Month: April 2015

Lunchtable TV Talk – Scorpion

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The best part of the show Scorpion -so far- has been hearing the gorgeous song “Under the Milky Way” by The Church. That having absolutely nothing to do with the show itself, I cannot really endorse the show as being anything more than a normal procedural show that has very little distinguishing it from similar, previous shows on network TV.

A lot like Leverage and Alphas before it, the show focuses on a group of misfit geniuses who work together as a team, using their unique individual strengths to solve crimes, save lives and so on. Maybe it is different that the group of geniuses works as a part of US Homeland Security, so they are not renegades running amok fixing things of their own accord. Unusual social underdogs coupled with overachieving IQs. It is not that this is unpleasant – it is a perfectly entertaining show, and I am watching – and continue to watch it. The slight difference in this show compared to some of the previously mentioned ones – the group (Scorpion – as the show is titled) has a government handler (Robert Patrick) and a kind of former waitress, mother of a misunderstood genius who becomes a social translator/handler for the group (universally recognized bad actress Katharine McPhee – just check out the soap opera mess that was Smash).

Occasionally there is a funny line or reference thrown in. It accounts for the second time this week that I heard a reference to Gavrilo Princip in a popular network TV show (okay, the other show was The Slap, so it is a big stretch and exaggeration to use the word “popular” in reference to it). The finale of The Slap and a recent episode of Scorpion referred to Princip, the Serbian assassin of Archduke Franz Ferninand – a seemingly small event that triggered World War I. Scorpion will not be triggering any wars or setting any fires (even though a recent episode included a giant fire started by the group crashing landing a helicopter).

Lunchtable TV Talk – Banished

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Banished has a fantastic premise that feels wasted with this show. It has the chance to explore something we have never seen before. But instead, it makes vague allusions and oblique references to things like interactions with “the natives” and only one character succumbing to snake bite. But if you were the first “colonists” – prisoners and the military men from England  – sent to Australia, this should somehow feel wider – told as a much bigger story and through a broader lens, yet with a lot more detail. But it feels like everything about the story and the scenery is too contained, too limited. It never fully conveys how far away they are from everything. They talk a lot about these long prison sentences and the opportunity to go home someday – and even if they all know they will never really get there, or that they will starve before their sentences are up, you never quite sense that urgency or the true sense of eternal banishment that the round-the-world incarceration of geography has imposed.

On a lighter note, the British dude from one of my least favorite shows (another one with a good premise and the opportunity to tell a much-needed story), Looking, gets to beg in the same way in both shows. In Looking he was constantly telling his illicit lover, Patrick, that he will leave his boyfriend someday. But just not yet. Be patient. Eventually he leaves the boyfriend and gets together officially with Patrick, but in the last episode, sets Patrick off by pleading with him to consider an open relationship.

In Banished, he begs for his food back when a bully steals his food every day. Then begs the authorities to take action when he tattles on said bully for stealing his food. When nothing happens because the bully is the only smith among the prisoners, he eventually kills the bully. And then begs for his life and whines and cries in an understandable but not particularly appealing way.

We also get to see Ewen Bremner – best known as Trainspotting‘s Spud – as the colony’s minister/pastor. Funny how nearly the whole gang from Trainspotting are television staples today.

Hopefully, if this series has a second season ahead of it, these kinds of problems can be addressed. I don’t really think a premise with this kind of rich historical import deserves to be a second-rate soap opera.

Lunchtable TV talk – The Slap

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Overwrought, overbaked, pretentious eight-part program based on an Australian book and then Australian series of the same name – The Slap. Americans always make a mess of things they try to redo. A story that details the aftermath of an unfortunate and heated afternoon in which an adult slaps an unruly child across the face, and what that does to everyone who attended the event where the slap occurred.

