Month: August 2016

Lunchtable TV Talk: Billions

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We got rid of Nicholas Brody in Homeland, which could not have come sooner. It saved Homeland, and in exchange, we got Damian Lewis as self-made billionaire and financial wizard/criminal Bobby Axelrod in Billions. (FYI: Lewis is okay, but he is the least interesting thing about the show.) Is Billions great, on par with lauded fare like Mad Men or Breaking Bad? No. But is it interesting? Yeah, more than marginally. We get Malin Åkerman, who was so mercilessly set adrift after Trophy Wife was canceled, and she is unexpectedly fantastic as Lara, the bitchy, cutthroat, scheming, fiercely loyal wife of Bobby. We also get doses of Maggie Siff, who is always great (Mad Men, Nip/Tuck, Sons of Anarchy), as Wendy Rhoades, the person who is actually closest to Bobby, who has worked for him for an eternity and kept him “sane”, and who happens to be (improbably) married to the man who has made it his life’s mission to destroy Bobby. That man is US Attorney Chuck Rhoades, played by Paul Giamatti, who is also always great, especially because he does fundamentally unlikable and complicated so well. His role here is no different, even if his character’s more stubborn than a dog with a bone – so hellbent on some kind of twisted sense of justice that he will let it destroy his marriage, his peace of mind, possibly his career and sanity, taking along with it his entire life and everything he values (taking a page from Les Misérables’s Inspector Javert, chasing this “villain” for his entire life – villain or no, the moral of the story – since there always is one – is that he only hurts himself in his dogged and endless pursuit).

There are other stories, characters, actors here, but there four form the real core of the show, what drives it forward and what keeps me watching. The rivalry between Bobby and Chuck – the stupid bravado driving both forward with what seem petty motivations in many cases, and the damage this does to everyone around them – from colleagues and employees to their families and loved ones – is the real driving force of the show. Also why I will continue to consume another season when it returns.

Lunchtable TV Talk: Heartbeat

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I wrote a bit the other day about how there is a glut of medical drama on tv and wondered about why some of it works, hits its stride, gains an audience (ER, Grey’s Anatomy, Chicago Hope, Chicago Med, The Night Shift…) while other stuff fails (Monday Mornings, A Gifted Man, Off the Map and a bunch more…). There are other shows that fall into the medical category but I would not put them in the broad “medical drama” category, for example, Scrubs was a long-running and successful comedy; The Knick is an exceptional prestige period piece on Cinemax – an entirely different breed from the churned-out, regurgitated medical-drama-of-the-week delivered on network TV; House was less about medicine and more about a troubled man; Nurse Jackie was a lot like House – medicine was the backdrop but Jackie as a woman trying to balance addiction, work, family was what brought the house down.

Heartbeat is another one of these that absolutely didn’t work. I don’t even know how to count the ways it did not work. But here are some reasons:

  • Melissa George (in general in the role – beyond her reach; in the role – too over-the-top and trying too hard/overacting)
  • The love triangle
  • The head of the hospital: Not believable as head of hospital; it’s like casting decided that they needed a hot, young, non-white/”ethnic” woman in a leadership role and checked that box off a list. It’s not that the actress was bad, just that the whole setup was stupid.
  • The flashbacks: Added no value, tried to build some meaning but just wasted time.
  • The outlandish medical stories (this was meant to be the hook, I guess)
  • The outlandish scenes (dance party in the hospital, some kind of off-site race, a flash mob in the hospital, etc.)
  • Gimmicky
  • Poor writing and even poorer dialogue: It was abjectly stupid

I could elaborate on these points, but it would waste even more time (and I already wasted enough by watching the ten or so episodes of this that existed).

Lunchtable TV Talk: Homeland

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Not all shows are blessed with sheer perfection. In fact, most aren’t. Even the best shows have uneven episodes or seasons and threads or characters that don’t quite pan out.

One of the most uneven shows, Homeland, saw a revitalization last season as its troubled protagonist, Carrie (Claire Danes), left the CIA and worked in Berlin. Of course her path never strays far from her CIA officer life and its characters, even when she tried everything to escape. It’s part of who she is, even when she formed an identity and family life outside of it. The most recent season revived the show – and my interest – even if there were bits I did not care for (Carrie going off her meds again!)

If anything, this new life for Homeland, without Nicholas Brody and that whole mess with which Homeland was introduced to viewers, shows that you can’t really write some things off, even if they seem to have expired. After delivering a knockout punch with its first season, Homeland should probably have taken a different tack. It became progressively more difficult to deal with season by season until it reinvented itself with the last season. With an unbelievably talented cast, you just need some stellar storytelling to get back on track.

And, ultimately, as Carrie herself learns, you can go home again.

Now let’s see what Homeland’s fifth season, which will begin in early 2017, brings. (I realize I have/had nothing new to write about the show – it’s been written about and analyzed ad nauseam by professionals and others… and I don’t need to add to the cacophony. As usual, though, I am just cataloging my viewing experiences for my own sake.)

Lunchtable TV Talk: The Catch

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Decisions on whether to cancel or renew TV shows are fundamentally mysterious to me. Loads of good TV gets canceled (and sometimes not even because of poor ratings) while crap gets renewed. Maybe there are monetary or political considerations at work in these decisions. A good example of this, for me, is the show The Catch. It’s the fourth of Shonda Rhimes’s shows to be on the air at the same time. Her grip on network television feels almost dictator-like, as the trio of her hit shows – Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal and How to Get Away with Murder, dominate. The long-running Grey’s has hit a creative renaissance, while (for me) Scandal and How to Get… suffer. Scandal grows increasingly ridiculous while How to Get hit a popular nerve in its first season, but seemed to grow less interesting in its second season. Maybe it was just me, but I grew weary and considered whether I should even continue (especially because it lost its magnetism for me).

