TV actors

Lunchtable TV talk: Billions – a dick-measuring contest in need of neutering

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I’ve written about Billions before, early on in its run. I mostly thought of it favorably.  While Showtime’s Billions has always been focused on characters who are petty, smug and selfish, it’s reached a whole new level of narcissism, disconnect and cruelty. Featuring a cast that includes Damian Lewis just off his Homeland run, the inexplicably magnetic Paul Giamatti, and the most compelling of all, bringing soul and humanity to a show largely devoid of either – Maggie Siff. There have been plenty of other notable performances throughout the series’ run (five years), but it’s fair to say this trio is the heart of the show.

I use the word “heart” liberally. Because the show really doesn’t have any. It’s always been a combination of soulless Wall Street-meets-tech bro, concocted in a simmering cauldron of rivalry between an aggressive, Machiavellian US attorney, Chuck Rhoades (Giamatti) and hedge fund giant, Bobby Axelrod (Lewis). Stuck in between the two is the US attorney’s wife, Wendy (Siff), who also happens to be the in-house performance coach/psychiatrist to the hedge fun and personal friend/advisor/conscience to Axelrod.

The show has always shakily walked the tightrope between gripping and ridiculous. The decline into full-time ridiculous started last season; the show has completely fallen off the tightrope in the latest season. It’s just become stupid.

There was a time when the ridiculousness was tolerable, possibly humorous, but we are living in the exact wrong moment for the self-satisfied, hellbent-on-destroying-others, dick-measuring contest this show has become. Please neuter it.

Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash

Lunchtable TV Talk: Pamela Adlon

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I woke up this morning feeling cold, cranky and unwell, thinking to myself, “I am so tired and so done.” I was overwhelmed by the exhaustion of extending myself too far, from bending in every possible direction to always show others I love and support them, in particular when it’s so thankless and often feels one-sided. It’s easy to get mired in feeling sorry for yourself.

And then I remembered: oh yes, Pamela Adlon‘s Better Things returns with a new season today, and despite the intentional decline in my television viewing, this is something I am genuinely excited about. Dealing with all manner of topics from being a single mom to three children to being the daughter of a challenging parent to menopause to dating and sex after 50, the thing I keep coming back to Better Things for is the deep wells of love and compassion that Adlon’s main character draws from and shows without reservation. Thinking of Adlon’s boundless love (and talent) kind of helped me get out of bed this morning.

For whatever reason, the picture Adlon has painted, and imprinted so that I continually return to it, reminds me vaguely of a Japanese poem, “What a Little Girl Had on Her Mind” by Ibaragi Noriko. It ends with (italics mine):

“The little girl grew up.
She became a wife and then a mother.
One day she suddenly realized;
the tenderness
that gathers over the shoulders of wives,
is only fatigue
from loving others day after day.“

I suspect, since she writes and directs the show, that its heroine isn’t too different from Adlon herself. I suspect that she, like the character, receives frantic calls for help from her kids, from her friends, at all hours, and despite the agony she feels (and she makes this look realistic, painful and heartfelt), no matter how busy or tired she is, no matter the annoyance and anger she may feel in equal measure, she is overwhelmed by the need to love and support and take care of. Sometimes it’s so palpable in watching her that I almost hope she won’t respond with love, care and understanding. (Take care of yourself, lady!) But she always does. The woman knows what’s important, and I can’t think of a better thing to spend my time watching…

Never mind that I love Adlon and have since she was very young in films like Grease 2, of all things. She was one of the most enduringly brilliant parts of Californication. Don’t get me started on the voiceover work. And even if all of this was lovely, she’s really come into her own and owns this quiet but revolutionary space that is Better Things. She is in control; she runs the show (figuratively and literally in this case); she (Adlon) and her character balance toughness with vulnerability and abundant love. It’s remarkable.

As a side note, I’ve written about my strange, down-the-rabbit-hole viewings of actors interviewing actors, and one of my all-time favorites, which I stumbled on two or so years ago is Sterling K. Brown in conversation with Adlon. I loved what a giddy, respectful fanboy he seemed to be. Imagine my utter delight when I saw that Adlon turned up in a recent episode of Brown’s This Is Us as his new therapist. It was perfect.

Lunchtable TV Talk: Better Things

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I stumbled on Better Things rather by accident. I had not read anything in the lead up to its being shown, and then was happily surprised to see that Pamela Adlon stars and is a co-creator with Louis C.K. It’s only two episodes in, so, like most things I feel compelled to talk about prematurely, it’s early days. I don’t know where it will go. But I like the confident-but-vulnerable feel the show projects even from its first moments.

