Television

Classic Trek: Yeah, It's Good

2008-09-14T19:30:00.000-07:00

I am watching the first season of Classic Trek (birthday present!), and I have reached the conclusion that it was a pretty darn good television show.

I've alway viewed Classic Trek fondly as the granddaddy of the Star Trek universe, and I'm a fan of the movies. And there are episodes such as "Space Seed" and "City on the Edge of Forever" that are true classics in every sense of the word. Unfortunately, it is easy for Classic Trek's positives to get lost amid the silly music and blinking lights and the, by our standards, hopeless special effects. So, yes, us geeks like it, but otherwise . . .

That's how I approached my viewing: me and my geek-dom. Upon viewing the first season, I must make a case for the show as truly well-crafted television. I have listed some of my arguments below:

SPECIAL EFFECTS

I'll deal with the hard one first. Yes, by our standards, the bouncing ship on a string is a little pathetic, but considering the standards of the day, the special effects weren't too shabby. They are only slightly worse than Lucas' in the first Star Wars (which came along nearly ten years later). Star Trek effects were done on an extremely tight budget (it is hard to imagine, these days, how comparatively poor television used to be, even taking into account that Paramount executives were probably tightwads). The skill of the effects speaks to some very, very dedicated effects personnel.

Additionally, the science-fiction part of the effects is quite forward-thinking. I don't mean the wooshing doors which are just annoying. (As Gene Hackman says in Superman II, "With all this accumulated knowledge, when will these dummies learn to use a door knob?") But the ship's library is very smart (really kids, the Internet didn't exist back then) as is the turbolift (with handholds, which I like better than later designs) and the sickbay med panels (when I went to see my father in the hospital two years ago, we walk around his floor until we found the monitor that was tracking his heart information. Not really all that different!)

Okay, granted, there're a lot of bulbous chirping lights, but as Tom Paris points out on Voyager, garish lights you can snap on and off are a lot more fun than panels you just tap.

Out of all the technology on Star Trek, though, the thing I consider most prescient is the communicator. Sure, they had walkie-talkies back then, but it takes real smarts to imagine something as small as the communicator Roddenberry put into the crew's hands. Not until the last five years did cellphones reach that size.

SCIENCE-FICTION PLOTS

Classic Trek used every single standard science fiction plot ever invented, and then it reused them. There are the episodes where people age too quickly or too slowly or too weirdly. There are the episodes with evil androids (sorry, Data, although Lore was pretty evil too). There are the episodes with the kid(s) with telekinetic powers. There are the MUST DESTROY UTOPIA episodes. There are time travel episodes and false gods episodes ("Q" anyone?). Star Trek has them all and added a few really stupid ideas, like "Spock's Brain", just for fun.

What surprised me, watching the first season, is how seriously the writers took these ideas. I think in some corner of my mind (based, I imagine, on what I have read about Paramount at the time) I believed the studio never really "got" Star Trek. I must have transferred that information about the studio bosses to the Star Trek writers and assumed the writing was a hackneyed attempt to pretend to be sci-fi.

Well, that may have been the studio's attitude, but the writers themselve made a solid effort to create consistent episodes that work on a science-fiction level. That is, the sci-fi element is threaded through the plot, it isn't just dressing for the plot (which happened in the 1980's; I've written elsewhere about why that doesn't really bother me).

DIALOG

McCoy-Spock-Kirk exchanges are (rightly) touted as good writing. What I hadn't realized was how modern the dialog could get. There are a number of scenes where Kirk and McCoy have exchanges that could show up in Bones (Booth and Bones) or Stargate (Daniel and Jack). In the episode "Mudd's Women," McCoy is going on and on about why Mudd's women are so attractive; Kirk makes a suggestion to which McCoy responds, "Sure, but it wouldn't make my med panel go 'bleep'" at which point Kirk looks at him blankly and says, "I don't know what you mean." Kirk could be Bones saying, "I don't know what that means" to the latest pop culture reference from Booth. It is very funny. (And yes, I do think the sexual innuendo is deliberate, and yes, there is a lot more of it on Classic Trek, and yes, the studio heads probably didn't get it.)

FINAL THOUGHTS

Three Seasons: The first season of Classic Trek appears to be the best. I've rented episodes from season 2 and season 3, and even the best of those seasons ("Turn-about Intruder" and "The Enterprise Incident") don't show the attentiveness I have seen so far in the Season 1 episodes.

Spock-Kirk-McCoy: When I teach Argument/Persuasion to my composition students, I usually describe "Spock" as the logical approach to argument; "Kirk" as the emotional approach; and "McCoy" as the ethical approach. I now think I've been wrong. Kirk has been stereotyped as an "overgrown boyscout": no brains, lots of brawn, action, action, action. And of course, Tim Allen did a magnificent protrayal of this stereotype in Galaxy Quest.

But after watching Season 1, I think Kirk is actually the ethical member of the triumvirate: he is the one who makes decisions based on what is best for humanity or best for his crew (after getting Spock and McCoy's input). It isn't his fault that the writer's change his moral base (ethics needs a moral base) every episode!

I also think Shatner had it in him to be a better actor than he has been treated. I think nowadays with all the money television has, he would have gotten a good coach who could have helped him smooth out some of that start-stop dialog. His sense of comedic timing is impeccable, and his physical acting (other than when he is falling out of chairs) is excellent; he obviously understood how the role was supposed to be played (as did Nimoy with Spock, only apparently Nimoy annoyed people less when he made his demands).

Utopia v. Dystopia: Star Trek often paints itself as a utopia-centered show (and yes, okay, Roddenberry wanted it to be utopian). However, the first season of Classic Trek is much more dystopia-centered than utopia-centered. I believe that Star Trek, ultimately, is a dystopia phenomenom and that its dystopia status is inevitable; in fact, I would argue that all science-fiction writers eventually end up dystopia writers since dystopia provides conflict. However, I will grant that Star Trek tried really, really hard to be utopian in the 1980's.

Stargate to House: Story Arc as a Necessary Evil

2008-05-20T16:07:00.001-07:00

I recently reached Season 5 of Stargate. Season 5 is when Daniel Jackson ascends or dies or, at least, leaves the show until he gets a better contract.

I remember hearing about the incident back when it originally happened. My reaction at the time was, "Oh, another actor who thinks he should be the center of the script!" (my apologies, Michael Shanks). Now that I have more investment in the disappearance of Daniel Jackson's character, I went onto the Internet to discover why Michael Shanks took a year off.

I discovered yup, he came back when his agents re-negotiated a better contract, but I'm more interested in the explanations Shanks gave to interviewers at the time: namely that his character had become superfluous since the show was doing this whole conspiracy/a million-military-episodes arc: not much need for a language-guru archaeologist.

Shanks' reasons may have been a contract ploy, but they happen to be accurate. In Season 5, Daniel Jackson basically spends every episode playing straight man to Jack. Which is very funny, but not exactly character-driven or in keeping with the show's original feel.

All this analysis of Stargate is a big lead-in to the following: I find the story arcs of most shows incredibly dull.

Weird segue, huh? But I agree with Michael Shanks' analysis; I too think Stargate morphed from "our fun group visits another interesting planet this week" to "watch next week to see if the good guys took over a particular outpost yet" type of show. I've always found the former approach much more engaging than the latter. "Watch next week to see if the good guys took over a particular outpost yet" is inevitably linked to "what's the big story arc this season?" and as previously stated, story arcs just don't captivate me in the same way a tightly plotted episode does. I was rarely interested in the arcs on Buffy (with one exception--see below). I gave up on Angel because of the story arcs. And I have about as much interest in the "conspiracy" arc of X-Files as I do in the composition of plastic.

Here's what I can't figure out: do most viewers prefer arcs or do viewers put up with them for the sake of the characters?

If you watch how shows unwind, usually the first season is a collection of individual episodes: plot-driven, tight, and non-arc-related. By the time you hit Season 4, however, everything is arc-driven (with the exception of Star Trek, thank goodness). Granted, by this point, the only people watching are die-hard fans; hence, the writing is all about, "Will so-and-so finally do X, Y, or Z in this episode?" The writers assume the viewers have long-term viewing and emotional investment with the show.

And I don't want to. Have investment. I figure I have enough problems with investment issues in my real life; why create more? I like certain characters; I get a huge kick out of Jack and Daniel's relationship on Stargate (and a bigger kick out of the unintentional or intentional homoerotic element that, like it or not, I am SURE attracts a certain number of dare-I-say female fans). I love Mulder and Scully. I am incessantly amused by David Boreanaz's ability on Bones to be completely different from his Angel self while still being David Boreanaz. (And I like the rapid-fire dialog.) But I simply can't go on caring. I don't want to go on caring. It's like American Idol. I was interested when I watched last year, but I can't remember anyone's name now--well, except for Sanjanya, bless him.

There's nothing particularly profound about my disinterest in becoming emotionally attached to television characters or, even, my huge interest in plot-driven episodes (with a touch of character interaction to satisfy my need for subtlety). But my non-profound reactions do bring up the whole issue of "Why do people enjoy . . . " fiction, a particular show in the first place?

Is it the story arc? Is it the characters? Is it the suspense? Is it the need or desire to "connect"? Is it emotional? Intellectual? Logical? Is it about imagination? Are we forced to invest in TV characters (you can't get the created universe without the writers' story arc, darn it!) or do we WANT to invest? Is it all the gadgets? Is it personal--what people get is entirely individual and the story arc is the only way to deliver "whatever it is" to as many people as possible?

My theory is that story arc is the only way to deliver whatever it is people really want: that is, we are looking for something other than the arc, but the arc becomes the vehicle and, like it or not (I say to myself), the arc is the only decent delivery system.

Maybe, just maybe, without the arc, we wouldn't get the wry, self-deprecating yet wholly untrustworthy Garak or the utterly entertaining, self-aware and ambiguous Spike. Maybe, without an arc, I wouldn't appreciate Samantha Carter's practicality (most normal woman character in all television: I kid you not) or Cuddy's snappy comebacks: "Is your yelling designed to scare me because I'm not sure what I'm supposed to be scared of. More yelling? That's not scary. That you're gonna hurt me? That's scary, but I'm pretty sure I can outrun ya."

Perhaps, without a story arc, I wouldn't look forward to Jack's unflappability or General Hammond's stoicness. I certainly wouldn't learn that Teal'c likes vibrating hotel beds! And perhaps, without the story arc, I couldn't appreciate all the fun details (so smart to move Wilson's office next to House's) and other such touches, such as ending and beginning Season 1 of House with Mick Jagger's "You Can't Always Get What You Want" and the final pay-off of Sarah and Grissom (which I realize is over, but I stopped watching CSI 2 seasons ago).

Maybe, just maybe, the story arc is a necessary evil.

A few arcs I admire:

Buffy, Season 2 is the smartest story arc ever created: it combines a fundamental/classic plot (boy dumps girl) with a supernatural/mythic twist.

The House arcs are always very, very good. However, when I borrow the seasons from the library, I never watch the arcs, just the individual "cases."

On Star Trek, I've always liked the Borg arcs. However, I've never cared for the Cardaissan arcs. I LIKE the Cardaissans: great bad guys. But the arcs are very military/very spy-capture-torture stuff. To be clear, I have no ethical problems with military/spy-capture-torture television/films, just no interest (my apologies, all Bond fans).

The amazing show Dead Like Me is a continuous story arc. It isn't soap operatic, but both seasons together are like watching one long story. It is also unbelievably good: the writers/producers could give Whedon a run for his money. The show is smart, insightful, human, funny, and has Mandy Patinkin, the stunning Britt McKillip, and an excellent heroine (Ellen Muth).

Buffy & Riley, Buffy & Spike

2008-05-20T16:06:00.001-07:00

I'm currently watching Buffy: Season 5 (just finished disc 5). Based on the travesties of Seasons 6 & 7, I'd forgotten that Season 5 is actually, well, pretty good.

It doesn't have as many classic episodes as the other seasons. Despite its weaknesses, Season 4 has at least three classics: "Pangs," "Something Blue," and "Hush" (oh, and "Superstar"). Season 5 really only has one: "The Body." I like "Intervention" personally, but I don't think it has that quality, the quality that makes one remember an episode for itself, rather than the story arc it belonged to.

Having said that, I do think Season 5 is well-written. It has a consistency about it that Season 4 lacks (and I'm not even going to get into Seasons 6 & 7!). If I remember correctly, there was a strong chance Buffy would be cancelled after Season 5, and the writers made a real effort to create a big, Buffy-worthy send-off.

Which brings us to the handling of Buffy & Riley. I was very impressed by the break-up writing for Buffy & Riley. Compared to the break-up writing for Anya and Xander--okay, I said I wouldn't get into the last two seasons. In any case, Buffy & Riley are handled extremely well. I found their break-up entirely believable and, even, inevitable.

To be clear, I am not one who loathed Riley. I am also not one who takes sides on the Buffy & Angel v. Buffy & Spike debate (except to say, I think Buffy & Spike were handled very badly in . . . OKAY, I WON'T mention the last two seasons). I actually quite like Riley. But he and Buffy would never have worked and even though Buffy went running after him, I think it's just as well Riley missed her.

Riley needs to be needed. Now, to an extent, we all need to be needed re: Xander's "comfortadore." But Riley doesn't just need to be needed in a Maslow's heirarchy kind of way, Riley needs to be needed in a "define me" way.

That is, Riley needs someone to tell him how to be needed; for another type of gal, that would work fine, but Buffy, for all her self-reliance, is not into managing her relationships. And her relationship with Spike points the distinction.

Spike is the ultimate romantic; even when he was William, his relationships with all women (including, we later learn, his mother) are founded on emotional highs. This isn't the same thing as chivalry by the way--that's Angel's gig. But Spike defines moments around him in terms of desire, lustful, affectionate, and fanciful. This makes Spike easier to control than Angelus (bad Angel) since Spike is willing to sacrific dreams of revenge for good onion rings. This also makes Spike (and I quote him), "Love's bitch," but, and herein lies the lesson, this is Spike's nature.

Spike isn't waiting for someone to define him. He's already defined. When he decides to love Buffy or rather when he decides that loving Buffy is inevitable, he goes at loving her (or stalking her) with all of himself. He doesn't wait around for Buffy's signals. He doesn't even wait around to see if she approves, and her lack of approval doesn't alter Spike's fundamental personality in the slightest.

Riley, however, needs the signals. He needs to be given definitions after which he is fine. This is one reason Riley becomes much more interesting once he re-enters the military. The military gives him definition. Now, there's an "every authoritarian institution is bad" theme going on in the last three seasons of Buffy which, other than being rather adolescent, also crippled a number of possible plot lines; I don't think the military MADE Riley want definitions; I think Riley is attracted to institutions that give him definition. There's nothing bad about that, and I respect Riley for recognizing it and going off to a life that will ultimately give him more comfort than Buffy can.

This brings us to why I think the Buffy-Spike relationship had much greater potential than, ultimately, it was given. In the last two seasons, the writers gave rather facile excuses for not promoting the Buffy-Spike relationship such as, "But Spike is evil." Yeah, sure, but the show had a regrettable tendency (repeated at the end of Angel) to pick and choose when exactly to remember characters' evil sides. I maintain that Spike's quest for morality gives rise to much more difficult questions of free-will, goodness and evil than, perhaps, even Buffy writers could handle.

In any case, I don't rest my defense of Buffy-Spike on the quality of Spike's evil. I rest it on the level of comfort Buffy feels around Spike. I think this is the key to the relationship; I think, to an extent, it is the key to every workable relationship (on television and off it). From the beginning, Buffy has no problem talking to Spike, and Spike has little difficulty comprehending Buffy. They speak the same language. To an extent, they even think the same. Until Spike starts stalking Buffy, she keeps her home open to him. She yells at him and then asks him to watch her family. She stops by his crypt at every opportunity.

I'm not saying that Buffy is secretly in love with Spike. She isn't in Season 5; I'm not sure she ever is. But she feels comfortable around Spike. Spike is sure enough of his own personality to take Buffy as she is. In Season 1, Buffy says to Giles (concerning one-episode-boyfriend-Owen), "Five minutes in my world, and he would get himself killed." Buffy finds no comfort in people who need her for what she can give them, whether the "what" is excitement or definition. Instead, Buffy finds comfort in people who love her but don't need her and go on being themselves (Giles, Willow, Angel, Xander, and Spike: interestingly enough, this means that Buffy finds comfort in people who may, ultimately, leave. If she had told Riley she needed him, he would have stayed; she told Angel she needed him, and he still left--thus the risks of loving people who have their own definitions and agendas).

I believe this desire for comfort outweighs all other types of love. Lust comes and goes. Affection is a long-term investment. Comfort is what people truly seek: to feel comfortable, feel like one can relax. In some Maslow's heirarchy way, this is the kind of love everyone is seeking: this person gets me, this person talks my language, understands what I'm trying to say. And really, what Buffy needs isn't someone who needs her to need him but someone who gets her and doesn't fall to pieces as a result.

High School Xander

2008-05-20T16:04:00.002-07:00

I've been rewatching the second season of Buffy. Like many people, I've seen plenty of Buffy; I've developed opinions regarding Angel, Spike, Willow, Giles, Buffy, each season, the excellence of Principal Snider, the humor of Joss Whedon, yadda yadda yadda.

However, other than a very decided opinion on the stupidity of Xander's non-marriage to Anya (the writers' fault, not the characters), I haven't spent much time thinking about early Xander or High School Xander.

Watching Season 2, I've come to appreciate all over again how well-written and funny the show is. I've also come to appreciate Xander's character and, naturally, Nicholas Brendon's portrayal of Xander.

Joss Whedon has said somewhere that Xander is basically "Joss in high school," only (quoth Joss, not me) much better looking. Nicholas Brendon isn't really my type (I prefer rugged actors like Robin Sachs of Ethan Rayne's fame). Still, he is cute, and yet, and here is where we get to Nicholas Brendon's awesome acting, he manages to sell the whole I'm-a-geeky-unpopular-kid-who-uses-humor-as-a-defense-mechanism persona.

When you consider how much Seasons 1-3 of Buffy rely on faux high schoolers, the success of those seasons is remarkable. I believe in the teenness of Willow, Buffy, and Xander in a way I never believe in the teenness of Smallville's cast. Nicholas Brendon's acting is part of the reason. He captured the essence of 16-year-old guy; he used whatever background/memory/experience/observation he had to give us the mannerisms and emotional responses of a male teenager.

To return to Xander the character, the success of Xander the character rests, I believe, on Xander's humanness. Xander is fundamentally good, but he isn't heroic-rush-to-the-rescue-and-look-soulful good. He's just average guy good, real life good. Even in "Inca Mummy Girl" where he gets to play the romantic hero, he does it in a very human, 16-year-old boy way. He shares Ho Hos! He tells silly jokes! He takes Inca Mummy Girl to a dance!

Xander is the guy who is brave in spite of being freaked. He is the guy who does the right thing eventually. One of the most mature/human things Xander ever says is after he returns from his hyena/pack phase. To Giles he says: "Shoot me. Stuff me. Mount me." Yeah, he was being a jerk. It's over. He'd rather not remember. And he's never going there again.

Xander's one flaw is a tendency to hector. But again, this tendency makes him human. It isn't so over the top that you start to detest him; it isn't so understated to make Xander too good to be true. I hold Xander more responsible than Willow for the whole Xander-Willow fiasco (Season 3). Yes, yes, I know that in general terms, they are equally to blame, but Xander has a tendency to take a situation and run with it. It's a type of me-me reaction that accompanies hectoring. It's, well, it's so 16-year-old guy.

And yet, this is also the Xander who buys Cordelia's dress without telling anyone. He always protects Willow (watch the show carefully to see how often Xander puts Willow before everyone else). Also, as I've stated elsewhere, I believe Xander is the only one who really understands how lonely Buffy really is (here Xander stands in for Joss).

Lastly, Xander is just funny; Nicholas Brendon has excellent comedic timing. In my favorite episode of Season 2 "I Only Have Eyes For You," Willow makes scapulars for everyone. Xander responds by saying, "And what are we going to do when we find the spirit, Will? Flip it?"

Ohmigosh, I'm laughing so hard, I can barely write.

Okay, so maybe you have to be an English teacher to think the transposition of the words scapular and spatula is just hilarious, but my point is, the joke works to a large extent because Nicholas Brendon makes it work. It's one of those word jokes that are easily lost until you've watched a movie a couple of dozen times (like the "Moby Dick" joke in Finding Nemo--yep, really, it's there). There's lots of those jokes in Buffy, and the ability of Whedon's cast to deliver said jokes deadpan is a huge part, I believe, of Buffy's success.

So kudos once again to the first three seasons of Buffy and extra kudos to Nicholas Brendon's Xander.

Why Didn't Anyone Tell Me About Columbo?

2008-05-20T16:04:00.001-07:00

I grew up without a television set; nevertheless, I was aware of shows like The Brady Bunch, not to mention The Addams Family, and, later, Family Ties, Cosby, and Soap. I watched them on friends' televisions, my grandparents' television, and the occasional television that we rented. Yet somehow, I missed Columbo.

I'd heard about Columbo, of course, but for all I knew it was one of those odd 70's shows where people stand around in yellow and orange kitchens, having pointless conversations accompanied by incredibly boring camera work. (Guy one talks. Guy two talks. Guy one talks. Guy two talks. Pan of kitchen. Guy one talks.)

But Season 4 of Diagnosis Murder isn't available yet, so in desperation, I ordered Columbo over Netflix.

I love it! Yeah, it is more or less the same plot over and over and over, but sometimes, it gets downright clever. The camera work isn't that bad. The acting can be quite good. Peter Falk is adorable. The clothes (now that the 70's have come back) are surprisingly modern. The timing is excellent. And the whole thing is so very relaxing.

I should state here that I enjoy television that doesn't demand too much investment. There's this idea in our culture, which I have addressed elsewhere, that if something doesn't MAKE ONE THINK or MAKE ONE FEEL, that thing must be shallow and a waste of time. But I'm a huge advocate for the well-made piece of entertainment. It doesn't have to much me THINK and FEEL; it just has to satisfy my entertainment needs.

I'm also a big believer that anything can be judged to a standard, but that it should be judged to an appropriate standard. There's no point comparing Columbo to War & Peace, but it is perfectly okay to compare it to, say, Diagnosis Murder and other murder mystery shows.

In fact, the producers of Diagnosis Murder were producers on Columbo: they use the same approach, which is to tell the audience the identity of the murderer right off the bat. I actually like this approach. I was never one to try to guess the murderer anyway. I'm more interested in the detection process, how the murderer will be caught (which is probably why I like forensic type shows). The payoff is that the writers can make the murderer as cunning as possible; they don't have to drop incredibly obvious clues. The one catch with Monk is that Monk's brilliant observations are really, well, the sort of thing police do catch. However, in the interests of playing fair, the show can't make the clues too obscure (the audience can't be too surprised when the murderer is revealed). The downside is that obvious clues pit the audience against the detective: why can't he figure it out faster than us? But Columbo (and Diagnosis Murder) avoid this.

And of course Peter Falk, like Tony Shalhoub, makes a great detective. He is smart, tenacious, and unflappable. And he has all the required tics and idiosyncrises. I have mixed feelings about idiosyncrises. The detective has to have them to make him/her memorable: a detective like Monk is all about his idiosyncrises. However, the idiosyncrises can get distracting. I personally prefer sarcastic Monk to totally freaking-out Monk (although the Alice Cooper episode with freaking-out Monk is worth the freaking-out).

Likewise, I prefer subtle Columbo to bombastic Columbo. In the pilot, Falk played Columbo as low key and tough. When the murderer said (they always say this), "You just won't give up, will you?" Falk ducked his head and gave this slow, private smile. It was utterly charming and very subtle.

Yet in the next few episodes, Falk was all over the place. It was almost as if the director said, "Hey, they love Columbo's idiosyncrises. Give us more!" so he did. I was very disappointed.

Now he's settled down to somewhere between the two, which I can handle. In any case, Falk reminds me of Leslie Jordan (completely different personality type): short men who can walk into a scene and completely steal it.

This isn't the same thing as Dustin Hoffman stealing a scene because he acts well; Falk (and Jordan) can do it through good-old fashioned radiating charisma. It's a remarkable thing to see. Part of it, I think, is that something that Charles Grodin, Craig T. Nelson (I've been watching Coach episodes lately), Richard Dean Anderson, and Thomas Haden Church all have: the ability to make you laugh by lifting an eyebrow or just looking blank. It's something about the way their faces are constructed. (By the way, Thomas Haden Church is totally underappreciated for his excellent comedic talents. He is the master of the deadpan.)

Closing tangent: I've noticed all the above examples are men; this is nothing against the excellent comedic abilities of, say, Dawn French (Vicar), Emma Chambers (Vicar), Jane Leeves (Frasier) and Melissa Peterman (Reba). However, after a brief glance through IMDb's top comedy movies, I'm forced to the conclusion that women are not called on to play the "straight man" very often.

The one exception I could think of is Gillian Anderson, who does it very well. There's an X-Files episode where Mulder and Scully go to a town where, due to some astrology thing, everyone's personalities are accentuated to the nth degree (turning the teen flirts of the high school into man-seducing psychopaths: it's a kind of Buffy meets Amityville Horror deal). Mulder gets even more obnoxious than usual, and Scully minds it much, much more than usual. There's this ongoing fight about the car, and how Scully never gets to drive, and about how far she has to pull up the seat (Gillian Anderson is only slightly taller than me at 5'3" and David Duchovny is over 6'). It's totally hilarious, but it's all played straight. Great stuff.

Back to Columbo: if you want to veg (and yes, in my world, vegging IS okay), check out Columbo: non-demanding, tons and tons of fun.

Blathering On About House

2008-05-20T16:00:00.001-07:00

These are the dog-days when I correct papers and then correct more paper and then correct more papers. I'm home much of the time and in the interests of being fair (to the students and to myself), I take breaks and watch shows.

Lately, I watched the first season of House. I noticed a few things that interested me. One of the main things I noticed was how thoroughly fleshed out the show was right from day one. I've formed the conclusion that when a producer/director has a vision--a particular way he/she desires a show to unwind--it has a tremendous impact on the quality of the show.

If, on the other hand, the show is like the technology/consulting firm I worked at which couldn't make up its mind WHY it had merged, then all you've got is a bunch of characters, a cool set, and a few ideas.

The next thing I noticed was that Wilson lies A LOT. I didn't realize this the first season because, gosh darn it, Wilson is so nice. But in his gosh-shucks way, he lies all the time. And yet House puts up with him, and I think House puts up with him because Wilson lying makes life interesting and because Wilson isn't wrong or stupid with his lies. House tends to associate himself with people who will expose him, and Wilson does that. He just does it by lying.

The third thing I noticed was that Chase is actually very, very funny. There's a scene where House decides to actually visit a patient. Foreman and Cameron are all "Wow, he's going to see a patient!" But Chase says, "I don't know who I am anymore" in this dead-pan way. It is very funny. He is also more amused by House than the others. I think this was smart writing. On the one hand, it made Chase less sycophantic than House sometimes paints him. On the first hand, it makes Chase's betrayal of House that much more awful. And yet comprehensible. And House takes it (and gives Chase grief for the rest of his life).

Moving on, I must mention Jeremy Brett's Sherlock Holmes which I have also watched recently. It's Christmas time (not Holiday time--this is my blog; it's Christmas time), and every Christmas, I watch, "The Blue Carbuncle" from the Sherlock Holmes series starring Jeremy Brett.

And I appreciated all over again how wonderful that series is. The thing that makes it so incredibly wonderful is that the directors allow the culture to exist without making big, "DID YOU NOTICE HOW CHAUVINIST THEY ARE? DID YOU NOTICE HOW IMPERIALIST THEY ARE?" comments.

In the episode following "The Blue Carbuncle," "The Copper Beeches" a young governess is offered a position by an extremely odd man. She is offered the position through an agency, and the woman who runs the agency pressures her into accepting what is clearly a bizarre/predatorial situation. The woman really should protect the young governess, but she doesn't. You feel the load of being an independent female employee in the early 20th century. But yet--and this is important--nobody comments on it. The director doesn't make a huge point of it. Sherlock Holmes and Watson never mentioned it. They take the assumptions of the culture for granted.

And yet the scene's treatment is too marked to be accidental. You feel that the director cared enough to be honest without being made preachy or nervous by Conan Doyle's material.

I feel the same way about the 1980s Miss Marple movies versus the recent Miss Marple movies, which I loathe. The 1980s versions present Christie's world intact, honestly. The recent versions put their own agenda and badly written scripts before Agatha Christie's vision.

In the novel turned movie A Murder Is Announced, for example, two older women live together. They are friends. Agatha Christie never comments on the relationship. It wasn't unusual in that day and age. It didn't come hung about with possible labels and possible inferences.

In fact, it didn't necessarily mean anything sexual at all. And it didn't necessarily not. It was an age when people were allowed a great deal more freedom with their sexual orientation than they are now. Really! (The very lack of speculation meant that Cary Grant, for instance, didn't have to declare himself. Thank goodness because I don't think Cary Grant would have known how to declare himself. He would have gone to therapy instead, and thereby, destroyed the very sexual ambiguity that made him such a fantastic actor in the first place.)

But in the recent Murder Is Announced, the two women aren't "friends" or roommates. They are lovers, and Miss Marple gets to make some very sanctimonious, very modern speeches about being true to oneself.

Now, get this: in the book and in the movies, one of the women is killed. In the 1980s version, the devastation and anger of the survivor is superb. It strikes you right to your heart's core. It's REAL.

But in the recent version, ho hum, another bad day for lesbians everywhere.

Ironic, huh?

To bring this back to House, I think Shore is trying to do the "no judgment, just showing people and life" thing. Not completely--hey, it is an American show--but to an extent. Which is rather unusual. More power to him!

Getting Snarky About Anti-Television Rhetoric

2008-05-20T15:55:00.001-07:00

I'm rereading Kathleen Rooney's Reading With Oprah, a book that I read about the time I wrote my thesis and which I found enormously helpful. Rooney creates a scholarly and surprisingly objective response to the OBC phenomenon and its fall-out. In general, the book is an attempt to understand the patterns of high and low culture in America or, rather, the perception of high and low culture in America (I think the latter is more probable than the former, personally, since my experience is that most people read/watch whatever they want. Unfortunately, I think Rooney may have been influenced in her writing by the academic tendency to define problems into being and then be shocked--shocked!--that such problems exist).

In general, the book makes some valid points, and I recommend it; however, half-way through, Rooney finds it necessary to explain to the reader why she thinks OBC failed in its objectives (before Oprah herself cancelled the televised version of the club). It is here that Rooney's argument falls to pieces, and it falls to pieces because Rooney doesn't understand television.

Rooney claims that the problem with OBC (which in general, she is very generous towards) was the format--i.e., no matter how good the books, the format of television would have produced a flattening effect whereby interesting/well-rounded novels were reduced to a few applicable labels.

I read that and thought, Has Rooney never attended a graduate-level class? Or a non-televised bookclub, for that matter? Girl, I hate to mention it, but that's par for the humanities course. (Interestingly enough, the bookclub I now attend, which is composed mainly of ladies from my church, is far less reductive [to borrow Rooney's term] than most bookclubs, which just proves that reading and analyzing scriptures all your life has its payoffs).

Now, granted, Rooney has a point. I've never been a fan of the packaged-this-is-your-life approach to literature but my dislike of this approach extends beyond Oprah. I have argued many times--in my thesis and elsewhere--that if you want an in-depth, passionate discussion about a piece of art, go to the fans (book and television). However, in order to bolster her argument, Rooney proceeds to make the extremely reductive argument that television is, by its very nature, stulifying and simplistic.

"[A]t this point," she writes, "one must do more than announce that TV flattens the complexity of things (which you'd have to be a fool to deny that it does) and leave it at that" (my emphasis).

Well, I guess I'm a fool, but I'm a fool who knows a lot more about television than Rooney does. (She goes on to produce several run-of-the-mill arguments: television is aimed at the lowest common denominator; it infantilizes viewers; it destroys the imagination: all this because of its commercial nature . . . Since up till this point in her book, Rooney displays a passing appreciation for the commercial nature of publishing houses, her sudden dislike of commercialized art sounds a little, uh, choosy.)

In any case, for someone who tries very, very hard throughout the beginning portions of her book to be a non-snob (although her dislike of genre fiction kind of gives her away), this "television is simplistic" argument kicks Rooney way off her egalitarian pedestal.

And it is impossibly stupid. The issue is not "Is television complex?" or "How can television be complex if it makes money!?" the issue is "TELEVISION ISN'T BOOKS!"

The latter statement would have given Rooney enough ammunition. If she had said, "The two mediums are incompatible: the kind of well-roundedness achieved by literature is not the well-roundedness aimed for by television," that is perfectly sane and defendable. There was no need for her to decide that television in its entirety is simplistic, etc. etc.

Such arguments are easy to refute: books flatten reality all the time. Reproduced dialog and in-depth descriptions as well as plots encapsulated in 500 pages are all contrivances and not how things occur in real life. At least with television, you have a constant stream of sensory perception (sight, sound) while with books, all you have is words on the page which don't make your imagination work at all . . . .

And on and on and on.

Since I like both books and television, I won't bother. The point is, however, that if the standards of one medium are held against the other, both will appear flat, overly stylized, and fake. It is frankly stupid to look at television as a failed reproduction of what literature (the true art!) is attempting to do, just as it is pointless to look at novels as a failed reproduction of something that television is attempting to do. (And while we are at it, why not bring poetry into the mix? Wheelbarrows in the rain: how reductionist is that! Oh, wait, maybe poetry shouldn't be held to this particular standard . . .)

And can we please get over the whole "television speaks to the lowest common denominator" argument? Seriously, has Rooney EVER watched the Simpsons?

I've been rewatching CSI: Season I and have been amazed, all over again, at how well-written the first few seasons are. I'm always impressed by seamlessness (one reason Tolkien impresses me): people who write well enough to make it look easy. (I think good art always looks easy from the outside. Bad art appears clunky and mannered and "look at me"!) I'm not just referring to the repartee on CSI but to the ordering of the scenes, the use of external, visual clues to move the plot forward, and the strong characterization of minor characters like Hodges, Ecklie, the coroners, and Greg.

Not to mention the acting, the editing, the directing, and a myriad other choices made by the producers.

"Ah, yes, Kate," my peers in college used to say, "but you are searching for those things; you are intellectually trained to look for them."

Sure, and I'm also intellectually trained to look for nuances in War & Peace, which doesn't alter the fact that is possible to read War & Peace purely for the plot and come away with no particularly in-depth reaction than, hey, a bunch of people died and a bunch of people got married.

The first point being that the things I notice in CSI are there to be noticed, which means that the writers are as smart as me (and much, much better at streamlining texts). In fact, if you watch a lot of television, you begin to realize how well-grounded the writers are in their culture. Television writers insert popular culture, film, and show-based references throughout their scripts on a constant basis. It's a little unnerving after a while. (All these writers holding private conversations with each other through their scripts!)

If the people who dislike television are incapable of seeing those things, well, hmmm, could it be that from television's point of view, they are untrained and uneducated? Well, well, that sure does change the stakes, doesn't it?