I do admit though that the final of the eight parts was somewhat moving (as well as the hour that focused on Uma Thurman’s middle-aged character facing a surprise pregnancy, which was quite difficult for me even though it was as wrapped up in stupidity as the rest of this series). This was quite a waste of time. Many friends have mentioned trying to watch this, but found it hideous for a number of reasons. First, totally disconnected narration that sounded like it was a part of another show; second, characters who are ostensibly married, related or best friends who seem like they don’t know each other at all – absolutely no chemistry. Finally, it was just overdone and pretentious in every way. It came together in the end. A seemingly minor character, Richie, weaves everything together in the end – and he turns out to be the only sympathetic character in the entire show.

The Slap finale, though, was the first of two times this week that I heard on mainstream TV an improbable reference to Gavrilo Princip, assassin of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand.

Lunchtable TV talk – The Goldbergs: Nostalgia makes me cry, as do robot overlords

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The Goldbergs was a bit over the top for me in the beginning, but as I continued to watch, the 1980s nostalgia eventually won me over. Many, many moments choke me up with tears. The show manages to evoke nostalgia, emotion without being overly saccharine. And I suppose people who did not grow up in that era might not feel as strongly about it. But they can find other points to connect with emotionally (the importance of family, the connection the crazy mother has with the kids, the sense of not wanting your kids to grow up, the feeling that everyone is awkward in youth but eventually, with the right guidance, they find their voice and path). It is interesting to watch the Goldberg kids grow up.

A recent episode made me laugh out loud. The dad wonders why someone would destroy a perfectly good Fiero to make a robot when the youngest, Adam, enthuses about the greatness of The Transformers (toys and cartoon). Adam pits the “stupidity” of a game “where grown men hit a ball with a stick” against his future run by robots. Argument ensues about baseball versus robots – America’s pastime (past) and its robotic future.

“Robots aren’t even real.”

“Oh you’ll see how real they are when cyborgs take over and outlaw your precious baseball.”

Lunchtable TV talk – American Crime: Don’t believe everything you read

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After spending a lot of time watching ridiculous shows, I thought American Crime, with its gritty realism, would be a good change of pace. In many ways, it is. It is gritty and real and tells a story from multiple perspectives. Characters are real, complicated, vulnerable and flawed – mostly unlikeable – but then, aren’t most people, especially on TV? While most characters are exaggerated for television, I find the exaggerations are only slightly true here. For example, with grief exploding from the uptight mother of a murder victim, she is desperately trying to keep it together, tightly wound, and keep control over her emotions and how things play out (a stellar performance from Felicity Huffman). Ultimately, most of what comes out of her mouth is critical, unpleasant, drives wedges between other characters and her, and above all, comes out as racist and short-sighted.

Who am I to say that her lashing out (however controlled it is) is exaggerated? Her insistence in a recent episode that “this family was never normal” strikes me as funny in that it’s true that no family is ever normal. The brother of the murder victim seems to be one of the only clear-headed, normal people here. His handling of the manipulative demands and undercurrent of racism his mother has always doled out is inspired. He finally confronts her – he seems to be the only one confronting anyone with reason in this show – and it’s hard to watch. It’s for scenes like these that I continue to watch, even though I am not finding the show particularly meaningful or compelling.

I read a lot of articles introducing the show before it started. I had high hopes. But the show unfolds slowly and is mundane. Perhaps this is what things are like – slow and murky. In the criminal justice system, justice is not swift and even if the outcome is “fair”, it is not going to seem fair to all parties. Crime and its aftermath has a way of revealing secrets under the surface – which then tear people apart on top of the grief and loss they are already feeling. It can unravel tenuous “peace” – in families, in societies. For example, we can see a relatively deft handling of the racial and cultural issues at play in society as a whole here, and these tensions lead to stupid decisions and explosions. Nothing is obvious, but it is undoubtedly taxing to try to create a story from all angles. For example, the story explores divides within one community. The father of a Mexican-American family that is central to the story condemns “illegals” as giving the rest of them a bad name. Naturally this does not go over well within his community (his family is shunned from their church after the father’s tirade on “illegals” is broadcast on the news).