Adlon is Sam, a working actress and single mother of three daughters. It’s clear she struggles (as you would trying to balance all that), but it’s also clear – in almost effortless but not particularly linear – storytelling that she has a complete identity: her professional identity, her parental identity, her daughter identity, her sexual identity. And some of the best moments so far are when some of these collide. In episode two, driving in her car with her troublesome (and unlikeable) teenage daughter, she gets so angry that she pulls the car over hastily and delivers the most frustrated, honest “lecture” I’ve seen on tv. Her irritation is clear (at having to escalate things just to get her daughter’s attention, being wounded by the unfairness of her daughter’s comments while at the same time being furious about the fact that she knows the daughter is smarter than that and is just being manipulative). And she calls her daughter out on it in a real way.

But every mother has also been a daughter, and we see the strange relationship her character has with her own mother. Somehow it reminded me of a scene in the long-lost HBO show, Enlightened, starring Laura Dern. I found it to be frustrating and did not really like Dern’s character, but in her own mother-daughter relationship, Dern’s character comes to the realization that “The mother is just a child, too”. In viewing Better Things, we have a weekly window into that sentiment (along with many others). No parent, or daughter, or whatever else we define ourselves as, is going to be perfect – and as Adlon explains to an audience at the end of episode 2, we’re all just making it up as we go along.

And that – an easy answer that is not really an easy answer at all – is why I think I am going to like this show.

Lunchtable TV Talk: Rizzoli and Isles

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In a transitional week – in many ways – during which I attempted to “decompress”, I decided to binge watch the TV show Rizzoli and Isles. Why this show? Perhaps because I had never seen any of it; perhaps because it would not require much attention (would allow for the thoughtless decompression I desperately needed); perhaps because there are seven near-mind-numbing seasons with which to anesthetize my brain. It could also be other, more random things like remembering with some sadness the mid-show suicide of one of its leads, Lee Thompson Young; the entertainment value of the older detective character, Vince (Bruce McGill), mostly because I have a weird obsession with the movie My Cousin Vinny, and I could play a “Hi Bob!”–Bob Newhart Show-esque drinking game, downing a drink every time McGill utters one of the words or statements that were made so distinctive by his rendering of them in Vinny. (Seriously, after McGill got to repeatedly utter the phrase “Sac o’ Suds” in Vinny, I never imagined being able to hear him say “suds” again – but he did, in an R and I episode about a murder in a car wash). Really I could cite a whole list of reasons why I chose this show over anything else. But none of it much matters.

As I write this, I am heading into watching the final season, which just ended its cable run after seven series. I can’t really write a “comprehensive review” (do I ever?) but here are some of the things that struck me:

  • Lead Angie Harmon: I like her character, Detective Jane Rizzoli, and want to like her, as an actress, but it’s hard to reconcile with the Bush-supporting, religious nut conservative she seems to be in her real life. The interplay she has with her socially awkward best friend, Dr Maura Isles (Sasha Alexander), helps with the objectivity.
  • I like that most of the time, when the characters are not okay and are struggling with something, they say so. When someone says, “Hey, are you okay?” most of the characters feel comfortable enough to say, “No, I’m not.” I notice this because in most shows, every character is either unhinged and obviously not at all okay or is portrayed as being tightly wound and bearing a stiff upper lip (never being able to admit to some vulnerability). Particularly in these kinds of procedurals. This made Rizzoli and Isles feel more human and real.
  • I felt that Lorraine Bracco’s presence as Rizzoli’s mother, particularly in the first season or two, was completely wasted, annoying and out of place. The character’s development has helped.
  • I felt genuinely sad when, in season 4/5, the real-life suicide of actor Lee Thompson Young, was handled on the show (as an accidental death). I remembered seeing him play a role in the ill-fated and stupid show FlashForward, in which his character kills himself.
  • The fun part of watching the seven seasons of this procedural retrospectively is seeing all the guest stars who went on to other things – Cameron Monaghan from Shameless, Taylor Kinney from Chicago Fire (and former Mr Gaga), the red-haired dude who has been Jiminy Cricket in Once Upon a Time and is now a detective on Murder in the First – and a whole bunch of others. Even Jerry from Parks & Recreation.
  • There is nothing particularly important or special about this show, but its near-blase approach to women in powerful or not traditionally female positions is a positive shift. When you consider the near radical feminism of putting Cagney & Lacey on tv in the early 80s as real women with real problems who also happen to be detectives, and the novelty of that (and much scholarly research and writing, believe it or not, has been written on the subject), it’s remarkable to see Rizzoli as an experienced detective who has not had to endure quite as much sexism as her predecessors. She undoubtedly experienced plenty – it’s just that she probably does not face it from everyone she meets, including her colleagues in the department.