The second point: If a thing is made with intelligence, one can find intelligence there, and television is very, very, very intelligent.

Take, for example, my favorite episode of House, the last episode of season 1.* In one episode, you have three plot lines running simultaneously plus an overarcing plot line, which is House's issue with his ex-girlfriend. On top of that, you have the introduction of several temporary characters (the students in the class) who, for the purposes of the plot, must make an instantaneous impression on the viewer. *[NOTE: It is, in fact, the second to last episode coupled with the last scene of the final episode; if you watch the two consecutively, the final scene of the final episode, where you hear "You Can't Always Get What You Want" by the Rolling Stones, is the pay-off for the previous episode.]

And we haven't even mentioned the fact that the writers manage to use House's staff plus Wilson (on top of all those extra characters) to develop various plot points.

Oh, yeah, and then there's the backflashes. And the editing (which is always excellent with House), the acting, the lighting, the dialog, and the camera shots.

And lastly, the music, which is excellent, especially in that particular episode.

And all of it is seamless and self-contained; the set-up is paid-off (at several levels). The episode never jars; it never comes across as clunky. Television can. This episode doesn't. It is truly artistic. Again, one definition of good art could be art-that-makes-you-notice-all-the-hard-work-the-writer-did-and-instead-of-letting-you-enjoy-the-creation-calls-attention-to-itself-on-a-constant-basis. That would not be my definition, but then I don't read the same kinds of books that Rooney does. (In all fairness, Rooney might agree with me, although she does prefer books that "put [readers] through the paces of moral awareness, affiliation, and disaffiliation . . . they encourage us . .. to grapple with ideas and situations different from our own," all of which I find frankly tiresome. I don't, by the way, consider myself to be a lowest common denominator.)

To return to House: this intelligent, sophisticated, multi-layered episode is simplistic? Based on the lowest common denominator? According to whom? By what standard? Because it prevents people from (to quote one of Rooney's experts) "being able to imagine any social order different from the established one"? Does any novel do this? Does any good novel do this? Does any oevure beyond the purileness of Ayn Rand attempt to do this?

Again, the complexity is there. That doesn't mean people go looking for it (although a lot of fans do). By the same token, people don't necessarily go looking for complexity in Jane Eyre, Shakespeare, Catcher in the Rye, or Moby Dick (one of my favorite Lois Lowry passages is from her YA book Taking Care of Terrific: in the book, the narrator's housekeeper is reading Moby Dick which she imagines rather like a cruise with whales, a cruise where Gregory Peck just might show up. The narrator decides that the problem with the world is that most people have lost the capacity to believe that "Gregory Peck might be along.")

When Rooney claims "[Its pervasiveness] is what makes TV's anti-imagination effect so frightening: no one is safe," she means the absence of the kind of imagination she and her experts utilize and applaud. Television provides plenty of imagination, just not the same kind of imagination as one gets from books. But I suppose that concept is just a tad too complex for book-readers to understand.

CSI Characterization

2007-10-09T06:03:00.001-07:00

I recently rewatched CSI: Las Vegas, Season 2. I was able to get the entire box set through my local library (plug for local libraries!) and subsequently watched all 24+ episodes over two weeks.

Watching the entire season reminded me why I liked the show so much when it first came out. (It isn't that I dislike the show now; the fact that I rarely watch CSI: Las Vegas these days has more to do with the fact that the only channel I get clearly is Fox, and I don't want to fuss with manipulating the antennae back and forth. And yes, cable is one of those things I refuse to get.)

What has struck me watching Season 2 is how on-target the Las Vegas characterizations were right from the begining. CSI: Las Vegas is one of the few shows I watch where I like every single one of the scoobies, and their characters function correctly in every single episode.

Now, I want to be clear here. CSI, like Law & Order, is not a DEEP and PROFOUND show. Both shows are very plot-oriented, and the plot is thirty minutes of action to twenty minutes of visuals; there simply isn't space for insightful characterizations. Characterization rests almost entirely on tone of voice and body language. One reason I admire Chris Noth from Law & Order so much is that he does so much with so little. I don't mean he overacts, but he adds these little smiles and grimaces and eye-rollings to his scenes that give him depth even though the depth is largely superficial.

This type of characterization reminds me of the Iliad and the Odyssey where people are constantly characterized by their most remarkable features: gray-eyed Athena, wise-guy Odysseus, lammo Achilles, etc. This is characterization at its most basic: just keep reminding the audience what THIS character is supposed to be.

So, on CSI: Las Vegas, Warwick is the rock (and resident holder of all sex appeal), Nick is the damsel in distress, Kat is the beauty with brains, Grissom is the cool geek, Sarah is the troubled, feminist youth, and Greggo is the CSI wannabe, who, if the show wasn't strictly heterosexual, would be paired with Nick. (The writers used this undercurrent effectively, by the way, when they made Greg's reaction to Nick in Season 2 pure and simple hero worship. It is done unabashedly, and it works well as a counterbalance to the crazy cable guy who also wants to emulate Nick. And it's a nice change to have complicated emotions OTHER than sexual interest displayed on the television screen.)

About Nick being the damsel in distress--for those of you who have watched Buffy, Willow was usually the damsel de jure in early episodes when she was always being captured and, subsequently, rescued. Whedon was quite unapologetic about it--it didn't make Willow weak, and she was so darn good at evoking sympathy with her big, soulful eyes.

Nick doesn't look soulful, but he is the character that the others consistently rescue. I love this. It is such perfect casting. Just as being rescued didn't make Willow weak, being rescued doesn't make Nick unmanly. He is THE nice guy on the show, the good guy, the Xander of CSI. Kat or Sarah could never be the damsels de jure because CBS cares a lot more about feminist strictures than Whedon (until the end of Buffy, that is). By making Nick--the guy we all like--the rescuee, the rescuers can still do all the work, and we don't think any less of Nick for the result.

As for Grissom, I really admire William Petersen. I have a feeling that the integrity of CSI:LV has been perserved as much as it has been (in the face of CSI: Miami) due to Petersen's efforts (he is a producer on the show). He never tried to make Grissom a sex magnet which wouldn't have worked anyway because William Petersen is stocky middle-aged guy to his very core. In any case, Grissom as sex magnet isn't necessary; the storyline between him and Sarah was foreshadowed early on when Grissom was still weird bug guy. Sarah being Sarah, the attraction between them is entirely believable. Sex magnet or not, Grissom's character holds the show together, much in the way I think Michael Moriarty held Law & Order together for four seasons. (I just can't adjust to Waterson--nothing against the actor; it just isn't the same.)

As for Kat and Sarah--they are very pretty women, but unlike the women on the other CSIs, they come across as naturally pretty. For example, Kat is a model-beautiful woman, but she is aging, and she looks it, and her character knows it. And Sarah looks like every single pretty hippie college student I've ever seen in my life. They don't seem excessively glammed up, and if they are a little camera-ready, well, pretty people can work in law enforcment.

Altogether, CSI: LV's characterizations have a patina of reality that CSI: Miami doesn't have (but then I don't think CSI: Miami really cares. I don't know what CSI: NY thinks it is doing. I love Gary Sinise, but the show is Boring with a capital B. I have high hopes for Fox's New Amsterdam, by the way).

Coupled with the characters' patina of reality is a truly odd kilter that, again, I put down to William Petersen. When Grissom starts rambling on about bugs or Maslow's heirarchy or other bits of unexpected trivia, he steps into the presence of those other odd but great detectives--Sherlock, Monk, House--television hits classic territory and survives.

Respectless Television

2007-10-09T06:01:00.001-07:00

I've been thinking about the last episode of the last season of Bones for awhile now. It bothers me so much, I have to write about it.

In the episode, a mother is dying from AIDS. She believes she will no longer be able to care for her mentally retarded daughter. So she kills her. At the end of the episode, Bones goes to prison and tells the mother, "I understand--your motive was love" or words to that effect.

At that moment, I lost all respect for the writers of the show. Which upset me, since up to that point, I'd considered Bones one of the better written shows on television. But there are a few things I can't stand, and I'm afraid the above plot (as well as Bones' reaction to the above plot) is one of them.

I'm not a politically correct kind of person. If I was, I would have referred to the daughter as "a young person with mental disabilities." Having made that disclaimer, it astonishes me how morally purblind television can be about "children with disabilities."

Let's take a look at Booth and Bones' reaction to a child with "normal" abilities. An ambitious mother encourages her "normal" nine-year-old daughter to compete in beauty pageants--veneering her teeth, buying her a corset. Booth and Bones are appalled, and rightly so. The crazy, ambitious mother argues that her daughter LOVES competing; why should the mother withhold something so fun? I've heard non-fictional mothers make this kind of argument on Dr. Phil and wanted to smack them. When I was nine, my idea of fun was dumping two pounds of sugar on my Cheerios; that doesn't mean it was a good idea.

Anyway, Booth and Bones are appalled and angry and snotty to the crazy, ambitious mother. And they don't change their minds when it turns out that beauty pageant pressure was largely to blame for the girl's death. (By the way, the scene in that episode where Bones teaches anthropological heirarchies, with pictures of skeletons, to pre-adolescent girls is great.)

We turn now to the last episode of the season: the primary caregiver of a mentally retarded daughter decides to kill her daughter. So the mother is a sicko. She decides to commit murder because her daughter couldn't possibly have any kind of life without the mother around, which makes her an egotistical sicko. She believes there is no other way to help the daughter. Murder is a probable and plausible solution to this woman. Which makes her an egotistical, sociopathic sicko.

This is love? This is any sane person's definition of love?

Granted, the kid would probably have been stuck in a state-run institution and granted state-run institutions don't have the best reputation. If I remember correctly, I believe there was a chance the kid would be put into the care of a rather nasty individual. And that's all very bad. But let's look at this another way.

The caregiver of a boy with "normal" abilities is going to die. The seven-year-old boy will be put into foster care. The caregiver decides--out of "love"--to kill the child to spare him from the horrible foster care system.

Okay, now, doesn't that make you want to barf?

So, why is it different when the kid is mentally retarded? Why is it okay to poison and/or push mentally retarded kids onto railway tracks (same plot: Cold Case episode)? Because mentally retarded kids couldn't possibly have or want to live like everyone else? Because their desires can't be easily assertained, so the primary care giver must know best? Because mentally retarded kids never recover from the deaths of primary caregivers? Because death is better for mentally retarded kids than institutional living or even life under rotten conditions? Could it be that the writers believe mental retardation is worse than death and the only thing that makes it okay is the wonderful caregiver?

Politically incorrect questions, and House can ask them because he is honestly trying to understand the underlying moral reasoning to people's behavior. But the Bones' writers weren't trying to understand any underlying moral standard when Bones got all compassionate with the egotistical, morally-depraved mother: they were just falling back on a fictional cliche that is too superficial and stupid to be believed.

What will they do next season? Have a mentally retarded child molested by a pedophile, and then have Bones go to the prison and tell the pedophile, "Oh, yes, I understand--you did it out of love"? You can bet Bones wouldn't say that about a pedophile of a "normal" child. But I suppose the comparison isn't fair. After all, in the hands of the right writer, murder can be made to look as sweet and innocuous and heart-wrenching as sending a kid off to day camp. I wonder if Susan Smith's kids feel the same way under all that lake water?

Great Dogs

2007-10-09T05:59:00.001-07:00

I'm not really into animal movies. See my post "Animals That Talk" about why. But I have a soft spot for two TV animals: Eddie from Frasier and Diefenbaker from Due South. In both cases, the dog is used to illustrate character and actually makes sense within the context of the show.

Eddie is Martin's dog. He is also one of the most expressive animals I've ever seen on the screen. I've developed quite a partiality for Frasier. What I like the most is that both Frasier's point of view and Martin's point of view occupy the same space. Although both the intellectual, snobby son and the down-to-earth cop father are played off each other, I never feel--as I do with Everybody Loves Raymond--that they are played at the expense of each other. No one is the bad guy.

Martin, played by John Mahoney, is a great character, and he has a great dog. The dog is used as a plot device and as a joke device. Again, the dog (it is actually two dogs over the 11 seasons) is very talented. He reminds me of The Thin Man dog: Asta.

Like Asta, Eddie and Diefenbaker are constantly on the set. I suppose dogs are easier to handle than kids, but I alway roll my eyes when television mothers have kids and then the kids MAGICALLY disappear for the next, oh, six or seven years. Of course, one isn't supposed to *gasp* mention Murphy Brown, but, well, Dan Quayle was right there, wasn't he? The kid showed up something like 12 times in ten years. Easy to be a single mom under those conditions.

Eddie and Diefenbaker, on the other hand, are constantly at hand. Eddie has to be walked. Diefenbacker rides around in the back of Ray's car. With Diefenbaker especially this is impressive since, unlike Eddie, he is often filmed outside. The directors never forget to include him in shots. I watched an episode recently where the car was driving away. It was likely driven by stunt men, and I figured, "They don't need to include Diefenbaker. They could just say that he was lying down." But no, just as the car turned the corner, Diefenbaker's head popped up. That is cool.

Diefenbaker is also used to illustrate character. He is a deaf wolf who was brought to the non-wilds of Chicago by his Canadian Mountie master, Fraser (played by Paul Gross). Fraser talks to Diefenbaker all the time, responding to Diefenbaker's presumed comments. There's an ongoing joke that Diefenbaker saved Fraser's life once and now he makes Fraser "pay and pay and pay."

Diefenbaker is not as cuddly as Eddie; after all, he's a wolf. But this also serves to elucidate the varying characters of the dogs' two masters. Martin is friendly, old-fashioned, protective of his dog and his sons (no matter how exasperated). Fraser, the Mountie, is kind but also somewhat reserved and aloof. At the end of the first season, there is a heart-rending scene where Fraser believes he must shoot Diefenbaker because Diefenbaker has become a menace to society. Paul Gross doesn't have Fraser cry or even rage. He does a series of confused double takes which are more painful to watch than any great emotion. So he loves Diefenbaker, but he isn't going to smother him in kisses.

And the dog--I don't think it is really a wolf although later the show implies that he is a mixed breed (maybe dog and wolf experts complained)--trots along with Ray and Fraser with interest but without any "all over you" ebulliance. Eventually, you start to believe Fraser's assessment of his own dog!

I also have to give kudos to Newbie's stuffed dog in Scrubs. There is one episode where J.D. keeps moving the dog to scare Elliot. For some reason, it makes me laugh like crazy.

For more great animal TV, check out Creature Comforts, the British version. It is hilarious! And very off-kilter.

Cox, Becker & House

2007-06-06T19:31:00.003-07:00

So I guess I have a thing for bad-tempered doctors with hearts of gold.

Cox (from Scrubs), Becker (from Becker) and House (from, uh, House) all, sort of, fit the above description. But they are different in rather interesting ways. Cox and Becker, for instance, are much more functional than House and not just because of his leg. They have a greater ability to interact with others and, in Cox's case, are much more medically fallible.

In fact, Cox is the most realistic of the three. He is a very good doctor but, as far as I know (I've just started watching the show), not a genius. Becker isn't a genius either, but Becker sets himself apart by willingly staying in the Bronx when he could, with his credentials, make more money elsewhere.

Like the other two, Cox is aware of his own personality flaws (in the episode last night--these are reruns--he tells Newbie, "You want to be me? I don't even want to be me.") Unlike Becker, who isn't always aware of his effect on others, Cox--like House--can deliberately changed his behavior to produce an outcome, such as the episode where he provokes Kelso into taking back rounds--for Kelso's own good.

And Cox has an ex-wife girlfriend and a son and an intern who adores him.

Becker does eventually get a decent girlfriend--played by the very talented Nancy Travis. Like Cox, his personality, while not entirely environmentally induced, is strongly influenced by past unhappiness: multiple divorces, a bad childhood (that's Cox), etc. I'm not saying the writers use that material as an excuse for Cox and Becker's behavior, but it is important to understand their backgrounds in terms of the distinction between Becker & Cox and House.

With House, the producers (who I am now going to refer to as David Shore since Shore is the only one I know [from Due South, another great show]) are doing something rather difficult. House really isn't supposed to be a doctor with a heart of gold. House is really supposed to be a jerk. A complicated jerk but a jerk. The environmental complications--his leg, his lost girlfriend--do not fully explain him. I realize "The Jerk" was supposed to elucidate this, but I thought it was much better elucidated in the episode with the carpet stain. Yes, House plays games, but Shore wanted to make it clear, through that episode, that there's a real part to this guy that can't stand inconsistencies in his environment. It isn't supposed to be this weird thing that House goes through every now and again. It is supposed to BE House. All the stuff he does and says isn't a "front" or bad temper or a coping mechanism or disillusionment (which Cox, for example, portrays very well) but the guy himself. (Although House does have a stinky dad.)

And once you accept that basically House is NOT someone you would really want to spend time with, it gets a lot easier to spend time with him. He manipulates and plays games with people NOT because secretly he is trying to help them be better people (yuck) but because he really can't stand not to know why people do what they do. Other people create chaos, and he doesn't want chaos even though he believes in chaos. He MUST dig out Wilson's secrets. He MUST find out what is wrong with his patients. He MUST know.

Which makes him difficult to be around but a great diagnostician.

What makes all three of the doctors interesting to watch is that all three of them act the role of "fool"--not "fool" in the Ben Stiller sense but fool in the old Shakespearean/King Lear sense. They say things other people don't admit/want to hear. (I must include Cox's ex-wife girlfriend here, especially the episode where she keeps trying out lines like, "I'm not wholly myself when Cox isn't with me" and then saying, "No, it doesn't sound like me, does it?")

Now, I've got a big dose of Jane Austen in me--I believe in appropriate conversation for appropriate venues, but that didn't stop Jane Austen skewering people in her letters to Cassandra. It doesn't really work for effective day-to-day living; it is much better to accept other people's fallibilities and forgive and all that.

But it makes GREAT television.

My Guess: The Next American Idol

2007-06-06T19:31:00.001-07:00

I confess, I watched American Idol this season. I'm being apologetic NOT because I think people should be apologetic about watching television but because I'm usually down on "reality" TV. I don't want reality TV to take the place of good, old-fashioned non-reality TV--like Buffy and such. (CSI is more or less "reality" TV with non-reality characters, much like Law & Order, which is a lot like watching your local news, only more interesting.)

However, I did watch American Idol this season, mostly to listen to Simon's comments and to read Television Without Pity's summations. In any case, I've been surprised at how nobody (that I've read so far) has caught on to why Melinda got dropped.

Melinda was/is phenomenal. She's a true professional. And that's why she didn't win. American Idol is very American in that at some fundamental level we think we're watching, LIVE, an Horatio Alger book. Horatio Alger wrote a bunch of books back in the 19th century about poor boys making good. They were probably all poor white boys but they were plucky and intrepid and made money and moved into the middle class. (Unlike Jeffrey Archer characters, they remained pleasant people and didn't try to kill each other or other people.) And much has been written about how influential this idea is in the American psyche.

Well, yeah. And that's not necessarily a bad thing, no matter what grad-school tries to tell you. And it does explain American Idol. Melinda didn't need anyone's help to "make good." She was already a professional with style. American Idol did give her more confidence but other than that, her leap up the rung isn't quite as far as it will be for . . . Jordin.

Yup, that's my guess. I like Blake, and I think Blake is a very, very gifted young man. But, first, I agree with Joe R. from Television Without Pity that first place really won't do Blake any favors. Secondly, it will Jordin; it will make Jordin's life (I'll pause here and say that for the sake of Jordin's future happiness, I hope that isn't true in the long-term, but I'm sure it will be true in the short-term.) Jordin is not a professional (as far as I know). She's a high schooler with a powerful set of lungs who is the same age as the show. Ha Ha Ha. (I've been reading too much TWP, and I'm beginning to adopt the style. She's not, of course.) The point is, the voting audience can make a difference with Jordin's life, in a way they really couldn't in Melinda's. Based on descriptions of Melinda's graceful farewell (I never watch the result shows; I draw the line at that much substancelessness), I would say that the 29-year-old was kind of sick of the whole thing and ready to walk away. Which is lovely really. But if you're a voter on the show, you're going to want to vote in the person who cares to win. And the person who cares the most, I think, is Jordin.

Critiquing the Critiquers

2007-06-06T19:29:00.001-07:00

I maintain in my thesis that the only people really talking about the arts--as in created works meant for audience consumption--are fans. Academe seems vaguely embarrassed, as intellectuals so often are, by the whole thought of people actually liking--as in enjoying, as in willingly partaking of without complaint--television or popular books. There seems to be this general idea, which one encounters initially amongst teenagers, that anything REALLY popular must be simply dreadful--as in filled with conservative, pro-establishment, capitalistic statements. Unfortunately, this leads many academics who want to explore popular culture to create unbelievably convoluted justifications for doing so. I recently read a book about romance novels by a professor who evidently enjoys said novels; however, she spent several chapters-worth arguing that just because a novel ends in marriage doesn't mean it is anti-feminist; the marriage actually represents a new beginning and a new state of society, etc. etc. She's right, but it would be so much easier if she'd just said, "I'm sorry you detractors think marriage stinks. I don't. Get over it."

Basically, to return to my thesis, I argue that while fans occasionally get caught up in this kind of foolishness, they are principally fans. That is, while they make hurumph noises about the media industry and all the greedy corporations, they are mostly interested in the WORK.

And this is enormously refreshing.

Take for instance, Jacob and Joe R. who critique American Idol for Television Without Pity. I confess, I watch American Idol now mostly so I can read the critiques. They vary considerably from week to week. Jacob is more poetic but less grammar conscious (lots and lots of run-on sentences). He also swears a lot more, so if that sort of thing bothers you, don't read him. Joe R. swears less and is more pithy. In general, although they both utilize sarcasm like a sledgehammar and are more than a little self-aware, making references to their own status as viewers as well as to other shows (academics call this "intertextuality" which means, well, making references to other shows), they do talk about THE SHOW. They talk about how well Ryan Seacreast did that night. They talk about the singers. They talk about the judges. They reference the audience's reactions. They dissect what the Idols wore. They make fun of the Idols' commercials.

Like any kind of in-depth, relentless dissection, it gets a bit tedious after awhile, but then so do academic treatises and said treatises get tedious much faster. And Joe R. and Jacob, without tying themselves into convoluted knots, take themselves much less seriously than your average popular culture academic.

And they often reach heights of perception and poetry. Regarding Sanjaya's release? dismissal? Joe R. writes, "When the time comes [for Sanjaya's last song], Sanjaya changes a lyric to 'Let's give 'em something to talk about, other than hair!' Man, that's so...he is very, very seventeen, is he not? That whole attitude of 'Let me try to deflect your criticism of me by wearing my hair in outlandish and frightening ways, but don't talk about me and mind your own business!'? Very seventeen. As if to prove my point, seventeen-year-old Jordin loves it. Even Simon has to give it a smirk. Hey, he's someone else's problem now."

And Jacob wrote the following concerning a young woman who, during try-outs, wanted to win approval from her mother. I happened to see this particular tryout, and I completely agree with Jacob's assessment.

[This] is really upsetting, for some reason, to watch. I think it has to do with the anger. She's kind of a goober, this girl, and the 'TV pretty' speech is one of the few times she focuses on anything, and it's so sad because she's totally cute, with a strange deep duckly voice and dorky ways, and it just gets worse. 'Um, it did hurt a little, but [my mother is] coming around and supporting me a little bit.' [After the audition, which she bombs] Ryan Seacrest is this close to crying . . . and it's a strange little collage of things that shouldn't make you cry, like Ryan and Taylor Hicks and this weird girl, adding up to something pretty bleak, emotion-wise. I still don't think I've nailed it down exactly, but I think it's the sincerity of her, and the anger . . . and the complete lack of talent, and the fact that the four judges don't get it, but Ryan totally gets it, so there's a whole inside the room/outside the room issue, and no way to protect her.

Uh-huh. And again, all this analysis is coming about because these two guys watch THE SHOW and comment on THE SHOW and have opinions about THE SHOW. They do use their insights to jump off onto other topics, particularly Jacob who knows more about music in his pinky finger than I do in my whole life ever (I'm with Joe R. on this one who writes, "All this time I felt like a fraud because I was recapping this music show, and I have terrible taste in music, but now? I realize that I'm the perfect person to recap this show because everyone on here has terrible taste in music, too! It's like a weight has been lifted."). But principally, the two critiquers are concerned with THE SHOW--whether it is good or bad; what they don't like about it; what they like about it; what works; what falls flat, etc. etc. And I think, really, this is what academics don't get, humanities academics particularly who are SUPPOSED to care about literature and poetry and character development and such: you can't write about stuff, really write about stuff, that you don't love, and you can't love it if you're attaching "imperialistic-ideological-the-underpinnings-of-liminal-culture-ooh-are-we-supposed-to-like-this?-how-class/race/sex-conscious is it?" labels to it.

Which is why, in the long run, television and the fans will win.

Through the Stargate

2007-02-27T19:38:00.000-08:00

A long time ago, when Saturday night actually had shows on that I liked, I watched quite a lot of Stargate. I lost interest after awhile. Probably the show became a saga and sagas usually bore me. But I've started rewatching the show through Netflix. It doesn't have the same enthrallment factor for me as Star Trek or Law & Order or X-Files, but there are some definite pluses.

First, the premise makes slightly more sense than Star Trek. In science-fiction terms, of course. The only aliens are nasty, bad snake things (although more aliens are implied). Everyone else is human. No weird foreheads. No strange ridges. No elongated earlobes. Of course, it is highly doubtful that, absent a universal translator, they would all be able to understand each other. Language evolves, and a bunch of ancient Greeks, ripped away from their original culture, aren't going to speak anything that sounds even like modern Greek, let alone English. But, as E. Nesbit says in The Story of the Amulet, "I think I must have explained to you before how it was that the children were always able to understand the language of any place they might happen to be in, and to be themselves understood. If not, I have no time to explain it now."

Secondly, Stargate is darn good storytelling. There's a rather startling lack of theme. SG-1 goes to a planet. Bad guys are there. SG-1 outwits them. SG-1 goes home. And in the meantime, the audience gets a little bit of mythology and anthropology and lots of statues and stuff. In fact, it is really more fantasy with sci-fi trappings than anything else.

Thirdly, it is a military operation! Thank goodness for a military operation that doesn't pretend to be anything else. Earth is trying to find a way to defeat the bad guys and get allies; there's a notable lack of diplomatic speechifying. And, well, let's face it, fatigues are sexy. Guns are sexy. And those little earpieces that secret agents always wear are super sexy.

Of course, the team breaks protocol about every three seconds. It would be nice to watch a show where the team didn't break a thousand rules in order to go back for that one person or one friend or one artifact, consequently jeopardizing their lives, their mission, Earth and the entire human race. But still, it is nice that there is some structure/heirarchy to the whole operation. (Although I must say that the "President" is a stunningly understanding man who agrees with General Hammond to a truly extraordinary extent.)

Fourthly, they kept the same characters as in the movie. I really admired them for this. There seems to be a (largely American) idea that if you don't have the same actors, you have to create a whole new back story. Timothy Hutton's Nero Wolfe series proves that viewers are fully capable of separating actors from characters and can accept the same actor in different roles or different actors in the same role. It's all fiction. So, I like the fact that in Stargate, Daniel is still Daniel and Jack is still Jack even if they aren't James Spader and Kurt Russell.

Along the same lines, the team is a likable team. This is very, very important to these kinds of shows. I happen to get a huge kick out of Richard Dean Anderson (who I much prefer as Jack rather than MacGyver). He reminds me of Charles Parker from Dorothy Sayer's Peter Wimsey mystery series; they have the same laid-back "ohhh-kay then" kind of attitude. It's a refreshing change from angsty, furrowed-browed heroes (although Jack O'Neill has plenty of furrowing stuff in his past). On top of all that, Andersen is willing to do just about anything. Shortly into the first season, he plays both a caveman and a 90-year-old. In both cases, there's no self-consciousness. You can always tell. Self-conscious actors make the viewer uncomfortable. Andersen doesn't seem to care what the writers throw at him (this was one thing I always liked about Jonathan Frakes).

Plus I like Daniel and Carter. And I really like Teal'c. I think Christopher Judge is a whole bunch of fun as well as a very handsome guy. I admire him for unabashedly acting in Stargate kinds of shows (rather like Kevin Conroy--Batman--who I also really admire; I like it when actors find their range and stick to it).

Another Jane Eyre--Hooray!

2007-02-27T19:37:00.001-08:00

I'm a big Jane Eyre fan. I like 19th century novels, and I like happy endings (which many 19th century novels don't have), so Jane Eyre gives me all I want.

The latest Jane Eyre series is another British production, starring Toby Stephens (as Rochester) and Ruth Wilson (as Jane). The casting is odd but effective. As with Timothy Dalton, the classical description of Mr. Rochester is sacrificed for the sake of very, very good acting.

This means that we ignore the fact that Toby Stephens is a very handsome guy as well as an extremely youthful one. The ages are nearly right (Stephens is currently 37; Ruth Wilson is 25), but it is hard to remember this, just as I can never believe that Zelah Clark and Timothy Dalton (from the 1983 Jane Eyre series) are twenty years apart (they aren't; they're ten years apart). Like many casting choices, Jane and Rochester are a problematic pair--neither are roles you want to sacrifice to novices, no matter how appropriate in appearance.

However, as a relative novice, Ruth Wilson does a splendid job, and I place her up there with Zelah Clark. In fact, in some ways, I think she captures Jane's youthful fascination with Rochester better than Clark.

The 2006 series does a number of other things right, including the selection of material and the use of flashbacks. First, it is carefully, and faithfully, cut to a specific theme. This is the only way to handle those huge 19th century novels where a billion different ideas are presented at once (the plot of Jane Eyre is deceptively straightforward; there's a lot of meat on them bones). The series writers chose a rather modern theme--the search for affection by a young woman starved of any true affection for most of her life--and yet one in keeping with the book. Too often, historical scriptwriters choose modern themes that do not in any way resonant with their non-modern material. Jane Eyre being what it is, and Bronte being what she was, this particular modern theme in no way jars with the material or the setting.

My personal feeling is that the main theme of Jane Eyre is more closely achieved by the 1983 version; it is a theme echoed in Richardson and Austen (however much Bronte would have disliked the comparison): integrity means that one relies on one's own judgment. Jane doesn't run from Rochester because she's a prude; she runs from Rochester because she will not sacrifice her judgment even to her own desires. This is a pretty powerful concept and always modern.

Having said that, I don't mind other approaches so long as those approaches play fair, which the 2006 series does. The modernness of the theme does not detract from the basic non-modernness of Jane Eyre. She is not a 21st century girl, no matter how much her struggles touch her 21st century audience. For example, one of the movie (not television) Jane Eyres has Jane and Helen acting like a couple of wise-cracking junior high students. It makes me wince every time I watch it. (And yes, I do watch it even though it makes me wince.)

To be fair, the Jane and Helen section (Lowood School) is difficult to cast and to script. I was impressed by the use of flashbacks in the 2006 series, and I thought the writers should have used more of them--that is, skip the childhood/Lowood scenes and start with Jane's arrival at Thornfield. However, the childhood/Lowood scenes are necessary; we learn about Jane's passionate nature (later tightly controlled), her treatment by the Reeds (foretelling later contact with the family), her friendship with Helen, her training at Lowood School--all important scenes which help explain Jane's character and motivations. It's just they are so very tedious. I've honestly never seen a presentation of Jane's childhood that didn't either bore me or make me laugh it was so unlikely. The 2006 series has the merit, at least, of being quick.

More on the childhood/Lowood section: one huge problem is that we 21st century Americans have a hard time understanding why a respectable and independent headmistress, Miss Temple, would kowtow to someone like Brocklehurst, so most versions eliminate the headmistress completely, giving the whole school section a rather lopsided, episodic feel. Unfortunately, if she is left in, the section runs the risk of being turned into a dissertation on feminism, which really isn't its point. The Lowood section, like the final section, is more about religion than anything else.

In regards to the final section, with St. John Rivers & company, the 2006 series (thankfully) leaves it in. A great many of the themes in Jane Eyre come to a head in the final section. The casting of St. John (pronounced "Sijin," which for some reason strikes me as so elegant; I never tire of hearing it) is fascinating, partly because the choice once again reflects theme. The 1983 series cast the exceedingly tall, exceedingly blond and exceedingly stern Andrew Bicknell while the 2006 series cast the dark, short, tightly wound Andrew Buchan. Both versions work. The 1983 series emphasizes St. John's domination of Jane; the 2006 series emphasizes St. John's repressed nature (and yes, that is "repressed" in the Freudian sense). Since both domination and repression are factors in St. John's personality, both interpretations work.

All in all, the 2006 series is worth viewing--more than once, if you're me. I like the ending best of all the versions, including the 1983 version. It doesn't leave you quite as bereft (happy ending, okay, now everybody go home), and you get to see the kind of woman Jane Eyre becomes, surrounded by family, friends, and a great deal of affection.

Thoughts of Kate Rewind

2007-02-27T19:34:00.004-08:00

I don't know if anyone remembers the (short-lived) show Century City, but here's what I wrote about it at the time:

I watched Century City this week, and it's pretty bad.

As in bleeech.

I usually stay away from law firm shows, mostly because I find them boring as in "this is less interesting than my job." [At the time I wrote this review, I was working at a law firm as a legal secretary.] Law firm shows are basically soap operas with court room scenes.

The exceptions have been Law & Order and The Guardian, the latter mostly because why pass up an opportunity to watch Simon Baker do anything? but The Guardian went soap two seasons ago, and I gave it up. [The Guardian is now off the air; I really did like it for its first couple of seasons; Dabney Coleman played the father--he also played the father in the Tom Hanks' movie You've Got Mail--and I thought the father-son dynamic was well-played. The downside was that the father-son dynamic was basically two emotionally stunted men trying to relate to each other, which meant lots of dead-end conversations, which I found amusing--rather like watching lots and lots of Spock & Sarek--but apparently, the powers-that-be decided the relationship needed more DRAMA. That's when the show went soap.]

[Back to Century City.]

However, the idea of Century City is so very cool, I thought I'd give it a try. It's set about sixty years in the future, and the legal debates are over things like human clones, etc. etc. Very cool and moreover, an interesting juxtaposition between sci-fi and contemporary culture, since sixty years isn't that long but long enough.

It was possibly the dumbest show I've seen on TV in a long time, and yes, I am including My Big Fat Obnoxious Fiancé (which had some interesting sidelights on human nature). Century City was mind-numbing in its stupidity. The "hero"-—the brash, young lawyer who is going to save the world—-was so annoying, I wanted to dropkick him through the plate glass window, and if it had been an Angel episode, he would have been. It makes me appreciate that however bad the shows I like get, there's bad and then there's REALLY bad.

The brash, young lawyer ends the trial sequence with this big, emotional argument that is completely groundless legally and instead of, well, dropkicking him through the court room's plate glass window, the judge lets him go on and on and on at the jury. His argument? It’s okay to break the law in this one case because it's, you know, really, really, really important.

So much for the law. I'd like to see my lawyer try that one in court: "Yes, he smashed into her car, resulting in permanent bodily impairment of 75%, but in this case, he really, really, really didn't mean it, so you should let him off."

