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Lunchtable TV Talk: Hell on Wheels

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I remember seeing TV ads for Hell on Wheels when it was first being introduced on AMC many years ago. I must have been in the US on holiday, and nothing about the show appealed to me except maybe the presence of Colm Meaney (I’m a Trekker, right? No one can resist Chief O’Brien!). That was not enough to induce watching. It was a couple of years later that I picked it up, more in boredom/lack of things to watch than anything else. I was not immediately captivated, but I did immediately think that Hell on Wheels was not quite like anything we had seen before.

Ostensibly about the competition around and westward expansion of the railroads in post-Civil War America, the story, without delving too deeply into any of the details, hinted at stories of war and post-war, the end of slavery, immigration (and the haves/haves-not among immigrants, including the Chinese who came to work on the railroads), manifest destiny, religious persecution, Native Americans (both from the perspective of racist white men and those who had lived among them and understood the nuance and difference among their cultures and tribes), and so much more. I found myself most deeply engaged in the show because it did touch on so many things, overlaying a light dusting of sensitivity and thought provocation to what was nevertheless a sort of… adventure tale of one man running away from his past and his grief (with every mile of track he built, the further he got from the past) and all the mistakes he made on that run.

It didn’t moralize or dig deeply into the issues it touched upon, which was probably more a strength than a weakness. However, touching on all the things it did, many people found it unsatisfying because it could seem at times to lack focus. Be that as it may, the loose storytelling and casual mention of the wide range of things one would encounter on the western frontier, for me at least, evoked the sense of boundlessness – both opportunity and danger – that seemed to fire the imagination of most people who moved west.

Populating that vast landscape, a set of vibrant and diverse characters, memorable in their imperfection, roamed and also seemed to run from checkered or unhappy pasts. The aforementioned Meaney as villain Thomas Durant; the lead, Anson Mount as Cullen Bohannon, a Civil War veteran and former slave owner who initially sets out to seek revenge on Union soldiers who had killed his wife, but as he struggles and suffers, eventually makes new mistakes and also manages to let go of the past and his anger; the troubled whore-turned-madam, Eva, with her Indian facial markings and lost love with former slave (and one-time series regular, Elam Ferguson (Common))… and no one more entertaining, horrifying or even tragic than “The Swede”, Thor Gundersen (the incomparable Christopher Heyerdahl).

It seems strange to say that a show I never even wanted to watch is something I will most miss, even if I am absolutely sure that the show is ending at the right time and on a high note.

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: 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: BrainDead

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I was not sure what to make of the show BrainDead. But I am enjoying it immensely as it goes along. But will it be long for this world? If ratings are any indication, no. You can see the fingerprints of Robert and Michelle King (responsible for The Good Wife) all over it. Will that pedigree change anything? The Good Wife suffered from low ratings throughout its entire run. BrainDead shares some casting overlaps, stylistics, and a superb cast overall, just stuffed with talent. I hope it gets a longer chance to prove itself. It’s a timely commentary – and tonic for the times.

Aaron Tveit (from Graceland) is charming and smooth; Mary Elizabeth Winstead – I finally get it. She had been talked about a lot but I could never see the “it” that made people talk about her. Overall I did not care for the English-language remake/version of The Returned, and she was one of the central characters (no one really looked great in that near-train-wreck). Also the formidable Margo Martindale. Brandon J. Dirden, who was one of the FBI agents (Stan’s partner) in the most recent season of The Americans and so much more. And Johnny Ray Gill, the guy who was Sam in the ambitious and rewarding Underground. The great Tony Shalhoub, who needs no further introduction because he is the best. And Danny Pino, the dude who left Law & Order SVU and came to BrainDead from a role in Scandal.

The contentious nature of politics is ratcheted up a few million notches in this dark-comedy drama. A lot of crazed making up facts. Only at least there is an explanation: some bugs – literal insects – are taking over people’s brains. In our ‘real’ world, I guess we don’t have an explanation for the extremes. Politics is rough enough without erasing facts (or losing half your brain to a parasite and suddenly listening to The Cars’ “You Might Think” on repeat).

