perk and flaw to Hannah. She’s a goddess of stupid actions, a young woman wildly self-absorbed to the point that she doesn’t see other people’s problems. She expects her parents to support her, and when they refuse, she doesn’t take the responsibility upon herself, she shunts it over to her best friend. She chases after seemingly unavailable men, jumps from job to job, and has an uncanny ability to assert ridiculous beliefs. Dunham’s primary focus seems to be Hannah’s flaws – both literal and perceived.

She acts as a kindred soul to some, and a mirror of bad qualities to others, as Jill York wrote for Nerve:

“I still don't like Hannah Horvath, and I certainly don't like that I see so many of my own negative qualities in her, but I like that she and her cohorts force me to see them. And I think that's why Girls has resonated so strongly with us spoiled, lazy types: it takes these uglier truths about ourselves and how the rest of the world sees us and it spits them back in our faces, leaving us to think about whether we'll choose to stay on the Dark Side or take our first steps toward the light.”

Are, perhaps, flaws and stupidity just as relevant to young adults as heroes and role models? Some may relate to a piece, as York does, because they recognize their own inadequacies. Questionable characters become warning signs for the audience’s personal failures, which may or may not inspire improvement. Other audiences might be adolescents in that messy limbo who relate to the uber-emotional turmoil of a sparkly, fantastical modern fairy tale – flaws attract flaws.

The above focuses on young heroines, but the idea applies universally. Though often framed by heroic means, comics consistently pluck at inadequacies and trauma raised by bullies and angst. Before the superhero renaissance, comics were obsessive pulp that thrived because the audience could relate and subsequently escape into fantasy. Even The Dark Knight Rises takes a Twilight turn (though much more skillfully crafted) with overwrought romance-induced depression.

On a theoretical level, I think of the fear I invoked with my teenage book collection, of how many teens have already written about how they’ve moved beyond Twilight, and I think the mechanical definition leads to a bigger truth: Popular Young Adult fare reveals the “Dark Side” of both adolescence and adulthood – the questionable and problematic worlds that ultimately appeal to the youth, and the fear that such portrayals invoke in the adults, because as one old pop song asserted: “children are our future; teach them well and let them lead the way.”

Narrative Illogic in "Louie"

By Isaac Butler

One of the oddest aspects of the TV show Louie is the way that a certain kind of narrative sloppiness has reached feature-not-bug pervasivenes within the show.  The first season of Louie spends a great deal of energy making sure we know Louie only has one sibling, his brother.  By midway through the second season, he has two sisters.  When one of them drops off her daughter for the weekend, Louie, the daughter and the brother hang out, only the brother appears to no longer be his brother, despite being played by the same actor.  Louie crashes a motorcycle at the beginning of season three only to drive it in the second episode. There's a whole disappearing-reappearing jacket thing in the episode where Louie wants to buy a house.

(I do not include on this list that Louie's ex-wife is black. Simply put, I know interracial couples whose children have pale white skin and blonde hair. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.)

Patton Oswalt has penned for Slate a stirring defense that I find almost-- but not quite-- convincing:

 Louie has not foregone narrative logic; he’s embraced illogic. I’ve known Louis C.K. since 1990 and, like all great comedians and even greater story-tellers, he’s sloppy with the details. And he’s got a filmmaker’s innate sense of visuals over logic. Over and over again, both onstage and in one-on-one conversations, he swears his shaky allegiance to the factual, chronological nuts-and-bolts of the recounting of a story, or even the remembering of a life. There he is in this episode, on the motorcycle from the season premiere—the one he crashed into a truck—which he absolutely should not be riding. Then there was the episode last season where he was checking out the new apartment and his jacket disappeared and reappeared moment to moment. He’s jettisoned daily order for a larger, emotional truth. I know that sounds cheesy, and very new-agey, but it’s an old-fashioned notion, one Louis refuses to let die. Robinson Crusoe strips down naked, swims out to his shipwrecked boat, and then fills his pockets with goods. Ray Davies is purposely oblique about being “glad [he’s] a man / and so is Lola …” Ozu’s domestic interiors have zero spatial congruity from shot to shot. But we recognize the great, human storytelling, and feeling of trust and confessional, in all great works and, guess what,Louie is a sloppy, illogical, great piece of work.

This paragraph actually attempts-- with less success- what Louie is doing, which is to say use panache and ability to jump over some serious holes.  Robinson Crusoe doesn't conform to our ideas of what a novel should do because those ideas hadn't been invented yet.  Much of the book is actually an achingly dull religious tract, and the same events are revisited multiple times in different narrative modes with key details changed or elided.  Lola's deliberate entenre-laden ambiguity is completely irrelevant to what the show Louie is about. Louie doesn't use narrative ambiguitiy to any productive end.  If Lola contained a verse about meeting the titular character in a bar and then a later verse that said that actually they met five years later in an ashram, it would be a little closer to what the show is doing. I'm also not totally sure that the spatial incongruity of Ozu's films is relevant here, but I'll have to leave that to someone who knows Ozu's films better than I do.

Anyway, what I am convinced by is that clearly the narrative illogic of Louie doesn't matter. It doesn't matter to me or impact my enjoyment of the show, and it clearly doesn't matter to critics or audiences. What I'd like to figure out is why it doesn't matter. Pretty much any other mainstream narrative work that was this sloppy on basic issues of narrative detail would get slaughtered by critics.  In fact The Killing regularly got mocked for having moments that seemed narratively inconsistent or illogical (for ex: a scene where Linden uses a fake name in front of someone and then answers a phone within earshot with her real name).

I think it's a mixture of three-and-a-half things.  One of them is affect related. Louis CK is just a really likeable guy and an oddly charismatic screen presense.  Simply put, he is so fucking charming even in his self-lacerating misanthropy, that you root for him, and this rooting for him transfers onto the show. You want to cut the show a lot of slack as a result simply because you like him and by extension it.  Second is a more transactional operation. The rewards of following the show down the paths that CK carves out outweigh whatever the problems are with the show.  There's a fear-- a fear I share-- that a more "well crafted" show would lose the vitality and originality of CK's voice. So it gets a pass on this stuff, a not dissimilar pass to the one that Kevin Smith got until it became absolutely clear that he actually just isn't very good once you get beyond the bracing piety-destruction of his foul, foul mouth.

 Third-- and I think this is most important for those of us who create-- the show creates a frame that makes this illogic a non-issue. Louie as a narrative project constantly changes all sorts of rules on you. Sometimes it starts with standup. Sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes it ends with it. Sometimes there's no standup in an episode at all. Sometimes it begins with its credits, sometimes it doesn't.  As story might take multiple episodes to complete, or five minutes. The show changes to fit the needs of each individual story, whatever they are.  