They also used up something like fifteen of their ideas in one episode.

It's a failure waiting to be dropkicked into TVland's oblivion bag. [And it was!]

Unless this is par for the course on legal-eagle shows, and I just missed it up until now. If so, they're hideous! Ban them all!

[And, regarding my final statement, I don't appear to be wrong. Crime shows in general seem to do okay, but legal shows have a hard time treading the line between Boston Legal-what-do-we-care-we're-just-having-fun-besides-where-else-would-ex-Star-Trek-actors-go?-dom and accuracy. Perhaps because real law is kind of tedious and kind of dull and kind of mind-numbing and kind of goes on for hours and hours before anything remotely fascinating happens. This is also true of forensics, but, as the one CSI episode points out, you can always cut the time it takes to do a lab test to make it look more exciting. The end result IS still accurate. But if you try to cut a lawyer's argument to make it more exciting, you cut all the times the other lawyer said, "Objection! Objection!" while filing annoying documents with the judge, and the end result isn't accurate at all, at all.]

And More X-Files

2007-02-27T19:34:00.003-08:00

A while back, I wrote out my theory of At Least One. That theory applies to my current ideas regarding X-Files. It is necessary to remember, at this point, that I have not seen all the X-Files seasons nor have I ever read any of the fan theories. Basically, I have no idea whether my ideas are something that everyone else in the X-Files universe already knows. Probably.

My idea is that at least one person (me) thinks Skinner is head-over-heels-fall-down and-faint-in-love with Scully. And I'm willing to bet that at least one person (not me) thinks Skinner and Scully should have ended up together.

What is so fascinating to me about Skinner and Scully is that, taking the Whedon model (Angel, Spike) into consideration, Skinner ought to be the romantic hero; that is, the guy who sacrifices himself for the woman and puts the woman first and never thinks of anything else (which is how Skinner always comes across to me when he is around Scully) should be the one who ends up winning her heart.

But he doesn't. She ends up with Mulder, which is, of course, what we all expected but is also unexpected. And I think the reason for the unexpectedness is Duchovny's rendering of Mulder.

Mulder does sacrifice himself for Scully. But he plays him as rather remote. Scully, however logical and scientific, is clearly (I think) enamoured with Mulder by the time of the movie (being enamoured never stops her doing her job, however), but Mulder always seems to be holding Scully off with huge "Back off!" signs. He cannot live without her, and his enemies know that. But at the same time, he will never commit, never get close, never (really) admit any need for Scully. Even when Duchovny is given such lines, he almost always plays them "off."* I don't know if this is Chris Carter. I suspect not. I suspect it is Duchovny.

And I think this is fairly clever. The point, for me, of the Mulder-Scully relationship is that the final "I love you! I love you!" confrontation is unnecessary because they have already been living a "marriage" for most of the seasons. Their relationship is the relationship of people who are so far gone in terms of intimacy with another human being, Mulder's "Back off!" signs are completely pointless. Which will not, of course, stop Mulder from putting them up. And Scully is willing to put up with Mulder putting them up. Which consequently gives the relationship more edge, more reality, than most romantic TV relationships.*

To return to Skinner, I like his character, and I love that he does turn into moody, obsessed guy whenever Scully shows up and that Scully (as far as I know) and Mulder (as far as I know) seem completely unaware of this aspect of his character. But I'm really glad Scully kisses him in the boat episode. The guy should get something for his trouble!

*My favorite indication of this "offness" coupled with reality is in "Memento Mori" when Scully tells Mulder that she has cancer and instead of getting maudlin, he says, "I refuse to accept that." I LOVE that line: "I refuse to accept that." Somehow, it makes Mulder so much more real and passionate than the usual romantic hero and yet, at the same time, gives you a sense of Mulder's remoteness. Mind you, that sort of inaccessibility is great to watch on the screen, but not so great to fall for in real life.

Voyage(r) Over

2007-02-27T19:34:00.001-08:00

I started watching Star Trek: Voyager, starting with its pilot, two years ago on April 8, 2004 (no, I didn't memorize the date; I looked it up on Netflix). This Saturday, I finished the saga (meaning I can now start all over again!). Following are my overall reactions to the show and my specific reactions to the finale.

Overall, I think the show is the most consistent of the Star Treks in terms of writing. It has few "classics" on the order of "The City on the Edge of Forever" (from Star Trek: Original) or "Sarek" (from Star Trek: Next Generation), but the overall writing is consistently high and seems to entail much more thought than many Next Generation episodes. I have compared Next Generation episodes to old, old stories being told in a science-fiction setting--hence, the mythic and implausible, if delightful, nature of Next Gen plots. Voyager's episodes are more about character interactions or "what ifs" (for instance, what if we contacted a planet that underwent its entire history while we watched).

Of course, the problem with such stories is that while it is possible to lay out a myth in under sixty minutes, it is very difficult to do the same thing with a character or what-if plotline. Voyager episodes tend to aim for complexity, bringing up all the variables and problems of an issue, and then, oops, only got ten minutes left, falling back on a deus ex machina after all. Consequently, as I have often maintained, Star Trek: Voyager has some of the best 2-parters in all of Star Trek history, since in the 2-parters, the writers can work out all the variables and problems without the easy short-cut. ("The Killing Game" is a great example.)

Now, one solution to the deus ex machina resolution is the Babylon 5 approach where you have endlessly complicated and ongoing plot lines. But that sort of thing makes me tired, so I'm glad that, overall, Voyager avoided it.

On the other hand, as Eugene points out, "[O]n Voyager, a few episodes after supposedly going through a . . . cataclysmic confrontation, it's like somebody's rich uncle showed up with a platoon of lawyers, handed out wads of cash, hauled the vehicles off to the body shop, and made the accident 'go away.' Presto chango. The next day you'd hardly known it happened. A good day's work for the insurance company, but bad day for storytelling." This is, I agree, one of the weirdest things about Voyager. One of the best 2-parters is "Year of Hell" (with the multi-talented Kurtwood Smith--That 70's Show). It is a very dark, very gripping episode which explores the problem of time manipulation. Kurtwood Smith's character keeps trying to change single events in the past, hoping that each single event will change his own time period back to the way he wants it. It doesn't work, of course--each change alters the universe in various ways, but he can never recreate the exact conditions he is hoping for. It's a great episode: Kurtwood Smith's character is very much the flawed Ahab beloved by Star Trek writers; as a by-product of "Ahab's" choices, Voyager is caught up in these (mostly negative) alterations and is practically destroyed.

And then, oops, our two hours are almost up, so someone flicks a switch and Voyager is back to its usual self, all clean and new and pretty again.

Now, granted "Year of Hell" was one of those back-to-the-future-we-can-pretend-it-didn't-happen episodes, but the new and improved Voyager shows up even after battle-intensive shows that don't involve time-manipulation. And I always wonder, "Who are the planets that keep repairing this ship?" and "Will they send the bill to Starfleet?"

I think Voyager could have afforded to look a *little* damaged--one of the things I like about Deep Space Nine is O'Brian's constant struggle to keep the station from exploding, especially as he stumbles across Cardassian booby-traps (a great Deep Space Nine episode is when a Cardassian booby-trap goes off, Gul Dukat shows up to gloat and then can't leave the station.)

On to Voyager's finale--when I first saw the finale, I was disappointed. I thought the beginning was very smart (start with the end!) but the end of the episode has none of the gentle sentimentality of "All Good Things" (Next Generation). (I demand sentimentality at certain times.) I also remembered the episode as a cop-out. I don't mind time-manipulation episodes for fun, but I hate having the denouement, the final achievement, rely on time-manipulation.

After seeing the finale again, I have to qualify my initial reactions (to a point). First of all, time travel is an ongoing theme of Voyager (what with the Federation "Timeship" chasing them all 7 seasons). Also, the Borg was Voyager's primary enemy (and such a useful one!). And Janeway's regret over stranding her crew in the Delta Quadrant is, while not a recurring theme, a returning issue (meaning, it crops up when the writers want it to). The finale dealt with all these things. It also dealt with what I think is the true theme of the show: Voyager retains its standards even though it is far from home. Yes, yes, in practical human terms it seems highly unlikely that the ship would retain its crew or its culture. But this is the mythic aspect of the show, and, I think, one of its strengths. Janeway has to hold her crew together and hold them to an ideal without any backup (i.e. Starfleet breathing down her neck). There's an X-Files "The truth is out there" religious element to the whole thing, and it makes for a great theme.

And I think Janeway, as acted by Kate Mulgrew, plays up to this theme very well. The underlying problem, of course, is that while it's fine for God to expect everyone to hold themselves to a standard, it's much less fine when a flawed human does it, and people tend to resent the flawed human in spades. By necessity, Janeway's command style was more in line with the demi-god nature of Star Trek's Original captains than with the administrative, diplomatic nature of Next Generation's captains. Yet I also thought it within character for Janeway's older self to regret the choices she had made. And I thought it within character for her younger self to stick to the rightness of those decisions.

But I sure wish the writers had emphasized all this. The idea--that it isn't worth getting home unless Voyager can get home with integrity--is there in the finale, but it is bypassed rather quickly for the sake of all the other stuff. And the other stuff isn't even the Borg! The finale focuses a lot on the Voyager crew in the future. I would have preferred more emphasis on the Voyager crew after they got home (the second time): Does 7 go see her aunt? Do Tom and B'Elanna maintain their relationship? Does the Doctor really decide to go with 'Joe' as his final name choice? More than anything, though, I would have liked them to focus on the problem of "What is more important? Getting home or how we get there?" I realize that some resolution was needed, but I kind of wish the episode had ended with Janeway making the same decision that had stranded Voyager in the Delta Quadrant in the first place--that is, I wish she had opted for the "Hey, if it takes us sixteen year, it takes us sixteen more years!" option. Thematically, I think that would have been great. It would have underscored the show's repeated claim (shown through the Doctor and 7-of-9) that life, despite suffering and risk, is worth being lived.

As I continue to mull the show over (and begin watching it again), I will probably have more blog posts. For now, as the good Doctor would say, "I must say there's nothing like the vacuum of space for preserving a handsome corpse."

House Stuff

2007-02-27T19:33:00.003-08:00

In case it happens, I want to go on record as stating that I think House and the horrible cop should become friends. (And I don't check spoilers so if it happens, it means I am really brilliant.)

Yes, yes, I know the horrible cop is horrible and is harassing everyone and making everyone's lives miserable, etc. etc. etc. (And I think the resulting dynamic between House and Wilson is excellent writing.) And I also think the cop has crossed a line that House himself wouldn't cross (after all, House stops harassing people once they leave his vicinity). But I think that the cop perceives House as a cancer and all his associates as bad cells feeding the cancer. In other words, he is House, only with a badge and a gun and way too many warrants. (I think the House comparison is deliberate: I got a kick out of the scene, several episodes back, where the cop said to Foreman, "Everybody lies," and Foreman did this little double-take.)

In any case, I think it would be nice for House to have one more friend. He could have nice friend (Wilson) and horrible friend (cop). And THEN he would get in on cases and stuff. The cop could a warped Dr. Watson to House's Holmes.

Of course, how to bring about this "beautiful friendship" is anybody's guess.

Two Types of Science-Fiction

2007-02-27T19:33:00.001-08:00

There are, of course, many, many more, but for the purposes of this post, I am narrowing the types to two: in the first type, the story grows out of a postulated change or advance in science: cloning sheep leads to cloning humans which leads to . . . ; string theory leads to contact with other dimensions which leads to . . .

In the second type of science-fiction, the science-fiction provides the setting but has very little to do with the story. That is, the story doesn't grow out of the science-fiction. The science-fiction simply exists so that a story may be told in that setting.

C.J. Cherryh, Whedon's Firefly, Asimov (sort of) all fit into type 1. Star Trek (and occasionally Asimov) fit into type 2.

I postulate these types in response to my brother Eugene's post The Brave Old New World of Star Trek. While I agree with his description of the Star Trek universe as fundamentally static--and the Federation as an internally rotting utopia that finally, thankfully, gets the boot--I do not consider that the silly, even mind-numbing, philosophy behind the show has much of anything to do with the show itself. I think there are a number of us Trekkies who watch the show for its stories, not for its conceptualization of the future--just as there are a serious number of us who enjoy X-Files while considering the whole government conspiracy angle to be too too jejeune (however, the comparison is not really very fair; Roddenberry seems to have truly believed in his rose-colored concept of the future, but Chris Carter, like Whedon with Buffy, deliberately created a X-Files mythology, and the mythology itself is not jejeune).

In any case, for me, the point of Star Trek has never been to watch the Star Trek crew surviving in the Star Trek universe, but to watch old, old stories with classic structures (problem, climax, resolution) being translated into "sci-fi" (or quasi sci-fi) terms. The best example of this is the episode "The Offspring" where Data creates a child. The plot is from the Greek myth "Pygmalion" where the gods bring a statue to life. In this case, the "statue" is an android similar to Data but more human than Data can possibly be; like all good Greek myths, that situation ends with pathos. It is a terrific episode. There is also "Starship Mine" which is simply just the movie Die Hard, only on a starship not in a bank. Additionally, I've always liked "A Matter of Perspective" which is a murder mystery seen from several different angles. And I get a kick of "Royale" which is one of those you-have-to-complete-the-story-to-win episodes (and involves a you-have-to-beat-the-casino-to-get-out-alive subplot). Due to Picard's archaelogical interests, there are also a few Rider Haggard-type episodes.

It's one big borrower-fest! Which I don't mind and actually enjoy. I like watching old stories in new settings. I love reworked fairtyales (like Tanith Lee's version of "Beauty and the Beast" which takes place in the future and involves aliens) as well as Shakespeare plays set in the 18th, 19th, 20th centuries (anything but the 16th, which is good because 16th century costumes always look so uncomfortable). Voyager is somewhat of an exception since it has the underlying plot of the crew trying to get home. (Check this blog for an upcoming post on Voyager, and its underlying plot line.)

To sum up, most Star Trek episodes are individual stories that just happen to use the same setting and the same characters as that episode you saw last week. With that in mind, I'm not sure the comparison to Firefly is altogether fair. Allowing for the fact that Firefly is possibly the only perfect season 1 on record, it definitely belongs to type 1, presenting a plausible future based on present information/trends. Unlike Whedon's work, Star Trek also has no mythology (or at least, no mythology that anyone who reads history would take seriously). Most importantly, the static nature of the Star Trek universe is necessary. You can't borrow and rework individual stories every week if the universe keeps changing (yes, I know Whedon did it, but like I said, Firefly is the only perfect season 1 on record).

I won't go into the debt that science-fiction owes Roddenberry's attempt but imagine a world without Galaxy Quest, which is as much a tribute as it is a spoof. No Star Trek, no Galaxy Quest. Now, isn't that sad?.

Confessions From the Stand

2007-02-27T19:31:00.001-08:00

I like forensic shows (CSI, Criminal Minds, House), but I don't much care for court room dramas. I'm excepting Law & Order here; I haven't watched L&O in a long time but from what I remember, it was more law and less drama, which I prefer.

The reason I don't care for court room dramas, in general, is that inevitably there is this big confrontational scene where the hero(ine) lawyer confronts a recalcitrant witness and, whilst ignoring about twenty-billion procedural and lawyery rules, breaks the witness down.

I don't buy it. I don't buy it even a teeny, weeny, bit. I think criminals or liars or whatever are much more likely to behave on the stand the way they do on CSI and People's Court--that is, they are far more likely to justify themselves and argue and become defensive or just go on shrugging their shoulders and protecting themselves.

After all, once a case reaches trial, the supposed criminal has already been questioned and requestioned and probably deposed. If there is any lingering sense of guilt, it has had many, many chances to come out. This struck me recently when I watched the HBO movie Mrs. Harris, based on the real-life murder of the Scarsdale doctor. Like many made-for-television-real-life-cases movies, it was kind of a nothing, but afterwards, I watched some of the interviews with the real-life people. They had an interview with Mrs. Harris. Now, granted, it was a short clip and granted, too, I didn't know the context, but the woman quite honestly didn't seem to have a clue that she murdered or caused the death of another human being. This interview was after she'd spent several years in jail. "It was both our faults," she said, and then, "I guess the mistake was going to see [the doctor] that night." Ya think? Ya think that maybe if you hadn't driven five hours with a gun to see a guy you were angry at, he might not be dead? It may have been an accident. It may have been murder. But I'm not sure the woman ever realized or accepted, no matter how much she claimed to love the guy, that her actions, her choices, led to another human being no longer existing in mortality. Don't give me that extenuating circumstances stuff. She drove five hours with a gun, and the guy died! And it was both their faults?

But I think Harris' reaction is much more likely in the court room than sudden tearful confessions. Alan Tudyk's masterly portrayal of the murdering pedophile on CSI:LV is another case in point. The character keeps making excuses without at any point realizing that to normal people, the excuses are as bad, if not worse, than the crime. But he has a moral hole in his conscience. (Which still does not, in my opinion, justify witch-hunting pedophiles.)

I'm not saying that all people who commit criminal acts and all people who go to jail are like this, but in a court-room situation, you are dealing with a person who is either innocent (and shouldn't be confessing all over the place) or is guilty and has already run the gauntlet of guilt-inducements and, whatdayaknow, hasn't confessed. So the idea that suddenly, miraculously said party would suddenly, miraculously break down and confess from the stand is very, very unlikely.

In general, I don't really believe that people can be broken down by having other people yell THE TRUTH at them. Anne Perry used this technique in a number of her mysteries, and Orson Scott Card got into it in Speaker for the Dead. It seems to me that most people, even people without moral holes in their consciences, get rather tired of being yelled at and, since most things in life are rather complicated, find plenty of ways to pick apart the yeller's statements without taking them to heart. Watching People's Court, I've been struck by how human people are, how much they rely on impressions, tones of voices, imagined scenarios, expectations when making decisions and how much they think their actions are justified by impressions, tones of voices, imagined scenarios, expectations.

All in all, real court room dramas are mostly sad, not triumphant. I prefer forensics, those tiny bits of test-tube triumph.

Star Trek Kids

2007-02-27T19:29:00.001-08:00

I'll start with Star Trek: Next Generation since Star Trek: Original did not have an ongoing child star (unless one counts Chekhov). Wesley: Wesley was supposed to be the brilliant genius boy of the show. Hence, he immediately became the recipient of all the loathing people feel towards "I can fix the warp engine in six easy steps" type characters.

This was a pity since the actor (Wil Wheaton) was a somewhat better actor than he was given credit for. Not a great actor. Just better than the aura of genius-child led viewers to believe.

Out of the Next Generation children, I myself far preferred Alexander, and I thought the Worf-Alexander episodes were some of the best Next Gen did. Alexander is Worf's kid and a small bundle of constant and opinionated motion.

Overall, however, I credit Deep Space Nine with the best children: Jake and Nog. The wonderful thing about Jake and Nog is that neither of them was expected to be part of the operations on the space station. Secondly, Jake especially was a downright likable kid, being decent without being either overly Pollyanish or overly bratty.

The nice thing about Nog was that he pushed beyond the assumptions of his culture but didn't become too human. This was true, actually, for the entire House of Quark, wherein Quark (who lives far from his home world) remains wholly himself while expanding beyond his culture's expectations. (This was to an extent one of the themes of the show; Odo and Garak also experience separation from their homelands and are thereby required to adjust and adapt against their wishes.)

On Voyager, interestingly enough, most of the children were seen in relationship to 7-of-9: Naomi Wildman and Icheb. I thought the Icheb character especially effective. In his case, the bright boy of Starfleet persona was somewhat more believable than with Wesley. You feel that this isn't a little adult but a somewhat gawky yet kind teenager who just happens to be bright. He was also a good counterfoil to 7-of-9, and I count it a point in the actor's favor that a (tepid) sexual tension existed between Icheb and 7-of-9; a 17 year old boy, no matter how long he was kept in stasis, would have to deaf, dumb and comotose NOT to react to 7-of-9.

As I understand it, Enterprise had no children. Archer does have a dog which brings one back around to Next Gen and Data's cat, Spot. Not that children and animals are necessarily equated, but I did grow very fond of Spot. (I enjoyed Data's poetry on the subject). I would have liked to see Data get a kid. Like Voyager's Doctor, Data could always supply good fodder for the plot mill.

The Confessable Pleasures of People's Court

2007-02-27T19:27:00.002-08:00

I am occasionally home in the afternoons these days and sometimes, while making lesson plans, I catch some of that wacky daytime television. It is admittedly pretty awful, and the number of psychology-lite shows is truly astonishing. So when I want some real grit, I turn to People's Court.

I get a huge kick out of People's Court for several reasons. The first reason is that the announcer makes zero attempt to be suave. It's pure over-the-top Barnum & Bailey ringmaster stuff: "He's accused of being a cheapskate." "She's a woman with a mansion and SHE wants payback." The point being that I don't mind trite and tacky as long as everybody knows it is trite and tacky.

The other reason I enjoy it is Judge Marylin Millian. She really is the pick of the crop amongst daytime judges. First of all, she is fun to watch. Second, she has a real knack for sizing up people (the trick with these shows is to remember that the judge has seen all the complaints and whatnot before the case gets on TV; she just uses the television portion to verify evidence; so when it looks like she is cutting people short--and this is true for all the TV judges--she is really just moving on from evidence that she has already looked over) as well as her ability to put in plain speak commonsense rules of life.

I look on it as a kind of therapy. I can get very frustrated with my students sometimes, and it is refreshing to have someone else say all the stuff I'd like to say but can't.

For example, there was a lady on one day who agreed to take care of another lady's dog (for money) and then the dog got out and the lady who was supposed to take care of it didn't want to pay for the lost dog. The judge pointed out that if you agree to take care of someone's dog as a service, and you lose the dog, it really doesn't matter much whether or not you INTENDED to lose the dog. You still lost it.

This is enormously refreshing although I'm sure that, like Dr. Laura, it'll get old after awhile, and I'll go back to watching Rumpole of the Bailey episodes while I figure out how to make grammar interesting. I never did understand why people who listen to Dr. Laura would NEED to call her. I KNOW what she is going to say. How could you possibly be surprised that she doesn't think you should have a baby by your drunken, abusive boyfriend who is twenty years older than you? Why would you bother to call and get yelled at?

I think it is "But this time it is different" syndrome. Now, in matters of the heart, I think there is some truth to the "But this time it is different" protestation. I'm not advocating relationships with drunken, abusive boyfriends, but I really don't think there is a one-size-fits-all solution to personal relationships out there. (But people sure want to believe that there is--hence all the psychology-lite shows.)

But with the law, well, the law is the law. Even when Judge Millian feels sorry for people, hey, if you don't have the proof, you don't have the proof. And if you came to court without proof, nice having you but you just lost your own case. And boy, that's nice to hear. I don't think of myself as an especially harsh person, but I get very weary sometimes of all the reasons students have for not getting their work done each week. (Although I try to remind myself that from their perspective, it is one excuse; from my perspective, it is number one thousand and three hundred twenty eight.) If you want to earn 3.0 credit hours, come to class and do the work. Why complicate it with a bunch of excuses?

I think this means I'm getting old.

In any case, it's nice to watch a show where people who behave badly by commonsense standards are told they are behaving badly by commonsense standards. And where women who have babies by drunken, abusive men are told they are stupid. But the men still have to pay child support.

Sherlock: Brett and Everett

2007-02-27T19:27:00.001-08:00

I recently watched Rupert Everett as Sherlock Holmes in The Case of the Silk Stocking. I enjoy Everett in general and, on paper, you'd think he'd make a perfect Holmes. He is almost too handsome, but he has the classic Holmes' profile. He is tall, saturnine. He exudes an off-kilter vibe.

As Holmes on the screen, however, he is all wrong. He comes across as bored aristocrat, a la his role in The Ideal Husband. He is too genial on the one hand, too off-hand on the other. At one point, he comes into Watson's apartment and sprawls on a sofa opposite Watson's fiance. As he exchanges witty conversation with her, he does not come across, even vaguely, as a highly critical and intense misogynist. Most disappointing, he doesn't even come across as particularly brilliant.

I think it is a misuse of Everett. As a detective aristocrat, he would be perfect. He is far more Wimsey than Holmes.

To be fair, I am comparing Everett to Jeremy Brett. I consider Granada's Sherlock Holmes series to be the most brilliant on record with Brett as the standard bearer for all future Holmes. Brett not only has the perfect profile, his face has more roughness, more vulture-like qualities than Everett's. He is a coiled spring, a contained manic-depressive who leaps, at a moment, from low to high energy. He NEVER sprawls. He is private, self-contained with a brain that works 24/7. He is much more Monk than Wimsey. He is also intensely middleclass (this is important to the context: Watson and Holmes are gentlemen, but they are NOT aristocrats; they came out of a class that considered its middleclass status preferable to aristocracy; Queen Victoria had made middleclass conservatism cool).

I also love Granada's Watsons: David Burke and Edward Hardwicke. They play Watson as an intelligent professional man. His intelligence makes Holmes' brilliance more apparent. Neither of them are buffoons. And both of them, Hardwicke especially, have an immense kindliness of manner, displaying decent, gentleman-like behavior at every turn.

Finally, what is so wonderful about Granada's Holmes, produced by Michael Cox, is that it captures the feel/essence of the stories without being simply retellings. Brett's influence and the director's influence on the outcome is apparent. The stories are fleshed out with more details, more perspectives, more nuances--you feel that this is truly Holmes come to life. On the other hand, the series displays a great deal of respect for Arthur Conan Doyle and for the stories.

This is a huge contrast to the latest Miss Marple mysteries (2004) where the writers continually alter HUGE hunks of the original stories. I endured them for awhile, but eventually the producer(s)' contempt for Christie's craft got to me. They alter plot lines. They change Christie's characterizations. They even switch murderers! It never seems to occur to them that the reason people like Christie is because she tells a good story. She wasn't an intellectual writer, but she was a stunning craftswoman, and these would-be adapters aren't even half that good.

And I don't expect them to be. But when you are offered decent material, use it! In comparison, both Michael Cox and Brian Eastman (who does the Poirot movies) have exhibited a strong comprehension of the power and structure of the original stories as well as an ability to transform and visualize that comprehension.

Back to Everett--it didn't bother me that they made up a new story. Making up new stories about Holmes is a time-honored tradition. But their Holmes simply wasn't Holmes. Why not just make the film about some 1890s aristocrat who gets dragged into doing a bit of detecting? (Answer: they wanted to make money off the Holmes' name.)

New Season

2007-02-27T19:26:00.001-08:00

I wasn't too happy with the season premiere of How I Met Your Mother. I thought Season 1 very funny and just plain cute. However, it is a show with a resident bombastic jerk, Barney (Neil Patrick Harris). Harris is perfectly cast and very good at his job (see my post below about great jerks), but he needs to be reined in. Otherwise the show just turns into, well, Two and Half Men: lots of potty humor. Yawn. Yawn. I felt that Barney was expected to carry too much of the premiere. It would be like Hodges (another excellent jerk) being expected to carry an entire CSI episode. In doses, he is fantastic. An hour of him simply wouldn't work.

Hopefully, the show will even out as the season continues. (It could be that they just need to get Alyson Hannigan back into the mix).

Speaking of CSI: Vegas, I was disappointed. The set-up for the cases was blow-your-mind gorgeous. But the mysteries themselves were ho-hum. Even by ho-hum standards. Half-way through the show, I thought, "Oh no. Oh no. They're going to do the Without a Trace thing" where you have fifty minutes of character development to ten minutes of mystery. It was just so "here's another scene where we show you characters reacting to each other." Yuck.

However, the last two mysteries were pretty darn interesting. So I won't give up hope yet.

I didn't see the premiere of House but based on the next two episodes, I would say it is right on the money, as usual. I recently read an article about Hugh Laurie. The article mentioned that a number of networks are now trying to create "hero jerk who tells it as it is" shows. (Justice and Shark, for instance.) Such shows might take off, but the writer correctly expressed some doubt. The fact is House works because of Laurie. It's a British thing. In America, we tend to think of character actors as one-trick ponies. In Britain, a character actor can be fully complex while still remaining on-task (Atkinson in Black Adder; Dawn French as the Vicar of Dibley). Consequently, Laurie doesn't act like a jerk and then act like Mr. Smiley. He retains an inner consistency of idiosyncrasies (and as far as I can tell, never forgets them) along with his flawless American accent and his limp and cane.

Hasn't anyone gotten rid of Ghost Whisperer yet? Yes, I stay home on Friday nights, and I'd like something else in that time slot.

Criminal Minds still has lousy music (although they seem to have punched it up a bit). This is a show that could actually use some more character development (with Mandy Patinkin as the House character). Serial killings are frankly too gruesome for long term consumption. All in all, I thought "The Fisher King, Part 2" was a success. I also have to mention that Gubler (who plays Reid) is possibly the oddest sexy guy I've ever seen on television. He really is sexy, but boy, not at all typical. Kudos. He and Patinkin and Gibson form a kind of triumvirate of intense, sexy, odd guys (with Gibson's "normalcy" offsetting the other two). They are the best part of the show although I like all the other characters, and I think Glaudini is an especially strong character.

Bones was good. I don't really get the point of Tamara Taylor. I don't think scooby gangs benefit from too many additions. Keep it tight and small is my recommendation. I really enjoyed David Boreanaz in the premiere. I think he and Emily Deschanels have great sexual tension, and he was at his most charming. It was like a time warp back to Angel: nice Angel, of course.

There are Aliens and Then There are Aliens

2006-09-07T16:30:00.001-07:00

While watching Star Trek:TNG recently, I thought about the ways in which we humans think about aliens or the concept of aliens. There are basically three models:

Star Trek model: this is also, kind of, the Star Wars model. Aliens are seen as potential friends or at least potential neighbors. Granted the Star Trek model depends on existentialism, reducing all alien races to a few existential characteristics (so that all Vulcans are logical, all Klingons are warrior-like, etc.). Granted, too, the function of Star Trek aliens is to allow human issues to be discussed that, for reasons of political correctness, can't be discussed about humans. Hence, even though all the humans in Star Trek are rational and vaguely agnostic, they are still able to discuss religion with Bajorans and with Worf.

Star Wars follows this model in that the Star Wars universe is peopled by aliens working side by side with no one much remarking on the fact. I prefer the Star Trek version, simply because I loathe (as in detest to my heart's core) Ewoks. Star Trek aliens may be existentialistic but at least they aren't cute!

All in all, this model is remarkably inclusive. It is one of the better side-effects of liberal humanism. Aliens, however problematic they prove at first, can be loved and understood in the long run.

Interestingly enough, however, even in Star Trek, the scariest enemies are bug-like creatures. The Borg is Starfleet's main enemy, but the Borg are still comprehensible. When Star Trek wanted to created a worse enemy than the Borg, what did they do? They brought in the bugs.

Which leads us to model 2: Independence Day. In model 2, the aliens are buggy and evil. They can't be reasoned with. They don't seem to have reasons, just superior technology (that can, nevertheless, be brought to a standstill by a mild, little earth-created computer virus. Yeah, right.) And well, thank goodness for Will Smith, I say.

The X-Files model: In the X-Files model, the aliens are big and bad and buggy, BUT they aren't the real enemy. The real enemy is the government that hasn't told us, the American people, about the big, bad, buggy aliens. In fact, in X-Files, the aliens, or rather the existence of aliens, represent for Mulder belief and hope. The problem is the humans who get in the way of that belief and hope. Men in Black is this model turned on its head. (Yes, the government isn't going to tell you, but they aren't going to tell you for your own sake.)

Personally, I don't know. I think it is possible aliens are out there, although I don't spend a lot of time tidying my apartment for a possible visit. Like any good Star Trek fan, my own sci-fi universe follows the many-aliens-functioning-together-in-the-same-universe scenario (although I leave open the possibility that said alien societies are a tad more complicated than they appear on the surface).

But truthfully, in my heart of hearts, I think Douglas Adams is right. If there are aliens, they don't pay us much mind. They are no more good than your average pompous liberal (such as the Vulcans of Enterprise). And no worse than your average bureaucrat who wants to build a bypass through our galaxy. And if they do make contact, they will be Ferengi wanting to trade. Face it, they won't go looking for the Dalai Lama or George Bush or Al Gore or sincere Hollywood stars or even Queen Elizabeth. They're going to be dialing Donald Trump's number.

Thoughts on X-Files

2006-09-07T16:30:00.000-07:00

I've spent the last three weeks teaching unappreciative students at the local business college, but I'm not going to rant about that. (Other than to remark that some people never leave Junior High--sad, but true).

I've actually moved on from X-Files back to Lois & Clark, but I recently watched episodes from the sixth season of X-Files. I'd heard that some fans felt that Season 6 was a cop-out, the season when--gasp, gasp--X-Files got popular and just went downhill and gave up the, you know, truth and all, man.

Usually, I disregard that kind of complaint. In High School, I had these friends who got SOOO upset when people who hadn't been listening to U-2 before Joshua Tree became U-2 fans: Like, they are so fake, like, you know. I would stand there, feeling bemused, thinking, But aren't you happy that now more people like what you like?

As I've said, some people never grow out of Junior High.

Having said all that, I have to confess that the Season 6 X-Files episodes I saw, although I enjoyed them, didn't have the grittiness . . . no, that's the wrong word, the oddity, the off-kilterness of the earlier seasons. The cases were bizarre, and there was a great deal of humor, but everything else was kind of . . . normal. It was like watching Mysterious Ways, which, don't get me wrong, I liked* but which was not exactly filled with the X-Files mystique.

On the other hand, it is usually so difficult for a show to last beyond its fifth season with any credibility that just the existence of good storytelling in X-Files Season 6 is fairly impressive.

*I really like Adrian Pasdar, although I don't watch much of the stuff he has been in recently (Judging Amy, for instance). Mr. Pasdar is THE GUY who played the psychotic businessman in the short-lived television show Profit. I saw about one episode of Profit when it first came out. I really liked it (it was the episode where he sticks nails in his shoes to pass the lie detector test), but I promptly forgot the show's name and completely disassociated the actor from that Mysterious Ways guy (I mean, Adrian Pasdar showed up on Touched by an Angel!--I just didn't make the connection to psychotic businessman). Nice to know Adrian Pasdur is something of an oddball when it comes to picking parts.

Superman, Romantic Couples, House and More

2006-09-07T16:26:00.000-07:00

I'm in the middle of watching the Lois and Clark saga. This is the first time I've seen the whole thing. It's a lot of fun. I still feel pretty much the same way I did when I wrote an earlier post about the show. However, now that Lois and Clark are engaged, some of the grist has gone out of that mill, and I've been wondering why.

I am an incurable romantic. Well, as much an incurable romantic as a reasonable realist can be. Anyway, I like seeing couples in shows get together, and I really, really loathe shows that spend seven seasons keeping the leads apart. And I really, really, really loathe shows that bring them together and then split them up, Buffy and Angel being the notable exception because Whedon did it so darn well.

But, as noted with Lois and Clark, once the leads get together, there's that whole problem of keeping up the tension/interest, and I've decided that it only works if the characters bring the tension/interest with them into the relationship.