The point is – the show’s treatment tells it from many sides, but as one online outlet explains:

“The problem with frank conversations about race and prejudice, particularly as it pertains to American life, is that the issue is so enormous that it’s impossible to have a comprehensive discussion on the subject. There’s too much at stake with too many affiliated tendrils to ever feel as if it’s a topic that has anything close to a solution, much less one that could be reached by simple dialogue. So instead of having the big important conversations about race and really digging into the main course that is oppression, society tends to prefer it’s race conversations in amuse-bouche portions, just bite-sized bits of conflict that fuel the Twitter outrage fires for days until they eventually burn themselves out, often just in time for another flare up.”

Perhaps I find the show frustrating because the characters are weak and human and do exactly what real people would do rather than what you want them to do – or what they should do (and what TV characters looking for “redemption” would do). In that sense, even five episodes in, I am not sure what I think about American Crime.

Lunchtable TV talk – Allegiance

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One of the latest in network TV’s scrambling to copycat critical hits, Allegiance, exactly as one article says, is a dumbed-down version of The Americans – which is, conversely, one of the smartest shows on TV.

Luckily Allegiance has been cancelled:

“NBC said “nyet” to Allegiance late last week, pulling the dumbed-down version of The Americans from its lineup and effectively canceling the Thursday-night drama. It was a tough blow for the show’s producers and its roughly 6 million viewers, but at least their suffering is over.”

I cannot really even explain how unappealing this show has been. Hope Davis is a better actress than this show can allow. The eldest daughter in the family, Margarita Levieva, is likewise better. She keeps turning up in roles and on shows that seem beneath her. She needs to land somewhere that will let her be more than a supporting player to see if she can hack it. Giancarlo Esposito has appeared in the last couple of episodes as the ultimate villain – and he’s always fun to see, but even he can’t save this urgent mess.

The only other point I wanted to make about this show is that it is nice to see an Asian man in a semi-leading role that is not in any way a stereotype. Kenneth Choi, who has also been seen recently in Sons of Anarchy as a more stereotypical Asian-man character, the leader of a Chinese gang – plays Sam Luttrell, the New York CIA station chief. He’s no-nonsense and like any other character. Race does not really come into question – and maybe in a show like this it doesn’t. It’s more in shows like The Walking Dead or Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt that stereotypes come up and people begin questioning the roles. Glenn, one of the long-time survivors in The Walking Dead, ends up not only as a badass fighter but also is in love with Maggie, a fairly religious southern (white) woman. Plenty of discussion has swirled around his role, especially early on. But these days, a lot more talk focuses on Dong, the GED student with whom Kimmy Schmidt gets involved on the Netflix series, Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt. It pokes fun at some of the awkward racial issues – sometimes in juvenile ways. But it also features an Asian immigrant male as a romantic lead rather than as the butt of every tired joke or at the heart of every stereotypical role. For this reason, I can appreciate Allegiance’s use of Choi.

Otherwise, glad to see that Allegiance is not coming back.

Lunchtable TV Talk- Guest star: Courtney Love

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Courtney Love has lived a life full of drama that has played out in the public eye – both by her own hand and because some of her antics have been so outlandish that a public debacle was unavoidable.

The only reason I think of her now is that she has appeared in small but somewhat tantalizing guest roles in a few shows lately – first as a preschool teacher in Sons of Anarchy and as a hitman in the increasingly ridiculous Revenge. Then I read that she plays a role in Empire (one of the few shows it seems I have not seen).

I can’t judge Love and some of her seemingly odd life choices, but in seeing these very brief appearances on TV, I started to wonder what kind of performances we may have missed from her because of these odd life choices and seeming derailments. She showed tremendous promise and generated buzz in a few film appearances that coincided with the height of her band’s fame (Hole, for anyone who doesn’t know, however improbable that is). I can’t claim to know what she was going through privately, but I wonder sometimes whether, had she continued acting really actively, her skills would have been honed. Where would she be now? She’s doing a fabulous job in these small roles – and standing out doing it (not just because she is Courtney Love). But what more might she have done had she focused? (And not knowing everything, I don’t know if it has a lot to do with focus.) When we have seen glimpses of a sane and talented actress in Love, I have to ask what more we might have seen?