It’s a hyperbolic mirror of our current situation – Tony Shalhoub’s character wants to name a kiosk after Ronald Reagan (a WWII veteran! Only he’s not – he just feels like one because he made a movie in which he served in WWII) – and Shalhoub’s opponent wants to call the kiosk after Emma Goldman. There is no middle ground and no compromise.

Photo (c) 2009 Neil Conway.

Lunchtable TV Talk: The Night Shift

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Sometimes the stuff television offers feels like it’s churned out on a conveyor belt in a factory. Some time ago I watched the previous season(s) of The Night Shift, about a bunch of doctors working the – duh – overnight shift in a Texas hospital. It was not anything special – in fact when I picked up watching the latest season, I did not even remember that there had already been two, not one, seasons. But… I still kept watching.

Between seasons of The Night Shift, I started watching the Chicago juggernaut (Chicago Fire, Chicago Med, Chicago P.D.). Not only did Chicago Med (and all its gratuitous crossovers into the other Chicago properties) wash away all memory of The Night Shift, when The Night Shift returned, it felt and seemed a lot less interesting than it had been because it was a lot like watching more Chicago Med, only with characters I no longer remembered or recognized. (Weirder still, they are all on NBC in the US, so… burnout, anyone?

Despite the American appetite for medical, legal and cop shows, I’d think the idea of getting lost in the oversaturation of the theme(s) would be enough reason to look at different topics. I don’t know – despite the “danger” in being lost in a sea of sameness, people keep introducing new shows in the same mold, and some catch on while others don’t. I don’t know why. I tried to watch Code Black, but holy shit – I could not even get through one episode (it seemed badly miscast), but it was renewed – multiple times, maybe. I thought Monday Mornings was a good premise, and I liked it, but it didn’t last and its decent cast landed elsewhere (e.g., Jamie Bamber had a great turn in the deeply unsettling but immensely satisfying British crime drama, Marcella, and prolific and interactive Tweeter – she seems exceedingly generous with her time – Jennifer Finnigan is a lead in Tyrant). I thought a Jennifer Beals-led medical-supernatural drama, Proof, was overegged, and it too was canceled. Go figure.

The Night Shift, being rather lacklustre and lacking in any real hook, seemed like it might suffer a similar fate. Maybe watching Scott Wolf be an alcoholic surgeon “working the steps” (in The Night Shift) rather than Oliver Platt being a particularly intuitive psychiatrist (in Chicago Med) is the kind of thing that makes the difference. I don’t know. It’s not like either show is must-see… it’s just that this is what is on in the background as I am working on a million other things. It takes something really remarkable to make me look up from my work and pay close attention (and there are very few of those things right now).

Lunchtable TV Talk: American Crime, s2

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The first season of American Crime was often hard to watch. It was challenging material, telling intricately interwoven stories that highlighted prejudice and different perspectives. It was good, but I was not sure it could stand for another season.

The second season is an even more tightly woven narrative, with more riveting performances from mostly the same cast and a few new faces (Connor Jessup, best known until now from Falling Skies has been particularly good, which isn’t a surprise when you consider that he was also one of the better parts of Falling Skies). Masterfully done – often employing images disconnected from sound, so you are never sure what has happened until it unfolds moments later. Fluidity, uncertainty, exceptional and brutal storytelling from different perspectives. Are you ever sure what has really happened? No. If anything the story in the second season punches you in the gut with the realization that there are no absolutes, yet we watch all the characters from their very different perspectives grapple with their own “absolutes” and the dissolution of those certainties.

The second season, as I write this, has been over for some time, meaning that I am left with very few details. The important point – and reason why I am writing about this so long after the fact – is that it does punch you in the gut and make you question what is true and real. The story revolved around feeling versus fact.

And, right now, America is faced with a high-stakes election in which “feeling” trumps (no pun intended but apt here) fact. Stephen Colbert revived his Colbert Report character to introduce the term “Trumpiness” and address this topic; John Oliver took it a step further, explaining that the theme of the recent Republican National Convention was “a four-day exercise in emphasizing feelings over facts”.