What I mean by that is NOT angst caused by external problems. What I mean is foibles. Chandler and Monica worked, in my opinion, because they brought foibles into the relationship. Dharma and Greg worked for the same reason; Dharma and Greg were completely different and imperfect beings before they entered the relationship and one of the intelligent aspects of the show was that marriage didn't change either of them fundamentally (because, news flash, marriage doesn't: this is the reasonable realist part of my personality). They made adjustments, but Greg's uptightness and obsession with details didn't go away. And Dharma's competitiveness and foot-in-mouth tendencies didn't either (one of the smartest aspects of the show was that Dharma was more like Greg's mom than anyone would ever admit). The couple grew without abandoning their individuality--the things that made them sweet or irritating or exasperating. (Time Goes By worked for the same reason.)

For a negative example, although I was a fan of the Buffy-Angel relationship, Angel brought no foibles into the relationship. He had lots of angst, yes, but all his angst was caused by externals. For the purposes of Buffy, Angel had enough angst to keep the relationship tense, but Whedon later gave Angel some foibles ("I'm not cheap, I'm old."). The fact is, no matter how much women say they want it, a guy who spends all his time looking soulful and worrying about the woman is romantic . . . but dull.

On Lois and Clark, Lois (Teri Hatcher) has all kinds of foibles. She is competitive; she is opinionated and outspoken, not always at appropriate moments. She has trust issues. But Superman (Dean Cain) has nothing except angst caused by externals (he is an orphan, he worries about not being able to help people). This makes him a hero, in the traditional sense of the word. But it also makes him a tad uninteresting within the relationship. (Granted Hatcher is a better actor than Cain, but I still think the writing has a lot to do with it.) When he was trying to keep his identity a secret from Lois, that was interesting. When he and Lois were trying to adjust to being engaged despite the whole Superman job-on-the-side thing, that was interesting. But now that they're just in love, it's a tad dull. All the energy has to come from the outside.

It's a pity because, like I said, I prefer the leads to get together. And I hate being manipulated into thinking that it will happen THIS week, no, NEXT week, no, the week AFTER next. Blech. I spit on thee, manipulative shows. But writing that can sustain a romantic couple's togetherness seems to be a tad difficult to come by. Anyway, I do think it comes down to the characters' foibles/imperfections. The tension has to come not just from watching the characters overcome a nefarious plot but from watching HOW they, in their peculiar ways, overcome the nefarious plot.

Having said all this, I still can't think what Superman's foibles would be. And I've gotten the same impression from watching Smallville. Again, the foibles can't just be angst or worry about other people or even weird tics. They have to be fundamental characteristics like Monica's obsessive neatness or Chandler's sarcasm or Lionel's grumpiness or Spike's joie de vivre over potato chips and rock bands. But Clark Kent is noble and kind and generous and patriotic and decent, etc. etc. etc. And he needs to be. If he becomes all angry and dark, he'll turn into Batman, and he can't be Batman because Batman is Batman. For this reason, Batman provides a lot more material than Superman. Which makes Superman actually more of a challenge.

The one thing I did think of was gullibility. Or guilelessness. They've done this with Wilson on House. I've written earlier about how much I've admired their characterization of Chase. I've begun to appreciate their characterization of Wilson. Chase is a pretty boy, but he starts out with strikes against him since he is (at first) a rich pretty boy. But Wilson seems like Mr. Decent right from the get-go. Only this is a guy who has had several affaires (at least two, by my last count) and has, by his own admittance, a difficult time walking away from situations which will lead to affaires. He is TOO nice, for which quality House is always ragging him. This isn't just House being mean; House sees exactly where Wilson is heading when he starts comforting nurses and having late-night conversations with interns. It is Wilson's dishonesty about that path that bugs House. It is very, very smart writing since it makes Wilson incredibly flawed, but you still like him. (I love the line where Foreman gets put in charge and Wilson says, "Oh, I guess I'm his best friend now.") The House writers really do impress me.

Anyway, Superman's gullibility or guilelessness could bring tension into a relationship. But it would still be difficult to write.

Odds and Ends

2006-06-23T16:34:00.000-07:00

The last few weeks have been spent on my thesis, which is near completion. This post is a bunch of stray thoughts I've had lately, nothing terribly coherent.

New VW Commercial

I hate it. It's the "low ego emissions" commercial. Actually, there's a series of them. I watch them and think, Do VW owners really think this way about themselves? That everyone else is self-absorbed and egomanical while they are just SOOOO laid back and unconcerned? It would be funny if the commercials were playing off of that self-perception (as some commercials do) but the commercials are more about reinforcing the self-perception than making fun of it. They are really disturbing. They also remind me of the art crowd I knew in high school who were so concerned over not being cliqueish, they kind of turned themselves into a clique. In any case, I have decided to never, ever, ever, ever buy a VW.

More jerks (see previous post)

Bob (Saverrio Guera) from Becker: he also showed up on a few Buffys and Monk. He is a fine actor and hilarious as Bob. He plays the token jerk, but he is allowed to get in some zingers and has a great straight-man demeanor.

Janice (Maggie Wheeler) from Friends. I rewatched some Friends episodes recently. Janice was Chandler's reoccuring girlfriend with the horrible laugh. She did an excellent job of being obnoxious and funny and almost charming. You could see why Chandler went out with her, and you could see why it was never going to work.

Newman (Wayne Knight) from Seinfeld. Seinfeld is a show that I get tired of very quickly. (I like the play on language, but it is mostly the same thing over and over.) But I love Newman. He's the bad guy in Jurassic Park. He also showed up in Branagh's Dead Again. He is great. I love him in anything. He knows how to play scary nerd almost effortlessly.

Richard Dean Anderson

I recently (about a month ago) watched some old MacGyvers. Yeah, I was a MacGyver fan back in the day (as well as a Knight Rider fan, which I have no desire to rewatch). I can't say MacGyver impressed me particularly. What did surprise me is that although, naturally, I thought Richard Dean Anderson was so, so cute back in my teen years, he struck me in retrospect as way too much of a pretty boy. This is a man who has aged extrememly well and is about fifteen billion times handsomer now than he was in his twenties. Granted, I tend to like my men a bit aged (older Angel is way more attractive than younger Angel), but, too, I think teenage girls have a penchant for male effeminate looks (such as Leonardo DiCaprio in Titanic). Maybe, they find effeminate boys less threatening? I have no idea, and I was a teenage girl.

The Da Vinci Code

I may have been wrong about Hanks never choosing the wrong movie. I've heard The Da Vinci isn't doing so well (although doing so well is a relative term). I can't say I'm upset. I realize that movies mangle history all the time. Look at Pocahontas. But Dan Brown allowed himself to be pulled into making out that The Da Vinci Code was real history. In other words, he turned it into a cause (I can't say whether he set out to do that or not, but once the book became a bestseller, he certainly did). I've read several Bible scholar commentataries, and this is precisely their beef. They enjoyed the book, but the moment Brown started selling it as non-fiction, they got a little testy.

Thing is, the book isn't just a little wrong, historically speaking, it is REALLY wrong. As in REALLY, REALLY wrong. As in SOOO wrong, it's kind of embarrassing. As in Pocahontas wrong, without the animation or singing trees to hide behind. It isn't even vaguely right. And all the wrong stuff was checkable. And Brown didn't check it. In other words, he is no Michael Crichton who becomes, briefly, an expert on dinosaurs or submarines of whatever. He's a guy who read a couple of books and then made out he was an expert. (And now the couple of books' authors are upset.)

However, despite the movie's non-smash-hit status, I doubt Brown is crying on his way to the bank. It's not like this is some kind of morality lesson. (Check your facts next time!) And golly, look at the industry he spawned!

The Strangest Show On Television

2006-06-09T10:08:00.000-07:00

I suppose it isn't really, but it comes awfully close. Everytime I catch an episode of Smallville, I am surprised once again at how (unintentionally) schizophrenic it is. It could be kind of campy and deliberately self-mocking (a la Joss Whedon) but it never is. And the result is a very puzzling show.

Take Tom Welling, for instance. Now, the definitive Superman, to me, is Dean Cain. He may not be the greatest actor to ever hit planet Earth, but he looks and acts completely right. He is handsome in a Captain America kind of way. He is exceedingly fit but rather more Tobey Maguire than the Hulk. He is smart and kind and completely guileless. That is how Superman is supposed to be (while we're at it, I'll admit I tend to like my superheroes a tad more disturbed, a la Wolverine; still, Superman as Superman is very important--see The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller for a psychological contrast between Superman and Batman).

Here's the weird thing about Smallville--the writers create moments and dialog where Welling is referred to as if he were the Dean Cain prototype. Except that he isn't. In the beginning of the episode I saw Saturday night, Clark is on the football team. As he is running down the field, the episode's bad guy (a bookie), mutters, "Trip," and Clark trips but doesn't fall because he is Superman. He rams into another player but still manages to make the touchdown. Not a bad beginning to an episode.

Next scene, Clark is at the hospital and his assistant couch (the guy who is now on Supernatural) says, "The player [you hit] broke his collarbone in two places," and then goes on to tell Clark that people are getting suspicious, that he (Clark) shouldn't have been able to do that much damage to a guy "twice his weight."

Are they joking? There's no suspension of belief needed here, folks. This isn't Tobey Maguire running full-tilt into Arnold. This is Tom Welling running full-tilt into a high schooler. Of course he's going to break his collarbone, powers or no powers! (Fragile things collarbones.)

The other episode that I watched (I really, really want to like the show; I miss my occasional dose of Buffy/Angel; I need a superhero show to replace it--no, NOT Charmed, which, to give it kudos despite its soap opera nature, doesn't take itself seriously) was pretty much a Charmed take-off...by way of Buffy and Alias. I think I went into shock. It would have been funny if the writers had indicated that there were doing all this borrowing to be funny. But they weren't. Smallville is such a very earnest show, like Everwood--with Superman.

Actually, the kid who plays Lex seems to know that he is playing borderline over-the-top stuff (and does well opposite Marsters, who doesn't really have to try hard to be excellent on Smallville). And Lex is the best character on the show. But I don't really know if anyone else gets it. The show just pulses with teenage angst.
I suppose it isn't really, but it comes awfully close. Everytime I catch an episode of Smallville, I am surprised once again at how (unintentionally) schizophrenic it is. It could be kind of campy and deliberately self-mocking (a la Joss Whedon) but it never is. And the result is a very puzzling show.

Take Tom Welling, for instance. Now, the definitive Superman, to me, is Dean Cain. He may not be the greatest actor to ever hit planet Earth, but he looks and acts completely right. He is handsome in a Captain America kind of way. He is exceedingly fit but rather more Tobey Maguire than the Hulk. He is smart and kind and completely guileless. That is how Superman is supposed to be (while we're at it, I'll admit I tend to like my superheroes a tad more disturbed, a la Wolverine; still, Superman as Superman is very important--see The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller for a psychological contrast between Superman and Batman).

Here's the weird thing about Smallville--the writers create moments and dialog where Welling is referred to as if he were the Dean Cain prototype. Except that he isn't. In the beginning of the episode I saw Saturday night, Clark is on the football team. As he is running down the field, the episode's bad guy (a bookie), mutters, "Trip," and Clark trips but doesn't fall because he is Superman. He rams into another player but still manages to make the touchdown. Not a bad beginning to an episode.

Next scene, Clark is at the hospital and his assistant couch (the guy who is now on Supernatural) says, "The player [you hit] broke his collarbone in two places," and then goes on to tell Clark that people are getting suspicious, that he (Clark) shouldn't have been able to do that much damage to a guy "twice his weight."

Are they joking? There's no suspension of belief needed here, folks. This isn't Tobey Maguire running full-tilt into Arnold. This is Tom Welling running full-tilt into a high schooler. Of course he's going to break his collarbone, powers or no powers! (Fragile things collarbones.)

The other episode that I watched (I really, really want to like the show; I miss my occasional dose of Buffy/Angel; I need a superhero show to replace it--no, NOT Charmed, which, to give it kudos despite its soap opera nature, doesn't take itself seriously) was pretty much a Charmed take-off...by way of Buffy and Alias. I think I went into shock. It would have been funny if the writers had indicated that there were doing all this borrowing to be funny. But they weren't. Smallville is such a very earnest show, like Everwood--with Superman.

Actually, the kid who plays Lex seems to know that he is playing borderline over-the-top stuff (and does well opposite Marsters, who doesn't really have to try hard to be excellent on Smallville). And Lex is the best character on the show. But I don't really know if anyone else gets it. The show just pulses with teenage angst.

House Analysis

2006-06-09T10:06:00.000-07:00

Another perfect final episode from House! (If you haven't seen it and plan to, be warned: I'm going to give everything away.) Normally I am suspicious of "it was all a dream/it was all in my head" episodes; I enjoy them but consider them cop-outs, especially to end a season. But House last night worked for several reasons.

Firstly, unlike so many "it was all in my head" plots, the other characters did not act exactly like themselves, only morphing into not-themselves symbols at the end of the episode (Star Trek always did that). Everything was off-kilter from the beginning, and it was only the intrinsic oddness of House that kept one from guessing what was going on (although once House himself figured out the first hallucination, I easily guessed the rest). But frankly, the plot was too odd for even House. (It says something about the writing that they could keep you going for as long as they did--a half hour in my case; yes, I am susceptible to well-written plots,and I didn't guess the Sixth Sense twist until the very end.) Chase was too much like House, Cuddy was too girlishly pleased when House could walk, Wilson was too analytical. No hospital would stick a patient in with a gunman (where are the police?) The "fake" patient was too weird (even for House; that was the beauty). The eyeball was too horror movie gothic. In retrospect, everything was wrong right from the beginning.

Even more beautiful was that it actually meant something. That is, it wasn't just House having hallucinations and then, bingo, we all wake up and oh, it wasn't real so who cares. The first thing that struck me as off-kilter, for instance, was the idea that House would tell the supposed wife about the supposed husband's affair. He never does that unless the affair and the disease really are linked. It struck a false note. But evidently, it is a possibility, a fear, that House himself imagined. It crystallized for him the argument at the end of the episode.

In other words, the guilt is real, and the apology was sincere. It expanded House's personality. When he apologized, he was, in effect, apologizing to himself (which is less corny than it sounds). The gunman's arguments (in effect, House's arguments to himself) weren't wrong. They were actually, typically, House--that we aren't kind for sentimental reasons but from a necessary lack of hubris. But House was also apologizing because the arguments wouldn't make any difference. "I know what's wrong," he says, and he goes down and rips the "fake" patient to shreds.

And the show retained that complexity up until the end. When House asks for Cuddy's (not real) treatment, he is asking for his leg back. But in the hallucination, he was willing to sacrifice the leg to have his mind back. And both desires are true. It's the essence of House that he wants two things that he believes are incompatible. It is what makes the show work so well in the long run.

Great Jerks

2006-06-09T10:05:00.000-07:00

There are good guys and there are bad guys and there are ambiguous guys. And then there are characters who function as jerks or bullies or losers. And some of them are so good at what they do, they become lovable. It isn't that they are mean--I've written elsewhere about my dislike of mean characters--it is that these characters perform a necessary function of unlikability, and they manage to embodied or convey unlikableness in a frankly likable way. They become whole and believable personalities.

1. Hodges from CSI

I love Hodges. He is nerdier than Greg, odder than Grissom. He toadies. He pushes people's buttons (not always on purpose). And he is great at what he is. One of my favorite episodes is when he smells a dead guy (or part of a dead guy) and is defensively embarassed when Grissom finds out. "You think that's gross, huh?" he says. "No," Grissom replies, "that's the first time you've impressed me," and Hodges is so surprised, he shuts up. It illustrates the quirky dynamic that is at the heart of CSI:LV.

2. Jayne from Firefly

He comes off as mean, stupid bully guy, but the thing I like about Jayne is that he remains himself. He doesn't suddenly morph into understanding guy. His apparent meanness isn't a coverup for a really sweet individual (which would make the meanness actually more icky). He is fully himself. He isn't a hero and certainly doesn't want to be mistaken for one. There's a kind of honesty about him except that Jayne would eschew even that praise. Consequently, Mal appears an even better captain for willingly taking Jayne aboard for the sake of his abilities (the episode where Mal remembers collecting his crew is one of my favorites).

3. Chase from House

I've written about Chase here.

4. Cordelia (Buffy Cordelia)

Cordelia was slated for a heroine role almost from the beginning, but she was played, at the very beginning, as the snotty, shallow individual who cuts down the heroine. However, even in the beginning Cordelia had certain attributes that ended up making her a heroine later. In "Earshot," for example, while everyone else is freaking out about what Buffy might overhear, good old Cordelia is saying exactly what she thinks. I'm bored--Can I leave now? "I'm bored. Can I leave now?" I also think Whedon & crew did something psychologically right about Cordelia. The snotty girl is so often cut down to size in teen shows but in Buffy/Angel, Cordelia's High School snottiness is (I think correctly) perceived as an adult strength. One of my favorite early episodes of Angel is when Cordelia gets her new apartment. The ghost woman is criticizing her, cutting her down, mocking her. "Bitch," she finally says to which Cordelia replies, "That's right. I am." She was the bitchiest, meanest, snottiest girl at Sunnydale High and she's going to let someone else push her around? I love that. I think that is the essence of Cordelia-ism.

5. The Thenardiers on Les Miserables

The singing version. First of all, they have great songs, but I also think it is interesting that they are not only not punished at the end, they thrive. Apparently, Hugo's Christianity was of the "it'll come out in the wash" variety. And I think that letting the Thenardiers thrive was, unfortunately but necessarily, truthful to reality.

6. Mr. Collins from Pride & Prejudice

There's only one Bingley (think Superman). There's really only two or three Darcys (think Angel and House). There's a few kinds of Wickham (think Hugh Grant in most roles). There are numerous Collinses. My personal favorite is the A & E version; he is so very pompous and so very self-confident for all the wrong reasons and so very off-putting and so very clueless. And so very, very funny.

7. Charles Grodin from Heaven Can Wait

Technically, he is a bad guy, but he is incredibly hilarious. Not that bad guys can't be funny (think Alan Rickman from Robin Hood) but Grodin's type of sarcastic and amoral badness makes him a likable jerk. He has one of those faces where he lifts an eyebrow and you just start laughing. He does it again, and you can't stop. Why? Why is that so funny? But it is.

8. Quark from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine

Granted, Quark borderlined bad/ambiguous guy at the beginning of the series but I think eventually he ended up as supposedly unlikable guy who yet manages to keep, barely, on the right side of the law. He was no Dukat and he wasn't really even like Garak. He was just Quark: not nice, not bad, not good, not ambiguous (he ended up ambiguous; however, unlike Spike or Garak or, say, Faith, Quark didn't set out to be ambiguous. He thinks he is acting morally according to his lights.) Shimerman played it perfectly (he played Principal Snider perfectly as well): nicely nuanced performances that never crossed the line either into totally unlikable meanness or into reformed gushy sentimentalism.

9. Wesley from Buffy/early Angel

I just rewatched some early Angel, and I didn't appreciate how funny Wesley was at the beginning of that show (and the end of Buffy). He was still playing incompetent, pompous guy ("I'm a rogue demon hunter!" "What's a rogue demon?"). Denisof has great comedic talents that were kind of wasted later on. I don't hold it against Whedon for turning him into brooding, dark guy at the end of Angel (and the episode where he shoots the robot version of his father is one of my favorites), but I recommend that fans go back and watch the Angel episode where Denisof and Boreanaz dance ("She" First Season). And then watch the scene again. And again. And again . . .

10. Michael Culver as Prior Robert in Brother Cadfael Mysteries

He plays the priest who is always giving Cadfael a hard time. Culver is one of those (mostly) bald sexy guys with a beautiful voice. As Prior Robert, he manages to exert a self-righteous authority that makes you dislike him without actually hating him. In the books, Cadfael says that he has learned to tolerate the Prior Roberts of this world and even to admire them for their basic toughness, despite the fact that in terms of mental makeup and ambition, Cadfael is Prior Robert's dead opposite. Culver manages to portray a character that fits that description surprisingly well. (I also like Prior Robert's toady, Jerome--played by Julian Firth--mostly for his voice. I can recognize it just about anywhere.)

The important thing with these jerks is that you want to watch them. Somehow the cleverness of their written characters or the self-sufficiency of their acting or the believability of their parts makes you want to watch them again and again, and you do.

Morphable Actors

2006-06-09T10:02:00.000-07:00

So I'm watching Batman Begins, and Tom Wilkinson's name pops up on the screen. Good heavens, says I, Tom Wilkinson? He's a British actor who does Miss Marple films! (Actually, he's done one: Pocketful of Rye). So, I look him up and realize this guy has been all over the place. I saw him in The Importance of Being Earnest, I saw him in Shakespeare in Love, I saw him in an Alleyn mystery. He was in Sense & Sensibility, Prime Suspect 1 and of course Batman Begins (as Falcone). He is one of those extremely talented British actors who can morph into any role and so effortlessly you don't notice.

I don't know if we grow actors like that in the states. I suppose you would call him a character actor, but American character actors always seem almost aggressively full of personality, like Dick Van Dyke. There's this British morphability that you find in people like Gary Oldman and even, although he is harder not to recognize, Rowan Atkinson. I'm not saying that British actors are better than American actors. I think the Hollywood star system has a great deal to be said for it (it produced Grace Kelly, after all and, rather against its will, Cary Grant), and I admire stars like Tom Hanks (although The Da Vinci Code confuses me; is that really his type of film?). But I always get a kick out of never knowing when British actors will show up next. Their morphability seems to be built into their training or their style. Like Hugh Laurie morphing from Wooster to House (and Hugh Laurie is hard to miss, being 6'2" but really, you'd think it was two totally different people). (On the other hand, Alan Rickman, who I adore, is always definitely Alan Rickman. And so is Judi Dench.)

Actually, come to think of it, I get the same kick out of spotting cameo actors on TV as I do out of spotting British actors in films so perhaps the morphable British actor is, in America, the morphable television actor. For instance, Megan Follows has shown up on a CSI and a Cold Case; well, okay, she's Canadian, but both Alexis Denisof--Wesley from Buffy/Angel and Alyson Hannigan's husband--and Amy Acker--Fred from Angel--showed up on How I Met Your Mother, and they're not Canadian or English. And Spike (James Marsters) showed up on Smallville. (One of the few episodes I watched; I really don't get that show.)*

Total tangent: actually out of the Buffy/Angel universe, Hannigan and Boreanaz seemed to be doing the best career wise. (I think Marsters has a band.) I don't know if How I Met Your Mother will last, but it is an absolutely delightful show. Every time I watch it, I say, "Ah, that was delightful." And Bones is just fantastic. Nice to know it has been signed for a new season. (Excellent season finale as well.)

*My favorite cameo of all time is the chess playing guy who shows up as the toy restorer in Toy Story 2. I saw the movie in the theatre with a friend, and we both started yelping when he came on the screen. But you had to have seen the chess playing short (attached, I think, to Toy Story 1) to know who he was. It was a great little cameo. (And, in theory, could have been the same character.)

The Television Experience

2006-06-09T09:58:00.000-07:00

There are things that I will watch on television but will never, never rent. This is not, necessarily, a "high culture" versus a "low culture" thing. It isn't that I only rent sophisticated movies/television shows. (I rent a ton of Star Trek and other sci-fi shows, for example. And I keep waiting for Scarecrow and Mrs. King to come out on DVD so I can rent it through Netflix.) Rather the criteria has more to do with the time I am willing to admit (to myself) that I will spend doing something. And this is one reason why television is so wonderful and why, I think, commercial television will never disappear.

I will not, for instance, rent Seinfeld. Or Friends. Or Hallmark movies. Or movies like Legally Blond. I look at them in the library, and I just can't bring myself to say, "I'm actually going to set aside time during my day to watch this stuff." But if it is on T.V., that's okay, that's different. It isn't planned. Besides I'm eating dinner or reading articles for school or going over grades at the same time. I'm multi-tasking. The T.V. is just background.

The "I'm going to pretend that I don't actually watch this stuff" isn't the only factor. I never rent CSI: Las Vegas, although I'm an assiduous CSI watcher. I love House, but I never rent House or tape it. For me, CSI and House encapsulate the television experience. Separate the shows from that experience and they simply aren't the same. I taped House once and ended up watching the commercials anyway (not on purpose; I forgot I was watching it on tape, but it indicates how important the television experience is). It isn't necessarily that I like commercials, although I do like some, but that the experience of watching ten minutes of plot with three minutes of break (in which I can read, correct a paper, vacuum) is part of the whole television experience. It's like those nineteenth century plays which including Dancing Barbers and vaudeville acts between Hamlet's soliquoy and his death. Without the interruptions, it's just some two-bit plot with music. With the interruptions, it becomes TELEVISION, an hour of plot and previews and commercials and music and commentary and news excerpts. And really, there's a big difference.

The Thesis I'm Not Writing

2006-06-09T09:53:00.000-07:00

I first considered writing a thesis on the three CSIs but I wasn't sure my professors would really go for 100 or more hours of television as a primary resource. I also would have had to come up with a lot of guff about regionalism and identity and although I can do that sort of thing for a space of a blog, I can't do it for much longer. (Eventually, I find myself just making stuff up. "As a region coalesces its imaginative pre-figurations in its attempts at self-expressive identification, regionalism is formed . . .")

Basically, if I were to write a thesis about the three CSIs, I would begin by noting that they are all filmed in LA, but all utilize very different images. I would go on to ask, "Is this how Americans perceive these different locations?" (This is the kind of question professors ask, rather than, Is this what these locations are really like? Because if you answer the last question, "Yes," *zap* no more thesis.)

For example, CSI: Miami is all bright, glowing sunlight. Everyone is always squinting. The CSI lab is made of glass through which the glowing, bright sunlight reflects and refracts; the lab is filled with shiny objects upon which the sunlight glitters. CSI: Las Vegas uses darkness in almost the same way: long shadows, dark punctuated by flashing lights. Their lab is a low-ceilinged warren with a circular format.

And in CSI: New York, it is always raining. Or at least, overcast. Gloomy with occasional afternoon sunlight that never seems to reach the ground. And the lab is a warehouse.

The first question, as noted above, is, Is this what Miami, Las Vegas and New York are really like? Well, possibly. The second question is, Is this how most people perceive these various cities: are the producers digging into some deep, Jung-like American concept of Miami, Las Vegas and New York? If you gave Americans Rorschach-like tests and asked, "What is the first word that comes to mind when you hear Miami, Las Vegas and New York?" would they say, "Sun," "Night on the town" and "Rain"?

Possibly. Those sociologists and humanists who have been brainfried by Marxist theory, will tell you that television reinforces (or creates) these images, but I think it is far more likely that the producers chose such images to create the impression of a place, enabling the suspension of disbelief. (Because, after all, Miami is not the same thing as New York.) We are, as the audience, supposed to believe that Caruso, Sinese and Petersen never, ever see each other. Of course, our (supposed) ignorance makes us pawns of evil mass media. But since it is only supposed, I don't really think it is much of an issue. The point is, fiction doesn't work at all if you keep looking at the scaffolding. And despite the attempts of higher education to turn everyone into skeptical literalists, it would be a pity for the arts.

In any case, I think the producers, writers, directors, etc. believe that Americans have an idea of region that the shows/episodes then play on. Which is pretty fascinating in its own right. It means that Americans associate rats, sewers, rain, sidewalk artists and art crimes with New York; sun, hurricanes, boats, drugs, drugs, drugs and hotel crimes with Miami; night, gambling, serial killers, weird families and bugs with Las Vegas (although the latter has more to do with Grissom than with Las Vegas). And who is to say Americans are wrong?

The second fascinating thing is that although the shows are similiar in many ways, and although a truly awesome amount of each episode takes place indoors, the overarcing image (this is Miami, this is New York, this is Vegas) is retained mostly through light: the amount of glittering sunlight, absence of sunlight and damp sunlight in each episode. Each show carries a tone, of sorts. It could also explain why I can't get into CSI: New York, no matter how hard I try. I mean, rain? Dampness? Oblique sunlight? It's all very atmospheric, but I just can't get excited about it. (Of course, I live in the Northeast so I see it everyday.)

Primetime Special

2006-04-03T06:58:00.000-07:00

ABC had a "What would you do?" special on last night, where they set up various scenarios (couple arguing in a park; racist cab driver, etc.) and then televised people's reactions (do they intervene? do they agree with the racism?) It was one of those "Isn't society rude and horrible!" kind of specials. It was interesting, but I thought the ABC folks missed some rather obvious clues.

For instance, one of the scenarios was a boyfriend yelling at his girlfriend. Last year, they chose a white couple (two actors); this year, they chose a black couple. The question was: "Are people more likely or less likely to intervene?" the implication being that they will be less likely to stop to help the young black woman.

This may be true (although it was disproved in this particular case), but the scenarios weren't fair. In the first, the girlfriend was sitting on a bench. The boyfriend leaned over her; he often grabbed her wrists; she was hemmed in. She kept her face down and didn't answer back. In other words, she appeared to be a victim. In the second case, the couple both stood (most of the time). The girlfriend had room to walk away, and she did occasionally, but more often, she faced the boyfriend and often, even, closed the gap between them. She raised her voice. She told him off. When he picked her up, it looked like he was horsing around. ("No, it didn't!" exclaimed the Primetime people. "Here's another shot." Oh, that's a good argument: when people are walking in a park, they always have multiple camera angles from which to comprehend an event.) Also, he was slightly taller than her, but not by much.

In other words, the body language of the second exchange was totally different from the body language of the first. Although the same number of people intervened in the first as in the second, in the first they were more likely to walk up and intervene directly. Interestingly enough, the one direct intervention in the second scenario occurred when the girlfriend sat down on a bench, and her boyfriend leaned over her.

(The Primetime people also didn't ask whether people were more worried, in the second scenario, about being racist or appearing racist: i.e. Am I just assuming that this is bad because the two people are black? This is a bigger concern, I think, than they allowed for.)

Another 2-part scenario was bullies in a park: would people intervene to help a young boy being bullied by three other boys? People did intervene, the majority of them women. The Primetime folks then changed the dress of the bullies so they appeared like gang members (these were 11/12 year old boys). Oh, my, wasn't Primetime surprised by how many more people intervened!

But again, the scenario is problematic. The boys were all of a height and similar in appearance. In the first case, it was difficult to tell (despite Primetime's aggressive assertions that it wasn't difficult to tell) which kid was being bullied. Are these other kids his friends? Classmates? Is the bullied child going to turn around in just a sec and bully the others?

In the second case, the difference in clothing (more, I think, than the clothing itself) signified that the bullied child was not one of the group. Again, again, body language makes a difference. I think this is important. Do we really want a society where people automatically assume negatives when they look at a scenario? Isn't it better to have a society where people aren't sure what the entire facts or story of a situation might be and are reluctant to pass judgment?

Which isn't to defend bullying or to negate the positive example of the adults who did intervene and tell the bullies off. But as with the fighting couple scenario, I think people aren't always quick to sum up situations; they are quick to react to perceived victimization.

As for the racist cabbie driver, also an actor: he did manage to solicit racist comments, but again, the various encounters struck me as more complicated than the Primetime people realized. (They wanted immediate aggressive responses: "Why didn't the passengers stop the cab and walk away!"). We live in a society where we are expected to ignore race and yet talk about it. What I saw going on was a continual effort at negotiating the fine line between these two expectations. Also, Primetime labeled racist ANY passenger's comment about race when, in some cases, the comments were no less or more innocuous than saying, "The English can't cook," or "The French are snotty." Not very nice statements maybe. Inaccurate statements maybe. But I wouldn't deem them racist.

In fact, I was impressed by how many people were willing to deal, in some fashion, with the experience. It wasn't this knee-jerk--oh, racist comments are occuring, let's shoot the driver--reaction; they were trying to understand their driver on a non-racist, non-judgmental level. Which was rather extraordinary. (The Primetime people pointed out that the drivers in Savannah, Georgia didn't get as many arguers because they were a bit too charming.) When the woman in my master's program sneers about Christians and damns them all with generic statements, do I get offended (as a Christian), do I exercise tolerance (as a Christian), do I start an argument, do I take issue, do I sue the school, do I walk out of class, do I support her right to free speech? It isn't that easy an issue, and the Primetime people, in their search for THE TRUTH ABOUT AMERICANS, totally missed how well people in general handled the driver.

But then, it is television.

TV Again

2006-04-03T06:57:00.000-07:00

I absolutely adore the Nimoy Aleve commercial, where he does the "Vulcan thing."

I've also developed an appreciation for the Outback commercials. Maybe I just like Aussies since I think the new Aussie gecko (for Geico Insurance) is hilarious.

Saw John Denver on PBS last night. I know it's common to make fun of Denver; what impressed me (it's all that American Idol I've been watching recently) is what a mighty fine tenor the man has. He CAN sing.

I ended up watching 60 Minutes last night, not something I usually do. It was a pretty good 60 Minutes. One of the sections was about the NYPD and how they have expanded their police force to include a lot of anti-terrorism intelligence gathering. The 60 Minutes host kept saying, "So, you are saying that the FBI and CIA are incompetent?" and the police chief kept saying, "We just like to have the information quicker." Watching it was a libertarian's dream come true. Yes! Small city organizations are more effective and more easily streamlined than large bureaucratic organizations. Yes! Yes!

The second section I watched was about donor babies (male donates sperm to a sperm bank) and how kids are seeking out both their half-siblings and their donors. The 60 Minutes guy kept saying, "So, you really think of yourselves and brothers and sisters?" to half-siblings which was stupid because technically, they are brothers and sisters. What I thought most amusing was a lesbian couple who had picked a donor because he was a doctor of critically ill children "so he must be kind," and they wanted to raise a sweet, kind child, etc. This guy has come forward, and he is exceptionally handsome, very articulate but shall we say . . . a trifle self-centered. It wasn't so much the matter of his donations that struck me. He was very forthright about his sense of responsibility for "his" kids. He's willing to bridge the information gap, but they aren't his problem. Which, legally, they aren't. Nevertheless, there was something a bit chilling about this abundantly confident, excessively handsome man, who refers to himself as a hunk, shrugging over the number of children out in the world that he has sired. Not exactly someone whose genes I would pick if I was trying to raise a "kind" child. (If I was raising an ambitious, self-interested guy, well, yeah, maybe.) But I thought it was amusing that the lesbian couple had made all these assumptions about this guy based on, mostly, his own description. He was also a very popular choice, so he's got a lot of kids out there.

And then they showed a clip of Andy Rooney's diatribe over the ickiness of governments supporting the lottery which is being played mostly by low-income individuals and individuals on welfare. He's right, of course, but I don't see the lottery going away any time soon. Playing the lottery, as I argue in one of my folklore papers, is like believing in Marxist theory: it's a comfortable performance that softens the hardship of one's financial state. (While doing absolutely nothing about it.)

Cold Case was also different from usual. Cold Case is possibly the most romantic show on television. Every week, it's a new couple who loved each other in the past but were divided (by prejudice, hatred, jealously, etc.) after which one of them died. 15, 20, 30 years later, that death is being investigated. Like if Hamlet decided to look up the reasons for Romeo & Juliet croaking. Romance is all very well, but Romeo & Juliet gets tiresome after awhile. This Sunday's episode was somewhat different from usual since it involved a serial and a current-day rescue. Nice change.