These kinds of change-ups regularly happen in literature, sometimes happen in film and very rarely happen in television (think, for example, of what a big deal the Three Trips episode of Mad Men was... it was a big deal because it was rare). Within the lower-rated end of TV comedy, this kind of rule-shifting is happening more frequently, But still, even within that, very rarely do the actual given facts of a show change.  Community might vary wildly in terms of style from episode to episode, but the show wouldn't abruptly make Jeff's father a regular and well-adjusted presense in his life.

Finally (this is the half thing) it's also worth thinking about which details are allowed to change. They turn out to be the details that don't matter that much. I mean, if Louie suddenly had three kids (or none!) that'd be a very strange shift that most people wouldn't accept. But the given rules of the world: Louie is single and divorced. He has two kids. He is a stand up comic. he has frought relationships with the rest of his family. He has friends who are other professional stand up comics. These stay consistent. 

UPDATE: Over on twitter, Jason Zinoman writes in to say a few words about how the illogic helps on top of the ways it doesn't detract.  He says that the narrative illogic "underlines the fact that Louie is from one subjective flawed POV to an extreme much more so than Girls or Curb Your Enthusiasm," that narrative illogic supports C.K.'s surreal brand of humor that traces back to his earlier, less-autobiographical material, and that the illogic "often serves as a jolting surprise... [which is] essential to comedy. But also to his brand of genre blurring [and his] worldview."   Jason also adds that it's dangerous to give CK a lifetime "free pass" on this stuff, as it could easily slip into indulgence.  "How many play debates end with `but it's abstract'".  I think that all makes a lot of sense. 

We're All Fucked: The "Election" Films, The Wire and The Future of Democracy

By Isaac Butler

I wrote a thing for the good folks at Hooded Utilitarian about the Hong Kong gangster saga Election/Triad Election, The Wire, and democracy.  The essay is completely spoiler free about the Election films, which, taken together are one of my favorite films of the aughts and are both available on Netflix Instant for the first time in awhile:

Many pixels have been spilled documenting David Simon’s perspective on our crumbling institutions of government.  As he told The Believer, societal institutions are like the Gods in Greek Tragedy, inexorable, powerful forces that undermine individual agency.  The truth teller in a Simon piece is always the head that’s eventually going to be on the block. Attempts to improve the overall situation are doomed to succeed only on a small level, and only for a brief period of time, but are still noble and worthwhile.  Simon believes in individuals. Individuals may, in fact, be the only thing in which he’ll invest his faith. This forms a tension with his Democratic Socialist political leanings and this tension is part of what makes his work so electric and alive when it is at its best.

The perspective of the Election films inverts this equation. In To’s Universe, individuals are the problem and institutional tradition’s bulwark against individual will is the only thing standing between order and chaos. The problem in the Election films is that post-Millenial capitalism, with its empowering of individual will, embrace of selfishness, and temptations of money has eroded these institutions to the point where they are a hollow, symbolic shell...

You can read the whole thing here. 

Pulling Out Of Here To Win

by 99 Seats

Man, this post is way, way, way overdue. I actually meant to write about this stuff on the blog about a month ago, but events kept getting in the way. And then I meant to write it last week, but there was too much stuff going on. And then I meant to write it yesterday, but by then, I was tired from everything else. Today, though, today is quiet and relatively peaceful and I have some time to myself. So here it is.

I've left New York City.

On Tuesday morning, I got on a plane for Los Angeles. I'm writing this from my sublet in central L.A., sort of Thai-town, sort of Little Armenia, sort of Los Feliz, if any of those words mean anything to you. They mean only a little bit to me right now. But mostly they mean "home."

So how the hell did this happen? Like Hemingway's quote about going broke, gradually and then suddenly. I've been kicking around making this move for a while now. My reasons are about one-third professional, one-third personal and one-third that place where the personal and the professional overlap and become the spiritual.

On the professional tip, I don't think it's a surprise to anyone that I've felt fairly frustrated by the NYC theatre scene. I've been banging my head against its doors and ceilings for nearly two decades now and, honestly, I'm tired. I'm tired of busting my ass, gathering resources, calling in favors, stretching fifty-cents to make a dollar and then at the end of it, having a lot of bubkis to show for it. That's overly harsh. Let me soften it a bit: I don't know what else to do. One of the reasons I've been largely absent on this blog for the last few months has been an absolute torrent of work. I stepped down from the leadership of The New Black Fest and basically did project after project. Between about last November and this spring, I wrote two full-length plays (one a three-act bear), a longish one-act and two ten-minute plays. One of the ten-minute plays received a full production and three week run. The other ten minute play had a quick and dirty production for one night in a bar. The longish one-act got about a week of rehearsal, then a one-night presentation. About a month later, we got another whack at it, with another week's rehearsal and three performances, in a semi-staged manner. The two new plays got a few hours of rehearsal and then one-off readings. I also got a workshop presentation of another full-length play, a week or so of rehearsal for that, two performances, semi-staged. Oh, and a friend of mine who runs a community theatre in Rochester put together a reading of a group of my short plays. I think I'm even leaving some things out...Wait, I am. I also wrote a short holiday-themed piece for a reading series and two short pieces that I read myself, one at another reading series and one at a special event honoring a friend and colleague. Basically, from November until May, I had a deadline every week. Most of the work I did I consider some of my best. I grew as a writer. And many of these events were well-attended and well-received. All of which is, and should be, satifying enough. I'm doing better than a great number of writers I know and I am blessed for the opportunities I have. But.

My disdain for soccer is well-known amongst my friends. In particular, I'm dismissive of soccer because of the possibility of a 0-0 tie. That can't be a satisfactory result, no matter how brilliant your defensive plays are. As I joke (and I may have even stolen this joke from someone), those guys ran around for 90 minutes and I scored as many goals as they did. And I just sat here drinking a beer.

By the same logic, the guy at my local bar who sat there, every night for the last seven months, drinking cranberry and vodkas had as many productions as I did. I was just more winded.

At a certain point, you start thinking it's you. I can say all I want about structural this and structural that, and none of this doesn't mean those imbalances aren't true, but there's a certain point where you have to consider that nobody here really wants you. Or you don't know how to make them want you. And if that's the case, why keep digging this hole? I'm careening into my late thirties. If there's time to make a change, it's now.