I highlight these timely things, despite their non-existent connection to American Crime (apart from the tangential Trump & GOP “feeling” that crime in America is out of control and crime rates are on the rise, despite the fact that data doesn’t support this “feeling”) because it is easy to lose sight of the fact that other people have completely different experiences of the world. What one person, irrationally or not, fears, is normal to someone else. American Crime excels at telling a complex story from fragmented viewpoints (in a way that our lacking-in-nuance political system never will).

Lunchtable TV Talk: Motive

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TV is a lot richer in summer these days than it used to be – we got a few seasons of some exciting new stuff, whole seasons of Orange is the New Black and BoJack Horseman on Netflix and quite a lot of “off-season” (if you can really even call it that any more) filler to carry us through until fall. In fact, you could almost argue that spring and summer bring some of the best stuff now. There are no boundaries to prime release time for TV shows (and, as I have argued, can you even call them “tv shows” any more, seeing as how they may fit the format but aren’t broadcast on any network and can be inhaled one full season at a time?

Because of that, addicts like me are spoiled – and never have to go through the withdrawals that generally accompanied the dry season of summer. Still, though, nothing is so abundant that I don’t end up seeking out filler beyond the filler I was already watching.

That’s how I ended up watching Motive. My mom told me about it, and apparently had been telling me about it for some time since I still claimed never to have heard of it when it was heading into its fourth season. Maybe because it’s Canadian and didn’t last in its big US network broadcast slot (and was eventually moved to USA), it was not a big title. Nevertheless, just before the fourth season kicked off, I watched all three of the preceding seasons. Why? Reason one: nothing much else to watch that weekend while I was busy with other things; reason two: Louis Ferreira. Who is he, you ask? Well, the only reasons I know and like him: he was Colonel Young in Stargate Universe (the only one in that franchise I cared for, largely because of Robert Carlyle) and was in Breaking Bad. There are worse reasons for watching a show. Reason three: I liked the idea of already knowing the crime and finding out the motive.

Oddly, for a Canadian police mostly-procedural, I have been pretty entertained. I raced through and didn’t pay rapt attention, so I can’t cite plot points or anything particularly notable. But I saw a lot of standard Canadian-actor extras and Battlestar Galactica alums, which is also fun. I didn’t remember at first that the lead, Kristin Lehman, had been a key supporting player in The Killing, which was also good – I like her a lot better in Motive as detective Angie Flynn. In fact, I came to like her a lot, and it’s the easy chemistry between Lehman’s and Ferreira’s characters that make the show as watchable as it has been. That is, chemistry based on deep friendship and respect between colleagues, not sexual tension or something similar. You don’t see that much on TV. In very subtle ways, stuff about Motive is different, and is why I keep watching.

Photo (c) 2014 Michalis Famelis.

The heavy burden of the ingénue … and the old hag

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I used to work somewhere where the chief editor, who was and is a great writer, wrote or edited a lot of articles, often on short notice. This usually led him, last minute, to groping for a word to describe a preternaturally talented, unusually gifted musician. He always landed on “ingénue” even though he was almost always writing about a male musician. I brought up the misuse every time (as copy editor/proofreader), and he’d answer, “Oh, really?” And then substitute “ingénue” for “wunderkind”. Every time. I think of this every time I see the word “ingénue”.

This also springs to mind every time I read an article about women over 40, for some reason. Particularly when I read about actresses over 40 who opine (if not complain) about aging and the bitter, brutal competition they face in Hollywood. Or women who have fallen victim to the sad, repetitive story of being cheated on/thrown aside for the much-younger nanny. (Amy Schumer poked fun at this trope in a recent Inside Amy Schumer sketch – in the end, the “nanny” doesn’t need to be a hot, young, naive woman. Men are pigs, as the sketch posits, and will stick it in any available hole.)

A recent article about (almost-unknown) actress Lauren Weedman (I remember her well from two shows that missed their mark despite starting with promising premises – Hung and Looking. I eventually came to hate-watch Looking because its promise was so squandered in my mind). Her husband cheated with a young nanny, and she divorced him. Weedman put a comical spin on her suffering:

“There’s something so damn interesting and damn depressing about men being attracted to much younger and naive women. Leaving behind their old, aging, bossy wives—like that old biddy Gwen Stefani. Just today I read that the definition of “ingénue” was a girl that was young and naive. My entire life I’d thought that it meant “young and pretty.” It never dawned on me that naive was a selling point.”