I still can't believe in Courting Alex. I don't think the sexual tension is there. They need to stick Jenna with someone like the young guy from Out of Practice (which is coming back). Courting Alex seems to be building off of the old Dharma & Greg idea of two incompatible people (easygoing individual and uptight individual) nevertheless being smitten with each other, but the boyfriend on Courting Alex doesn't seem different or unusual enough; he doesn't wear suits--big deal. And it's not easy to believe that Jenna Elfman's character is a tense person; she simply doesn't exude tense. (Unlike Gibson--Greg--who did and still most effectively does.)

New great show (well, great show on DVD): Rosemary & Thyme, which is kind of a modern Miss Marple, only with two Miss Marples (in their 40s) who run a gardening business (and happen to stumble over buried bodies and poisoned victims, etc. etc.) A sort of Cadfael meets Miss Marple meets Cagney & Lacey show.

Show Intros

2006-03-13T08:06:00.000-08:00

Another list. It's mid-terms, which is one of the hardest times of the semester; it's when I have to stand up and explain to my students (again) that intent is not the same as work; you may have meant to be in class, but that doesn't mean you were in class. You may have great reasons for not being in class, but . . . that still doesn't mean you were in class. You may think I'm mean for not understanding what great reasons you have for not being in class, but . . . that still doesn't mean you were in class. Like American Idol contestants, they confuse the quality of their characters with doing the work that will enable them to pass the course. And I have to get up and say, "Look, if you aren't going to come to class, just drop the course. And don't negotiate with me." I'm beginning to think that the primary purpose of a High School education is to teach students to charm or otherwise maneuver their way into grades (which reminds me of that scene from Clueless where the heroine does precisely that and her lawyer father commends her).

Anyway, not a relaxing time of year so I watch television, which is enormously relaxing. The following are a list of various show intros that I like, that I don't like, etc. in no particular order.

1. Again, Enterprise, which I didn't watch while it was running. But I would often watch the intro. One of the best Star Trek intros ever. Okay, okay, I do get a kick out of the intro for Star Trek: Original--all that goofy singing. But in general, I consider Star Trek intros fairly dull. Enterprise was a nice exception.

2. Criminal Minds needs a better intro. Cold Case is good. CSIs are good. Bones is okay. NCIS is okay. But Criminal Minds is really awful.

3. I love the intro to House: I'm afraid they are going to change it, which often happens after Season 2 of a show. Although CSI: Las Vegas only changed a little bit (thank goodness). So perhaps, House will stay as truly awesome as it is.

4. I liked it when Monk changed its intro though. I didn't mind the original, but I have tremendous respect for Randy Newman songs.

5. The American Idol intro confuses me. Is it a girl who walks out? Or does a guy walk out and then turn into a girl? Or do they change it every other night? Or what? (Speaking of American Idol, I don't care for Ryan Seacrest at all, but he is an excellent host. Also, speaking of American Idol, if they didn't have Simon on there, what a gooey, pointless show that would be.)

6. One thing I wish is that DVDs with multiple episodes wouldn't play the intro every single time. I think the intro to Dead Like Me is very clever, but I get sick of watching it time after time after time after time. Since I can never find the "turn the intro off" button, methinks it may be a legal thing.

7. And I really get annoyed by intros that recapsulate the plot. The early Buffy DVDs do that. Okay, by the time it gets to DVD, and I've rented it, I think the marketers should assume I'm passably familiar with the show. The Quantum Leap intros on DVD, for instance, are something like three minutes long. Actually, television intros in general have improved enormously since the 80s.

8. I must mention the PBS intro for Mystery with Gorey's figures. A true classic. Many PBS shows have classic intros: As Time Goes By, Red Dwarf ("It's cold outside . . ." or is that the end?), Black Adder(actually, I'm thinking of the end credits again, especially in the Regency Era episodes).

9. Not really an intro, but I quite like NCIS' technique of snapshotting the end of a sequence and then playing the scene through to that snapshot--a tad contrived but effective.

Canon Couples

2006-03-13T08:04:00.000-08:00

My favorites. My least favorites. And so on and so forth. In no particular order. WARNING: Spoilers.

1. Trip & T'Pol. I didn't watch Enterprise when it was running, but I've picked up on some of the general plot lines recently. Our Fox station here shows the 2-part episodes over and over and over. I've been pleasantly surprised that they stuck with the Trip/T'Pol relationship (which, eh hem, I prophecied from the beginning). It is also one of the few times that I think killing off a character was appropriate. After all, T'Pol/Trip can't be the first Vulcan/Human couple. That's Sarek & Amanda.

2. Buffy & Angel. Buffy & Spike. I'm okay with both of them. I do think that Buffy & Spike had a lot of potential which was totally misused. One of the most common arguments made by the Buffy producers (about Buffy & Spike) was that, come on guys, Spike is a bad guy. Yes, he is, but they romanticized him too much to make that argument believable (besides, if you want bad, check out Angel). On the show Dead Like Me, Eric McCormack (Will of Will & Grace) shows up in a couple of episodes as an abusing boyfriend. His performance is so subtle and yet so craven, you really do believe that this guy is a horrible, horrible person. (And I must say, I was impressed by McCormack's acting. He took nice-smiley-guy Will and transformed that charm into something almost grotesque, but it wasn't overplayed either.)

3. B'Elanna & Paris. The thing I really like about B'Elanna & Paris is that they have a continual relationship. (They don't get together, break up, get together, break up a la Friends.) Check out As Time Goes By for more of the same. Dharma & Greg are another good example. And Margot & Jerry in Good Neighbors (Barbara & Tom are, of course, the heroes of the show, but the thing I like about Margot & Jerry is that their relationship functions successfully on a day-to-day basis without them resorting to psychological insights and conversations about "our feelings.")

4. Speaking of Friends: Chandler and Monica. I believed in that relationship in a way that I never believed in Ross & Rachel (the problem with Ross & Rachel is that Ross' character started out as smart/sarcastic and a little goofy. By the end of the show, they had turned him into a whiney jerk: the butt of all the jokes; he simply wasn't as funny.)

5. Al and Trudy. Speaking of butt-of-the-jokes: Tim was always making fun of Al on Home Improvement, yet it never was reduced to kick-the-guy-while-he-is-down humor. And they let Al get married. (To an heiress: how cool is that! Also, Trudy is kind, happy and matter-of-fact: a perfect fit for Al.)

6. Chakotay & 7-of-9. Believe it or not, I'm beginning to understand this relationship. I've been watching Voyager DVDs over the last year and a half. I'm about 2/3rds of the way through. It is astonishing. I thought I was passably familiar with the show, but I think, altogether, I saw about 1/8th of the episodes the first time around. I'm really enjoying seeing them all now. And I'm beginning to believe in Chakatoy & 7-of-9 as a couple. Chakatoy kind of grows on you. I'm willing to accept, much more than with Riker, that this laid-back guy is truly not interested in his own command. He didn't become a Marquis because of authority issues (although some Marquis probably did), and he is more than willing to serve under Janeway. (I never, never believed that Riker would keep giving up command positions).

7. Riker & Troi & Whorf. Speaking of Riker . . . I may be one of the few people who believed in that triangle, although it was inevitable that Riker & Troi would get together. By the time they did, however, I really didn't believe in their relationship anymore.

8. Jane & Rochester/Elizabeth & Darcy, etc. The historical romantics. I believe in them more or less based on the actors. I believe in the Dalton/Clarke Jane & Rochester. I don't believe in the Welles/Joan Fontaine Jane & Rochester (although Welles is perfect as Rochester). I haven't seen the new Pride & Prejudice yet, so I can't comment on that. And yes, I absolutely believe in the Firth/Ehle combo. I don't really believe in the Olivier/Garson combo, although I like the movie, but that's because I keep thinking Greer Garson will dump the lot of them and go off and start a business somewhere.

9. The winner of the Great If Dysfunctional Award: Grant & Bergman (with Rains as the third party) in Notorious.

10. Most touching, even transcendent: Mikako & Noboru of Voices of a Distant Star. Check out my brother's review of Voices of a Distant Star here. You can usually find Voices at Blockbuster or through Netflix.

11. The couple I would like to see: Grissom & Sarah--oh go ahead and promote the May/December relationship already. One of the negatives about cultural sensitivity is that it has become very un-okay for dramas to link up older men and younger women or, even, older women and younger men (except in a comedic sense). So much for Jane & Rochester.

12. The relationship that is doomed to occur: Hotchner & Greenaway on Criminal Minds (that's Gibson & Glaudini). I could be wrong about that; I'm hoping that the show doesn't go the Without a Trace route; I think soap operas and forensics should not mix. But if it does, that's the relationship that I'm betting will occur. (I don't mind CSI: Las Vegas' implied relationships; I do mind when the relationships begin to manage the plot, rather than the other way around. I don't watch shows like Sex in the City for a reason: oh, gag.)

13. The relationship that was doomed even though it didn't need to be and was handled totally stupidly by the producers: Assumpta & Father Clifford.

14. Greatest couple of all time: Powell & Loy in the Thin Man series.

Child Actor

2006-03-06T06:59:00.000-08:00

Every now and again, I watch Two and a Half Men. In general, I don't care for the show. Charlie Sheen is not one of my favorite actors, although the show is well-acted, and Jon Cryer is an excellent straight man. (I first saw him on a Becker episode where he was fantastic.) But the show crosses the line for me from funny-if-occasionally-dirty to dirty-in-order-to-try-to-be-funny. Only the British know how to pull that off. (Actually, British comedy is unique in this regard; British sitcoms will combine scatalogical humor, puns, sarcasm, high comedy and dirty jokes without flinching. Americans try too hard. If you want a tiny, tiny taste of it, American style, watch Still Standing with the British actor Mark Addy. For the real thing, check out Black Adder, Thin Blue Line, Vicar of Dibley.)

So, I only watch Two and a Half Men once and awhile. I watch it, quite honestly, for the kid. It's one of the few shows I've ever watched due to the child talent. What I like about the kid, Angus T. Jones, is that first of all, he is ordinary: a rather pudgy boy with no pretensions to unbearable cuteness (not like those horrible children on Seventh Heaven). He is precocious but in a very real, obnoxious, brat kind of way. He is also quite a good actor. Last night, he was bothering his father and uncle about the death penalty and cannibalism and asking things like, "So, if you and your girlfriend crashed in the Andes and she died, would you eat her?" which is so precisely and exactly what a 13 year old boy would say (and his father and uncle were so precisely and exactly irritated by the questions), I practically fell off the couch laughing.

Like I say, usually I don't watch a show for the kids. Randy, Jonathan Taylor Thomas, on Home Improvement was noticeably the best of the child actors (although the actor who played his older brother, Zachery Ty Bryan, keeps showing up on forensics shows as the jerk co-ed--poor guy, talk about type casting. Tangent! Tangent! far too precious but nice guy Wil Wheaton showed up on CSI: Las Vegas as a vagrant. Talk about strange. Everybody shows up on CSI: Las Vegas, even Maury Chaykin!) but Randy couldn't have carried the show alone. Few child stars can. (Without being so saccharine, you want to vomit.) Angus T. Jones comes the closest I've ever seen.

TV Update

2006-02-22T07:00:00.000-08:00

I've been impressed by Bones. It is a remarkably funny show, and David Boreanaz plays the deadpan straight man very well. Unfortunately, I don't watch it that often anymore because Criminal Minds is on opposite. I actually think Bones is a better written show. Criminal Minds can get a bit clunky, and it's too full (even by CSI standards) of explanatory technobabble (where experts explain things to other experts who, in real life, wouldn't need those things explained). But I adore Mandy Patinkin. It's that voice. Actually, all the men on Criminal Minds have stellar narrator voices. But Mandy Patinkin is in a category of his own. And I like all the characters (men and women) which is really, really important to appreciating a show like that. (For instance, I loath the main male character--the character, not the actor--on Without a Trace and consequently, can barely tolerate the show. I stopped watching when Malone forced Vivian out of "his job"--instead of going to Chicago like he'd planned, wife or no wife, a circumstance that he brought on himself--and was able to get "his job" back because of the implicit old-boys' chauvinism of the agency. So it might be realistic, but it doesn't make me like the guy.)

I haven't--weep, weep--been able to watch House as much as usual since I have class Tuesday night. I caught Monday's episode. It's still House-y. It's still great.

I continue to keep up with CSI: Las Vegas, but I think the current season is pretty poor.

I was wrong about Twins not lasting; it's a cute show. I was wrong about Out of Practice lasting; it's gone. I've developed a real soft spot for How I Met Your Mother. Allyson Hannigan is a great comedic actress.

I've watched a couple of Numbers episodes and liked them okay. My problem with the show is that it quite often seems like the numbers part is simply a substitution for ordinary FBI grunt work, and that the numbers solution doesn't really get to the solution any faster. The numbers' guy is always saying, "Get me all the data." So, the FBI has to go through and cull all the data anyway? Isn't coming up with an equation about it just an extra step?

But I do think that the characterization on the show is well-done and surprisingly realistic. I believe in the brothers as brothers.

So Prison Break is coming back! I've mentioned before that I can't watch the show since, although I think it is very cool, it forces me to watch from week to week (like 24). I admit to being somewhat startled by the previews. They didn't get the brother out yet? What have they been doing?

Courting Alex

2006-01-24T15:14:00.000-08:00

The first episode of Courting Alex was a huge disappoinment. I never realized how much difference Thomas Gibson (Greg before he became a stern-faced profiler on Criminal Minds) made. Jenna Elfman is a great comedienne. She deserves a good straight man. Unfortunately, her leading man on last night's sitcom did not come up to scratch. There's something a bit off when the (only) really funny scenes are between the heroine and her geeky dates, and the scenes between the heroine and the hero just fall flat.

The impressive thing about Dharma & Greg was that although Greg played the straight man, he was never played as silly, and he never broke character. (Actually, there are a lot of impressive things about Dharma & Greg including the psychology; it is entirely believable that Greg would "rebel" against his parents by marrying this impulsive chick who then turns out, what do you know, to be rather more like his own mother than her own. And it is entirely believable that Dharma would decide that her soul mate is a man who can give her the stability she never thought she had, and in some ways really didn't have, in her own home.)

Frankly, Jenna Elfman just isn't surrounded by that good a cast. I like Dabney Coleman; I think he is hilarious in You've Got Mail. But Dabney Coleman can't do all the work. Dharma & Greg had two sets of extraordinarily gifted and funny actors as the parents. Also, the writing was better. It's too bad, since Jenna Elfman deserves another hit.

American Idol ponderings

2006-01-24T15:13:00.000-08:00

Okay, here is the thing I don't get about American Idol.

But first, I'm going to back up.

I watched American Idol last night. It's a show I watch now and again. Mostly, I avoid it because I don't like watching real people being criticized on television. I don't much care to watch fake people being criticized either, which is why I tend to avoid watching shows like Everybody Loves Raymond. But there's a kind of fascination with pure awfulness and whatever Simon will come up with to say to pure awfulness, like listening to Dr. Laura rag on someone. So I watch American Idol now and again, and last night, it became patently clear to me what Simon will tolerate and what he loathes.

He will tolerate nervousness. He will tolerate people trying hard. And he will tolerate a degree of good-natured goofiness. He dislikes it when people choose songs outside their vocal range (look, it's another Whitney Houston choice). He dislikes people who think they can sing and can't and want to argue with him about it. And he really dislikes people who think they can sing and can't and argue with him because he just doesn't understand what absolutely special people they are. (Last night, one of the "I'm so special/I tried so hard" types was arguing with Simon, and he said, "Oh, okay, well, NOW you can sing.")

So, this is pretty obvious, right? And I figure that if you decide to compete on American Idol, you would probably be familiar with the show. You would know that this is how Simon behaves. You would probably even agree with him most of the time. It doesn't necessarily follow, but I would think it would be very difficult to get through three seasons and NOT, at least, find Simon mostly amusing.

So, this is what I don't get: say, you're a fan of American Idol, and you've watched the last three seasons, and you know how Simon behaves and what just ticks him off, and you even have agreed with him when he lambasts the goofy, awful singers. You sniggered. You said, "Oh, man, what losers." And now, it is your turn. Wouldn't it occur to you, at some level that perhaps, just maybe, you might be one of those goofy, awful singers Simon berates? I mean, wouldn't it? It's not like it didn't happen last season or anything.

I can, vaguely, understand someone with no singing ability or experience deciding to go in just for a lark. I can, vaguely, understand someone going in with the hopeful expectation that Simon will say, "Oh, yes, you are the best we've heard." I cannot fathom going in there and--knowing the set-up of the show--being surprised and hurt and so, so upset when Simon says, "You're not a good singer. This is a waste of time."

At this point I have to thank my parents for all those piano and instrument lessons they made me take. I don't have a great ear myself (one reason I don't talk about music a lot on this blog), but I have been trained. I can recognize flat singing when I hear it. I can recognize when people miss notes. I know why Simon passed the little cowbody, with his magnificent nervousness, despite the mistakes he made. I can't always hear the mistakes. There're some singers come in and they seem okay to me. But I can compare them to other singers, on the show, at church, and I know they aren't THAT good. Better than me isn't much of a criterium for success. And I don't get why the folks who try out can't recognize this. We're all better singers in our baths than we really are in public life, but if you really loved music and listened to it all the time and enjoyed it, wouldn't you recognize the basic underlying excellence of Julie Andrews or Jewel or, good grief, even American Idol stars. Wouldn't you hear it? Wouldn't you at least guess?

People seem to believe, at some Horatio Alger level, that singing is just, you know, intuitive and you don't have to be trained or sing in a band or in choir or, even, golly, sing a lot or anything, yet still can have this residual ability lurking inside you; someone just has to offer you a big old contract and that ability will burst--burst, I say--out of you. Which is weird. Any talent needs to be exercised, improved, worked on. Even the little cowbody was passed, I think, only because Simon couldn't think of any other way for the guy to get training. Do people believe "I'm fabulous even if I don't do anything about it" about painting and writing and sculpture and cooking? Even Picasso had mentors. But singing--which is comparatively harder to master without some underlying ability--seems to belong to this "I'm good but nobody knows it" mentality.

And I don't get it.

Chase

2006-01-03T06:11:00.001-08:00

The remarkable thing about the character Chase on the TV show House is that he isn't entirely sympathetic. Despite his pretty-boy looks (which are constantly commented on by House), he is far less innocent that he appears. Not that he is evil, only very self-serving. Which doesn't negate the complication of his having contemplated entering the priesthood. The result is a fully complex human being, whose motivations and opinions aren't entirely objectionable.

He is a difficult character to like, however, and yet he never passes the line into the utterly dislikable. I think this is due mostly to House himself, who keeps Chase's baser instincts in check by calling Chase on what he does and harassing him endlessly about it. More than that, since House--who acts as the moral center of the show--tolerates Chase, the audience is persuaded to tolerate Chase.

For instance, in the episode where Chase is being questioned for "killing" a patient, House takes a fall. He does it in his usual grumpy, cynical way so at first you don't realized how much House hasn't protected himself. In large part, this is due to House's honest evaluation of his part in the situation--he didn't tell Chase about his father and thus left Chase open to the shock of sudden knowledge--and also to House's leadership style, which is to protect those under him (House's refusal to fire any of his people, not even, at first, Chase, says a great deal about his personality; he would prefer to deal with his interns himself than feed them to the wolves).

A complex, not fully likable yet watchable character is difficult to pull off. I've never been able to get into Everybody Loves Raymond because the characters are SO horrible to each other. They cross the line for me and becomes unbearable. Everyone has different tolerance levels in this regard. I've never cared for meanness as its own excuse, which is, I suppose why Chase remains so remarkable a character to me.

Angel v. Spike

2006-01-03T06:11:00.000-08:00

I was reading one of my Christmas presents this morning, a collection of essays about Angel & Buffy, and decided, Hey, I've got some opinions about all this stuff. While the shows were going on, before I started this blog, I would exchange e-mails about the episodes with two of my brothers. Below is an e-mail that I wrote regarding Angel v. Spike during the last season of Angel (with some editing).

Crazy Spike with a soul was fun but ultimately not different enough from Angel. And Spike is intrinsically different from Angel. If you were to compare them to Old Testament people, Spike would be Jeremiah and Angel would be, oh, Saul before he went nuts. Something like that. That is, Angel is the noble guy who fights. He's interested in redemption but he isn't particularly theology-minded. Which is less of a contradiction than it sounds.

Angel's "disillusionment" always seemed a practical extension of his personality. And his adoption of a fatalistic, Norse-like idea of the universe (there's nothing beyond this life but we fight the good fight anyway) is also in keeping with his warrior ethic.

Spike is the visionary. But he's not an Isaiah type visionary. He's a Jeremiah type visionary. The guy who can cut through all the gobbledygook to the center. It came off trite but Spike's statement last night that he could see the poetry in how to kill the bad guy was dead-on accurate. There's an episode back in early Buffy where Spike comes back to town after being dumped by Drusilla. He runs into Angel and Buffy who are pretending to "just be friends," and he knocks down their explanations, bang, bang, bang. Later, Buffy says, "Spike can figure it out, for some reason."

(The episode where Spike explains to Buffy why slayers die is another great example of this.)

This is what makes Spike Spike. Spike is Jeremiah saying, "Don't be stupid. The Babylonians are stronger than you." And then watching everyone around him doing the exact opposite of what he suggests and self-destructing.

The difference is, Angel will adopt disillusionment as a way of dealing with life, but I'm not sure it matters much to Angel. His "theology" is secondary to his behavior, as it is with most people. But Spike, I think, is, while not a believer, a man who will keep worrying at the framework of things. In his head at least. He isn't a reader, and Angel is. He is a poet, and Angel likes Manilow. This works. As character development, it's ripe for exploration.

For instance, Angel's redemption has no religious foundation whatsoever. He feels guilty. That's enough. He doesn't like to hurt people. That's enough. But Spike, in my personal estimation, would have been more prone to go at his redemption (if he decided even to pursue it) from the point of view of theology—why and what for and what does it mean and so on and so forth. He won't stand for anything shallow or insincere but he would be more likely to take it to pieces, and he would go at it harder. The inconsistencies upset him more. Angel tries and gets bitter and gets over it and keeps going. I don't think Spike has that kind of personality. Angel is, say, Zeus and Spike is, say, Eros or Loki or a dozen other tricksters who undermine things precisely because the moral discrepancies bugged them.

So, I would have liked to have seen Spike take his getting a soul from a more religious angle. Get all priestly (in fact, a priest Spike would be a hoot). He wouldn't have to keep up the intensity for longer than one season of Buffy. He could relax a bit. But it would have been far more interesting than Spike moping around soulfully after Buffy. It would have been much better if he'd come back and the business about having a soul so consumed him that Buffy just lost relevance.

But maybe not, since Spike has always been a closet romantic.

Note: the (non)use of Spike during the last season of Buffy really bugged me. I thought he was given precious little to do except stand around. Actually, I wasn't a huge fan of the last season of Buffy at all. Yes, yes, I know people who thought the seasons got better and better for both Angel and Buffy. I don't, and I agree with Peter Beagle who thinks that Angel gained this wacky soap opera baroque quality. I pretty much skipped the middle of Angel, and only watched the last season because it was the last season. Which doesn't mean that it still wasn't better television than a lot of other stuff out there. But I HATED the lighting in the last season.

My comparison between Angel and Spike continues below. This is an e-mail from the same season (the episode where Angel and Spike are chasing after the goblet of something or other).

The fight sequences between Spike and Angel went on a bit long, but they were still very cool. Truth is: watching two guys beat the crap out of each other is sexy stuff. I don't mean Texas Ranger type beating. That's not sexy. That's just pathetic. But the whole Henry IV/Hotspur thing: "Hi, we don't like each other, but we're both reasonably honorable so let's hack each other to death with swords." And then they fight and get all bloody and one of them falls over and croaks out, "You have all the honor, comrade" and dies.

That is very sexy. And, yeah, the whole male bonding thing can be fairly sexy too. Not sappy male bonding a la Beaches. Home Improvement type male bonding.

The cleverest of the clever bits was the whole Angel vs. Spike thing. The clever part was that the arguments played on the Angel fan versus Spike fan arguments that I hear about from my Buffy friends. Personally, I like 'em both, but there are definite followings amongst the fanbase and definite (and vocal) opinions about who Buffy should end up with. The whole exchange played on that and it looks like the writers will go on playing with it for this Season. There's a tongue-in-cheek aspect to it that I find very amusing.

I also thought the dialog worked on several levels. Spike's romanticism was played out effectively but more importantly I think it gave Angel a bit more depth, ambiguity-wise. The line that Angel, as Angelus, gives Spike, "You can take all you want, but nothing is yours" is reflected in Angel's "good" self. Just like Spike wanted the cup to get back at Angel as well as for the meaning it would give his life, I think Angel's warning, while partly given to dissuade Spike, was honestly meant. He's still trying to dish out to Spike the same advice: there're no automatics; there're no guarantees just because you have a soul. Angel, older and wiser, learned this the hard way. And I thought it worked effectively to illuminate the differences between the two.

I want to add here that the episode where Andrew shows up with the slayerettes (the episode with the crazy slayer) is another good instance where Angel's experience of pain comes up against Spike's relative youth (both in terms of years and in terms of years with a soul). Spike doesn't really grasp until that episode how bad badness can be; he hasn't understood what exactly he should be feeling guilty about. He wants to argue that he isn't that person anymore and that he sacrificed himself to save the world and come on, why SHOULD he care. He wants his beer and skittles life. He doesn't really know how to cope with his new persona. This does fit into my earlier analysis. Angel, who has already been through all this, has accepted a role/position/lifestyle that makes sense (to him). But Spike is bothered by the logic of the whole thing. Which doesn't mean he won't end up being a hero who cares about others, but his way of getting there will be a lot more confusing, unsteady and querulous than Angel's (really, think Jeremiah). As Peter Beagle says, "I like them both. I care about them . . . But I worry about Spike." (His article is in Five Seasons of Angel edited by Glenn Yeffeth.)

Second Seasons: The Polished Draft

2005-12-19T13:26:00.000-08:00

Whilst I sit here, rather hopelessly waiting for my final students to pass in their papers (I don't think it's going to happen, but you never know), I've decided to ponder on the problem of the polished draft.

What I mean by this is that I have occasionally read an old story of mine and been impressed by the energy. I write better plot-lines now and smoother paragraphs and whatnot, but that old story has more verve or wildcard ideas. The first draft, so to speak, is better than the polished, finished product.

How this applies to television: I am currently rewatching the first season of Nero Wolfe, which I love. It still makes me laugh like crazy. Now, I like the second season, I think it has a lot going for it, but the second season doesn't have the same flair or verve or huzpah or somethingness that the first season has.

It isn't that, knowing the characters, the jokes have become old because, as I have mentioned, I can rewatch season 1 and still laugh. Rather, I think Nero Wolfe is an example of the polished syndrome. Season 1 is a hoot, very stylistic, excellent period piece, great acting, snappy dialog, unusual set-up, and everyone loves it so they do season 2, thinking, "We'll give them more of the same, only better" and it kind of falls flat. And I think it's that "only better" that makes the diffference. Because the off-the-cuff, sloppy feeling of the first season (the episodes are cut in the most bizarre fashion) is part of what makes it so fun.

I think this happens quite often. The fans like X or Y or Z or whatever so the producers give them X or Y or Z only better, and it falls flat because X, Y or Z worked in conjunction with something else, not all by its lonesome. For instance, sure, Buffy fans loved Spike, but you can't just have Spike. You've got to have Spike and . . . Unfortunately, sometimes the fans don't realize that they don't really want just Spike, so they clamor for Spike and get Spike but Spike isn't enough, Spike has to be Spike with someone or for some reason. Likewise, the relationship between Archie and Nero is a blast but Archie and Nero for the sake of Archie and Nero simply doesn't work.

Which isn't to say that the second season of Nero Wolfe isn't good; it just lacks a bit of the "wow-za" of the first.

Now, Monk is a show where I think the second and third seasons improved upon the first. I get the impression (I could be wrong) that the producers (of which one if Shalhoub) run a tight ship, by which I mean that the show is meant to be about Monk and it is about Monk and nobody else; all other characters are supporting characters, and there aren't that many: the captain, his lieutenant, Monk's assistant and a kid. This extraordinarily tight casting means that no matter how much the fans like, say, Monk's brother, that doesn't mean he becomes a regular. It also keeps the episodes compact, focusing all the energy on the comedy, rather than developing characterization. It's a one-trick-pony kind of show, but it does its one-trick very, very well and better and better each season.

So I guess the answer is, Ignore the fans. Because you can't satisfy them even when you think you are going to. But don't ignore them completely because, well, they play your wages. Pay attention to them but ignore their suggestions. Something like that.

The Oddness of Dr. Phil

2005-12-06T14:44:00.000-08:00

I rather like Dr. Phil. I'm not a huge fan of talkshows in general, but I don't particularly mind them in the "universe is coming to an end" kind of way. In college, society is always about to implode due to reality television or Oprah or the "dumbing down of America" or whatever. In think this is hokey. What amazes me about Dr. Phil isn't the host, what amazes me are the guests.

When I used to listen to Dr. Laura, I felt similarly about her guests. Why are these people calling up so they can be yelled at? I would know within three seconds of any call what Dr. Laura was going to say. But it seemed like every guest was surprised--THEIR circumstances were different! Followed by another five minutes of the guest saying, "Yeah - but -" and Dr. Laura laying down the law. Why do people expose themselves like this?

However, radio is somewhat person-less; there's a literal AND figurative facelessness--but on T.V., there are the guests, don't ya know, all faceful and angsty and THERE.

And to make it even weirder, you have people like the lady who wishes she could "let herself go" in bed and the woman who doesn't want her neighbors to know how imperfect she is and people who are ashamed of their looks (actually that was on Oprah)--anyway, people who declare that nothing on earth will get them to reveal themselves to others except . . . they are on T.V.! Go figure. (It's hard not to suspect that the beautiful people who fear being looked at are just vain egomaniacs.)

I've decided that for many people, T.V. isn't real or is so glamorous it overcomes any reservations. But I actually go more with the first--that the little actress/actor in all of us kicks in on T.V.: a distance develops between the audience and the people on stage. And, as well, there's a hope that this--THIS appearance--will fix them, which is a debatable point. I once knew a therapist who believed that counseling was useless until the person/family was ready to change because otherwise, it was just a lot of talk. So, I suppose Dr. Phil's guests could see their attendance on the show as the last hurdle, the decision that now, finally, things will get better; and I suppose other guests just like their ten minutes of fame and will return to the same old same old patterns.

Lois & Clark

2005-12-05T12:49:00.001-08:00

Lois & Clark: The Further Adventures of Superman has got to be the most unself-conscious show I've ever watched. I didn't see it back when it first aired so I'm watching it now for the first time. It's a hoot! Pleasantly so. What amazes me is the "whatever" factor. Every show has a plot, sort of; if they want to throw in funny lines, they do; if they want to throw in kissing, they do; if they want to throw in hokey acting, they do.

It isn't deliberately unself-conscious or deliberately formulaic or deliberately anything, as far as I can tell. It isn't like watching Smallville where the plot is entirely haphazard but you still feel that the writers take themselves very, very seriously. Lois & Clark isn't even deliberately non-serious. It's all very Zen-like.

It is helped by the fact that Dean Cain is not a great actor and Terry Hatcher is little better. John Shea is better than them both but after about ten minutes in the pilot, Shea obviously decided to go for over the top villainy. He has that voice (sort of deep and rumbly) that gives anything he says extra cache, and he uses it.

One of the main reasons I think the show works is that Dean Cain and Terry Hatcher are good-looking people (they make, as the saying goes, "a striking couple") but not so devastatingly gorgeous that you never buy into the premise that these people can have normal lives and relate normally to the people around them. Of course, the whole Clark not looking like Superman thing is silly. But the writers know that. Of course it's silly! Ha ha! So suspend your disbelief already! (There's a scene in the pilot where Clark removes his glasses and says something like, "People won't know who I am. See--" and his parents kind of make these, "Uh huh, whatever honey" replies.) We are having fun, the writers seem to be saying, so much fun we don't care whether you (the audience) are having fun or not. This type of writing approach is rather refreshing.

The other thing I like about the show is that unlike the Superman movies (at least, the first one, which I rewatched recently) Clark IS Clark. In the Superman movies, Superman is Superman with a Clark disguise. But Clark of Lois & Clark is intrinsically Clark--he just happens to have powers and so adopts a Superman disguise. It may sound like nitpicking, but it actually makes a huge difference. In the Superman movies, Superman woos Lois as Superman, but Clark of Lois & Clark woos (and becomes good friends with) Lois as Clark. In fact, sometimes, I think the writers forget that the show is, eh hem, about Superman, not about this particular reporting team. Oh, yes, they seem to say, uh, throw in a Superman scene here.

And the show can be downright hilarious, usually in a comments-in-passing kind of way: a character says something, and you go, "Wait, huh?" There's this scene where Lex Luther marches around a room where he has all these artistic artifacts: the missing arms of Venus, the Boy in Yellow. The script doesn't even stress it. He just mentions the artifacts and goes on, and you're sitting there going, "What? What? Did he just say what I think he said?" (In that same episode Shea and his butler are discussing Superman's globe: "It's better than cable," one of them says. "In the future, every household will have one.")

What makes it so bizarre is that unlike Buffy and Angel, the humor--like everything else--doesn't seem to be deliberate. Nobody seems to be using humor as commentary or to create a certain type of show. It's just . . . there, available, okey-dokey, let's use it!

Which, all in all, makes the show extremely relaxing to watch.

Odds & Ends

2005-10-26T15:25:00.001-07:00

So CSI: Las Vegas is having a weird start to their season. I can't figure out if they are deliberately extolling the pointless-crime theme or if it is just lame writing. Whatever, I like my television to have a point.

I'm saddened that I can't watch Wednesday night's Criminal Minds. Mandy Patinkin! And the guy from Dharma & Greg! But I have class that night. I saw the first episode and liked it. Maybe this summer . . .

I have a theory that you can always tell when an actor/actress has kids, even if they are trying to play someone who is bad with kids. So kudos to Tony Shalhoub in "Mr Monk and the Kid" for believably playing someone who is unaccustomed to children. (Shalhoub has two kids.) Keep your eye on Hugh Laurie. He has three kids himself, but is supposed to be a kid-less misanthrope. I bet he gives himself away. This is why Hugh Grant is so good. He really is lousy with kids.

Speaking of Monk, isn't Ted Levine sexy?!

I watched Commander-in-Chief again. It's fun. But she's got to stop saving the world. The ambiguous Donald Sutherland character is carrying all the drama right now.

I confess to a sneaking liking for My Wife and Kids. It's a kind of Home Improvement, only more conservative (in terms of husband and wife roles). The show even has a "Wilson," the genius child from next door who doles out advice.

I prophecy that Out of Practice will last but Twins won't. After seeing the third Bones, it has a good chance of lasting (Boreanaz saying, "This is my space; that is your's. This is all mine," was well-done comedy. The man has talent; it just needs to be used right.) Good replacement casting on NCIS. Cold Case appears to have, thankfully, dumped the soap opera line, at least temporarily. (It's a very romantic show, though.) Ghost Whisperer will probably last but not because it deserves to. Unfortunately, despite the awesome Brent Spiner, I can't get into Threshold. How Numbers held out is beyond me.