I've always tried to be honest about my skills and abilities: I can write some pretty good dialogue, turn a good phrase here and there, and make a pretty decent joke. I prefer naturalism and realism to experimental theatre. I like contemporary stories, usually with a "ripped-from-the-headlines" feel. I'm attracted to the worlds of genre fiction, but I like tweaking it ever so slightly. The current trends in theatre run pretty much counter to all of that, unless you're a big enough name or can land a big enough name to make it to Broadway. I don't come with the kind of pedigree that opens doors on its own. I've felt stuck in a limbo. And sometimes, even my closest friends and colleagues have basically said, "You should be writing for television, not theatre." Generally in nicer terms than that. So...I may not actually be a playwright.

And if not, well, then, why not try my hand at another medium? At another city? So, to paraphrase the single worst phrase in modern sports history, I'm taking my talents to Venice Beach.

Please don't see this as "taking my toys and going home" or slinking out of town away from a trail of failure. I don't. I see it as a moment of clarity. I think I know what I'm doing, maybe for the first time in a decade. That's a good thing.

Personally...I've never lived more than an hour and a half from New York City. While those kind of roots are comforting, they can also hold you back. I wanted to see who I was without the back-drop of New York around me. Especially before I could never get out, never live anywhere else.

And thus and so, Flight 1691 brought me here, to a neighborhood that is really nothing like anything I've known. The closest equivalent is the farthest reaches of Queens, but that doesn't cover it. It's all just so slightly foreign. Mostly in good ways. I'm starting to like it.

A few nights before I left, I got some friends together at a bar and one of my closest friends and colleagues came by. The bar was in my old neighborhood of Inwood and he came all the way from the depths of Brooklyn, and so had to leave on the early side for the two hour ride back home. Right before he left, someone played Bruce Springsteen's gorgeous anthem "Thunder Road." And we belted it out lustily. This song fit my spirit and the time just perfectly. New York isn't exactly full of losers, but the feeling of breaking the bonds that hold you back and leaping out into the free air, that is what I felt. What I'm still feeling. I want to leave you with that. Even though I'm not leaving you at all. I'll still be sending dispatches from L.A. I do plan to take a whack at theatre out here and I know you're all just dying to hear more about TV writing. But for right now, close your eyes, listen to The Boss and think about driving down a sunlit road, the top down and a bright clear sky above you...

Don Draper Dreams

By Isaac Butler

 

One of the great challenges facing Mad Men as a narrative project is the essential opaqueness of its central character, one Mister Don Draper.  This is also what initially made the show so exciting.  Is Don a blank? A sociopath? Does he have hidden depths? Is he pure male rage?

As the show has progressed, we've see that one of the keys to Don's perpetual unhappiness is that he has constructed his life around protecting the secret parts of himself. This left him unknown, without real intimacy in his life, trapped in an unhappy marriage and unable to trust basically anyone, a cycle that only repeats itself as, unable to really confide in anyone, he hides greater parts of himself away.

The challenge this presents is that as audience we have some need to know what the heck is going on with our protagonist, and close-ups can only do us some good. In prose fiction, solving this problem is easy, there's a whole host of tools, from writing out his interiority to simply showing us how he sees things and what he notices, to narrating his thoughts, to metaphor etc.  In theater, this problem is often solved through direct address.

Neither of these strategies are available to Mad Men.  The Sopranos solved this problem by giving Tony a sounding board character in the person of his therapist. It didn't matter that he frequently lied to this sounding board, as the lies he told were often his own delusions about himself and that, in turn, was revealing. Breaking Bad solves this problem by having a protagonist who is unable to keep the secret parts of himself secret and by being plot driven enough that his actions can reveal his inner workings.

Mad Men, having used flashbacks to reveal Don's past, occasionally solves this problem by taking a page from the Sopranos playbook and using dream sequences and hallucations. . This latest season relied on two of them to let us know (a) that Don was worried about returning to his old alcoholic houndogging ways and (b) that Don felt guilt over one particular plot point in the second half of the season (you're welcome, spoiler-hounds). 

The problem with this strategy is that it just rings false because the fantasy sequences are so on the nose, so obviously thematically related and so, well, clear.  They're also used too frequently (a problem that dogged The Sopranos as well).  I'm also unsure whether we really need Don to be explained in this way.  Do we need the specter of a woman he used to sleep with hounding him through a fever to know his conflicts about his past and present selves? Isn't it more interesting, as we wait with baited breath to see whether cahnge will be fleeding or not, to leave the inner self burdened with this journey ambiguous?

(A)Waking Up to the Depressive's Fantasy

Television gets a bad rap as an “escapist” medium. Especially on network television, the people are prettier than we are, the stories are easily wrapped up after 44 minutes, there’s a kind of moral clarity (usually conservative) that’s missing from the real world. One reason to watch Law & Order or CSI, for instance, is for the opportunity to visit a world where the line between good and bad guys can be clearly drawn and the good guys almost always win. As a result, TV (especially genre TV) is often criticized as formulaic, uncomplicated, “easy.”

And maybe so, but I don’t think that’s a reason to dismiss these shows. One of my favorite explanations for how we experience stories is the idea of a “narrative world” into which we are transported. Every time we read a story or see a film or a play, we take a trip into this imagined space. The “escapism” of television isn’t then something we need to be ashamed of—it’s exactly the point. A show (or a novel or a play), when it works, offers up a universe unto itself: one that’s like this world, but not-quite.

At a conference this spring, I heard a brilliant paper that explored the relationship between science fiction and depression. Basically the argument was that films (her examples were Melancholia and The Future) use the tropes of science fiction, especially that of Armageddon, to literalize the emotional experience of depression, especially the way that the end of the world might not be so bad after all.

Pretty bleak stuff, all told—but the thing I was left thinking about is the way that depression and narrative can work in similar ways, especially in their ability to create coherent worlds and all-encompassing explanations. After all, who is more convincing than a depressive? Part of the experience of depression is its impenetrability—if you’ve ever experienced The Pit, or tried to talk a friend up and out of it, you know what I’m talking about. Inside the experience of depression, everything you see, everything you experience is just more evidence leading to the inescapable conclusion that you’re a complete turd and that there’s no way out of your current misery. It’s a fully functioning narrative universe, with its own (awful) logic and rules.

Perhaps this is why, in my experience, stories are so much more engrossing when I’m depressed. Since I was a kid, narratives have worked in this way for me—imaginative play also works really well as a dissociative tool, it turns out. I don’t remember many details of my dad’s crazy alcoholic behavior, but I remember writing stories in school (much to my parents’ chagrin) about a drunk driver. When I was 22, and getting sober myself, I was so obsessed with Buffy that I would dream about Sunnydale. Part of the experience of being in the oppressively convincing closed system of depression is having another closed system into which you might be transported.