Given this backdrop, The Catch was pitched as some kind of sexy mystery caper. Helmed by the usually solid Mireille Enos as Alice, it is immediately obvious that this show is not the right vehicle for Enos … or frankly for anyone in the show, including Peter Krause, who plays Enos’s conman fiance. He has conned her and her investigative firm, but doesn’t disappear into thin air afterwards because he has, apparently, actually fallen in love with his mark. The premise is flawed because it’s like it was written for the span of an eight-episode mini-series, not for a multi-season regular tv show. But it was nevertheless renewed for a second season, despite the weakness of the plot and the apparent discomfort of all the players in the play, so to speak. The script and story make all the characters look foolish and dumb, not at all the clever, canny, intuitive people we’d expect to be successful heads of major investigative firms or successful swindlers and con artists. I am prepared to buy into things that are not necessarily believable premises, but things like The Catch – with its bad plots, bad writing and overglamourizing its main characters – isn’t one of those things.

It’s boring; it’s a story that has been told multiple times before; it’s not even got a hook to differentiate it from stories like it before.

Lunchtable TV Talk: Difficult People & Casual

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In typical gluttonous fashion (for me), I inhaled all of the first seasons of both Difficult People and Casual within the last week (among other things). My conclusion, at first, was that Hulu is the platform for “bad humans” – the unlikable, negative, snarky types that we imagine we ourselves are not but enjoying watching in others (as long as they are not real and in our own daily lives). We enjoy seeing both their snark and sarcasm (which seems funny and sometimes smart/incisive) but also their failures and falls (which seems both relatable and also a-long-time-coming for people who are so unpleasant). I’d include The Mindy Project in this Hulu-based conglomeration of self-centered character comedy (even if I would not call all these things strictly comedy, and even though Mindy started on network TV, was canceled and snapped up by Hulu, which has arguably improved the show, in my opinion). But then I would be remiss if I did not state that Hulu isn’t the exclusive refuge of damaged-people comedramedy. You can get your fill of that kind of stuff all over the place – You’re the Worst is probably the best example, and one of the endurance runners (it’s back with its third season at the end of August). These kinds of shows take a while to catch on, if they do at all. This might be why they find their homes on non-network platforms, like Hulu.

These initial impressions, though, aren’t quite the whole picture. It’s a pretty obvious statement, but people are rarely, if ever, just bad, negative, bitter, cruel, difficult to the core just because they can be. Our protagonists in Difficult People clearly have family issues, and when we see how these unfold, we can see why the main characters are as damaged and making-light-of-it as they are/do. I watched Difficult People and enjoyed it (but was perhaps not as enamored of it as I should have been because I was also defrosting my freezer at the same time, which should have been an hour-long job that turned into an eight-hour ordeal). I guess it’s not necessary to be able to relate to the characters for a show to be good or enough – for example, on some abstract level I could relate to ‘protagonist’ Julie’s neuroses and self-involvement after seeing her mother. But real people, were Julie real, might gain some self-awareness from this kind of thing. She might not go on to railroad and take for granted her long-suffering, PBS-employee boyfriend, Arthur (the brilliant James Urbaniak). (I could be wrong, of course – I have plenty of acquaintances who are completely blind and lacking in self-awareness.)

Her best friend, Billy (our other ‘protagonist’) is the only person she confides in, does not take for granted, never criticizes, is supportive of… and there is some relatability in that, but not enough.

For me, the first season of Difficult People was quite entertaining, but ‘not enough’, which is not the most descriptive or resounding praise. It had a few twists that showed real glimmers of satisfying brilliance (for example, the dog-park con, the child menu restaurant, simultaneously breaking into the Curb Your Enthusiasm theme song, which is fitting considering that the show is a nod to Curb’s misanthropy). Despite not being quite enough in its first act, I am looking forward to seeing what its second act offers.

I expected Casual to be something along the same lines – comedy with a dash of humanity, all mixed up with some snarky sarcasm and unpleasant people. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it was not what I expected. At the risk of sounding hokey, I found myself moved in one way or another in almost every episode in Casual’s first season.

I, like most, had only seen Michaela Watkins, one of the series’ leads, in comedic and mostly in roles as the crazy/annoying/weird neighbor/ex-wife, etc. I’d never seen her be a lead, much less in a semi-dramatic role. She brings a sense of reality and vulnerability to the role of Valerie; you like her even when she’s making a mess of things and root for her, knowing what she has been through. She is very human, very feeling, eminently fallible, but always doing her best. In Casual, we meet Valerie just after her divorce (her husband has cheated on her with a younger woman, and Watkins channels just the right amount of pain-as-bitterness to reflect this), when she and her teenage daughter, Laura, have moved in with Valerie’s brother, Alex. Both Valerie and Alex are successful people, but their personal and emotional lives are a mess; it’s clear that they have a very close sibling relationship and, as becomes clear over the course of the first series, have had to rely on each other thanks to their flaky non-parenting parents.

Casual made me laugh, actually made me cry a couple of times, and on the whole, was enough because it spoke to me on many levels, because it had a bittersweet quality to it, because it could embrace cynicism without being caustic, because it was imperfect and still beautiful.