Watched a brief scene of Boston Legal. I must say that Spader and Shatner are hilarious together: like watching two wits from a Restoration comedy. By the way, everyone on that show looks related. Everyone.

I get all sociological: I've wondered if the new influx of brother shows is a way of casting two males leads without having to imply a homosexual relationship. Ah, the good old days of Holmes and Watson, Kirk and Spock. On the other hand, maybe it is a way to imply a loving relationship between two unrelated actors who are playing related characters--the network can play up the homeoeroticism without having to worry about political correctness (in either direction).

You can tell I've been a grad student too long. Speaking of which, my professors still want me to extend ideological theories for more than one paragraph. *Sigh.*

Commander-in-Chief: Yes, I Watched It

2005-10-26T15:25:00.000-07:00

I watched Commander-in-Chief Saturday night. It's the new ABC show starring Geena Davis as the United States V.P. who is catapulted into the President's seat when the top dog snuffs it. The idea, I think, is that she's a woman, and she's brilliant, yadda yadda, but she wasn't seeking power.

Here's the good stuff:

I like Geena Davis.
I adore Donald Sutherland (talk about scene chewing) who looks like becoming, I can only hope, Mr. Giles to Davis' Buffy.
Geena Davis' character is an independent.
Geena Davis' character is believably tough.

Here are the problems:

The movie opens with the V.P. being fetched out of an assembly. I've said it before (maybe not on this site), I'll say it again. It may or may not have been a slam at Bush (those 7 minutes in the classroom), but I think walking out of an assembly while kiddies are still singing is just rude. I don't care how big and powerful and important you are. It's rude. The guy with the brain clot back home still HAS the brain clot. The bad stuff isn't going to stop just because you get up and walk out, all important-like.

There's some kind of weird, ritualistic idea going on here: that if the politician would only react in 10 minutes, no 5, no 3, no 1, no 20 seconds, the terrorist-driven planes would disappear and the waves would wash back into the Gulf and the brain clot would dissipate even as we are speaking. Sure. Yeah. Right. Give me a break. Politicians, get over yourselves. Silly people who criticize politicians for things like sitting in a classroom for x minutes (and who expect politicians to be all-seeing, all-knowing, and omnipotent), get over your superstitions already. Presidents aren't magic. It's not Merlin to the rescue. It's a guy in a suit who works alongside other people in suits who rely on information from other people in suits who think that other people in suits know what they are doing even if they don't.

Problem 2: I don't think scaring an ambassador from a foreign country into complying with your wishes is terribly smart. It works on television, sure, but in real life . . . eh. Foreign affairs aren't that easy. I thought it would have been much more interesting if the scare tactic had backfired, and the new President would have had to make the hard decision of whether or not to go to war over a diplomatic incident. There's a mighty large group of people out there who really do believe that this kind of grandstanding works--that you don't have to go to war and lose lives and make the tough choices in order to win, you can just play mind games and make great speeches. But it doesn't work like that in the real world.

There's a Star Trek: Next Generation episode that illustrates this. Now, Star Trek: New Generation is not known for its profound plotting. Voyager gets the closest to combining the adventure story aspect of Next Generation with the no-easy-solutions of the socio-political Deep Space Nine. (Although Voyager usually gives up about ten minutes to the end and just winds everything up with a sudden plot twist.) But there is this Next Generation episode where Picard has been sent into Cardassian territory to bring back a rogue Federation captain who is blowing up Cardassian outposts. And Picard has to invite on board a bunch of Cardassians, one of whom is played by the same actor who ended up playing Gul Dukat, which means that he is really, really good at playing an ambiguous slimeball.

The Federation has informed Picard that they can't afford a war. He has to bring the rogue back. And he does, and in the process, he has to make some really difficult choices. And it turns out that, what do you know, the Cardassians are re-arming. But there isn't anything anybody can do about it. Picard warns the Gul Dukat character, and it's an effective scene, but you know and Picard knows and the Cardassians know that it doesn't make any difference. And if you are familiar with Star Trek, you know this is the beginning of the Marquis, where Federation members will go rogue to fight the encroaching Cardassians because the Federation itself can't afford to start another war and are too fine-spread anyway.

And the uncertainty is allowed to stand at the end of the episode (and you get to hear Colm Meaney sing an Irish song). It really is one of their most effective episodes.

The British do this sort of thing even better. Yes, Prime Minister works because the Prime Minister never wins. Well, occasionally. Sort of. But never really. And it isn't just because of Humphrey, the civil servant. It's because, well, it's government. Governments don't fix things, hey, presto fashion. It's not that easy, first of all. And it's a bureaucracy, second of all.

Which is why people who get excited about having a "smart" president ("He's so smart; he really thinks about stuff!") are kind of naive, me thinks. I always thought Kerry was a bit of an idiot, personally, but even if I hadn't, I wouldn't have been sold on the idea that "smartness" equals a peaceful, prosperous nation. What people who want "smart" presidents are thinking is that smart presidents will be able to do all these clever, grandstanding things (like on Commander-in-Chief) and fix stuff. But in the real world, people aren't impressed by articulate speeches and don't care much for someone else's logic and aren't going to stop to be managed or manipulated or "understood" in their geo-social-political context, etc. They just do what they want to do, and they don't always react along given "smart" lines.

Cunning, now, I don't mind cunning.

Hopefully, for the sake of Commander-in-Chief, the writers will realize this. Although, I'm not sure it matters. Maybe, Americans want their political fictions to be fantasy.

The Oddness of Smallville

2005-09-28T06:01:00.000-07:00

I watched the first Smallville episode late, late Saturday night and realized why I've never been able to get into the show. I'd like to; I think it is a cool idea. But I can't.

It was possibly the strangest plotted episode I've ever seen. There's that probability concept where a million monkeys typing in a room can produce the works of Shakespeare in a thousand years or something like that. That's how I feel when I watch Smallville, like the monkeys just decided to have the characters do THIS. Now, THIS. Now, THIS. Clark gets into an argument with his father, then goes to the graveyard, then has a long conversation with Lana, then returns the keys to Lex, then we see more of the dangerous kid with the electrically powered body. Now, Clark sees the wall of weird stuff in Smallville High School. And he saw the space capsule he arrived in, but he certainly isn't doing anything about it.

Very weird.

Also, my credulity is strained by his being a sixteen-year-old. Or a teen at all. I'm willing to believe that Clark is big for his age (cause he's a superhero and all), but the fact that no one seems to notice that this devastatingly handsome, hunky, 20-year-old looking guy is waltzing around High School strains the imagination. At least, on Buffy, they all kind of look the same. (Actually, Whedon's casting for Buffy was extraordinarily astute; teenagers are a lot weedier, a lot younger and lot more gauche than T.V. teens, but Buffy "teens" manage to bridge the gap between real teens and faux teens very effectively.)

Lex, on the other hand, is a believable 21-year-old, however power-crazed. He is possibly the most interesting character on Smallville (love those ambiguous villains) but there just isn't enough of him to make up for the haphazard plotting and the much too beautiful man. Christopher Reeve, however handsome, had the ability to blend when he needed to. The actor who plays Clark just isn't blendable. And for a superhero, that's kind of a problem. (Note to producers: think Tobey Maguire.)

Bones and House

2005-09-25T06:05:00.000-07:00

Season premiere and series premiere. House was, as always, spectacular. Setting aside the superb acting of Hugh Laurie, not to mention LL Cool J, the script, as usual, was excellent: well-written, well-structured. Although the subject is quite different, House scripts remind me of Whedon's perfect set-up and pay-off. They also prove that popular television can have layers (according to my thesis, viewers will give it layers even if it doesn't have them). House's "grief" list worked on so many levels: for Cameron, for Foreman, for House, for the prisoner. Yet, thankfully, without being spelled out. Show don't tell! Show don't tell!

House is one of those shows that I think improved over its first season. Not that the early Houses weren't good, but the pace, Laurie's sense of the main character, the scripts, with their interwoven themes, evened out over 22 episodes. The shows feel more solid, and the individual episodes hang together nearly without flaw.

Bones is, unfortunately, competing with about a billion other cop/forensic shows. And that isn't counting cable T.V. It has a good premise. David Boreanaz plays the same character he played on Angel and Buffy, except this guy can walk around in sunlight. He plays the gruff guy with a heart who will defend/protect the (shorter, slighter) heroine, who also happens to be good at martial arts and have a chip on her shoulder. Well, well, well. I think the characterization is deliberate. At the very end of the episode, Brennan asks the FBI man (David Boreanaz), "So, what, you think there's some kind of cosmic balance sheet out there?" Now, if that isn't deliberate . . .

It could last. The writing is okay. The scoobies are fun. It's in with a chance.

Prison Break

2005-09-07T18:47:00.000-07:00

I liked it, although I doubt I'll keep watching it.

I liked it because it was, to be upfront and obvious, cool. I have no idea how plausible it is and don't much care. I liked it for the same reason I like watching Jason Bourne and Batman: very, very smart guy--who thinks ahead--behaves in a levelheaded, yet crazily masochistic way to get his brother out of jail, and he does it in a cool, smart, masochistic way. The whole tattooed blueprint thing was kind of silly but incredibly awesome at the same time. (Although my instant thought was "Yikes, do they make the actor get all that makeup on everyday?" But my reason reasserted itself and pointed out that in the premiere we never see Michael Schofield's chest and back more than once. All the other times, he refers to the tattoo on his arm. Answer: no, he doesn't put the makeup on everyday, however it is done.)

The conspiracy stuff looks pretty lame but again, the plot is not what is so cool about the show. What is so cool about the show is the slow, cautious, cunning brain at work. I prefer the Bournes and Schofields to the James Bonds of the action world. Bond is all glitz and glame and big tanks. He's got the suit and the car and the style and the women, yadda yadda. I prefer desperately insane heroes with photographic memories personally.

I won't watch the show since it is one of these "gotta make you watch every week" types. I prefer House which, despite having a story arc, allows you to miss an episode here and there. And all House episodes are contained, more or less. With Prison Break, my original assumption was that Michael would get his brother out during the premiere and then the rest of the episodes would be about him surviving intelligently in prison. But it's all going to be about the silly conspiracy and Michael saving his brother (sort of 24ish--what will they do next season? Michael Schofield stays in, of course; he will sacrifice himself so his brother can escape, and then . . . he works to get someone else out?). Anyway, I really don't like being hooked on things. But it was a cool premiere. (For you Buffy fans, Michael was one of the swimmers in the episode "Go Fish.")

Nero Wolfe

2005-09-07T18:46:00.000-07:00

It's been awhile since my last post. This past week, I have been training a replacement in my (ex) secretarial job. Tomorrow, I begin teaching at our local community college (English Composition). At the end of the week, I will be interviewing to be a substitute at a local high school. And the following week, I begin my second to last semester in my graduate program. Consequently, posts might be more infrequent over the next eight months. Of course, I am about to re-enter the world of academe, so perhaps the posts will increase!

On to the post! One of the great things about Hutton's Nero Wolfe (and I say Hutton since it is clear from watching the commentary and comparing the first movie to the series that Hutton had a HUGE impact on the series' style) is the morality of Nero Wolfe. It takes a bit of getting used to since it seems, on the surface, almost brutal. On one occasion, a woman comes to Nero Wolfe's brownstone. She wants to stay. Nero Wolfe rejects her proposition. He has been offered $10,000 to find her. But since she has come to him of her own accord, he informs her that (1) he will allow her to stay if she pays him an appropriate retainer ($10,000) or (2) he will give her 24 hours to run, and then follow her in order to obtain the $10,000. She decides on (2) and is killed within 3 hours of leaving the brownstone. Wolfe sees no need to investigate; he is not responsible, has no client and is peripherally involved. Archie disagrees, gets himself in trouble, and Wolfe ends up resolving the case on Archie's behalf.

In an age still very much affected by chivalric impulses (not a bad thing), Wolfe's proposition to the soon-to-be-murdered victim seems callous (as it strikes Archie), but the more Nero Wolfe you watch, the more you begin to recognize that this hard self-interest is, nevertheless, intrinsically honorable. In a later episode, Wolfe deliberately withholds evidence, to his own inconvenience, since a woman wanted the evidence withheld, and he feels her (self-interested) choice (which got her killed) should be honored. He will take on clients and then release himself when a conflict of interest arises (in other words, he doesn't develop a liking for his clients and resolve to defend them through thick and thin; the one time he does defend a client through thick and thin--a gardener--he does it because he wants the man to take care of his orchids, which the gardener can't do in jail). He will withhold information from the police that he feels is not their province, yet he will respect a city ordinance not to enter his own study, simply because it is the law. He walks a fine line between deliberately subordinating justice to gain his own ends and satisfying justice to gain his own ends. And he never drifts off the line.

It is, overall, a consistent study of behavior that reflects, from what I have heard, Rex Stout's picture of Wolfe in the books. The television series' plots (which are played over and over by the same characters) are simply a stylish backdrop against which Nero Wolfe and Archie argue over the cases. Chaykin and Hutton pull this off (with more than adequate support from a stellar cast, including the marvelous Colin Fox) through rapid-fire dialog and fascinating reaction shots, but the complexity of Wolfe's integrity is the meat that the audience waits for. Without that underlying gritty hardheadedness, the show would be a more than adequate period piece but nothing more. It is the producers' willingness to keep Wolfe unpretty, unsympathetic and unsentimental that makes the show work. For 2 seasons at least!

The Best of Trek

2005-08-16T08:19:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite Star Trek: Next Generation episodes is "The Hunted." The reason it is one of my favorites is that it is one of the few Star Trek episodes where the good bad guy (Roga Danar) has to outwit the bridge crew before he can get off the ship.

That is, he doesn't just walk into a shuttle bay, commandeer a shuttle without anyone noticing (because these places are always totally devoid of personnel), get the shuttle bay doors open, fly out of the bay AND get it too far from the ship to be tractored in before the system so much as blips a warning.

When Roga Danar escapes from his cell (unbelievably but hey, at least it takes some effort), the bridge crew immediately shuts down all of the shuttle bays and transporters. Finally! Personally, I think it is really dumb that the transporters wouldn't be shut down anyway. I mean, where's anybody going to go? The Enterprise left the planet to go chasing after Danar. Do individuals habitually want to use the Enterprise's transporters to mock transport themselves to non-existent places? "Look, Mom, I'm transporting myself out into space. No, I'm not." Still, at least Danar has to outmaneuver this obstacle.

The bridge crew also set up forcefields on every deck. Again, well, yeah, people. Do ya think? It amazes me how often the bridge crew are stymied by wandering bad guys.* I'm not sure Danar should be able to get as far as he does in fact but by Star Trek standards, he's pretty smart so I'll allow him to outmaneuver all possible non-addressed-in-the-episode forcefields.

*Actually, it doesn't amaze me all that much. See below for my theory on why.

Anyway, Danar then has to outwit some form of tear gas; this is never fully explained. I think he is able to endure it because of all the amazing superman genetic manipulation he has undergone. He also has to outwit Data, which is somewhat unbelievable. (See my theory below for why it MIGHT work.) And okay, the ease with which Danar gets to Engineering just blows your mind. And the fact that no one runs to catch him. "He's headed to Engineering," Riker says. "On my way," Worf says and saunters briskly down the corridor. (Of course, if he ran, the camera would run out of room.)

Still--STILL--Danar has to work to get off the ship. It is, on the whole, a preferable episode to those episodes where the bridge crew only learns that someone is transporting (or borrowing shuttles) after the fact and oops, it's just too late to do anything about it. (One could argue that for all episodes where this happens, the viewer should assume that a long, Danar-like chase occured before Wesley or Worf or Data says, "He's transported to the surface, Captain!")

*My theory regarding Star Trek. My theory is that the Federation is run by a bunch of bureacratic types who honestly believe (or pretend to believe) that they aren't a military organization, like having extreme leftists run the war in Iraq. So they have all these bizarre rules and regulations that hamper the people who actually know what they are doing (actually, it's more like the British uppercrust bureaucrats trying to run India versus the lowerclass officers and engineers in India who actually knew what was going on; Kipling had scathing things to say about the British uppercrust types). So, they insist that shuttle bays not be guarded because that would imply, oh horror of horrors, that the Enterprise is a military ship (this theory also explains the reason Picard keeps telling everyone it isn't when it is). And they have to leave the transporters on because otherwise the Enterprise will be deemed a hostile, prison-like environment. And all that business about having one huge computer system so that problems on the holodeck always, always, always cause photon torpedoes to arm: that's the fault of the idiot bureaucrats as well. (Actually, Star Trek 3: Search for Spock more or less implies that the Federation is run by lousy bureaucrats).

My theory about Data is that his creator built into his memory processes a "slow" device. That is, the creator wrote a program where Data is forced to discard or randomly select information before he finishes computing all possible variables. It's really subtle; he can still rattle off information and numbers at the drop of a hat, but it keeps him from being too computer-like and forces him to learn: it's kind of like one of those gates in irrigation drains in Utah that flaps back and forth depending on the force of the water so the more variables there are, the more Data's response is "slowed" or checked (it's still very fast, it's just Vulcan fast rather than machine fast). Data's program also insists that he actually experience an "agency moment" where he has to think about his final choice rather than simply--computer-like--producing it. This checking-and-agency program makes it possible for Troi to beat Data at chess. And for Danar to "outcompute" him. And various other unbelievable scenarios to occur. It also explains the absolutely awesome ending of "The Most Toys" (great episode with ever talented Saul Rubinek).

All in all, enjoying Star Trek is much easier if one accepts the basic pointlessness of the Federation. Of course, Deep Space Nine got all gloomy about it. It is much more user friendly if one simply assumes that most of these people are totally clueless. We lucky viewers get to watch the few non-clueless Federation members. Well, non-clueless most of the time.

Abortion & Star Trek

2005-07-27T07:15:00.000-07:00

There's an episode of Star Trek: Next Generation, second season, where Troi is invaded by a "life entity" (the politically correct Trekkie word for "alien") which wants to experience life for its own sake and decides to start, inside Troi, as a fetus (it is eventually born). It is an unremarkable episode but has one scene of merit. Riker, Picard, Worf, Data and Troi have gathered in the conference room. The men are whittering away about the "life form" and whether it is threatening or not. Worf, the pragmatist, suggests aborting it. The men yammer some more. Until Troi speaks up and says, "I'm going to have it so get over it."

Now, I like this scene for two reasons, both of which have nothing to do with whether or not it is militarially intelligent for Troi to have the baby. (One of the amusing aspects of Star Trek: Next Generation is how much time Picard spends trying to convince people that the Federation isn't a military organization, all while the Enterprise is arming torpedoes every other episode.) I like it because it illustrates the problem of choice. The baby is growing in Troi, it is inside her body, and there really isn't much (absent a direct order which Picard can't give because, eh hem, this isn't a military organization) that anyone can do about it.

The other thing I like about it is that Troi chooses to let the fetus live. Which is all very proper and right for a non-military starship that is seeking out new life and new civilization. I mean, hello, here's life, might as well say howdy to it.

Now, in reference to issue #1, while not a fan of pro-choice, I get a bit wiggety about a government having any say about a fetus at all. Yes, society could extend rights to the fetus, but boy, imagine that as a complication of modern life! Suppose the fetus aborts naturally--there would have to be an investigation. And suppose the woman had been exercising too vigorously the day before. Would she be accused of self-aborting? On purpose? Would pregnant women's eating habits be monitored? If they didn't eat healthily one day, would they be fined? Could a child sue the mother for damage done to it as a fetus? You see the problems: messy, legal and highly problematic. To a degree, we must, as a democratic, secular society, allow the fetus to be the property of the woman.

But in reference to issue #2, the older I get, the more disenchanted I become with pro-choice. I was never a pro-choice advocate, but during my twenties I was willing to allow for the pro-choice argument. But it bothers me more and more the failure of the pro-choice movement to admit that they are, in fact, talking about abortion (and property). And what that means and whether it is a terribly good thing for a society to be so c'est la vie, not to mention disingenuous, about killing brand new life.

I might be less judgmental of a purely pragmatic argument, a la Worf, but it annoys me to the extreme that pro-choicers are so self-congratulatory about the "rights" they are defending while ignoring the side-effect of those "rights." It's especially hard when many of the same people who preach about pro-choice, also want me to get tearful over the death penalty, extinct plants and vicious terrorists. Even Star Trek drew the line at letting the Borg take over the universe.

I won't go so far as pro-lifers who insist that abortions are another Holocaust. I think that misses the point of issue #1. But surely there's room in the debate for people who think that the pro-choice movement is kidding itself when they claim they speak for all women. If women really are so independent and self-evolved, yadda yadda, shouldn't they exhibit their independence and self-evolution by considering the long-range social results of their behavior?

Truth is, a lot of women do, but they aren't necessarily pro-choice.

CSI's Top 10 Instructions to Criminals

2005-07-20T12:16:00.000-07:00

10. Don't cheat rich, powerful casino bosses (especially if one is a CSI's dad).

9. If you think you haven't left evidence behind, think again.

8. Bugs are CSI's friends.

7. If you kill your wife and hide her in the boiler of your basement in a city in the desert, you will probably be found out.

6. No, we aren't cops, we just act like we are.

5. Rental cars are never cleaned properly—don't count on them.

4. Never dress up in a fur costume on a country road at night.

3. Stealing dead bodies is a crime, even if it's the dead body of your best friend.

2. For the victims: Don't strike up e-mail conversations with criminals while they are in jail and then agree to meet them in dark, dangerous locations even if they are so very, very nice.

1. Never spit on a CSI.

Character v. Plot: The Catch-22 of the Television Series

2005-07-18T09:00:00.000-07:00

The reason most shows falter after two to three years, I think, is that story gives way to personality.

It kind of has to. The whole point of TV is to keep people watching and while the people in my college gasp in horror over such crass comsumerism, it's a respectable motivation. People who are bored don't watch. People who aren't being diverted don't watch. Not being bored and being diverted seems a fairly good definition of entertainment to me.

In the first season, and sometimes the second, this means that the writers pull out all the stops. They give you every single burning building, trapped in another dimension, time wrapping, wrongfully accused, meet up with old friend/lover/villain, identity theft variation-on-a-theme plot line that is out there.

Which leaves one going, "Uh, what about season three?"

What happens in season three is that plotlines based on the characters take over. This doesn't work in season one because the audience does not yet care whether Bobby's wife leaves him or Judy's husband is a drug addict or Samantha really, really wants a child. But by season two, the viewer has become invested in the characters' welfare. From the writer's perspective, this means they can put the character in danger and voila! that's enough to keep the tension going. (This is how soaps work.)

Star Trek: Next Generation, bizarrely enough, started doing this early on. I've been rewatching the DVDs sort of in order. I started renting season 2 (Netflix) and getting season 1 out of the library. What surprised me was that despite the totally hokey plots of season 1, they were far more action packed than the season 2 episodes I've watched so far. Season 2 is surprisingly talky and personality-centered. Since many times this involves watching Brent Spiner do comedy, I don't mind especially. (That's him in the picture.) And I think this early focus might explain Star Trek: Next Gen's popularity. Sci-fi, by necessity, has to focus on plot, and, like cop shows, it's kind of okay to do the same story over and over and over. They meet aliens! Someone dies! Whatever, it's the same story. But you can't churn out seven seasons without creating some attachment to the characters and eventually attachment to characters is what keeps a show going.

Take the final seasons of Buffy, for instance. Shows like the dream episode simply wouldn't have worked earlier on. Even "Band Candy" (season 3) wouldn't have worked in season 1 since part of the great joy of "Band Candy" is watching Giles, who we already know very well, acting like a hulking, belligerent teenager (and he does it magnificently; that's his real accent, by the way). The latter half of Mash was more about Hawkeye and crew than the Korean War or medicine.

The only problem with this people-intense approach is that plot is ultimately what runs the machine. Mash faltered and died (especially with the loss of Radar). It all comes down to story, really. Yes, there are shows like 7th Heaven and One Tree Hill and such that run basically on "what will happen next to so and so" (and I'd like to add here, in a random tangent, that there are few things that bug me as much as that manipulative mother on 7th Heaven; I like the actress; but I can't stand her Camden character). But story is still the power source. CSI, Law & Order, Star Trek, all those shows are aggressively popular because they deliver a story. Even reality shows are cut and pasted until some kind of plot emerges. (This week, Gary and Vanessa fight over food rationing!) Once all the stories have been used up, people are all that is left.

So,I don’t blame the writers for switching focus. They're just trying to make a living, and hey, I can always change channels. And sometimes it works. Take Monk, for instance. There are only so many detective plots out there, and there are only so many "what crazy thing is Monk doing today" ideas; to cope, the writers have focused more and more on using the marvelous comedic powers of Tony Shalhoub and Ted Levine. The second episode of season 3 is one of the funniest episodes of Monk I've seen. I keep thinking, "They can't top that," and then they do. (When Monk thinks he is locked in the panic room and Ted Levine is shouting instructions to him through the hole in the door is one of the dumbest funny things I've seen. Who would have thunk? Oh, yes, and the monkey. The monkey is great.)

Star Trek developed the Borg (getting one villain and keeping it is always a good idea). CSI: Las Vegas split their team up which I'm not sure worked, but it made for an effective near last line of the last episode. (Lot of work for one line, but hey....) Whedon's coping mechanism is usually to keep adding more and more and more characters, which doesn't really work, but it keeps things interesting. (Although I thought the last two seasons of Buffy and Angel were both pretty bad; Whedon-bad which means they were still rocking, but not so hot compared to the earlier seasons.) NCIS actually killed someone off. Which I didn't see coming, even though the TV ads told me it would happen, and it shocked me to my core. (But is she really dead?) So next season, the characters can HANDLE THEIR GRIEF, etc. etc. for twenty trillon episodes.

In general, I prefer plot & story to character development, but I do like to like the characters, at least. I could never get into Enterprise because, despite liking Scott Bakula, I didn't much care for any character except Trapp. But I like all the Star Trek: Next Gen characters, even Troi despite her silly lines. I adore Nero Wolfe (season 2 is coming out; it's coming out!) characters, which is a good thing since sometimes those plots are totally convoluted. The dialog between Wolfe and Archie goes a long way towards making the show work. I prefer CSI: Las Vegas to the others, mostly because I like the supporting characters; that is, I like Grissom and Caruso (lovely voice that guy has got) and Sinise but I don't much care for the supporting characters on Miami and New York. But I really like Warwick, Nick, Sarah (even Sarah, who is a basket case if ever I saw one) and Katherine and Greg, of course. Even Hodges and Eckley, who may be a bureaucrat but was right about Grissom screwing up as a manager.

So character does matter. But it can't carry plot forever. Even on a good day.

P.S. Plot and story are somewhat different things, but that's another post for another day.

Versions of Jane Eyre: Jane and Rochester Forever!

2005-06-23T10:31:00.000-07:00

The BBC version of Jane Eyre (1983) starring Timothy Dalton is possibly the best version out there. I've seen six of them, including a horrible 1934 version that has so little resemblance to the actual story, you wonder why they bothered to keep the title. The Orson Welles' version is, naturally, definitive, mostly because Orson Welles is Rochester. My biggest problem with this version is Joan Fontaine. She looks so thoroughly like the nice-girl-next-door, I never believe she is a somewhat eccentric, 18-year-old whose passionate otherworldiness will attract Rochester despite his good intentions. While Orson Welles is growling and bettling his brows and running about in gorgeous (and well fitted) dressing gowns, I keep expecting Joan Fontaine to say, "Oh, and when did you want your washing done, honey?"

Of the two most current versions (1996, William Hurt as Rochester; 1997 Ciaran Hinds as Rochester), I prefer William Hurt's, just because I like William Hurt. And I like Samuel West who plays Rivers. But the BBC version beats them all for several reasons.

Firstly, the casting is excellent. It seems totally wrong at first. Timothy Dalton is a really handsome guy, and Rochester isn't supposed to be. He's supposed to be, well, Orson Welles: striking looks and dark glances and stocky broodiness. Yet Timothy Dalton pulls all that off through sheer, magnificent acting. He's not too pretty, despite being handsome, and he builds on that. He's also a very big guy. I tend to associate him with James Bond, which is a mistake. Bond is all sauve elegance. Dalton can hulk about with the best of them.

The actress (Zelah Clarke) who plays Jane is also excellent. She plays Jane as more matter-of-fact than she comes across in the book, but she also captures Jane's tapped-down passion. She is perfect in appearance, being small, slight with a pair of gorgeous eyes and very fine features. She isn't really pretty but she isn't really not. The only snag is that despite her flawless skin and extremely youthful features, she's not 18. Everytime I see the movie, I try to pretend she's 18 for about 1/3 of the movie until I think, "She's got to be 30 at least." It's in her bearing and her voice. She moves and talks like an adult, not a somewhat gawky, if reserved, teenager.

But it still works. Age is not as great an issue in Jane Eyre as class and oh, yeah, that crazy woman in the attic. I just give up thinking she's 18 and figure this is the story of two people in their 30s and hey, why not. Jane just taught at Lorwood for another ten years, instead of two. In the end, the viewer ends up believing that these two odd people from very different backgrounds are soulmates, which is all that matters.

The second thing the BBC version does right is the scene with the gypsy. The BBC version is the ONLY version that has this scene. I think the other versions excise it since it is so bizarre and seem so exploitative. Basically, the gypsy is Rochester trying to pump Jane for information. Yeah, it does sound weird, but it makes perfect sense if Rochester is done right. Dalton does Rochester right. In most versions, Rochester is damped down (except Orson Welles but really, the Orson Welles' version is all about Orson Welles, it isn't about Jane) and nicened up. But he can't be. He's a weird guy. Jane loves him because he's weird. She's weird too. They're weird together. In order for Rochester to make any sense, he has to be played as a disillusioned idealist who has decided to be a rake and is really, really bad at it. He wants desperately for Jane to meet him half-way in his plan to make her his lover. But she won't, being too young (this is where the youth quotient matters), too inexperienced and too much of an idealist herself. Which he knows. So he gives up and just lies to her. But the first half of the book (and movie) only make sense if Rochester comes off as uncertain of Jane and of himself, no matter how much he blusters. He's a man who is very cocky when he gets what he wants but is intensely unsure of himself up until that point. (Although he gets so cocky when he gets what he wants that he has to fall off a burning building and lose his sight before Jane will put up with him for the long-term.)

Lastly, the BBC does Rivers absolutely, magnificently right. Samuel West does Rivers as a somewhat overly serious but still appealing guy. Which is fine. But it also misses the whole point of Rivers. In the BBC version, he is played by Andrew Bicknell who is a blond, tall, extremely handsome guy without a single hint of cuteness or prettiness. Thirty years earlier, he would have played the Nazi commander in every single war movie. In other words, he's kind of scary. And he's supposed to be. The point of Rivers is his contrast to Rochester. Rochester is cocky, insecure, brusque and kind of crazy. Rivers is utterly self-confident, logical and manipulative. With Rochester, Jane thrives. She argues, debates, threatens, talks back and eventually, makes her own decisions. With Rivers, Jane wilts. She nearly loses her self-will. And the point is clear: as William Hurt says in Accidental Tourist, "It isn't how much you love someone. It's the kind of person you are when you're around them." With his virtue and his in-your-face idealism, Rivers ought to be right for Jane (plus he doesn't have a crazy wife), but he isn't, and she isn't willing to settle for ought-to-be right. Rochester, despite lying to her and trying to convince her, even after she knows the truth, to be his lover anyway, is still someone Jane enjoys being with. This isn't some Harlequin Romance where the hero's passion excuses his behavior. This is Jane Eyre where the hero's character, in the long run, excuses his passion or, rather, disciplines it. He is Jane's friend, and she knows it, and for a novel written in 1847 that declaration of equal friendship is extraordinarily lovely. (Yeah, yeah, I'm a romantic.)

The BBC version is a little difficult to come by. It isn't, to my knowledge, on DVD yet. But it's worth tracking down, especially if you are an Eyre afficiando.

Reality TV I Have a Problem With

2005-06-16T13:07:00.000-07:00

In general, I don't have a problem with reality TV, which doesn't mean, confusingly enough, that I like to watch it. I don't have a voyeur personality; well, I do because everybody does; what I don't have is an objective voyeur personality. I feel bad when people self-implode. I get embarrassed when people behave stupidly. I want to run away, or turn off the TV, when people are mean. On top of which, many reality TV shows are tedious in the extreme. Others are incredibly tasteless (Temptation Island, Extreme Makeover where people who don't feel good about themselves are convinced that plastic surgery will change all that and then it doesn't). I've watch a reality TV episode here and there. One summer, I watched Big Brother; it was like watching my college apartment except that no one could leave. Like I say, people self-imploding.

So when I say I don't have a problem with reality TV, I don't mean I like reality TV. What I mean is that I don't see reality TV as prefiguring the end of civilization as we know it. Ever heard of the gladiators? Reality TV to the max, with the WWF thrown in for laughs. (In fact, there's a Star Trek episode where Kirk et al. show up on a planet and find the Romans televising the "games.") Which, I suppose, could augur the end of civilization as we know it, but at least we can take comfort in not being unique. There's this idea in academe that people who vote on American Idol and go to Walmart and watch NASCAR don't really want to do any of those things, they've been brainwashed by corrupt capitalism. But this is, really, just another case of "high culture" meeting "low culture" in which high culture is thoroughly bewildered that there exist people in this world who aren't like them. So they decide it just can't be possible. Americans don't really like shopping at Walmart, they just think they do.

Idiots. Academe, I mean. Anyway, to return to my point, I don't in general have a problem with reality TV shows. I don't like them, but hey, I don't much care for country music either or for that matter, peas or muggy weather. It's a matter of personal taste.

But I admit to having a problem with The Beauty & The Geek. There's two reasons. The first is that ordinary people mugging to the camera is one thing (Good Morning, America); beautiful people mugging to the camera is another (Joe Millionaire) but geeks mugging to the camera is hard to take. NOT because they aren't lovely to look at. I love looking at geeks. I consider the ground crew in Apollo 13 the sexiest sight in the world. It's hard because one of the points of reality TV is a kind of unwritten contract where the people mugging for the cameras become the property of America which then has the right to make fun of them, belittle them, laugh at them, dissect their personalities, etc. etc. etc. And I think the "geeks" who signed up for Beauty & The Geek probably knew that; they are smart after all. But haven't they been through this already? You know, like High School. Why go through it again? The result is that they seem less at ease (for all three minutes I watched last night) than your average Survivor contestant. There's a kind of "Why am I here? this is stupid" look to their postures, which you don't find even amongst Extreme Makeover participants.

My other problem is totally visceral. I call it my "Hey, leave the geeks alone; they're mine" reaction. I'm perfectly okay with beautiful people chasing beautiful people all over the sets of The Bachelor and The Bachelorette. But when models start chasing geeks, my feeling is, "Oh, just stay on your own turf already." Which is visceral, as I say. Intellectually, I know that beautiful women marry geeky guys; even the walking dead (if you've seen Mick Jagger lately) can marry beautiful women. But there is still a tendency to think in High School clique terms, which is silly really. You hang out with AV guys in High School, you tend to keep thinking that not only are they your type but a pretty well kept secret. And if the cheerleaders start waltzing in, figuring out that these guys are smart and make money and are fun to be around, that's just SOOO unfair. But perhaps, I'm giving the cheerleaders too much credit or not enough as the case may be (since being beautiful doesn't, contrary to what many people would like to believe, exclude smarts, sensitivity and kindness), and the AV guys a clue to begin with.