Which brings me to the late, lamented Awake. The pilot of this show was among the best I’ve ever seen, rivaling BSG’s “33,” and without BSG’s advantage of having already done the heavy expository lifting in a preceding miniseries. Lots of critics loved the pilot but doubted (rightfully, it turns out) whether the show would be able to sustain its premise for a single season, not to mention longer. And they have a point. The show’s hook is this: after experiencing a near-fatal car crash, detective Michael Britten awakens to find his reality bifurcated by grief, his son surviving in one world and his wife in the other, unsure which is reality and which is a dream. Each world has its own slightly different story logic: different partners, different cases, a different visual style (a green filter for Son World, red for Wife World).

At the same time that the show plays with this psychic switcheroo, it also tries to work as a much more standard genre cop show, complete with cases-of-the-week and an overarching conspiracy around the car crash that begins the series. As Britten goes about his daily routine as a homicide detective, clues from one reality give him insight into the case he’s working in the other, and he becomes a Superdetective, with unexplainable but unerring hunches that lead him to solve case after case. This veering back and forth between a visually and thematically daring structure and radically commonplace (if that’s possible) genre plots was ultimately the strangest element of the show, and was, in my opinion, what kept it from gaining the audience that would allow it to extend beyond a single season.

In a scene between Britten and one of his therapists at the end of the pilot, for instance, Britten explains that he’s uninterested in deciphering which reality is “real,” since choosing would be tantamount to killing either his wife or son. This was the moment in the pilot when I found myself unexpectedly moved to tears, identifying so strongly with this literalized representation of the denial that accompanies grief. But then, the episode immediately veers away from the suggestion that the show’s premise is all in Britten’s head, showing a shadowy meeting between higher-ups in the police department talking in cloak-and-dagger clichés about how Britten “knows too much” and might have to be “taken care of.”

Throughout the series, these shifts in tone gave me a serious case of the bends. Is the show a thinky psychological science fiction riff in the tradition of films like Donnie Darko, or a procedural cop show? Shows like Fringe and The X-Files have been able to achieve a balance between serialized and episodic storylines, but there is always clear thematic resonance between the two—something Awake never achieved. The cases and the conspiracy were consistently background noise to the much more interesting stuff about Britten’s grip on reality and his attempt to bridge his increasingly disparate roles as father and husband.

But here’s the thing: maybe what Awake is really about is the fantasy of the depressive. Retreating into a fully constructed reality won’t just save you, it will save everyone. The finale ends with a scene that at first appears to be the hackiest move of all, suggesting, Dallas-style, that the entire premise has been an elaborate dream, that the car crash never happened at all and that Britten’s wife and son are both alive and well. After some consideration, however, it is clear (and creator Kyle Killen has confirmed that this was his intention) that this third world is Britten’s fantasy, suggesting at least to my mind that both the metaphysical mumbo-jumbo and the hacky conspiracy and procedural plots are both signs of Britten’s deteriorating psyche. This is why it’s so interesting to me that the procedural element is so uninventive and that this is where Britten’s detective “superpowers” show up—when we’re trying to make sense of something that can’t be made sense of, don’t we often retreat to well-trod turf? If a story makes the most sense or feels truest, that often has more to do with its familiarity than its accuracy. Britten’s (and the show’s) investment in generically familiar cop drama is both a sign of his depression and his way out of it.

Throughout the series, the procedural and conspiracy plots often felt like (and probably were) ways to expand viewership—attract a “cable” audience with the high-concept stuff, and a “network” audience with the standard cop show stuff. But what it ends up illuminating is the way that familiar generic myths form their own kind of language, one that can both cocoon us from unwelcome realities but also offer a space in which those realities insist on expression, however indirectly. Weirdly, then, in the end Awake works as a kind of mirror image to The Wire. While The Wire exposes the institutional costs of thinking that the law works “like it does on TV,” Awake focuses on the individual psychic price of that belief. Instead of showing us how the stories are a lie, Awake seems more interested in why we might remain invested in those stories even when they don’t line up with reality.

 

The Fandom Issue: A Death In The Family

By Isaac Butler

UPDATE: Hey all. Apparently, this post has recently gotten linked to at TV W/o Pity and a couple of other places including Dan Harmon's twitter feed, and so I just wanted to say that while I standby this piece as it captures how I felt about all of this in May of 2012, I feel very differently now than I did then.

I've recently been rewatchign the entire show from the beginning in big marathony gulps and I find that my feelings about have changed in pretty big ways from the more complicated feelings I discuss below to unabashed adulation. Obivously, I loved the show in May when I wrote this, but my feelings about it were complicated. They are less so now.

I want to write more about it and my changing feelings when I've finished the rewatch (I'm halfway through season 2 right now). So while I'm in a different place w/r/t everything I discuss below, I still felt this way then and hope you enjoy or find some meaning in it.  

Here's the original post: 

 

I was on my way to a funeral when I found out that Dan Harmon got fired.  My wife’s Uncle, dead of heart failure, fifty-one years old.  Calling this “sad” seems like the grossest violation of the English language, and of the demand I place on my students that they use specific words. Rather than come up with some kind of metaphor, let me just say that he was going to start a new job after a lengthy, recession-induced unemployment less than a week after he died. His life had just started looking up, and then it was taken away from him.

Dan Harmon was fired as the show runner on Community, the ambitious, expensive, low-rated show he created just after that show received a last minute reprieve and fourth season. I don’t imagine there’s a single person reading this who doesn’t already know that.  Increasingly here in the United States, shows are identified with their creators who, in the artier end of the spectrum, stay on and oversee the programs they’ve created.  The Wire is David Simon. The Sopranos is David Chase.  Mad Men is Matt Weiner. Even The Killing, which is an adaptation of another TV show, is heavily identified with Veena Sud, its adapter and show runner.

 Over the weekend, I got to watch and participate in two different grieving processes, and found them to be almost exactly the same. One happened in person, the other over twitter and blogs.  One was religious, one was secular. But the emotional content was the same.  Dan Harmon being fired was a kind of death, a man being cut down in his prime and people mourned it as such. At the same time, Uncle Bill’s death was a disruption in the planned narrative of our lives, provoking the kind of rage and grief people—including myself—hurled at NBC and Sony.

 If this sounds callous, it’s not meant to be. I’m trying to highlight how absurd our anger over a wealthy television writer being paid to do nothing for a year is.  Even Harmon himself recognized this, tweeting out a reminder to his followers (and let’s just put a pin on that word followers shall we?) that he bought a house with his Community earnings and we shouldn’t feel bad for him.

 But feel bad for him we do. Or at least I do. Even if—and this is the confession I feel strangest about making—I think Community should probably have ended, and that the third season was routinely kind of a drag to watch. And now I notice that all of the language I was about to use here—idioms like “life support” or “putting it down”—refer us back to treating this show as a living thing, and not just a living thing, a person, and not just a person but a friend. 