I don’t find myself thinking this way about most actors – maybe I think of her because it feels like so much promise squandered. Maybe not “squandered” as much not living up to full potential. Maybe because I can never decide if Love is a misguided lunatic genius or a misguided lunatic idiot.

Lunchtable TV talk – BoJack Horseman: “Son of a bitch – that literal son of a bitch”

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I have never been one much for animation. Somehow I can’t get past the actual animation. As a person who is not that visual in the first place, I sort of need the realism of actual people to draw me into something I watch (even if I often watch only halfheartedly). I have always been this way, preferring live-action Muppets to cartoons. Animation just does not hold my interest for some reason, even if the story and the content are fantastic. Which means that I don’t get as much out of something great, like the film Persepolis, as I should.

I read many good things – or even not good things, but things that made me curious – about BoJack Horseman – yet another of Netflix’s triumphs – so I decided to give it a try. What struck me as I watched episode after episode is the sense that animation can actually poke fun at and draw out real satire from things, people, situations, trends in ways that “real” shows cannot as easily do.

That said, it always takes me a while to readjust my view to watch animals become anthropomorphized, interacting with and dating humans. Lifting the anchor to reality, the whole thing becomes a lot more palatable: it’s fine that a horse, BoJack Horseman, who starred in a sitcom is now a has-been trying to reignite recognition by publishing an autobiography he can’t get around to writing. It’s fine that his great rival is a dog, Mr Peanut Butter, who starred in a suspiciously similar sitcom. And because a dog is always aiming to please, this rivalry is more grounded in Horseman’s envy and depression. The dog is always exceedingly good-natured, a little bit vacant but very sweet and sincere and always attempting to be friends with Horseman. There’s almost no real rivalry until Horseman starts to have feelings for his ghost writer and Mr Peanut Butter’s girlfriend, Diane, a human.

“Son of a bitch – that literal son of a bitch.” -BoJack on rival Mr Peanut Butter

The mix of human and animal characters becomes, if not invisible, just an extra level of comedy. And can you fault anyone for creating a seal who is a Navy SEAL? No new stories in “Hollywoo”.

Slate offered a solid description of the show’s premise. It argues that the show is more clever than funny, delving into the comedic yet sad territory of has-been celebrity and the pervasive idea of “revival” in the form of tell-all autobios and reality shows.

Vulture’s analysis goes a step further and echoes about what I feel after watching the show: it is “one of the most aggressive portraits of depression I think I’ve ever seen. Look past the anthropomorphic animal characters and the satire of toxic celebrity culture: This show is radically sad. I love it.”

Lunchtable TV talk: The Good Wife and The Americans – When belief is the greatest rebellion

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In two of television’s best shows, The Good Wife and The Americans, the main characters’ children – teenagers – do not rebel against their parents or authority by partying, drinking, having sex, choosing inappropriate partners or dating at all, skipping school or typical teenage rebellion tropes. Instead, these teens rebel by seeking faith.

In many American families, this would not be unusual or considered as rebellion at all. But for the families at the heart of these two particular shows, faith is not central to the main characters’ lives and never has been. Many critics condemn the shows when they focus too squarely on the main characters’ children, and usually I would agree. In these shows, however, the children’s search for meaning and faith informs and deepens the viewers’ understanding of the characters we care most about.

In The Good Wife, arguably one of the most sophisticated and nuanced shows in recent years, the focal point is Alicia Florrick (Julianna Margulies). The show has always been a critical success but has always struggled in the ratings; at this point, given the way the latter half of its most recent, the sixth, season has gone, I think the show has seen better days. I highly recommend at least the first five seasons.