Mourning for Phil Hartman

2005-06-03T11:58:00.000-07:00

When Phil Hartman was killed, I had no idea who he was. My knowledge of celebrities is extremely piecemeal. For instance, I could tell you about Warhol's Udo Kier, but I didn't, for the longest time, have a clue who Jennifer Lopez was. Except she dated Ben Affleck, and I didn't know who he was either.

So Phil Hartman was killed, and I thought it was sad, but that's about all.

Then, about two years later, I got into the habit of watching Newsradio during my lunch hour. A half hour of chuckles really sets you up for the rest of the day, and I love the kind of straight man comedy that Dave Foley pulls off. (And is anything more adorable than Stephen Root? He's one of those actors who makes me laugh just by showing up on the screen.) Actually, that entire cast is great. Led, of course, by the marvelous Phil Hartman. Except that the name didn't register right away.

And then one day I was watching Kiki's Delivery Service and what do you know, the cat's voice is Phil Hartman's. And suddenly I realized this is the guy. And I went into mourning. Seriously. Maybe that doesn't strike many people as odd, but I don't usually get bowled over by celebrity mishaps. When Princess Diana died, my main thought was, "Well, she won't be in the news that much anymore," (I was wrong). But Phil Hartman's death was a real blow. I started thinking about the animation voices he might have done, sitcoms he could have been in. It was a real wrench.

Anyway, if you haven't seen Newsradio in a while, and you want to put on a black armband and laugh yourself sick over the great Phil Hartman, Seasons 1 and 2 are out on DVD. The episode "The Cane" is a masterpiece. Oh, and "Bill's Autobiography" is good as well.

House This House That

2005-05-25T11:41:00.000-07:00

I watched three of the House shows (1900 House, 1940s House and Manor House) and part of the fourth (Colonial House). Here are my thoughts:

The best is Manor House—by a long chalk. In fact, Manor House, narrated by Derek Jacobi, is so good that it almost belongs in its own category. Of the remaining three, 1940s House is the best. But Manor House puts them all to shame. (I didn't watch Frontier House and will address why in a later paragraph).

Manor House was superb for several reasons:

1. All the people involved were intelligent from the houseboy up to the lord of the manor. Unlike the sweet but woefully clueless family of 1900 House, the members of Manor House had some idea of what they were getting into. A number of the servants had grandparents who had worked in service (the butler's grandfather had been a butler) and all of the servants were hard workers and had little sympathy for those who weren't.

2. Both the butler and Sir John wanted to make the experience authentic. They wanted to feel what it would have been really like. I personally thought that Sir John was a pompous git (an intelligent pompous git), and I sniggered a bit at his "concern" for his servants (whom he barely knew and certainly didn't understand), but the end result was quite believable. I think there were probably manor house owners who got involved in the day-to-day workings of their households. But I imagine that there were those owners, like Sir John, who thought they knew what was going on, but didn't really have a clue about the lives of their servants and who could never have brought themselves to destroy the system, not matter how much concern they felt.

Sir John and Lady Oliff-Cooper, you understand, liked being lord and lady of the manor. I actually admired them for that. They were articulate about the problems they saw ("We hardly communicate," Lady O said. "Eventually, my husband would take a mistress and my children would be scarred for life. My son has to make an appointment to see me." And her son, Jon T, said, "Her brain has gone to mush," meaning that his Dr. Mom only talked about clothes), but they were also quite honest about how much they were loving it. They wept the day they had to leave.

The servants didn't. On the other hand, allowing that the servants had a tough life (and I'm very grateful my ancestors were the burgeoning middle class and preferred being poor in different kinds of ways), I found the servants' lifestyle ultimately more emotionally satisfying than the uppercrust lifestyle. I wouldn't opt for it under any conditions, but the servants had, at least, family-like relationships. They didn't all get along all the time, but they were close. Even the crazy French chef, whom none of them liked at the beginning, they considered part of their group—the crazy relative you keep locked up 364 days out of the year: nuts but ours. One of the housemaids said on the last day, "I don't know how I'm going to adjust to not having people around all the time." In any case, the servants' lifestyle was preferable to the life of Lady O's single sister; thank goodness for modern civilization in regards to women.

Of the servants, I agree with my sister Ann that it was Edgar who made the biggest difference. He was a regular CEO (without the fat pay check); he decided what Sir John and Lady O heard about matters downstairs; he disciplined the servants (he started out tough and ended up more relaxed, but he was still fairly strict); he had a great deal of investment in making the experience real, in making the manor a true Edwardian household. He, too, was able to articulate the experience. In one of the most heart-rending statements of the show, he noted that the system worked but was based on a lack of communication. Not deception per se but a lack of honesty. Any such system is doomed to fail, Edgar said, and the Edwardian world was indeed "swept away."

This desire for authenticity is notably lacking from all but 1940s House (where the imposed conditions create a de facto sense of authenticity). In all the other House shows, the people in the show are 21st century folks plunged into strange settings where they have to wear unusual clothes and make things without power tools. Survivor without the bathing suits. This is one reason I never watched Frontier House. Watch people starve. Yawn. Watch people bicker. Yawn. Watch people self-implode. Yawn. Yawn. Yawn. You can watch that on Big Brother. Why drag in the historic setting?

Colonial House reached a truly horrible standard here. In one of the few episodes I watched, one of the Freemen decided to go "exploring"—so he left the village and the 1,000 acres on which Colonial House was set and backpacked into civilization where he sat at a bar and got a free beer.

His excuse for breaking the rules: "That's what they would have done. They wanted to explore."

I was reading a book about Jamestown while I watched, and I started laughing. John Smith--who was tougher than this pauncy, self-absorbed, angsty "I just want to explore" idiot could ever hope to be--never went on "exploratory" journeys without several men and lots of guns.

And then the narrator said exactly what I was thinking without all the "pauncy, self-absorbed" stuff.

Personally, I would have kicked the guy off the show and told the rest that he'd been eaten by a bear. Or killed by a Native. Or gotten lost and starved to death. (No one's going to rush up to you in the wilderness with a pint, moron.)

He wasn't even punished, as far as I can tell, although he had the grace at least to be ashamed that he'd gone walk-about for three days while everyone else was working.

Thing is, the entire Colonial House show was like this. The religious issue really bugged me, not because there weren't many people who disliked Puritanism at that time, but because the issue wouldn't have been "my freedom of expression" but rather "what I believe instead." Ann Hutchinson, who got excommunicated by the Puritans, got excommunicated because she had a differing interpretation of scripture, not because she wanted to stay home on Sunday and watch TV. Even atheism was a theology of sorts, a position one took in regards the universe. I'm sure there were some cheerful agnostics and a lot of people who didn't much care but went along with the status quo, but IF you started making waves, it was usually because you had some kind of alternate belief system. If you were more into tolerance, you didn't sit around and whine about the lack of tolerance, you moved into Quaker territory, and if it turned out you really weren't all that much into tolerance, you promptly moved out again. After her excommunication, Ann Hutchinson moved to Rhode Island; they kicked her out because she kept trying to get people to do things her way. So she moved to New York and got killed by Natives. There was none of this "live and let live" stuff going on.

The point is, the volunteers of Colonial House were trying to live their 21st century lifestyles, rather than trying to accommodate their views to a 17th century lifetstyle. Instead of trying to realize, for themselves or for the audience, the reality of the experience, they focused instead on "getting in touch with ourselves" and "getting something out of being Puritans"—yech. Substandard English class is what it turned into.

3. One of the things that helped cross the line from 21st century people having an experience to 21st people capturing the reality of the period, was the reality of the work.

In 1900 House and Colonial House, there was no real reason why the volunteers had to keep working. There was no real debt they had to pay off to the company. Nobody was really going to starve (or get eaten by a bear). The 1900 House women could stop wearing corsets if they wanted. They were no real neighbors they needed to impress. The Colonial House folks could have unrealistic, New Age-type Sunday services if they wanted. There was no reality being forced upon them and therefore, no real reason to go through with the fiction.

In Manor House, however, there was an imposed reality. Unlike 1900 House, where it was simply unbelievable that the mother wouldn't have had any friends amongst her neighbors or anything to do except go bicycling, the servants in Manor House (and Lady O's sister as well as the tutor) truly were trapped. The servants eventually resorted to bargaining with Edgar for their time off, and they only got it because (1) they were able to prove that servants of their time period would have gotten it and (2) because Sir John interceded (letting them all have the same half-day off much to Edgar's consternation).

Secondly, real life duties existed in the manor. Sir John and Lady O had REAL dinner parties. They had the REAL British Poet Laureate to stay. They had a gala ball. They had a hunting party. All the guests were real, not paid actors or whatever. These were real events. And the real (and completely insane) French chef had to prepare real dinners (by the way, the insane French chef was also committed to the idea of authenticity and got truly brassed off at Sir John for wanting more modern dishes—he considered it cheating, which it was, and that Sir John wanted the best of both the 19th and 21st centuries. He got so ticked off, in fact, that he deliberately roasted and served Sir John a pig's head. The servants applauded—downstairs—Sir John truly had no idea how much he was loathed.)

The servants really had to work. And work hard. And both Edgar and Sir John insisted that they do the work as it truly would have been done. There was one rather chilling moment where a group of visitors were asking Sir John if his servants were happy, and he said, "Oh, yes, I think my servants are satisfied. A smiling housemaid is a happy housemaid," and in the background you saw the three footmen delivering dishes under Edgar's authority. And they didn't say a word. They didn't acknowledge what they'd heard. They didn't smile or smirk. When the (seated) tutor started going on about how rough he had things, they didn't respond, although later, Edgar criticized the tutor for "embarrassing Sir John and Lady O" and the footmen made the angry point that they were the ones doing all the work.

But nobody said a word. It was amazing. They kept within their roles, despite serious provocation. They acted real. And by doing that, the audience gained a sense of reality. I understood, as I never had with 1900 House, why the working poor were so attracted to socialism. When things are that bad, an ideology that promises to even things out looks pretty good. Granted socialism wouldn't have helped anyone. It took two World Wars to destroy the caste system in England and remnants of it still exist.

Now, it isn't really possible to have a truly authentic experience, but there's historical accuracy, and then, well, there's Survivor with funny clothes. If I were in charge of say, Renaissance Town, I would do what they did in Manor House and give everyone rule books. There would be flexibility, but the volunteers would be expected to keep within certain bounds. Or I would do as they did in 1940s House and impose conditions that force the volunteers into more historically accurate behavior. If you did the Plague Years, you could keep hauling people off ("Bring out your dead. Bring out your dead.") without warning. Much more disturbing than forcing people to build things with axes. I mean, come on, there are people who build things with axes in the real world. The only reason it becomes TV and "entertaining" is because the people doing it don't have a clue. And I just don't find it enjoyable to watch people not having a clue. Give me smart people with a clue and a desire for historical accuracy—that I can get behind.

Tuesday Night Round-Up

2005-05-19T08:33:00.000-07:00

NCIS wasn't on last night so I watched American Idol. My vote is for Bo Bise, the long-haired gent who wants to sing rock, although Simon thinks he should stick to soul. I think it should be Bise not only because he was the only good singer last night, because he is at least interesting to watch, because, hey, why not root for my generation, because his "homecoming" deal was so much more lo-key than the girls' (comparatively) but also because the guy actually takes chances. Other than the songs chosen by the record producing guy, the girls both sang songs which drowned out their voices: hum along deals. Bellow a lot but don't worry, the guitar will cover up any flaws. Bo actually chanced it. He sang without the band on his second and although he flubbed the end, the attempt and delivery were so stunning, he deserved to retire after that song alone. Even on the last, Van Halen? he managed to throw his voice over the band so that you actually were listening to someone sing, not just watching someone mouth along. Although, Carrie did fairly good on her last song, as well.

All that said, I still don't get American Idol. I mean, if I wanted to listen to Van Halen, why wouldn't I just go, uh, listen to Van Halen? I've never listened to a single thing by Clay Akin. CDs are expensive enough, thanks. It must be that whole personality-star thing, which frankly, I don't get either.

Anyway, House was on next and it was one of the single best episodes of House and of television I have ever seen. Excellent writing (set-up, pay-off, dialog, especially the line, "Because I hope this is more than a test."), excellent acting (I love the part where Cameron answers Dr. House's question with the correct diagnosis, "Dead muscle" and for just a moment, House realizes that his team is well trained enough, they might have saved him); the cinematography (the auditorium which gets more and more full as the lecture continues; the image of House's team and Dr. Wilson sitting beside each other), the movement from humor (gotta love that snake) to pathos. The "point" which is made so swiftly and profoundly at the end, you almost miss it. Excellent. Absolutely magnificent.

Good old Fox, except baseball starts up next week, so there goes the summer. I enjoy going to baseball games--the cheering, the food, the sun--but watching it on television is worse than watching golf which is at least soporific.

Why Quantum Leap Works

2005-05-11T07:37:00.000-07:00

Quantum Leap was started in the squishy 80s when multiculturalism was just beginning; in retrospect, it is pretty good multiculturalism since it is based on inclusion rather than exclusion or, to be blunt, interesting multiculturalism rather than boring multiculturalism (i.e. singing Jewish, Christian, Hindu, Moslem and secular songs at a Holiday concert rather than not singing anything at all). In Quantum Leap, Sam (Scott Bakula) leaps from body to body between the date of his birth in, I think, 1953 to the present (the 80s). He leaps into whites, blacks, Hispanics, men, women, old, young, 1960s executives, 1950s war heroes, 1970s stunt men. Every episode is a new adventure where Sam has to put something right before he can leap again.

I love this kind of set-up. No hanging storylines, just pure story. It ranges from totally silly to truly excellent, and it is very refreshing (I'm watching these on DVD).

However, from my position of too-educated person in the 21st century, I have noticed a troubling element. Why do all these people need some educated (Sam speaks five languages and has seven degrees or vice versa, I can't remember which), white male to fix their problems for them? What, they aren't capable of doing it themselves? Hello, white man's burden.

And I've determined that the reason it works at all is because of Scott Bakula. He's definitely a TV actor. I don’t expect to ever see him on the silver screen (and these days, why would he need to be?). But as a TV actor, he's quite respectable. As Quantum Leap's Sam he has two things going for him: he comes off as truly kind. And two, the man has no self-consciousness.

I've mentioned before that Tony Shalhoub has this quality. You can usually spot actors who do; that is, actors who are so little concerned with their own egos, they just float inside a part. (Robin Williams, who is a fine actor, is not a good example. Tom Hanks is, most of the time.)

In several Quantum Leap episodes, Sam "jumps" into a woman's body (and believe me, there's no way I could have written that sentence without it sounding vaguely salacious). The first time, a lot of the script is centered on Sam trying to wear heels, Sam dressing in 1960s mini skirts. In the second, he "jumps" into a 1980s mom in Texas and spends the entire episode running around in a long jean skirt with a large buckle belt. And here's where Scott Bakula excels: he does both absolutely naturally. In a way, the two approaches are American drag versus British drag. With the former, the emphasis is always on the clothes and the outrageous garb accompanied by the deep voice. British drag, on the other hand, can be found in pantomimes (where the men play the older women's parts: think Charley's Aunt); the sex role switcheroo isn't the emphasis per se, although it is part of the humor. Bakula, in woman's garb, can play off both forms of drag with very little effort and without losing his masculinity (which is necessary to other episodes where he plays the hero-gets-the-bad-guy-gets-the-girl). And consequently, Quantum Leap works. (Even Al grows on you after awhile.)

Comedy versus comedic actors

2005-05-02T14:12:00.000-07:00

There're sitcoms, comedies, spoofs, etc. etc. and then there's comedic actors.

For instance, on the sitcom Reba, although everyone is an adequate actor, only Steve Howey and Melissa Peterman, who play Van and Barbra, are actual comedic actors. On the show CSI, Greg is given funny lines and is almost a comedic actor, but oddly enough, CSI's best comedic actor is Brass. In the Sherlock Holmes episode, Brass tells one of the suspects to "cut the English accent." "I can't," the man replies, "this is my accent" at which point, Brass makes a kind of "what's it to me" gesture. It's very funny (and lightly done), and it's this physical/verbal ability that separates the actor who has been given funny lines from the actor who can actually do comedy. On NCIS, for example, despite the jokey script, the only vaguely comedic actor is the doctor.

It's a difficult thing to parse out. Howey and Peterman from Reba are broad comedy actors: that is, the Jim Carrey school of comedy: funny faces, overacting, etc. and it's hard to imagine them doing anything else. Ashton Kutcher is a good example of someone who is very good at playing the straight dumb man of broad comedy but because he is so good (at that) and so very good looking, he's gotten picked up to play more serious roles that aren't really his forte. Just because nobody else on That 70's Show can act (and I like them all) doesn't mean Kutcher can.

While David Boreanaz of Buffy and Angel is actually a fabulous comedic actor, he just never got much of a chance. If you don't believe me, just watch the episode where he dances and the one where he sings. The guy is good. He does broad comedy mostly. Sophisticated comedy is difficult to pull off. James Marsters, a better actor than Boreanaz, is stronger on sophisticated comedy, as indicated by my brother Joe's favorite exchange:

Xander: Do something, Spike.
Spike: I can't. I'm paralyzed with not caring.

However, Marsters and Boreanaz play off each other very well.

Sophisticated humor is the kind of thing that Hugh Laurie from House does: sarcasm, raised eyebrows, banter. Another good example is Rowan Atkinson from Black Adder. Sophisticated humor is more about timing and intonation than about broad gestures and distorted features. (One of the great things about British comedy is that it tends to combine low, broad, coarse and sophisticated humor into one package--check out Vicar of Dibley--while in America, it tends to be split up more.) My earlier example of Brass belongs to this category. Tom Hanks is incredibly good at this kind of humor, and is especially good in You've Got Mail. One of my absolute favorite deliverers of sophisticated comedy is Paul Eddington from Good Neighbors (as Jerry) and Yes, Prime Minister (as the Prime Minister). "You look like an ad for gracious living," Tom Goode says to Jerry in Good Neighbors. "I am," Jerry replies and somehow that's enough to start you snorting into your cocoa mug.

Cary Elwes (Princess Bride, Robin Hood: Men in Tights) delivers sophisticated humor with style (although he often appears in broad comedy as the straight man). The Holographic Doctor from Star Trek: Voyager was good in this vein. Data from Star Trek: Next Generation was also used mostly for sophisticated humor, a pity since outside his Data persona, Brett Spiner has a gift for broad comedy as well. Karen (Megan Mullally) from Will & Grace, despite being totally annoying, has a gift for comedic timing (no one else on that show really does). In the shows that I watch these days, only Brass of CSI has comedic abilities, Laurie excels at sophisticated comedy well while Robert Sean Leonard attempts valiantly to play up (he isn't as good). Nobody on Blind Justice has any comedic ability, but then the show doesn't call for it. Howey and Peterman from Reba are possibly two of the best non-British broad comedy actors I've seen on TV lately. I don't think anybody on Numbers even knows how to be funny, which may be why I stopped watching it.

Really, though, the Brits take the cake. Check out Alice (Emma Chambers) from Vicar of Dibley and the lovely James Fleet as her besotted boyfriend. Not to mention, the stunning Baldrick (Tony Robinson). Even the oh-so-blond Malfoy (Tom Felton) does a credible job in Harry Potter & The Chamber of Secrets when he says to Crabbe, "I didn't know you could read," raises his eyebrows slightly and shrugs, "Huh." But that may be because British comedy seems much more, well, respectable. Outside of Tom Hanks, American comedy seems to be considered "low" even when it isn't. Which may explain the bovine tendency of the Academy Awards to go for SERIOUS, ANGSTY, THOUGHTFUL dramas rather than the good stuff. But the Academy Awards is kind of silly.

It's Time to Talk about Star Trek

2005-04-25T20:20:00.000-07:00

It's always time to talk about Star Trek!

I'm in the process of rewatching--slowly, through Netflix rentals--Star Trek Voyager. I've watched Star Trek Voyager over the years but never straight through so there are a number of episodes, especially in the first two years, that I've never seen. I quite like it, although it improves immensely after the first season. Voyager produced some of the greatest two-parters of all time. And they supplied the single best Star Trek couple ever: Paris and B'Elanna.

But to go back to the beginning. My thoughts on them all.

Star Trek: Original: My favorite aspect of Original, like many people's, is the Kirk, Spock, McCoy exchanges. There are also various episodes that are so well done in terms of script, camera work, plotting, etc. that they are classics in their own right. I don't include "Trouble with Tribbles," a great episode, since it isn't as tightly written as, for instance, "The City on the Edge of Forever" and "Amok Time." The latter two are almost seamless is their action/dialog/theme.

And I read Star Trek Original novels--well, really I only read Diane Duane (Spock's World), although I like The Vulcan Academy Murders by Jean Lorrah. Both authors, women, depict McCoy, Kirk and Spock the way I think they should be depicted.

Star Trek Next: Generation: Well, it's a little 80s and little trite and little too squeaky clean humans and a little silly, but it's also a ton of fun. I'm a fan of Data and I like Picard and Geordi and Worf; I like Riker, and even Troi doesn't annoy me as much as she used to. ("Captain, I feel their anger." "Yes, Troi, I picked up on that; they are shooting at us.") I think my single favorite episode is "Data's Day" although I like just about every episode Q shows up in as well. I can't point to any episode that I would call classic; however, there are classic performances. In the episode where Picard performs a mind-meld with Sarek, Patrick Stewart does an amazing job. (It's a good episode in and of itself.) The episode where Data creates a daughter is close to classic.

Star Trek: Deep Space Nine: Not everybody's favorite, and I admit that I gave up before it got into the whole Babylon 5 soap opera thing (if I haven't mentioned before how much I dislike being forced to watch a show week after week, I'll mention it here: I hate being forced to watch a show week after week. Give me single story episodes, and I'm happy. But give me cliff hangers, and I turn off the TV set). But I quite liked the set-up of Deep Space Nine. I thought it complicated the Star Trek universe. The Klingons were scary and mean; the Cardassians were evil and ambiguous; the Bajorans had heavy duty political problems and the Federation seemed on the verge of toppling over from bureaucracy. And the space station was always breaking down. All together, it was a far more complex set-up than I think the Star Trek universe could really handle. (They figured out the solution with Voyager). In his excellent Nitpicker's Guide, Phil Farrand (who didn't much like Deep Space Nine at first) expounds on some of the weaknesses--the inconsistent religious themes, for one, and the "we're on the edge of the universe/no, we're in the middle of Federation space" locale problem--but all in all, I thought Star Trek did as well as can be expected with such a complicated political/religious setting.

There are some definite notables:

Jake Sisko actually looks like a real kid. Instead of being wonder child, he behaves like that you would expect a reasonably bright son of a captain to behave.

The Ferengis are great, and Armin Shimerman deserves super kudos for his portrayal of Quark (and for the principal on Buffy). As Quark, he is a morally ambiguous character who still happens to have a basic moral center that, sometimes, seems lacking in the more noble Star Trek officers. My favorite Quark scene is when Odo trashes his apartment, and Quark comes to check on him under the pretext of making a complaint. It's nicely done.

The excellent Andrew Robinson as the other morally ambiguous character, Garak (one of my favorite episodes is "The Wire").

The evil but yet again ambiguous Gul Dukat.

All in all I think some of the most complex episodes ("Duet") can be found on Deep Space Nine.

Star Trek: Voyager: Voyager is a synthesis of Deep Space Nine with the usual Star Trek pattern. That is, you've got to get these people out in space, you've got to give them complicated problems to overcome, and you've got to get them away from the bureacrats who kill all the exciting episodes before they even start. You can't have captains disobeying direct orders every episode; it gets a tad unbelievable. So you take a ship, put it in the Delta quadrant, but give it a captain who believes, Shackleton-like, that the only way to survive is to maintain Star Trek discipline and who is aided in this by people who have all been trained at the Academy, even if they later went off the rails (Paris, B'Elanna, Chakotay). The result is episodes that attempt the complexity of Deep Space Nine without the attendant problems of having to maintain a consistent world (i.e. Bajor). I mean, after all, they can always move on. As I've mentioned, the two-part episodes are some of the best TV movies I've ever seen. With some of the shorter episodes, you feel that the writers came up with a very cool idea, got it going and then, oops, got to wrap it up, give me easy plot solution #6.

And I like Janeway. I didn't at first, but I think she is a nice contrast to the overly pugilistic Kirk and the underly confrontational Picard. At first, there was a bit too much "we have to make her tough but feminine" (which dissolved into motherliness) stuff. But Kate Mulgrew manages to pull it off. I was very happy when they got rid of the bun though.

And that's it. I can't comment on Enterprise. Despite the excellent Scott Bakula who I still admire from Quantum Leap days, I could never get into Enterprise. I loved the opening credits/music, but I just couldn't connect with any of the characters, and then when I went back to try again, they were doing some ahhhhh Babylon 5 thing where you had no idea what was occuring unless you'd watched the last six episodes. It was also less of a family ship, which would make sense, but that's one thing I like about the others: society in microcosm moving through space. Of course, Original didn't have families on board either, but they had the terrific trio, including that man from Vulcan. Actually, the two men from Vulcan; don't forget the adorable Mark Lenard. And Original reached the status of myth, after all. Not the easiest thing to live up to. (Let's just ignore the existence of "Spock's Brain" shall we?)

I have been, and always shall be, your friend. Spock to Kirk, Wrath of Khan.

Tuesday Night Round-Up

2005-04-22T07:51:00.000-07:00

On Tuesdays, I watch three shows in a row. First up is NCIS, the extremely hearty, wink wink, nudge, nudge version of CSI. It is disturbingly chauvinistic (the character Tony would be sued for harassment by any self-respecting female employee), incredibly jokey, unbelievably unrealistic (would a goth really work for the navy?) and totally implausible. It's also light, nonsensical, you-can-do-your-homework-at-the-same-time fare. I can take about one of these shows per season (the reason I didn't even try to watch Eyes).

The producer is Bellisario, who also produced Quantum Leap. I quite like Quantum Leap, but the relationship between the characters on NCIS is pretty much the same as Sam and Al's on Quantum Leap, only more so. The most refreshing thing about this is that despite the sexual tension, it isn't leading up to anything. Kate is never going to get together with Tony or with anyone else. They will joke themselves into oblivion. Hi Ho.

After NCIS, I flip over to FOX and watch the last three minutes of American Idol and wonder at it bemusedly all over again. Then House comes on, which I love. I don't know who the writers are, but the increasingly complicated relationships reminds me a great deal of Joss Whedon's work; that is, rather than a big bad something happening (Wilson commits adultery! House is sued for malpractice!), the big bad slowly grows on you, like horror. However, I'm afraid that they ruined it; getting rid of Vogler and Cameron was a mistake. I'm hoping that they bring both back: Cameron because her sincerity (which could have been a front) undermined House's self-protection and Vogler, well, because Vogler was great, a good bad guy or a bad good guy, a relentless machine who represented the opposite of House in just about every particular but was just as fierce and remorseless in his own way. He was a great foil. And now he's gone. Huh. By the way, Robert Sean Leonard is truly excellent in his part. I forgive him for all the angsty teenage parts he ever played.

I finish up the evening with Blind Justice, which I have commented on earlier. I have ambivalent feelings about Blind Justice. The crimes aren't much to get excited about (you may notice that all three shows are mysteries; it's how I relax) and I don't much like cop shows where the answer is to beat up the bad guy; ho hum; it's not very imaginative. But I really like Jim Dunbar (Ron Eldard), the main character; he's a kind of a blind Archie Goodwin. He's not some super sensitive guy. He's the personification of tough, cocky cop whose blindness does not, in some automatic disability-in-TV-land way, do away with the toughness and cockiness. Last week, there was an excellent scene where the other alpha male at the precinct got fed up with Dunbar's cockiness and confronted him in the precinct's locker room. It was the sort of thing where, when Dunbar could see, they would have slammed each other into walls and stuff and then, wham bang, turned into best buds. But Dunbar's blindness changes the dynamics. When the second alpha male comes charging into the locker room, Dunbar tenses; he turns his head trying to gauge the other guy's closeness: what the threat is, how close it is. He can defend himself, but he's wary. And the other guy, who wants to beat the crap out of Dunbar, can't without looking like a total jerk. The result is this extremely tense argument that actually, in a way, resolves some of the issues. It was really very well down.

In general, I think TV, no matter how silly a great deal of it is, does attract good writers. There's stability, and money, in television. It's a good place to settle down. As television gets richer and richer, the fare actually goes up, which I realize isn't a popular view. One is suppose to think that television used to be so much better, just like one is suppose to think that everything used to be so much better. And granted, there's a lot of dreck on TV. But the overall quality is fairly high. You don't last unless you can at least produce a decent plot. Unless you're the WWF, which doesn't mean the WWF isn't very good at what it does (or that it doesn't produce plots, come to think of it).

The Declining Seasons of All Creatures

2005-04-20T09:33:00.000-07:00

The series All Creatures Great and Small is lovely. I'm on season 4 at this point, and I should say first that it is well-worth watching all of them. Unfortunately, the quality goes downhill with each subsequent season. So be prepared.

In his commentary, Peter Davison (Tristan) remarks that this was partly due to the fact that they ran out of story ideas. (James Herriot actually had the same problem with his books). The series' creators had no idea the series would become so popular so instead of stringing out the James-Helen romance and saving some ideas, they stuck every incident from the first few books into the first season. Result: they had to invent and reuse a lot of material. Peter Davison made a wry remark about his character, who is supposed to be a flirt, getting older and older while the "bright, young things" kept getting younger and younger. Tristan starts out as an eccentric (a "debauched choirboy" is the description) but ends up rather dull. In the 4th season, they created Calum Buchanan to supply the eccentricity that Tristan supplied in the first two seasons. Unfortunately, Calum just makes Tristan and Siegfried look like old fogies. It's kind of sad, although I suppose it reflects real-life.

They also toned down Robert Hardy's character in the later seasons, which was a mistake. They did it because the real Siegfried, who by all accounts was quite the outrageous personality, expressed some disapproval. Hardy, who knew the real Siegfried, had based his interpretation of the character on that knowledge and had already softened Siegfried's rather manic personality. But he was told to take it down even further. It's a pity since--as James Herriot's son, Jim, points out in his biography of his father--the crazy Siegfried was most people's favorite character. I love Robert Hardy. (For those of you who want to place him, he is Sir John Middleton in Sense & Sensibility; he plays the minister with the pin-striped robe in Harry Potter.) He's one of those British actors who pops up all over the place.

In the 4th season, Carol Drinkwater got tired to playing Helen and left. I actually prefer her replacement, who I think looks much more like a Yorkshire Downs' wife. Carol Drinkwater always looked like she was about to fly off to the Riviera, which actually is what she did in real life (well, to France at least). The spark is missing however. (Gossip central: Carol Drinkwater and Christopher Timothy had a romance in real life).

Christopher Timothy doesn't change at all. He was really excellently cast, and James Herriot himself thought Timothy portrayed his personality the best (out of all the TV shows being made at the time). Timothy manages to capture that laid-back, good-humored, yet somewhat tense personality that made it possible for Herriot to get along with the Farnons but gave him ulcers later in life. (He also had an extremely poor money sense.)

The worst thing about the later seasons (although the 4th season isn't so bad) is that they decided to overlay every scene with this totally sappy music. I can't decide if it is an 80s thing or just a director thing. I think it is kind of an 80s thing. Scenes which are actually not played as maudlin come across as maudlin and in some cases, the sappy, trilling music is so loud it drowns the rather good dialog. I wish very much that when they had released the series on DVD, they had fixed the music, but maybe, they couldn’t. (Heaven help us if people actually like it; it's pretty horrible.)

All that said, I still recommend the series, all of it. All the seasons are sweet (even without the music), fun, very relaxing and you learn an awful lot about vetting in the 1930s to 1950s.

Blind Justice

2005-04-10T18:38:00.000-07:00

ABC's Blind Justice is enjoyable if you completely suspend your disbelief. And I mean, completely.

A homicide detective loses his sight (most of it) in a gunfight. He fights to get his job back, succeeds and returns to work as a homicide detective with a gun!

The gun is supposedly for self-defense, but naturally, in the first episode, he pulls it and points it at a psycho murderer which indicates that the audience is going to see this sort of thing on a regular basis. Can super-detective use his amazing sense of hearing to shoot bad guys when his partner is being attacked?

I'm willing to bet that the creators borrowed the idea from the excellent British drama Second Sight starring the masterful Clive Owens. There are several differences, however. First, Clive Owens' character Ross Tanner is suffering from a genetic disease that causes blindness—that is, he is slowly going blind and is in denial. Second, nobody knows, at first, that he is going blind; he hides the condition (much like Grissom hides his hearing loss on CSI) to avoid losing his job. Third, he finally faces the fact that his pride is placing other people in danger and accepts dismissal gracefully. Fourth, the theme of sight (is seeing really believing?) is used throughout the drama.

That said, Blind Justice has one major thing in its favor; it's got a dog: Hank, a lovely German Shepherd who doesn't ever seem to eat or go poop.

Okay, now it's confession time. Despite the major flaws, I love this sort of show. Yeah, I know it's a rip off. Yeah, I know it's totally unlikely. Yeah, I know that he would never, ever, be given a gun in real life. But it's still so very cool. It could be that blindness fascinates me, being a disability that I fear. It could be that I get a kick out of the underdog proving the doubters wrong (you think I don't know where to shoot, I'll show you I know where to shoot). It could be that I just like mystery shows, and I don't much care who the protagonist is so long as he/she isn't dull. But really, it probably is the dog.

The Good Couples

2005-03-04T09:04:00.000-08:00

I've written a number of negative posts lately so this one is a return to the positive. Relationships. I've written elsewhere about the problem that arises in TV relationships when the leads (finally) get together and all the sizzle seems to vanish. A good many TV relationships are either about getting-together-breaking-up (OC) or they are about never-getting-together-until-the-last-possible-moment (JAG). There is a third alternative.

That is the relationship which is maintained with so much tenderness and goodwill that it (almost) doesn't matter if it is never consummated. Mulder and Scully come to mind. Assumpta and Father Clifford before that flopped. Spike and Buffy until that flopped (and I suppose tenderness isn't the word that leaps immediately to mind, but Spike always seemed to understand her better than anyone else). Inspector Lynley and Sergeant Havers.