 Dan Harmon also encouraged this.  Anne Moore wrote earlier in the fandom issue that part of the problem with being a fan is that creators are ultimately unavailable, can never know our names.  This is untrue for Harmon, who named an off-screen character after a troll on twitter and took the phrase “streets ahead”—originally used to insult him by a random viewer online—and made it briefly into Pierce Hawthorne’s catchphrase. The season finale this year ended with a full-out homage to The Wire… and then a twitter hashtag for fans. Harmon’s loveably TMI blog posts were like mini-feasts between shows. While Community was written by a cadre of writers, as an audience watching it, it felt like all of one sensibility, even when each episode was radically different from the last. 

 Community was the most ambitious show on television during Dan Harmon’s reign. He seemed determined to see just how many ways he could stretch the fundamental concept of the show, how many different genres they could attempt, how many different complicated running gags they could pull off, how many different ways they could get the Greendale Seven into trouble.  In this way, Community was very much like The Simpsons during its golden age of seasons 3-9. Every week we tuned in not knowing what to expect, and they gave us everything from quite dark straightforward realism to two bogus clips episodes.

 The part of this that’s hard to write is this next paragraph.  For it seems that the main thing that sets Community and Golden Age Simpsons apart is that the latter was consistently brilliant and the former had one truly amazing season (that would be 2) with two uneven seasons bookending it.  This should not be hard to write. Hell, this shouldn’t even be necessary to write. But in the wake of the show’s brief mid-season cancellation, the overestimation of Community took off to the point where it now feels, well, like speaking ill of the dead.

 But Community, particularly in Season 3, had serious problems.  Jim Rash and Ken Jeong were almost never funny, and they got less so as the characters' importance to the show's story grew. The depiction of the Dean was often tinged with a kind of latent homophobia that completely poisoned the third season’s mean-spirited Christmas episode. Many of the shows this season—including the heist episode in this week’s 3-ep burn off—were impressive without being particularly funny. And in the third season, the characters started losing the nuance they had gained in the second, with Shirley and Annie reduced to vocal tics and Troy becoming more dumb than endearingly innocent.

 In the midst of this, the season still pulled off two stone classics (Remedial Chaos Theory and Curriculum Unavailable) and had a run of episodes towards the end that reduced me to tears.  Because the truth of the matter is—notice how easy it is to slip into Jeff’s cadences—that Community really was something special, flaws and all, and both its positives and negatives were part of it speaking with one voice, and that voice was Harmon’s.

 And so yes, it feels like speaking ill of the dead to say that perhaps the show was bogging down, that perhaps they’d said all they had come to say, perhaps three seasons, one pretty good, one brilliant and one mixed-to-meh were enough. 

We don’t like to see things end. Relationships, people, television shows. We want to keep them around indefinitely. But does anyone actually think Six Seasons And A Movie would be good for Community as a work of art? That it wouldn’t just become a series of twitter-generated shibboleths, retreads of past genre parodies and Troy-Abed bromance ?

Soon we’ll get to see if keeping a television show on well past its prime is a good idea when Arrested Development returns.  Like Community, AD was a fan-beloved, low-rated, absurdly ambitious half hour comedy. And like Community, it hit its stride with a near perfect second season only to collapse in its third. Arrested Development’s third season is even weaker than Community’s, sporting only one good episode (for the record, that’d be S.O.B.’s). I am, to put it mildly, skeptical of the show’s return. 

The question I have always had is why we demand more quantity from the things that we love and why we are so unwilling to speak critically—or accept others speaking critically—of them. Why I feel actually slightly scared saying that Community wasn’t that good this season, and that fan and critical discourse around it had a kind of CLAP LOUDER quality to it. Or that I’m not looking forward to a new season of Arrested Development and might not even watch it.

It seems to me that death—and our fear of it—and mortality—and our desire to conquer it—is at work here. We form relationships with the art we love that mimic our human relationships, particularly when there’s a strong creator behind the work who we can form a quasi-relationship with as well. As with our loved ones, we don’t want this thing to die. And as in the US healthcare system, we come to prize quantity of years over quality of life.

As I’ve just relearned this weekend, saying goodbye when there’s no possibility of another hello is amongst the most difficult things we humans do. We have to learn how to do it over and over again, and we almost never get it right.  We idolize people and turn them into saints.  We invent elaborate mythologies to protect our hearts. Having no one to blame but the Universe, we blame we each other. This is what it is to be human, to get most things at least somewhat wrong most of the time and to keep going.

Most of all, when something we love dies, we find ourselves wishing for more time, as if time were the problem. As if more were the solution, the always for everything American solution for problems.  More.  Just give me more.  If I just had more this would all be okay.

In Uncle Bill’s case, that’s true.  He was in his early fifties.  Seemingly healthy until he abruptly wasn’t.  Loved by his family and neighbors and friends. About to start a new job. More really would be a good solution in his case. I’d love to have some more. Some more odd jokes over e-mail. Some more arguments about politics. Some more geeking out about his favorite guitarists.

To give one example: An e-mail debate broke out amongst Anne’s family members about who their favorite Sherlock Holmes was.  Who is your favorite Holmes?  Was it Basil Rathbone? Benedict Cumberbatch? Peter Cushing? Robert Downey Junior?  Bill replied with an e-mail titled “here’s my favorite Holmes” with a picture of Katie Holmes. A lame joke, perhaps, but as we told it and retold it, it got funnier and funnier.

I look at the Dan Harmon era of Community—and most other shows that have been cancelled—and it feels monstrous to mourn in the same way. To ask for More.  More time. To equate this thing, this show, this collection of stories with a person. It feels completely out of balance with a healthy attitude towards the world. Of course, Community knew that, and in giving us Abed, explored that idea over and over again.

I know it’s neither healthy nor mature, and yet I can’t stop doing it. This kind of love is, it seems, hardwired into me. I want to have disdain for fans. I really do. But—as is often the case in these matters—that’s because I recognize myself in them. The impulses they celebrate are ones I’m ashamed of, but we still both possess them.  And so I’m left crying at a funeral, and then crying the next day when I watch the show’s season finale, and mixing them both up in my head so that perhaps it’s Uncle Bill that got fired and Dan Harmon who died suddenly and then unraveling these associations and thinking myself a monster for even having them in the first place. 

 

Xander, Buffy and Feminism

By Isaac Butler

The Hooded Utilitarian has an interesting essay up about Xander's role in the Buffyverse and how this challenges the idea of Buffy The Vampire Slayer as a feminist show. It's an interesting piece that raises some good points (like the rest of this post it's filled with spoilers and thus hard to excerpt).