Lunchtable TV Talk: American Gothic & The Family

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Watching Rupert Graves seem to struggle a bit with an American accent and even seem to fit into an American ensemble felt strange. He never really embodied this role, and maybe it’s just my brain used to his Englishness. Or maybe, The Family suffered from a complete lack of cohesion that devolved into decentralized and sloppy storytelling over the course of its one and only season.

American Gothic and The Family are remarkably similar in many ways – they have a similar tone. American Gothic does not so much rely on the use of flashback, but the story draws from past events to build suspense in the present (unlike The Family’s more frequent and ham-handed attempts to use flashbacks). We have a member of the main family running for public office with a lot at stake if the family’s secrets are unveiled (in AG, one of the adult siblings is running for mayor of Boston; in The Family, the mother runs for governor of Maine). We have a law enforcement tie-in (one of the siblings in the main family in AG is married to a detective; in The Family, detectives investigate the disappearance of the main family’s young son, and one detective has an affair with the aforementioned misplaced Graves). We have the screw-up drug addict sibling in both stories; the Justin Chatwin character in AG better embodies the realities of addiction, much more convincingly than the brother (whom I can never see as anyone other than Matt Saracen in Friday Night Lights) in The Family. We get cops in AG who feel more like real cops/detectives rather than some kind of half-sketched out idea of cops (as we got in The Family). We get with AG a sense that the story knows its plot points and knows where it plans to go (unlike The Family, where the only compelling thing was Andrew McCarthy playing well against type). We get in AG a mystery that we care about finding a solution to (unlike The Family, which started strong with its first episode or two but fizzled out quickly. I am caught up to the most current American Gothic, and I am still hooked).

We have a mystery at the core of both stories and a thread of ruthlessness that runs through both in the protective siblings and family members who safeguard their secrets at all costs.

Although both were stacked with what should have been really all-star casts, The Family’s cast never really felt much like a family (the cast really did not gel for me. On paper, it looks great – acclaimed, good actors; chemistry though is a strange and rare thing that cannot be created just by having a great cast list). Despite – or perhaps because of – the dysfunction in American Gothic, you do get the idea that these people could be family. I don’t have feelings one way or the other about Virginia Madsen (for the most part), but I am thrilled to see Juliet Rylance, Justin Chatwin and Antony Starr (all of whom were co-stars in some of my favorites: The Knick, Shameless and Banshee, respectively; if you have Banshee withdrawals, Starr’s character here is a lot like Lucas Hood – mysterious, shady, reticent, volatile and with lots of secrets).

American Gothic could easily stray into the terrible territory of the now-departed soap/drama Revenge, which shared some of the same themes (but often handled them so clumsily and squandered all the suspense and goodwill built in season one, letting it trickle away in several misdirected, increasingly boring seasons). But American Gothic retains all the things that excited people about Revenge when it first began. (Virginia Madsen somehow pulls off the “trailer trash-turned-wealthy family matriarch” more effectively and believably than Madeleine Stowe ever did.)

I could be prematurely declaring success for American Gothic – but for now, I’ll cautiously say that it is definitely a better contender than The Family in terms of holding interest but… can it outlast something like Revenge and not degenerate into heightening levels nonsensical soapy dramatics. I realize that all shows of this nature rely on some soapy dramatics, and that’s not what I mean. Some shows manage to pull this off without appearing to be completely stupid and desperate. It remains to be seen whether American Gothic will be one of these.

Lunchtable TV Talk: Rosewood

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Rosewood is one of those shows. It’s one I could take or leave. My mom really liked it and encouraged me to watch. We don’t usually align on our favorite tv shows – this was no exception. But I like Morris Chestnut and decided to give it a go. (Sure, I preferred Morris in Nurse Jackie and even in the reboot of V… but I will take what I can get.)

This was a slow starter for me. I found the premise tired, the setting rather unbelievable, a lot of details thrown in just for the sake of drama, tension or diversity (i.e., nothing wrong with those things but they did not seem to flow naturally, which ended up being distracting). Characters felt artificial, showing up at strange times and just not fitting into the flow. I don’t know if this jarring effect was intentional (maybe it is more like real life to throw a group of unlikely random people together than other shows that cast for specific types of chemistry?), but for me, it did not work at all. I found myself annoyed most of the time by the female lead/detective, Annalise Villa, with whom Rosewood was constantly pairing up. Eventually, though, I warmed up to her and think she started filling the role more believably (that often happens on tv shows – actors and writers find their footing). I am still not mad about most of the rest of the cast and its characters, but Rosewood and Villa are a compelling pair.

