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Lunchtable TV Talk: Hit & Miss (or why I changed my mind about Chloë Sevigny)

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Hit & Miss was the first time I heard Joy Division’s “Atmosphere” in what would be twice in two days (the second was in the stellar soundtrack to Stranger Things). Just incidental but positive.

I don’t know quite what led me to Hit & Miss. It’s a British show from 2012, so it’s not new, but I think it appeared on a recent list of “must-see” shows (which I routinely paw through looking for gems I may have overlooked in my obsessive TV viewing. Believe it or not, with the mushrooming of different platforms and their respective original programming, it’s easy for a lot of good and true-to-the-word “original” programming slip through the ever-widening cracks).

The protagonist, Mia, played by the versatile Chloë Sevigny, is a pre-op transgendered woman – and hitman/professional assassin. She’s at the top of her game in terms of successful hits when she gets word that her former girlfriend is ill with cancer and the surprising news that she has a son, Ryan. By the time Mia receives the letter and goes to her former girlfriend’s home, the woman has already died, leaving behind just her children. Mia, wanting to be there for her son and indeed for the rest of the children, takes on the entire family. The drama that ensues from here plays out over the course of six episodes is well worth watching.

Somehow, describing the plot in these bullet points makes it sound completely outlandish: any show would have more than enough story to grapple with just managing any single one of the traits/points listed. That is, a story about a transgendered woman could make a whole show. The story of a female assassin, another. The story of a former lover having to return to the past to rear a child he never knew about, another. But to combine all these and make it not just work but triumph is a real feat. Not everything about Hit & Miss was perfect, but its understated nature and careful, never-gratuitous handling of all of the difficult and sensitive subject matter nearly was. And at the core of that near-perfection was a solid, committed performance from its star, Sevigny.

Why I changed my mind: Chloë Sevigny

Sevigny was sort of an “it” girl – but a subversive one – in the 1990s, but she never embodied that overhyped concept (a concept that makes one biased immediately against someone who is overexposed in the early parts of their career). Someone like Sevigny, who has never been “mainstream” in a sense but has been prolific in her varied work, is someone I felt that bias against, both because of the overexposure/praise and because many of her sometimes daring choices seemed attention-grabbing (unsimulated oral sex in The Brown Bunny) more than professionally risky. Not to mention that many of the characters, despite being vulnerable, are almost never likeable. Often shady, scheming, not anyone you would want to be friends with or emulate. But that is Sevigny’s genius. She can make all of these negative character traits work and weave them into so many vastly different characters but at the same time make many of these characters fragile and vulnerable in ways that I have rarely seen any actor convey. Over time I have come to appreciate the growing depth of her work (I loved to hate her in Big Love; felt she added an interesting, honest, world-weary depth to the already brilliant Bloodline; was one of the few bright points in the most recent season of the increasingly bad American Horror Story). Frankly she grounded Hit & Miss, which could have been a colossal miss had it not been for her performance.

Photo (c) 2005 Cesar Bojorquez

Lunchtable TV Talk: Stranger Things

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I never imagined, when he was young (or when I was young, for that matter), that Matthew Modine would, in middle age, come to play a range of (semi-)evil masterminds. But both here in Stranger Things and in the short-lived and flat Proof, Modine is just that. He is a behind-the-scenes kind of guy, pulling all the strings. Would you have imagined that when you saw him Vision Quest or Full Metal Jacket? (Well, maybe. In his long career, he has been and done almost everything.)

That’s not really the point, though. Where Modine fits into my brief and redundant narrative is that he, having been a fringe fixture in 1980s movies, fits well into a Netflix show that revives the 80s and its entertainment, its style and its feel down to the last molecule, Stranger Things.

I am once again hitting a wall in terms of finding an original thing to say about it – it’s been wildly popular (so much so that it took the Netflix platform down) and thus picked apart and analyzed to death. That happens with sudden phenomena such as these that feed so many different things:

  • Winona Ryder revival: a real one this time; for those who were not around in the late 80s and early 90s, Winona was a kind of offbeat ‘it’ girl; a shoplifting conviction and a lower profile made it seem as though she disappeared. She worked steadily but had both lost some of the indie/grunge cred that ignited her earlier career and, of course, aged out of the “it girl” title. She’s appeared in the Star Trek reboot and Black Swan as well as the lauded Show Me a Hero. She never went anywhere; nostalgia and the popularity of this show have just catapulted her back into the limelight.
  • 1980s nostalgia: oh, that dreadful fashion and hair; paeans to 1980s youth adventure films; nods to 1980s classic horror
  • Sounds: That unbelievable and dreamy soundtrack.
  • Immersion therapy: We have other 80s love stories on TV (Halt & Catch Fire), which are great, but you don’t really get to immerse yourself in the time and spirit as much because it’s a weekly. Stranger Things was nothing if not an eight-hour-long time-trip into 1983. And for those of us who were there, around the ages of the boys in the show, riding their bikes all around town looking for their lost friend, Stranger Things has brought that entire era back to life believably (perhaps nowhere more than in the wardrobes and sensibilities of the teens like Barb and Nancy).

All that said, I am not one of the people who loved this and gushed about it. I liked it, I binged on it. But do I anxiously crave another installment? Not so much. I was never THAT into the 80s as they happened, hated being a kid and being around the kinds of kids who are the protagonists of this movie, and I always thought Ryder was overrated.

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: 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.