I've found Buffy's claims towards feminism to be a lot more complex than it's more die-hard fans will cop to. (I've also only watched the series once, and it was a year and a half ago.)  Certainly, it falls within the general canon of "Male Feminist Entertainments" where the way a woman is empowered is to be physically a bad ass. But unlike other projects that adopt the Female Badass solution and leave it there, trudging on unquestioningly through the writer's male gaze (see Molly Million in Neuromancer as a good example) Buffy tried regularly to probe deeper within these issues. Rather than simply make a powerful female character by making Buffy Summers talk and act like a man, Buffy struggled with the tension between the traditional feminity she aspired to and the badass destiny she couldn't escape*. The problems she faced were also particular to her being a young woman and she seemed convincingly a woman, rather than a male character in drag.   

That said... the show was not without its more problematic moments, particularly as related to Faith, who often felt like a thinly drawn bad girl slut, designed for men to both get off on and disapprove of. And in particular the way the show treated Xander, and the way that treatment changed over time got increasingly problematic.

When Xander first shows up in the Buffyverse, he's harmless and abusrd.  Yes, his constant hitting on Buffy is annoying and tiresome, but the show treats it as annoying and tiresome (or, occasionally, endearingly pathetic). But, particularly in his long-terms relationships, Xander is the proto-typical Nice Guy Asshol; rather than critique this, the show grows progressively more fond towards him as a character as it goes along. It also becomes harder to stomache Xander's behavior as he moves out of high school. 

The HU post highlights what for me is a major turning point on these issues: When Riley issues Buffy an absurd ultimatum that she is correct for turning down (I'll just leave it at that) and the show uses Xander as a voice of wisdom chastizing her for doing it. My guess in this case is that the story's need to have Buffy be tormented trumped writerly concern for Buffy's empowerment, but it's still an awful moment.  

The show also loses some of the complexity w/r/t its point of view on Xander as it goes along, and this tracks with (although I think it's just a correlative relationship not a causal one as the HU post seems to indicate) a number of other problematic elements, like Faith, or the powerful-woman-goes-mad-with-power-and-must-be-stopped plot line with Willow or everything having to do with the female half of the brother-sister God duo that comes to Sunnydale to find the Key. 

My point here is not to knock Buffy for being insufficiently feminist, but simply to point out that this shit is hard to do, particularly when you're playing with genre tropes that have sexism hard wired within them. Joss Whedon, for example, is one of the few male screenwriters who is clearly thinking about these issue at great depth and with seriousness, and his record on this issue-- one in which he's increasingly identified from project to project-- is still mixed and complex, even in a show with a powerful woman at its core and a slate of female writers. 

 

----

*(I'm not suggesting that for a female character to be convincing, she must be feminine. The four friends in Sex & The City are plenty feminine, but for the first couple seasons, they are written as stand-ins for gay men (the writer's have discussed this overtly over the years) and do not actually behave or talk like any woman I've ever met, even on the Upper West Side. I simply mean that the tension between traditional male power-- like being great at killing people in hand to hand combat-- and traditional female gender roles is not a problem that men have to navigate). 

Ricky Gervais On The Daily Show

By Isaac Butler 

I can't really find the words to describe the dizzying.... heights? lows?... that this Ricky Gervias interview a/de/scends to over the course of seven minutes.  Just amazing:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart
Get More: Daily Show Full Episodes,Political Humor & Satire Blog,The Daily Show on Facebook

 

"Asian Food" Is a Lot of Different Kinds of Food

By Isaac Butler

So I've been making my way through this season's Top Chef, and a very odd thing has been going on that I feel needs mentioning, namely the treatment of Chef Beverly and the food that she cooks. For those of you who dont' watch the show, Beverly has staked out a reputation for herself by crying all the time, being impossible to work with, working at a very slow and detail oriented pace, getting bullied by the white female chefs of the show and making the same kind of food over and over again.

It's that last point that I really want to zero in on.  For what gets raised in episode after episode (and in Last Chance Kitchen, where she' currently reigning champ) is that she keeps making "Asian Food" and that her dishes are the same-old same-old.

We don't get to taste the food the contestants make, obviously, and thus it's hard to tell whether or not Beverly's food repeats the same profile over and over.  But I want to say that "Asia" is a huge continent with a wide variety of cooking styles, techniques and flavors. And if you narrow that down and go "Ah, well, clearly they're talking about East Asia" and you ignore most regional differences within the countries themselves, you still have several major cuisines that are commonly found in the United States (Thai, Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, Malaysian/Singaporean, Cantonese and Sichuan) all of which are quite different from one another. (If you drill down deeper, it gets even more complicated. Malaysian cuisine has three dominant food subcultures within it, all with different ethnic/class backgrounds and very different histories etc.)

On a technical level, Beverly has demonstrated a diversity of techniques that some of the other chefs lack. No one said that Sarah was just churning out the same old same old when she made risotto twice in a row. Heather made the exact same cake for two challenges, and won once with it. My beloved Kevin-- the hobbity runner up to the Voltaggio Brothers-- made bacon-inflected comfort food for every single challenge.

Given that the complaint about Beverly's repetitiveness is overtly tied to the flavor profile being "Asian" within the show (whatever that means) it's hard not to see this as some kind of odd chauvanism towards cuisines that the judges are perhaps less familiar with. People who specialize in farm-to-table comfort food, regional Italian cuisine or other Western forms can bend every challenge to that and they're discovering and displaying little nuances. Add in that multiple chefs have said disparaging things about Asian food on the show and it just starts to feel kind of offputting.

In other words: Bring back Anthony Bourdain. 

Thoughts On Season One Of Homeland

By Isaac Butler

This has been the year of infuriating-but-compulsive TV viewing in the Butler/Love household.  First there was Game Of Thrones, which alternated between beautifully acted, brilliantly rendered moments and sexposition set in cheaply built rooms that would look more at home in the BBC I, Claudius. And then came Showtime's Homeland.

Homeland, if you don't know by now, was a new espionage thriller about a secretly-manic-depressive CIA agent named Carrie (played by Claire Danes) who becomes convinced based on somewhat ambiguous information that a newly rescued POW and Marine Sniper named Brodie (played by Damien Lewis) was "turned" by an Al Qaeda muckety much named Abu Nazir during his eight year captivity.  The show follows both Carrie's attempts to thwart whatever Nazir may be up to (with the guidance of Mandy Patinkin's Saul Berenson, her mentor) and Brodie's attempts to reintegrate himself into his life with his wife (played by Firefly's Morena Baccarin) and his newfound celebrity.  