And that’s just it, isn’t it? “Ingénue” does not really mean what people think it does.

It’s not as though some of these over-40 women feeling the short end of the stick today were not once the pretty ingénues themselves.

Thus when I read an article in Salon recently that discussed Amanda Peet‘s frank article on aging in Hollywood, I could not help but think … isn’t that just what happens? The younger, fresher faces float in and seem effortlessly to usurp yesterday’s crop of ingénues?

You’d think so, but check out what Peet wrote:

“Recently, I was told I was ineligible for a movie because I wasn’t “current” enough. I’m constantly pushed out by younger talent, like Alicia Vikander. You might think, Wait, she’s 27 and a gorgeous movie star, and you’re 44 and a low-tier, TV-mom-type; you’re not in the same ballpark. But she is squeezing me out. She’s in the hot center and I’m on the remote perimeter. The train has left the station and I’m one of those moronic stragglers running alongside with her purse caught in the door. Everyone’s looking at me like, Let go, you bullheaded old hag! There’s no room for you.””

Even swallowing the idea that, yeah, she’s in mom-role territory and should not have to be competing against women 20+ years younger than her for those roles, this is ridiculous. In the real world where I live, we want to think (and are led to believe) that there’s this inclusive space for everyone (and as the article points out, there are the Helen Mirrens and the Charlotte Ramplings of the world – eternally graceful and untouchable, which give the illusion that women of a certain age are more than welcome on the silver and tv screens. But are they?). Still, I’d argue that the Peets of the world had their day – and perhaps pushed over-40 women off the platform before their time.

It’s a bitter pill to swallow when you’re on the other side of 40 (even if the whole Hollywood circus is becoming more incredulous in its casting. Yes, a 27-year-old should definitely play the mother of a pre-teen just because a woman in her 20s is photogenic – who cares about reality?).

Lunchtable TV Talk: Not Billy Flynn’s Chicago

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Dear god, I’ve sucked up Chicago Fire, Chicago PD and Chicago Med. I can’t defend it. I don’t know why. I don’t find it very engrossing and find entire episodes have passed without my having paid close attention – and the storytelling, particularly in Fire, leaves gaps, so it would be difficult to tell if it was the poor narrative or my attention span. Case in point: Chicago Fire returned from year-end hiatus, and I fully believed that one of the firemen was left with his life hanging in the balance as a cliffhanger, and when the show returned, he was returning to work. No explanation as to how he managed to recover. Did I miss an episode or is this just the way the show goes? (I realized after seeing Chicago Med and PD that there is a lot of crossover, so some of the story you think you missed might have unfolded in one of the other Chicago shows.)

I think I was seeking a mindless outlet after the mindless OD of House MD, and Jesse Spencer being a bridge between House and Chicago Fire seemed easy enough to cross. It entertains my ear to listen to the shortcomings of accent/dialect retraining. To Spencer’s credit, his midwestern American accent improved over the course of the few seasons that exist. I don’t mind him, don’t mind the woman who plays his partner/fiancee, Dawson, and don’t have feelings about a lot of the cast. But if ever there were an annoying ‘bawbag’ (to borrow from my friends the Glaswegians), the dude who was even more annoying on Sex & the City is him… I can’t remember his real name and can’t be arsed to look it up… but his character is the very loud, heavily accented, very Catholic Chris Hermann.

The captain is likeable but so overwrought as an actor, which I suspect is some holdover from stage training – he is so demonstrative and emotive in all his actions that it is just too much for television (it would make sense on the stage). He was the same as the perpetually tortured Muslim character in prison drama, Oz.

When I ran out of Chicago Fire episodes and didn’t have much more in my to-watch folder, I decided to go for Chicago PD. I find the scratchy-throat voices of both Sophia Bush and Jason Beghe to be just shy of fingernails scratching a chalkboard – and the looks on Beghe’s face along with how his head slightly bobs around when he is getting in someone’s face and being threatening – just a bit too much.

But who am I kidding? It is all too much!