Alicia faces many challenges in her personal and professional life, but one story that has not been particularly well-developed but which does shine a light on Alicia’s relationship with faith (as well as challenges with mothering – you never know what to expect from your kids!) is when her daughter, Grace, becomes curious about and explores Christianity. Alicia is not religious, and Grace’s exploration creates tension. It is not always the most well-designed plotline, but we can see clearly that Grace’s curiosity, though genuine, is a form of rebellion. Not argument-filled, contentious rebellion – but given Alicia’s ambivalence toward religion (I can’t recall if she ever explicitly stated that she is an atheist, but it is clear that religion is not a part of her life and that she did not introduce religion as a part of her children’s lives), it is a form of rebellion. After all, rebellion is often a form of finding and forging one’s own identity apart from what is expected.

In the better of the two shows (both of which are exceptional), The Americans, which, if possible, is even more highly acclaimed than The Good Wife, but less watched (!), the two main characters, Philip and Elizabeth Jennings (Matthew Rhys and Keri Russell), find themselves at odds when their teenage daughter, Paige, decides to pursue faith. Philip and Elizabeth, both undercover Soviet spies, are atheists – but each “welcomes” Paige’s exploration differently. Both main characters have a complex relationship with how to parent (and with America and their cause). Both love their child, but Elizabeth – less seduced by America and more deeply, ideologically committed to the Soviet cause than her husband – is first against letting Paige look into her religious curiosities but eventually joins her, as a kind of way to get closer and more easily manipulate Paige when the time comes to enlist her into the “family business”. Philip is perhaps the more emotional of the two, and feels that their children deserve independence and the right to determine their future for themselves. Regardless of whether he feels that religion is the right choice for his daughter, he does not easily conclude that he and Elizabeth should interfere – and is vehemently against recruiting her to the cause. (Interestingly, Paige is a bit of a manipulator herself – asking her parents for a simple birthday dinner rather than a party, and her only request is to ask that her pastor and his wife be invited. By having the pastor present at the dinner party, she ambushes her parents into letting her get baptized.)

Although these storylines are meant to guide and illustrate our thinking about the parents/main characters, they also underline the general tendency of people – particularly when young – not just to look toward ideas that are different from what they have always been exposed to but also to question and search for meaning, whether that comes in the form of religious faith or something else. We can see how wrapped up in and brainwashed people can become (see the recent HBO documentary Going Clear, about the cult that is Scientology for a testament about that) in their search for authenticity, identity and belonging. Some people find that in their church, some find it in a social setting or scene, some people find it in politics. We can see that Alicia Florrick, while strong herself, has a community in the legal profession, her law firm and now in politics (though she is struggling with that). We know that the Jennings couple in The Americans has a guiding belief in Communism. It is easy to forget as adults, particularly ones with that depth of community and level of ideological commitment, that young people, even one’s own children, do not necessarily share those things and values. (Obviously the case if you are secretly spies!)

Where both shows have an opportunity with the stories about their children is that they can show how their parenting and relationships with their children can encourage healthy questioning and exploration and be supportive without smothering or undermining reason (i.e., opposing the children’s curiosity to the degree that they become even more determined to pursue a path just to spite the parents). In both shows, eventually, regardless of whether the end aims had impure motives (as in Elizabeth’s case with her daughter – even if it is considerably more complicated than that), the “rebellion” is nurtured with discussion and showing increasing trust in the children, even if the belief/faith is not ultimately shared.

Lunchtable TV Talk: The Following

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The Following is the best show on television! Just kidding. April Fool’s Day!