The show’s premise is nothing particularly fresh – Rosewood is a private pathologist/medical examiner with whom the city of Miami consults on tough cases. And like all police procedurals that bring in medical examiners or psychics or writers or what have you, the non-police characters are still somehow woven directly into the daily investigative work of the police, which strikes me as pretty unrealistic. But how much would we watch otherwise? How much smoldering chemistry would you get between a detective and a pathologist if they each spent the entire show working in their own spheres? Yeah, exactly.

The show tries a few “hooks” – Rosewood is flashy, slick, arrogant (and with reason – he seems to be the best at what he does) and stubbornly unable to drop something once he has a hunch. But he is also riddled with a history of health problems and a stopwatch on his life – how much time does he have left? He imagines it might be as little as ten years. So… pack as much as possible – including crime solving?! – into the time that’s left?! I don’t know. That angle felt pretty weak to me from the beginning, and is often used as a convenient reason to introduce different characters and storylines that don’t always feel well reasoned otherwise.

For the first eight or so episodes, I watched but was disengaged, and would wander off to get coffee or something for minutes at a time. I am sure I missed something useful but it never really seemed to matter. Every episode felt like it was definitely much longer than 45 minutes. By the end of the first season, I was not hooked and could easily forget to watch the next season, but at least I was not leaving the room periodically while an episode was running.

Photo (c) 2010 Sergio Monsalve

Lunchtable TV Talk: Nashville redux

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When a show I really love is cancelled, I mourn it a little bit (Terriers, for example). When a show I love is renewed and then the renewal is inexplicably withdrawn (The Brink), I am furious.

Nashville is not one of these shows. My reaction to its existence and eventual cancellation was as muffled as the run-of-the-mill, trope-filled show itself. I liked the show at first. This did not last.

What started out as an entertaining, if soapy, look at a bunch of fictional country music stars became a ludicrous, predictable mockery of storytelling. I, for one, was pleased to see that it was finally put out of its misery. Only then to be disappointed that CMT decided to revive the show as one of the network’s offerings in original programming, claiming, “We will treasure Nashville like no other network”. Every other network and online platform is doing it, so why not CMT?

The only possible bright spot and hope for redemption is that the show was self-aware enough to know it was circling the drain and needed immediate therapy. It had already begun to significantly retool itself, gearing up for a kind of reboot in its fifth season. Nashville’s previous network. ABC, brought in veteran showrunners, Marshall Herskovitz and Ed Zwick, to shake things up (they are both still on board with the CMT move). We’ll see if this makes a difference (and, despite low expectations, I will watch). After all, I love Connie Britton (was she not amazing in her small role as Faye Resnick in The People vs OJ Simpson?), actually want to see what happens with Hayden Panettiere’s difficult Juliette character and perhaps most crucially am interested in the way the character Will Lexington continues his coming-out journey. I have read that some of the neglected and/or mishandled characters and their stories will be gone (i.e., Layla Grant and her whiny, sniveling, overprivileged troublemaking – highly annoying because just when you wanted to root for her, she did something to ruin it; Luke Wheeler – after his engagement to Britton’s Rayna broke apart, he has just been hanging around for no apparent reason).

The thing about Nashville is that maybe it’s not safe to count it out, which is another reason I will watch again. After all, it started out well and pulled me in. It pulled a lot of people in. I just hope that it doesn’t go the way, say, a bad job does. I was reminded today as I started writing this about how sometimes you start a new job, and because it’s new and different, you get into it and really like it, but soon all the weaknesses show up and the structure starts creaking. Day by day (or in the case of Nashville, episode by episode), you grow more disillusioned and unhappy. You stick with it in the absence of something else but feel yourself growing numb. Then when you try to quit, someone in the organization convinces you to stay (or the network promises big changes, as ABC was working on for Nashville). You have your doubts but agree. And immediately regret it. It’s time to cancel. In the case of the job, I cancelled. But I will still give Nashville another shot, hoping that it follows a happier trajectory than an unhappy corporate job.