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: Burnistoun

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Watching the very Glasgow, very Scottish Burnistoun has been a bit spooky, as many of the sketches model near-exact conversations I have had, situations I have been in and linguistic bits I’ve noted. So many of the things I’ve long enjoyed and laughed at in everyday Scottish life, the Burnistoun sketches and their creators, Robert Florence and Iain Connell, have captured in comedic hyper-reality. It speaks for itself (or “itsel”, as the Glaswegians would say, because who needs the final “f”!). Just watch! Love love love.

(Makes me think of gone-Hollywood Gerard Butler and our discussions on how “Gerard” is pronounced GER-ard in Scotland and ger-ARD in the US)

(Hilarious take-off of TV historian-personality Neil Oliver, his dramatic delivery while the wind blows his flowing mane; something I’ve also long been having a laugh at.)

(Voice recognition lift in Scotland. Good luck with that!)

(Nae rolls! When all you wanted was a wee roll and sausage!)

(Kenny Rogers impersonators: “That’s the Kenny Rogers I’m gonna marry!” Actually, after all the work the real Kenny Rogers has had done, these impersonators look more like the real Kenny Rogers…)

Lunchtable TV Talk: Maron

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I don’t know of anything better than a certain self-deprecating humor, the likes of which Marc Maron has mastered in his podcast and further on his TV show, Maron. I binge-watched all four seasons in two days (could not stop), and read just as I slid into season 4 that the episodes shown this week would be the last ever. It did feel fitting and perfect, ending on his terms, well before some ho-hum inertia, repetition or dullness set in.

I think what gripped me about Maron is how the somewhat unusual parts, which appear in every episode, are still relatable. I was shocked to find how many times the plot points mirrored things that happened in my friends’ and acquaintances’ lives.

Cases in point:

  • A colleague forced an elderly, dying hamster on another colleague and then dodged her phone calls when she was trying to call and ask him about this sickly hamster. In the end she took the hamster to a veterinarian and had to spend about 200 USD to put the hamster down humanely.
  • A man I used to know was secretly living in his storage unit/garage. He built a loft inside. I did not know for a long time that he lived in a storage space, so was surprised when he drunkenly phoned me one night and reported that he had somehow fallen out of bed… onto the hood of his truck?! It sounded logistically impossible until I later learned he was sleeping in a loft above his vehicles.

I could continue this list but it’s useless. I only want to illustrate that there is something both real but unreal about Maron, and this is its perfect imperfection … and why it was utterly addictive.

(And, my god, who doesn’t love the cats?)

No half measures: Overmuch Maron & hula time

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It seems I cannot watch any tv show without bingeing on it. Very late to the party, I started watching Maron – and am already halfway through. Maron, though, is worth the binge.

Something shorter, like BBC’s Upstart Crow… also worth the binge. Quite funny in that Brit comedy kind of way (which I don’t care for unless I am in the right frame of mind).

Something like Canadian crime show, Motive. Not as worthy, but even that I sat sucking up episode after episode.

In between I pick up new episodes of Tyrant or the very promising The Night Of.

Yet still can’t avoid crap.

There are many ubiquitous things I keep seeing, each time annoying me more. Even the compulsive viewing of Maron doesn’t keep me from seeing the endless nonsense about PokémonGO (Chuck D of Public Enemy fame even tweeted, “If you LOVE POKE MAN go and buy yourself a adult diaper too.”).

I also have not avoided the tiresome tedium of Taylor Swift/Tom Hiddleston/Calvin Harris. All I can say to that: Who gives a fuck? And yet this makes headlines.

Puke. Time for some Tahitian hits. Childhood hula lesson memories, inspired by a Tweet from Marc Maron.

 

Lunchtable TV Talk: 1992 – Italian TV

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“Don’t let Italy fool you” – the one motto that remains constant in my life. This motto, usually holding true, sometimes prevents me from watching some otherwise riveting film – and surprisingly television.

1992, a ten-part Italian TV series, tells a story of lives that intersect across several Italian cities in 1992. From perspectives that span the law, politics, corruption and scandalous outcomes of these intertwining areas, it’s a gripping story with deep, interesting characters, each with his or her own challenges, and quite a bit of insight. Modern stories that plumb the past not just to spin a tale of historical fiction but to shine a light on universal and enduring truths are common enough (we’re seeing echoes of this in the current TV dramatization of the OJ Simpson trial in American Crime Story: The People v. OJ Simpson), but are they always edge-of-your-seat TV? Not always. But in this case, I’ve been on a binge.

Admittedly though I’ve had this lined up to watch for more than six months. I kept putting it off because I don’t know Italian and did not really have time for reading subtitles. I got halfway through the first episode twice before finally getting through the whole thing in a third-time’s-a-charm result. Now that I devoted a whole day to gobbling this up, I can’t believe I didn’t watch it sooner.

Of note is the great soundtrack that is just so 1992 (“Nearly Lost You” by the Screaming Trees, for example). And also one character’s insistence that we have a leader in Silvio Berlusconi – and everyone else around him is discounting this vision as pure folly, scoffing at an opinion poll he’d done with youth. One man even laughed and told him the list of popular public figures he’d compiled, with Arnold Schwarzenegger in the number three slot, was patently ridiculous because – guffaw, guffaw – who on earth would take the idea of old Arnie as a politician seriously!? Haha. We know what happened there. And look what happened for Berlusconi in 1994 (and a few times thereafter).