The show has a number of things going for it. As an extended metaphor for Bush-and-post-Bush America, having an actually unhinged CIA agent trying to bust a clearly-damaged veteran is rife with possibility. And Claire Danes is-- as My So Called Life fans know-- incredibly good at crying, which she has to do at least once an episode. And as Danes begins illegally spying on Brodie (this isn't a spoiler, it happens twenty minutes into the first episode) the show has some fun with the narrative possibilities of you watching a scene and watching someone watching a scene. 

The show's secret weapon, however, is definitely Mandy Patinkin who seems to have decided that this project is the one where he's going to prove he's one of the greatest actors alive.  I don't know exactly what happened, but something in this show has freed Patinkin from the competent shtick of his Criminal Minds work.  In every single episode Patinkin surprises with some little nuance, whether it's the smallest shift of facial expression or vocal pitch, the furrowing of a brow, or (most effective) his I'm-going-to-murder-you smile. It's terrifying. And given that every other actor in the show is working through pure (and generally effective) brute force, the delicacy of his performance is a welcome shift.

That said, the show is not without its problems, however. It's got racial representation problems out the wazoo. It's got shoe-horned in nudity that's even funnier and more pointless than Game of Thrones. Everyone seems to have forgotten until about the tenth episode that the CIA is legally forbidden from domestic spying. It takes place inside of a suburban-Washington that bears no resemblance to the real place (there aren't roadhouses filled with Neo-Nazis in Northern Virginia, it's the Democratic stronghold of the State and a tech corridor). 

And it's got a serious weak link in Damien Lewis. Given his good work in shows like Life and Band of Brothers, this is shocking, but Lewis seems to have decided that, as we're supposed to not be able to tell whether Brodie is telling the truth or not, he'll deliver most lines with all of the authenticity of a game show host. Particualrly embarrasing is a scene set in Gettysburg where Brodie explains to his son The True Meaning of Christmas Bravery with a monologue that makes you beg for an Aaron Sorkin rewrite.

And yet... and yet... the show is very, very compelling.  Given that it's a thriller, and it's goal is to make you watch until the next episode, and that most television thrillers are pretty bad at doing this without resorting to the cheapest kind of button pushing, this is no small feat.  The mystery at the core of Homeland-- which, it turns out, is not the mystery you think it is-- is genuinely interesting.  And the turns the show takes are surprising. The writers plant a lot of seeds early on in the show that pay off in unpredictable and thrilling ways (none of which, obviously, I'll spoil for you here).

In fact, I was completely on board and prepared to write this show a qualified-rave review, until its finale.  I won't say that much about it here, except to say that it's a textbook case of what happens when writers are unwilling to make difficult decisions about their material, or to follow through on the choices they've made. As a result, the show's final ninety minutes reloes heavily on deus ex machina to set up a second season where the premise of the first doesn't have to be too radically changed. Having seen shows like Friday Night Lights and Breaking Bad and The Wire embrace the difficult positions their stories have put them in, the ending just feels like one giant cop out.

 Many reviewers have praised the finale, saying that Homeland did a great job of navigating the hurdles that having to continue the show for a second season presented it.  But if narrative choices are making you think about business realities, how good a job did the show really do?

Oh Thank You, Mac Rogers

By Isaac Butler

May I present to you, Upstairs-Downstairs Abbey:

 

 

Women's Work

by 99 Seats

We're a good month, month and a half into the new TV season (yeah, it's a TV post, what of it, you want to fight about it?) and it appears that the networks got the same memo this summer: A) if it works on cable, do that and B) do shows about women. Sort of.

It has seemed, to me, like a season full of shows revolving around women (if not, written by women, at all). If you buy into the idea that television, in addition to being a vehicle for advertising, is a kind of national subconscious, it makes you wonder what we think of these women. As the balance between the sexes, in terms of power, money and career, ever so slowly tips, is this push for shows about women an attempt to pander to a rising demographic? Or just retreads of old tires to catch a trend. I'm not entirely sure. But we have gotten a wide variety of characters on display. So...there's that, right?

Of course, that wide variety isn't, well, quite so wide. We have two shows from Whitney Cummings, a stand-up comedian, one of which is a star vehicle, the other, a pretty standard CBS, classic mold comedy with lots and lots of raunchiness. Honestly, I'm not a prude or anything, but the hour of 2 Broke Girls I could stand was just plain filled with smut. Lots of talk of three-ways, masturbation, tons of on-the-job sexual harrassment (all played for laughs), and generally just plain dirty-minded. Listen, I watch The League and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. I don't consider myself a shrinking violet. I still found it shocking to find on a network program at 8 pm. It would have helped, I guess, if the jokes weren't lame, recycled crap. Imagine what a 12-year old boy would have written, if he was asked to come up with a TV show about two girls living together and you've pretty much written the first two episodes of 2 Broke Girls.

At the other end of the spectrum is the somewhat (in some circles) controversial New Girl, created by Liz Meriwether (in full disclosure: I know Liz; she was in a playwrights' group I ran a while back and I rather like her). Yep, there are things about it that may make you want to crawl up the wall. But there's also some damn fine writing, good ensemble acting and the conundrum of Zooey Deschanel. I know I'm supposed to hate her and find her insufferable. But I don't. I don't even find the character insufferable. Just...a touch confusing. Because, let's be honest, she's cute as hell. I don't know that I've met someone that cute who's that awkward without some serious mental problem. Even for TV, it's a headscratcher.

The two women I think gettting short shrift in all of this are, technically, on opposite ends of the spectrum, but I think they would get along just fine in some other, alternate universe: Emily from Revenge and Jane from Prime Suspect. Both are quickly becoming required viewing for me. If you haven't been keeping up, Revenge is a textbook guilty pleasure: it's soapy, melodramatic and awesome as all get out. It's a revision on The Count of Monte Cristo, with a sweet-faced young lady doling out the righteous revenge on the wealthy denizens of the Hamptons over the course of one summer. It's damn good fun, especially in times like these, to see bad people  get their comeuppances. At the center of it, though, is Emily Thorne (played by Emily VanCamp), who plays the line between total sociopath, willing to use anyone and everyone in order to get what she wants, and truly righteous avenger very, very well. So far, the show has even given her main nemesis, played by Madeleine Stowe, a bit of a soul. Like I said, it's soapy, but addictive.