The characteristics of these relationships are: (1) They are working relationships; the "couple" is attached by more than just beautiful feelings. In Ballykissangel, Assumpta and Father Clifford, whether they like it or not, are the leaders of the town and act as en locus parentis over the social lives of the inhabitants. (2) The couples are characterized by an hyperawareness of each other, a kind of constant mental interference in the other person's life. Spike was bugging Buffy long before he decided he loved her. Scully would much rather hang out with "spooky Mulder" than go on boring dates. Inspector Lynley interferes to the point where Havers has to tell him to stop exercising his noblesse oblige. (3) Dialog is intimate. There's little embarrassment/self-consciousness and such. The revolving door of "does he like me/does she like me" is not just unimportant, it's long past. When, in the X-Files movie, Mulder says to Scully, "You kept me honest," he is making as passionate a declaration of intimate longing as anything that crops up in the regular to and fro-ing of The OC, Summerland or Everwood. Whether or not Scully likes Mulder is immaterial. They moved past that point a long time ago. (And the episode with the writer next door proves it—sort of.)

The writers, without giving up sexual tension, have moved the couple, and the audience, past the question "Will they get together?" to the question, "How do they get along?" I consider this to be quite a feat. Shows like Dharma & Greg, As Time Goes By and such already, of course, operate in this area. (I don't consider that shows like Everybody Loves Raymond operate in this area because, even though the leads are married, every episode is about the husband's stupidity causing him to lose the affection of his wife which he then has to win back. Home Improvement was a bit better since Jill was more amused than upset by Tim.) In Dharma & Greg, for instance, the issue of sexual attraction and love is a given. Some of the episodes circle around the "Are they still in love?" question but the majority show Dharma & Greg working, growing and compromising as a couple until the final episode when they decide that they are strong enough to build a family together. (It is one of my favorite shows.)

So, kudos to both the consummated and unconsummated but still fulfilling and fun to watch couples of TV. And to the writers who create them.

The Cop-Outs: The Second

2005-02-28T09:21:00.000-08:00

Xander and Anya don't get married.

Mostly, this was just poor writing.

Xander and Anya plan a wedding. The day arrives. Xander has a vision. He sees a future time in which he and Anya have turned into bitter people; he is bitter, stay-at-home guy; she is bitter go-out-to-work gal. He comes back to the present and breaks off the wedding.

It's so stupid, it makes you want to cry.

It is not unbelievable that Xander would run out on a wedding; it is unbelievable that he would do it in that way for that reason.

The thing about Xander is that he has no special powers. He's not superhuman. Or a (good) vampire. Or a witch. He's good at carpentry. That's all. His asset to the scoobies is one thing only: he sticks around. Even when he is so scared, he's going to wet his pants. Even when he is making bad jokes. Even when he is mocking his own freakingoutness, he sticks around. In a way, he's a bit of a lonely character, and it's to his credit that he recognizes in Buffy an equal degree of loneliness, a kind of remoteness. He fixes windows. He carries stuff. He waits to see if he can help.

The point being, that for Xander to leave Anya, the last thing that would work would be the threat of his own unhappiness or even the threat of things going wrong. Right up till the marriage, Xander is the optimist in the relationship. Considering how the season had run, I thought Xander would get back from the vision and say, "Yeah, well, life is hard, but I'm not so dumb or pessimistic that I'm going to buy into some demon's nightmare—even if the demon is me."

The point being: the vision is a total cliché. It is so unconnected to the actual personalities of Anya and Xander, it makes zero sense that level-headed Xander would buy into it.

What Xander would have bought into is a future where Anya has become completely dependent on him: the cute chidings of the present would have morphed into bullying, the kind of constant bullying that is completely unseen or acknowledged by the participants but easily noted by an outsider. Anya, for all her outspokenness, is prone to a "My man is everything" mentality, and Xander does have a streak of bully in his nature (which makes his refusal to act on it so much nicer). It would bother Xander more to see himself turning into a bully than to see himself turning into a bitter, old guy.

I think the writers knew this and tried to write this explanation back into the season later (the episode where Anya takes out an entire fraternity, for instance), but it was too late. They failed in the wedding episode and they failed big time. They didn't have enough set-up. Their payoff was a cliché. And the result was that Xander appeared a bigger jerk than he deserved.

Some of us simply excised the episode from our memory banks. I rewrote it in my head so it actually made sense.

It was a cop-out. Presumably, the writers felt that Xander and Anya just shouldn't get married. Maybe they felt Xander and Anya were too darn young (their characters, not the actors), which is probable considering that the latter half of the show seems to have been constructed by writers with serious 30-something angst. The point being: the writers used "marriage is hard and can suck" in the same way the Ballykissangel writers used Assumpta's death: it's SO BAD we don't have to prove that it actually makes sense.

And anytime a writer tells you, "Oh, yeah, but in real life there are no real answers and things don't make sense and bad stuff happens," you can be sure that what they are really saying is, "I don't know how to write a better ending so I'm going to be lazy and use the horribleness of life as a cover." I said the former myself as an undergrad in college, and the latter is exactly why I said it.

The Cop-Outs: The First

2005-02-28T08:53:00.000-08:00

cop-out occurs in a story, film, television program when the writers write themselves into a corner and use a deus ex machina to get themselves out.

A deus ex machina is not always or necessarily a cop-out. The end of the Book of Job utilizes two deus ex machinas and very good ones they are too (although the first--God shows up—is much better than the second—Job gets everything back).

The difference lies in whether or not the deus ex machina is a natural outcome, the logical next step in the progression of the story, or whether it is the result of lazy writing.

Two of the greatest TV cop-outs (at least in the last ten years) have been the death of Assumpta in Ballykissangel and the non-marriage of Xander & Anya in Buffy.

Death is almost always a cop-out, unless you're Shakespeare and you're just killing off people for fun (or because you can't pay them anymore). Unfortunately, in a generation raised to consider Shakespeare PROFOUND, death has become an easy way of sounding profound without having to go to the trouble of actually being profound. The Ballykissangel folks as much as admitted that Assumpta's death was used to shake things up, get the town of Ballykissangel out of its rut. They felt that things were getting too nice, too comfortable. So they killed off a major character.

You couldn't get more teenage novelish.

Death is easy. Death has all the merit of being SO BAD that it looks clever. It is much harder and takes much better writing to shake things up without killing someone.

In Ballykissangel, Assumpta and the Catholic priest of the town, Father Clifford have fallen in love. There are numerous directions this situation could have gone: they could have decided not to pursue their feelings; they could have gotten married and it could have failed (I'm not in favor of this because I think it is a cop-out of a different variety); they could have decided that they should get married and done the hard work of figuring out how to make it all work; they could even have done a Thorn Birds thing in which Father Clifford tried to justify an affair but still remain a priest.

They did none of those. They had Father Clifford fall head over heels in love with Assumpta. They had him fret about it for half a season. They had him decide that he would make all the sacrifices in order to marry her. And then they killed her off.

Give me a break.

It was completely out of character, first of all, for Father Clifford to fall for Assumpta in the way that he did. The first things you learn about Father Clifford is that he is an extrovert, that he has a creatively administrative mind and that he likes being a priest. I find it believable that Father Clifford would decide to apply his talents as a husband and father and citizen rather than a priest, but I don't believe for a second that he would suddenly decide that he never really wanted to be a priest in the first place and that Assumpta is all that he needs.

Love 101 (and this is true even for diehard romantics): Love ain't enough. What brings people together isn't just the warm fuzzies. It's sex, yes. And it's person A finding something in person B that satisfies them: sometimes it is how person A sees him or herself; sometimes it is what person A wants to get out of life; sometimes it is how person A wants to be treated.

The smartest lady in the world, Jane Austen, figured this out. In Sense & Sensibility, Marianne tells Eleanor that Willoughby wishes he had married her (instead of marrying for money), but if he'd married Marianne, he'd have spent all his time wishing he'd married for money. Jane Austen figured out (and she lived in an Age that allowed her to do this) that it isn't enough just to be fascinated by a person. Elizabeth doesn't just love Darcy, she admires him, and for Elizabeth admiration is a necessary component for love.

So—the idea that a guy who loves being a priest and is very, very good at his job and who has fairly well sublimated his libido, will suddenly give it all up on a whim is nonsense.

But easy to write. Oh, sure, love conquers all. And just in case we doubt that, well, now the woman is dead so we will never find out will we?

On the opposite tack is Cop-Out 2.

Even X-Files Had Stinkers

2005-02-25T09:14:00.000-08:00

I've begun to watch the X-Files from beginning to end. I've seen swaths of episodes from time to time. It isn't the sort of thing that I can watch week after week after week, but it is the sort of thing where I can sit down and watch a DVD's worth of episodes at a clip.
And it's good stuff. I'll probably write about it now and again, but I want to say first that "The Ghost in the Machine" is possibly the stupidest episode I've ever seen on TV.

It's from the first season—episode seven or something--and it made me realize: hey, even X-Files had its awful episodes.

I suppose the whole thing is really a matter of long-term quality versus short-term quality. In the short-term, you're dealing with a bad writer or a poor director or off-days for the actors. A Joss Whedon who produces a very nearly flawless first season (Firefly) is highly unusual (and expensive). In the long run, X-Files gains the quality reputation that it deserves, but honestly, that one episode was really, really terrible.

The plot was straight out of Star Trek (and at least with Star Trek, there was that camp-Star-Trekky feel to it): computer becomes sentient and attempts to take over EVERYTHING, killing people right and left and causing its poor creator to have a nervous breakdown. And guess how Mulder kills its? Mulder, who won't even kill deadly alien amoebas because he wants to "study them"? That's right, you guessed it, he gives it a virus!!! I sat there the whole time, going, "Uh, cut the power, guys. Uh, shut off the power and the generator. Uh, guys, it isn't that difficult."

And poor David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson are stuck there having to take this all very, very seriously.

On the other hand, I have to keep reminding myself that the show started in the 1990s. They keep using regular phones or really, really big cell phones, which confused me for awhile. There's something rather impressive about the undateability of the episodes. (Star Trek, on the other hand, can always be dated to about five years). Granted the 90s were pretty hip, but 12 years later, Scully's clothes and hair still look trés chic. Back to the first hand, even for the 1990s the show is fairly inexcusable. It was okay for Star Trek in the 1960s and for the 2001: A Space Odyssey. But the 1990s? Oh, please.

The Attraction of the Dysfunctional

2005-02-22T20:23:00.000-08:00

Sherlock Holmes, Nero Wolfe, Monk, Dr. House--they're brillant, they're dysfunctional, they're highly obnoxious, they're totally lovable.

Maybe not lovable. Nobody except a Watson, an Archie, a Sharona and presumably, a bunch of interns would put up with these guys for very long. Yet, as the main characters of major TV programs, they are long-term watchable.

I'm talking here specifically about the amazing Jeremy Brett, the incredible Maury Chaykin, the delighful Tony Shalhoub and the devastating Hugh Laurie. All four have taken on the roles of highly dysfunctional individuals, who, nevertheless, retain the respect of their viewers.

This is harder, much harder, than it sounds. Like a first person narrative, once your hero crosses the line from slightly annoying to incredibly irritating, you switch stories. It's one reason I have a hard time with Everybody Loves Raymond and Will & Grace. Megan Mullally who plays Karen on Will & Grace deserves to be ranked with Brett, Chaykin, etc. as a sarcastic harridan who is still the funniest thing to watch on the show. But an hour of Karen would be too much.

The key to Brett, Chaykin, Shalboub and Laurie is sarcasm but sarcasm wrapped up in an appealing package. Shalhoub especially illustrates this combination. Monk is an obsessive-compulsive filled with ticks that most of us recognize within ourselves. He is finicky, demanding, lacking in empathy. And he has a dry humor. It sits just below the surface, rising at odd moments in half remarks usually delivered in a deadpan manner. He is the perfect straight man.

And then there's the whole persona of Shalhoub which, through an utter lack of self-consciousness (the character is self-conscious but only a truly unself-conscious actor could pull off some of the stuff Shalhoub does) gives Monk an endearing quality. One of the intelligent parts of the show is that Monk's apartment, despite its squeaky, hands-off neatness, is decorated in warm, brown tones. And Monk's finicky obsessiveness is relieved by moments of pure kindness, such as his treatment of his brother, his treatment of Sharona's child and his treatment of the Captain when the Captain's wife is hurt. It isn't emphasized; it is omnipresent. Monk doesn't behave obnoxiously for seven shows and then really nice for one, justifing all his subsequent behavior. Rather, Monk's mix of humor, querlousness and kindness are at work in every episode.

Ah, yes, Monk has a brilliant older brother just like Holmes. I can't go into raptures over everyone of these guys. Suffice it to say that I consider Brett the definitive Holmes, and that he brought to Holmes the same combination of intelligent eye-brow lifting mockery (often at himself), oddity and kindness, plus an emotional tension which is shared by Wolfe and House.

Nero Wolfe and Dr. House are, perhaps, the least likeable, that is in their characters. But again, the audience keeps watching. With Wolfe and House, the quality that holds is an ability to cut through the crap and even more, the emotional cost of their choices. Both Chaykin and Laurie exude an utter lack of self-pity. (Self-pity kills a character faster than anything else.) They don't play for laughs. Despite Chaykin's bulk and Laurie's slenderness, they both play from a similar inner tension. There is a frenetic quality (which Jeremy Brett as Holmes shares) to their actions, an inability to keep still intellectually or physically.

Wolfe, at least, has Archie. Played by Timothy Hutton, Archie quivers with passion: the emotional excess that Wolfe cannot afford to feel. House is more distant. The wounded leg sets him apart, like Hephaestus. His distance gives him power. In the ordinary way of things, he would just be an arrogant doctor who nearly kills patients and gets sued. But in TV-land, in myth, he becomes prophetic. His gift ("or curse," as Monk would say) is that he perceives the real cost of choices and subsequently, endures real emotional grief. He is cleaner at heart than those around him. He doesn't lie to himself and therefore, his choices become real choices as when he decides to continue his painkillers, even though he knows he is an addict.

And that I suppose, is in essence the attraction of them all. They are more truthful than the rest of us and therefore more brave. Grissom from CSI isn't quite strange enough to join this coterie (my brother Eugene has pointed out that Grissom started out stranger), but he plays the same role. This person, one can say, can be trusted to tell us how things really are. They are talismans, heroes, tricksters who, by living outside the rules, keep the rest of us pure. Perhaps, it explains the fame of Simon (from American Idol), the only problem being that Simon is playing himself. It's one thing for a mythical doctor or detective to cry out Jeremiah-like condemnations, but when an ordinary mortal does it, well, that's just mean.

Magnificent M.A.S.H.

2005-01-31T13:28:00.000-08:00

M.A.S.H. is an amazing show. I've wondered what it is about M.A.S.H. that makes it so amazing. There's nothing that gets my back up quicker than anti-War propaganda. This isn't because I think war is a whole bunch of fun. It isn't because I think war is always the answer. And it isn't because I think any war is fought without mistakes.

M.A.S.H. attacks all of those ideas and very effectively. But the power of M.A.S.H. is that it is about ordinary people who think war stinks and who behave heroically anyway. Subsequently, the message is less "50 Ways to Protest Your Government" and more about surviving as an honorable person despite horrible circumstances. Instead of self-righteous admonitions by people who think that talking solves everything, you get the cocky wryness of Pierce in the face of people who think that ideologies solve everything. And the viewer ends up on his side since he's the one actually stitching up bodies and sending soldiers back to the front.

I've been watching the earlier episodes. I grew up watching the later ones, with Colonel Potter rather than Henry Blake. I never appreciated before how well characterized Henry Blake was: a mild-mannered guy who isn't cut out for war-time service and who doesn't have Pierce's manic drive, yet manages to survive (at least the M.A.S.H. unit) in his own way. The episodes reveal a man who is actually quite good at his job and very compassionate but whose basic effectualness is masked by his diffidence and lack of ambition.

I have also gained enormous respect for Loretta Swift. Frankly, I don't think television has produced her equal since. She makes the so-called assertive feminists of later television look like so many self-conscious wannabes. When you consider that the show was produced in 1972, Houlihan's blend of femininity, ambition, vulnerability and sense of duty are really something. One receives the distinct impression, at least in the earlier episodes, that her linking up with Frank Burns is an attempt to control a tiny part of the male patriarchy (which keeps her a nurse, no matter how much she is a Major). She is the best nurse, just as Pierce is the best doctor, which she also knows. But Pierce is too much a maverick for her to befriend, at least on a long-term basis. He is uncontrollable.

All this is conveyed without whining, without belittling Houlihan's faults or her strengths, without forcing the viewer to take sides for or against. It's what feminism could be if feminists would acknowledge that men are biologically the more aggressive member of the species and therefore understandably feared by women (without that making men evil or women weak) instead of all this gender-is-a-construct stuff, which turns the whole thing into a head game and darn it all, why don't men play along?!

The Beauty of Commercials

2005-01-31T10:12:00.000-08:00

I love commercials. One is not suppose to love commercials. One is suppose to sigh heavily whenever a commercial comes on and grumble about how long they are and how many there are, etc. etc. etc.

But I don't. I appreciate commercials. There's a huge difference between sitting down to watch an hour program, with commercials, and sitting down to watch an hour of movie. And, at least on weekdays, I go for the former over the latter most of the time.

What is great about commercials is:

1. You can multi-task like nobody's business.

During commercials, I cook dinner, read books for class, work on the computer. I can even clean, feed the cats, rearrange furniture. You can't do any of this stuff and watch an hour of movie (unless you've already seen the movie and just want to pop back in for the good parts). With commercials, you can get all kinds of work done AND watch your favorite shows.

2. Some commercials are very, very funny.

For a long time, my favorite was the cellphone guy. No, no, not the "Can you hear me now?" guy, but the rather ordinary fellow who would show up in people's homes and fix their bad cellphone connection problems. He's still on, but I don't like the commercials as much anymore. My favorite was when the farmer order a "herd of oxen" and got a "hundred dachshunds" instead. There's this great shot where the cellphone guy is standing in a field and all these dachshunds go scampering past. Marvelous.

I find car commercials rather boring, although I was getting a kick out of the cars-bouncing-the-ball-around commercial, but then they changed the music and I thought that ruined it. Prescription medicine commercials are dull in general—just a hairline away from life insurance commercials. I confess I love the NY American Express commercial, although I can't stand American Express (the card). I think the commercial is a lovely tribute to New York City--sponsored by a capitalistic, money-grubbing credit card corporation. Isn't America great?!

I don't mind the gecko for Geico but I've never quite got the duck.

Anyway, commercials are fun, and funny commercials are great and well worth the thirty seconds.

3. Commercials reaffirm my belief in the intrinsic sophistication of human beings.

No, really. According to the people who get upset about this sort of thing, Americans don't know their history or their states or their capitals, etc. etc. etc. Americans are supposedly dopes about politics. They supposedly don't have a brain in their heads.

And yet, they can grasp rather subtle commercials, without blinking an eye, like the woman in the rowboat who is hooked up to one of those parasailors and rowing as fast as she can.

We take stuff like that for granted. We are accustomed to ironic imagery. It's like going back to the days of the Ancient prophets and "getting" Isaiah without realizing that understanding Isaiah is suppose to be tough.

Commercials are very complex. In thirty seconds, you get a lesson in communication. The point of the commercial has to be made, it has to be made effectively, the imagery has to support the point, the joke has to work, and it has to work on a broad enough level that at least most of the viewing audience will grasp it. Commercials often depend on a kind of self-deprecation (in Murder Must Advertise, Dorothy Sayers points out the odd conundrum that good ads are almost always written with the tongue "planted firmly in the cheek" while ads written with a sincere belief in the product come off as stale and flat). Irony is at work. Cultural icons are at work. Symbolism is at work. And your ad company, advertiser and viewer take this all in without batting an eye.

You could argue that viewers aren't analyzing the irony and the juxtaposition of imagery or asking why a commercial is funny. You would probably be right. But the beauty of the right brain is that it all works anyway.

TV: We Just Love Those Toothy Guys

2005-01-26T21:47:00.000-08:00

Vampires. They compel us: in fiction, lore, on TV, in films, they attract. There are many analyses out there of what makes vampires so compelling. This is one more.

Caveat: The problem with analyses is that the explanation so often seems to miss the point. When something that is ultimately non-serious is taken very, very seriously, it runs the risk of falling a bit flat. What one loves gains a bit of, uh, blahness, as the final seasons of Buffy proved. (Uh, yes, I'm showing my bias there.) It's all right to get all maudlin and death oriented over vampires, but joie de vivre usually wins out in the end. Annette Curtis Klause's Silver Kiss is a much more substantial book, for example, than Charlaine Harris'Dead to the World (which is basically blood, guts, sex and more sex) but Dead to the World gets a bit closer to the mark in terms of catching the essence of vampire attractiveness.

In Harris'Dead to the World, the unreality of vampires is imposed onto the reality of a Southern town in a Sunnydale-like future. Robin McKinley's Sunshine attempts this same juxtaposition, in far better prose than Harris'. Klaus' later book Blood and Chocolate about werewolves succeeds for precisely this mixture of day-to-day living with super-natural living (vampires and werewolves aren't so much beyond nature as they are the embodiment of nature: very dead, very animal).

In other words, it isn't vampires, per se, that attract us, it's vampires and us. Dracula would be a cardboard monster if Stoker had used a vampire-expert as his narrator. Instead, he used a bunch of ordinary Victorians. It is their diaries, their excursions into Dracula's world that makes the book a classic. (For a hilarious version of Dracula from his point of view check out Saberhagen's The Dracula Tape.)

In Buffy, the vampires are more than cardboard monsters (bad-guys-who-get-killed) as their representatives Spike and Angel prove. Even more than Dracula, they provide a world, a society, which can be explored. The final season of Angel was redeemed from utter plot confusion by the continuing dialog between Spike and Angel. Being a vampire became, especially for Angel, not just a matter of personal redemption but a matter of social redemption, a construction of norms--this is what it means to be what you are.

The attraction between Buffy and Spike rests on a similar dialog and begins in the episode where Buffy requests Spike's advice re: how did the other slayers die? He tells her (and is subsequently hurt, emotionally, for his pains) by drawing on his experience. He invites Buffy into his world. His world turns out to be a strangely ordered one, in which Spike continually reaches out for the companionship he became a vampire to obtain but can never quite achieve.

In other words, the vampires of Whedon's universe are not merely lone creatures, searching, like lone gun men, for prey or revenge. They are explained by a theology, no matter how problematic. They belong to a system, no matter how flawed. They want companionship, not matter how incongruously that sits with their natures. Like Star Trek's aliens, they are a mirror to us ordinary humans but better than Star Trek's aliens, they are us, only dead. The mirror becomes exploration, not just reflecton.

And boy, doesn't that sound pompous!

TV: American Idol

2005-01-24T17:00:00.000-08:00

Here's the question of the day: Are the bad singers on American Idol really that bad and do they really not know they are that bad?

I have a hard time watching American Idol because I don't really like to watch people being publicly abused and humiliated in front of large amounts of people (one reason I have never been able to get into any reality TV show on a long-term basis). I see excerpts from American Idol as I am flipping through to watch other things, and yes, I'm a sucker for an English accent even if Simon is mean.

It doesn't surprise me that they allow bad singers on the show. Simon can't say caustic things unless they do. What gets me is that these singers are surprised when Simon tells them they are bad. And some of them are crazy. Are they really that crazy? Are they really that surprised? This isn't a case of people who sing okay but not great or even people like me who are practically tone-deaf but can at least recognize the difference between notes (and who would never, never, never do something like American Idol anyway—talk about nightmare), these are people who just can't sing. And who think they can. Is it wishful thinking? Is it a blind spot?

And why singing? Or rather why singing in particular? Why not American Idol Garage Mechanics? I'd rather know how to change the oil in my car than sing. Is it because singing is easier to gauge than repairing a car? I think that is part of it, but I think there is another component as well: it isn't just American culture or for that matter 21st century culture that has promoted singers as the idols of their time. Even the Middle Ages did it, although "sing for me or die" has a different ring to it than "sing for me and get a $1 million contract." Human beings seem to have a fascination with the ability of the human frame to produce music.

And I suppose it is rather incredible when you think about it.

Point Sunnydale?

2005-01-20T06:43:00.000-08:00

So the question with Point Pleasant is: Could it be more obvious that they are hoping to attract Buffy viewers?

Marti Noxon told a reporter that the show "tonally . . . is so different from Buffy." Okay, I might buy that, if the lead didn't look more like Sarah Michelle Gellar's sister than Dawn ever did (at least superficially; she actually has a very differently shaped face, but at first glance, you think, "It's Buffy. Good grief. It's Buffy.")

My reaction to the pilot episode was, oddly enough, the reaction I had to the Marti Noxon season of Buffy (the season where Buffy and Spike get together): good premise and . . . I kept waiting for the POW, the thing that makes you go, "Yeah, I'll watch this again." It never came.

But that could be because I'd seen so many previews, I pretty much knew the plot; it was sort of like watching the previews strung together with a few inbetweener scenes.

In any case, it could be a good show. Maybe. Right now, it looks more like an OC which takes itself seriously (as compared to the actual OC which doesn't). I kept going, "Hey, where are the scoobies? Where are the funky English dudes?"

Speaking of faux English dudes, Marti Noxon is hoping to get James Marsters on the show. My bets are he shows up as the protagonist's father (i.e. the ultimate big bad). Yeah, yeah, he's a sexy man, but eh hem, he's getting a bit elderly to play an 18 year old's love interest.

(I will give the writers points for heavy-handed but actual symbolism. Jessie, the lifeguard, was brought back to life when he was younger, bears a scar of the event, rescues the protagonist from the water and is the son of a female Christian preacher. They couldn't have been more blatant, but at least they used symbolism to do it.)

Science Guys and Why Women Love Them

2005-01-12T22:06:00.000-08:00

Asimov once wrote an article about why women found Spock sexy. Far be it from me to follow in the great man's footsteps, but I will attempt a similar analysis of TV (male) scientists.

First, and this may get confusing, there is the image of the male scientist: the nerd in a lab absorbed by some obscure subject matter. I will call this the "classic" image.

Now, there are real classic TV scientists and then there are fake classic TV scientists. Real classic TV scientists, of whom Hugh Laurie's Dr. House is the latest addition, are those who are believable nerds in a lab absorbed by some obscure subject matter. They say all the right stuff in the right way with the right attitude.

Fake classic TV scientists are those whom the audience are suppose to find classic despite the fact that they look and act like classic jocks. Nick from CSI is an example of a fake scientist; we are told that he was an unpopular geek in High School but he doesn't look or act like one. However, in Nick's case, his history is plausible. (Just for clarification: I don't considering acting like a classic jock a negative anymore than I consider acting like a classic scientist a negative). Greg (played by Eric Szmanda) is an example of a semi-real scientist since he is more believably off-kilter than Nick, and it truly isn't his fault that he is a beautiful person (being a classic scientist has less to do with being more or less beautiful and more to do with how the scientist carries him/herself--classic scientists can be beautiful and they can be confident; the rest is a state of mind). Gil, also from CSI, is a totally believable scientist (much more so than the leads of the other two CSIs) and is one reason the original show is so fun to watch.

To continue, Luke Giradi from Joan of Aradia is one of the realest of the real TV scientists and this is where we come full circle to Spock. Because fans adore Luke, played by Michael Welch (for more insight on Luke check out: http://tv.groups.yahoo.com/group/ChemicalBreakdown/). He appears thin and gawky, wears glasses, explains everything in terms of science and buys his girlfriend things like geods. So what's so sexy about this?

What is so sexy is the fidelity of it. The classic scientist is single-minded and faithful in his single-mindedness. In TV-land this faithfulness to the subject translates over into faithfulness to his spouse/girlfriend. One only has to look to Stephen Hawkins and Einstein to realize that it doesn't necessarily translate over in real life (although they seem to have been interested in only one woman at a time). But in TV-land, and possibly to a certain extent in real life, if you get a scientist, you get him for life. And he's just too obsessed with his science to give the woman any anxiety. This is incredibly attractive. (It's also the reason A&E's non-scientist but definitely single-minded Darcy worked so well.)

And it isn't just the female need for security (not a route I wish to go down at this point). CSI is built on the basis that "the Truth" (i.e. scientific truth) is of overpowering importance. Gil repeatedly tells his people, Don't interfere with the evidence. Let it speak for itself. Don't lie. Hugh Laurie's Dr. House is a rude, sarcastic (piano playing) guy. But he doesn't lie. I think this attracts people, and I know it attracts women.

And it's important that Truth here isn't political truth (the TRUTH about Iraq) or philosophical truth (the TRUTH about life, the TRUTH about dying). It's scientific truth. It's science guys in a laboratory doing experiments that nobody has ever heard of simply for the sake of the experiment. (Granting the fact that on CSI, where scientific truth leads to the capture of bad guys, it gains an extra bit of panache.) But the point is: there is no (or appears to be no) ideological agenda. And if the scientist can love the subject for its own sake, he must be able to pursue and love his lady for her own sake. And that--realistic or not--is very sexy.

The female scientist, by the way, is a variant of the male type, except that she is usually cold and aloof (rather than absent-minded) and she always has long hair which she lets down and--voila-- gets sexy. Dax from ST:Deep Space Nine and 7 of 9 from ST: Voyager as well as Dr. C from I, Robot all fall into this category. Men obviously find them sexy, but I'm afraid it has more to do with the latex than the nerdiness, although men do seem to like the female scientist's directness.

Beautiful People

2005-01-07T13:37:00.000-08:00

There have always been beautiful people on television. And what a shallow topic, you're thinking. Well, yes, it is. But they're still beautiful. Here begins the list of beautiful people:

Men:

Scotty on Cold Case
Warrick on CSI
Greg on CSI
Sean Bean

Keith Hamilton Cobb
Noah Wyle
Vincent D'Onofrio

Ashton Kutcher (yeah, yeah, but he is, I can't help it)
Conrad Dunn (see comment)

Women:

Grace Kelly
Julianne Moore

Lexa Doig

Nicole Kidman (see comment)

This list will be open indefinitely.

Villains, Good Guys and Unlikable Characters

2005-01-06T18:10:00.000-08:00

So I don't watch Without a Trace anymore and the reason, which I hate to admit, is because I don't like the main character. Well, and it was obviously headed towards soap-opera central with a steamy love triangle and so on and so forth.

But my reaction to the main character bemused me. In general, I don't rule out shows simply because I dislike a character. Quite often, I like a character, even if the character is a villain or kind of shady, so long as I feel that that character works and is necessary. Even badly written characters don't bother me—I just figure that's the fault of the script writer.

For instance, Jan from Firefly is an excellent example of a dislikable character who is nevertheless very fun to watch. Dawn from Buffy is a good example of the latter (average actress, pointless character—started out good, the writers ran out of ideas). Bob from Becker is a fabulous example of the former. Wesley (yes, Wesley!) from Star Trek: Next Gen was a good example of a character that needn't have been as annoying as the writers made him.Even when I just don't like a character at all, I can usually find something else about the show to watch. Wesley from ST:Next Gen didn't ruin everything for me. Kes from Voyager got close but hey, they got rid of her within three seasons, thank goodness, and even when she was on, she was usually playing opposite the doctor, who was a hoot.

But the main character on Without a Trace (Jack played by Anthony LaPaglia) is just—yech. And I decided that it’s an unfortunate combination between the script and the actor. I don't mind the actor especially, but his character is supposed to be this great boss who had an affair once upon a time with an associate. Two years later, his wife leaves him, moving to Chicago and basically stealing his daughters. He thought he was moving to Chicago too and one of his subordinates got his job. Then, his wife serves him with divorce papers, and he's back at his old job, ousting the subordinate, all for the sake of his daughters.

In all honesty, the ousting the subordinate part got me angrier than the affair part. The affair was just stupid people behaving stupidly. But the ousting the subordinate was unfair and wrong and sexist and also weird writing, script-wise, since the actress who played the subordinate (Marianne Jean-Baptiste) was actually a far more convincing leader.

BUT—this horrible script could almost work if the character was a charismatic leader who was good at his job, that is, if the character was actually interesting. There's a kind of fascination in watching people self-destruct. But unfortunately, LaPaglia plays the whole thing just on the edge of whine. Just barely. I don't think he means to. I think he means to be all concerned-like and angst-ridden. But it doesn't work. It comes off as the man feeling vaguely sorry for himself. Sorry for himself! Oh, I get it, it's the old, "It's my private life, nobody should care what a jerk I am" ploy. So he messed up his marriage. His wife obviously hates his guts. And now he is going to make everyone pay for it.

If, instead, they played him as a villain (and there was a marvelous show ten years ago or so about an amoral lawyer who cheated and lied and stole; the show was told from his point of view, which was great although the show only lasted about half a season—there's this scene where the villain sticks nails in his shoes to get himself through a lie detector test), the show would bounce back from maudlin to fun. Amoral works. But passing amoral turpitude off as "hey, he's the hero, don't you feel sorry for him?"—nah, I don't think so.

We Know Why They Do It But It's So Annoying

2005-01-06T14:23:00.000-08:00

One of the most remarked-on features of TV is the separation of the romantic leads. It has been commented on that if and when the writers bring them together, the dramatic tension wanes, and the viewers waft away to other shows that have leads who stay apart.

There is another side to this equation, however; it is the I'm-sick-and-tired-of-watching-nothing-happen-here-especially-when-the-reasons-for-keeping-the-leads-apart-are-so-contrived reaction. I gave up on JAG within two seasons because of this. I don't mind shows like CSI: Vegas where the romantic tension is so understated and unimportant to the weekly mystery, it doesn't figure except to spice things up. But I get tired of shows that keep you hanging on and on and on and on and on by hinting, "We might do something. Oh, wait, no--guess not."

Like soap operas where one conversation takes a full hour and the potential "couple" spends that entire hour exchanging remarks like, "I wish I could tell you, but I can't;" "I have something important to say—wait, someone just interrupted us;" "I rushed over to see you, and now we're going to have an argument about your cousin's twin sister's baby." Kind of like Smallville. Every time I flip through it to get to something else, Clark and some chick are having the same discussion: "I have a deep, dark secret." "Tell me your deep, dark secret, Clark." "I can't tell you my deep, dark secret. I care about you." "If you cared about me, you'd tell me your deep, dark secret, Clark." Ad nauseum.

It was Whedon who discovered, or at least proved, that you could tell the deep, dark secret and voila! add more tension and more plot. It was also Whedon who discovered, or proved, that you could bring the leads together and then separate them using characterization (rather than contrived plot devices), although even with Whedon the "I love you, oops you went evil" thing got a bit old. Still, I promote the episode from Buffy in which Buffy and (evil) Angel re-enact the romance of two ghosts, as one of the best "we're apart, but we still love each other" episodes of all time.

This brings us to the nearly impossible, which is a show that brings the leads together, but still keeps them interesting. Monica and Chandler from Friends passed the test. Luke and Lorelai from Gilmore Girls might. If one gives Spike the role of true romantic lead (rather than Angel; don't shoot me Buffy fans!), one can argue that he kind of ended up with the girl. Sort of. Well, no, I guess not. Even the reality romance shows can't come up to scratch (too much reality, although the proliferation of such shows reveals a romantic streak in American pop culture). Paris & B'Elanna from Star Trek: Voyager is one of my absolute favorite relationships of all Trekdom (but wasn't Chakotay and 7 of 9 a huge mistake? and that's a whole other post). On the other hand, Riker & Troi fell a bit flat at the end (even if you count the films).

If you have any "I wished they'd stayed together," "I wished they'd get together," "They got together and it worked" or "They got together and they flopped," I'd like to hear!