I have written many times about TV’s worst show, The Following. It makes law enforcement look like bumbling idiots (thanks, real law enforcement does that quite enough on their own). It leads viewers to believe that the diabolical cult leaders/serial killers are geniuses – but they are not particularly smart either.  They are just conscienceless and usually a step or two ahead of the law. And not even charismatic! Sometimes I ask myself if maybe I have been conditioned by too many police and legal procedurals and somehow imagine that investigations and catching bad guys is easier than it is. Maybe Kevin Bacon leading this team of FBI field operatives is exactly as murky as FBI investigations get. I don’t really know. But I know that it is not really entertainment, except for a self-torturer like myself, who watches weekly to find out what new level of stupidity and depravity the show will fall each time.

Kevin Bacon at his best…

The only remotely interesting part, which has been the case all along, is questioning how all these different people have been brainwashed to follow along with the cult of Joe Carroll – and now Carroll (the main baddie) is in prison, and the people pulling the strings … well, I don’t know where loyalty for those guys comes from. And the whole thing is scary in that you have to wonder how the world could possibly sustain this many psychopaths. The show constantly introduces new characters – hard to keep it all clear. It has taken the focus off “mastermind” Joe Carroll, who seems less crazy all the time given the cast of characters to appear since he exited the stage. (Michael Ealy is the latest, and it’s a pretty weird role for him. This is no Sleeper Cell.) There are a lot of echoes of far superior shows, such as Dexter and Hannibal, mixed in here, and even a tinge of the recent The Fall, in which Jamie Dornan is a serial murderer but also turns out to be a “normal family man”, like Ealy’s new character – but it’s like retreading old ground and treading water. Nothing remotely original here.

In light of viewing the recent HBO documentary on Scientology (Going Clear), I am not as inclined to doubt that insecurity and longing for belonging drive people into the arms of predatory cults and endow these followers with a sense of superiority (before stripping them down in the same way an abuser does with his abused). A cult around a serial killer is not really any different. Even in particularly gung-ho corporate environments, you get a lot of people who subsume their own identities and personalities and go beyond even “enthusiastic corporate cheerleader”.

I wrote earlier to a friend: “I wonder, being an antisocial non-joiner of anything myself, how people get so caught up in anything – whether it is a political party, a religious dogma, a corporation, a fraternity – whatever it is. And having this sense of self (as an antisocial, non-joiner) would I even be aware, or conscious, if I did join something? We have such powerful ideas about who we are that I wonder if we even see who we are.”

I find myself freaked out by things like crowds of people who start out applauding randomly and without any rhythm but end up clapping in a frightening group-mentality unison. It is not a big leap from there – people’s tendency toward sameness and wanting some kind of belonging and harmony – to see how people end up tethered to something insane through a combination of blind devotion and sheer lack of ability to think for themselves. Is that what compels people to watch and love The Following? That people fool themselves into thinking they are immune to brainwashing?

Forgive me in advance; this will be a sweepingly generalized observation. And it is a bit off topic, but I did think about the fact that the adults I knew as an adolescent – people like my parents and others their age (40ish middle-aged people) – always seemed to be on some kind of spiritual search. Some discovered religion, some New Age guru stuff (which hit a peak in the late 80s), some Scientology – but whatever they did or did not discover, I wonder if people of my own generation are as inclined to the midlife crisis and this hunt for greater meaning. All humans, I think, hunt for greater meaning, but I also feel there are generational components at work. The Baby Boomers seem to have invented the midlife crisis (maybe life in the western world was actually too difficult for these kinds of “identity crises” prior to the post-war generation – people were just busy with the business of surviving). My generation, the so-called Generation X, has never enjoyed a long period of success and prosperity (economically, societally), so we kind of just expect to make back-up plans for our real plans and just ride out whatever the outcome is. In that sense, as we are all in the throes of or entering middle age, we might yearn for some kind of connection, but I don’t see people en masse (and it might just be because there are fewer of us) looking for answers in an organized way.

Back to the point, though. I don’t know why The Following is popular or why it keeps being renewed. Was I poisoned by misguided expectations? My mother had been watching the first season and told me she found it “disturbing” and “chilling”. I expected to be somehow spellbound by this show, but it’s just stupid. By extension, I am stupid for continuing to watch.