Prime Suspect, as I'm sure you're aware, is an official American version of the classic British series starring Helen Mirren (TNT's The Closer has long claimed to be an unofficial one). I don't know the British series, but will definitely check it out, if for no other reason than to compare. In the American version, well, it's a fairly standard cop procedural. It's even pretty standard for a cop procedural starring a female lead. Crimes happen and Detective Jane Timoney solves them, with a snappy wisecrack and a jauntily cocked hat. One thing that do amp up is the sexism. Oh, my. The male cops on this show are SO sexist. Brian F. O'Byrne really needs a moustache to twirl when he's sending Jane off on obviously "women's work" assignments. It's thick and pervasive and feels both accurate and old-fashioned. The original series premiered in 1991, which isn't that long ago, but there's something about sexism here that calls to mind shows like Life on Mars or Mad Men, things set in the past. In a way, like with black presidents, our media is way, way ahead of real life. We're used to female detectives from, well, basically any cop show since Hill Street Blues, all serving without significant sexism. But the reality...maybe be different. And what Prime Suspect feels is real. Real in that they all seem like real cops. Including Jane. We get our standard cliche stuff (her live-in boyfriend has a young son and a snooty ex, who Jane regularly belittles and, on one occasion, blackmails into allowing an overnight visit), but Jane feels, if not original (because she's not) but truthy. And fairly hardcore. In the pilot episode, we get a police funeral (because what cop show is complete without one of those) and a tense little scene between Jane and her main cop antagonist, Brian F. O'Byrne (the character has the appropriately Irish name of Duffy). At the end of a little back-and-forth about how his precinct is his home and she's ruining it by being a woman, Duffy says to Jane something along the lines of "And watch, you'll tell me I'm your favorite because you know where I stand." That's how these relationships unfold, right? You expect her to say something winning and charming so he can start thinking, "Maybe she won't so bad." Not our Jane. She spits back, "You need to find a new home." And walks away. It's a nice little moment.

Listen, folks: it's TV. It really is primarily a vehicle for the delivery of advertising. It comes from a male-dominated world and is aimed primarily, still (and probably for a very long time), at a male-dominated audience. I wouldn't go so far as to call these shows and these particular female characters green shoots or anything. But it's better than a bunch of scantily clad women doing nothing interesting. Oh, wait. Never mind. Nothing's changed.

Charles Burns Did Liquid Television

By Isaac Butler

I didn't know that.  Here is one of the results:

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Clear Eyes. Full Hearts.

by 99 Seats

As I mentioned, I've been catching up on pop culture things* from the spring and that has meant a nearly marathon viewing of the fifth and final season of Friday Night Lights in hopes of being caught up by the final episode. That aired on Friday and I wasn't caught up, but I wasn't too far behind. Now I've watched it, pulled myself together and can write about it.

Isaac is a big fan of the show and still working his way through the season, so out of deference, I'll put all of my spoilers below the fold. Isaac, once you've finished it, come on down.

Sherlock

By Isaac Butler

I'm a bit late to the Sherlock party, having missed its television run and its first release on DVD. Now that it's on Netflix streaming, Anne and I have just completed the first season.  Here are some thoughts about it:

What, exactly, is the value of intertextual reference? Sorry to start with such a pretentiously worded question, but it's exactly the query provoked by Steven Moffat's televised update of the Sherlock Holmes mythos. You see, this Sherlock exists in today's world, rather than the late 19th century. Watson (played by The Office's Martin Freeman) keeps a blog this time around. They still live at 221B Baker street, Mycroft and Moriarty are still around and Watson is (sadly) once again a veteran of an Afghan War.  

Throughout, the series teases you with fun Sherlock Holmes inside jokes and references. And these do a good a job of flattering the audience into thinking they're smart and well-read, but beyond providing fan service, it's hard to see what value they bring to the table.  The show casts no interesting interpretational light on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's work, nor, beyond placing it within a literary tradition, does using Sherlock Holmes as a contemporary character provide much of a twist on the shop-worn tropes of the genius-borderline-autistic-detective genre (House, Bones, etc.). The original League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, in other words, this ain't.

Indeed, if you pull away the fact that characters are named Mycroft, Watson, Holmes etc. what you are left with is a stylishly directed, excellently acted predictable genre exercise. It's compelling television, to be sure. Your attention won't waver a second during each of the ninety minute episodes. And while it's much better than House or Bones, it's fairly comparable to the cop-shows-with-a-twist that currently populate the USA Network. In other words, it's the British White Collar. 

Now, I love a good episode of White Collar, don't get me wrong, and like that show, Sherlock skates by on its considerable charms.  Martin Freeman, in particular, is essential. That man might be the single most endearing actor working in television today.  The opening sequence of the show, which is largely just Freeman's Watson waking from a PTSD-style nightmare, hooks you immediately, and so long as the show is lensed through his character, it's overwhelmingly successful.  Things get dicier when the show focuses more squarely on Holmes (rather than on Holmes-via-Watson).  The improbably named Benedict Cumberbatch does a great job with the nigh impossible task of portraying Holmes, but the brilliant asshole detective has become  an enormous pile of cliches since the days of Doyle. Rather than reinventing that pile, Moffat et al dive right into it for a good swim. Again, if what you're watching for t is Holmesian mythos, this is probably part of what makes the show exciting. 

The visual style of the piece can't be beat.  The editing, which often involves one scene erupting out of the shadows of the last shot of the previous scene, is particularly wonderful. Given the somberness of much of the visual palette, the jaunty Masterpiece Theatreesque harpsichord and horn score reminds us to laugh, and the show's use of text messages (which appear legible to us, floating ghostlike out of their phones) is great. 

Least compelling are the mysteries themselves.  It's true that we might not possess Holmes' encyclopedic knowledge of forensics, photographic memory and deductive power, but unlike Holmes, we are possessed with television viewer logic. As a result, we get ahead of him. The first mystery is solveable through TV logic roughly twenty minutes before Holmes figures it out, and in the third episode (which is a compendium of smaller mysteries) two or the mysteries are solveable simply by the old Scooby-Doo rule that if a character is introduced who has no reason to be in a scene, they probably did it. The second episode, meanwhile, is pretty much a failure. It is the least Watson-lensed, and the mystery eventually leads them into problematic Orientalist territory not that far removed from a Fu Manchu novel. 

 Sherlock is stylish, well-acted fun. It does not meaningfully comment on its source material, nor does it really expand the possibilities of the Mad Detective genre. Moffat's real skill as a writer and show-creator is fan service. His scripts are clever enough to flatter viewer intelligence without ever challenging them. He positions intertextual reference in such a way that you feel good about yourself and smile with recognition. Every episode has one moment where they shoe-horn in Holmes telling a character everything about themselves based on small details of the way they dress or stand.  He creates a compelling story that doesn't run out of gas until you're near enough the end that you don't mind. And his dialogue is always charming.  It's easy to see what he's finding such success with Doctor Who. Perhaps I was not the right fan to be serviced, as I'm a bit more resistant to Sherlock's charms than others. Still, I did enjoy the show, and look forward to seeing it's season-ending cliffhanger resolved, whenever it might be that I can get it without working too hard to find it.