Photo (c) 2010 Emily Carlin

Lunchtable TV Talk: Feed the Beast

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Feed the Beast is one of those kinds of shows that could go either way. Based on a loosely classified ‘Nordic Noir’ Danish show (Bankerot) about a restaurant and the criminal underworld around it, it could have been quite a vehicle for storytelling and talent. It also appears on AMC, which has a history of mostly quality hits rather than misses (with a few exceptions, of course). But then, even though the show is watchable, it feels like it is always on the edge of comedy, and I don’t think it is supposed to. Maybe this is because everyone in the show feels like a caricature.

First and foremost, David Schwimmer plays, Tommy, a slightly angrier, more bitter and grief-stricken version of whiny, pathetic Ross from Friends. It’s not that he is incapable of something else – it’s just that this role requires it. And we know from the 12 or so years of Friends that he has mastered that role (incidentally I read an interesting take on Friends’ Ross and how he – and how he was treated and turned into a kind of cartoon – mirrors the way society treats and views intellectuals. And Schwimmer is probably underrated in general; as far as I was concerned, his performance in The People vs. OJ Simpson – as Robert Kardashian – was one of the highlights of that program). In any case, despite Schwimmer’s capability, his presence in a role that so closely matched the Ross role on some levels distracts and inevitably leads the Friends-soaked brain to scream out: “comedy”.

Tommy’s best friend, a low-level conman – and chef – “Dion” (an effective Jim Sturgess), who “bobs and weaves” his way through life, also feels comedic, mostly because his egregious actions don’t seem to lead to real consequences. Sure, he went to prison, but in his own estimation, he enjoyed it there because he got to cook. When he crosses bad guys, he gets a beat down, but nothing he doesn’t just walk away from. He keeps getting chances – and maybe that is what I find unbelievable, even if in real life I see people who get more chances than they deserve and more chances than I can count. It is not unrealistic at all; it just seems that way to me because my own view of the world is linear, and I am not a conman who counts on wriggling and wiggling my way out of every scrape. (And of course these scrapes the character gets into are all his own making; all get worse because of his propensity for piling shit on shit and promise on promise – none of which he can keep.)

The two friends reunite and open a restaurant, Thirio (‘the beast’, apparently, in Greek), which had been their dream along with Tommy’s deceased wife, Rie. This explains Tommy’s grief and anger – and increasing alcoholism, which he tries badly to mask (with his career as sommelier); the only thing keeping him going at all is his son, who has not spoken a word since his mother died.

Naturally the restaurant opening is much easier said than done and ends up involving Dion’s connections and obligations to underworld criminals (the main one is played by Michael Gladis, who is best known as Paul Kinsey from Mad Men – a character who always struck me as near-caricature tragicomedy, which contributes to my feeling about Feed the Beast) and Tommy’s racist, hateful father (to whom he has not spoken since sometime before he even got married). It all makes for what could be a compelling story – but it never quite does. I keep watching because I do get drawn in; yet, it’s never quite as good as it could be. I suspect this is because of this aforementioned hint of comedy I keep getting the scent of (and shouldn’t be).

Casting breakdowns – Women are screwed

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I stumbled on this article while having an exciting lunch of rice. Oh, how I could live on rice. But I digress.

The article addresses television casting: “Men can be all shapes and sizes on film; women must be hot.”

While this is probably true 99 percent of the time, I am very interested in cases that go against this pattern. Even where a show is unsuccessful (and maybe is a contributing factor to its lack of success – for example, the short-lived and frankly not very good What About Joan?, which starred the unconventionally/not typically attractive Joan Cusack as the lead and the very conventionally attractive Kyle Chandler as her lovely, doting, devoted boyfriend. If it were not a vehicle specifically for the already well-known Cusack, would the casting breakdown have said, “Normal, frumpy, almost-middle-aged woman – average, no one would take a second look woman”? And if it does highlight some non-mainstream casting, that is the whole point of the show – Less Than Perfect, Mike & Molly, Ugly Betty – and no one could really claim that America Ferrera is not attractive. She was just made to look like a misfit in the fashion-model world. Nor is it even fair to say that the stars of the aforementioned shows are not attractive – but the premises and way the roles are written emphasizes that they do not fit into some scripted beauty ideal).

Why is it that if that were the casting description, and the eventual casting decision, people would question, “Why would he be with her?” about the hot boyfriend, but no one really questions that hot women would choose TV’s less-than-attractive men. (And here we might hear the “men have power/money” argument, which could explain many older men-younger women connections on TV, but it does not explain the King of Queens or the According to Jim phenomenon. In real life, I suppose I meet a lot more women of all types who consider men as a whole package, so the looks are not the deciding factor. I suppose TV reflects real life in this way – men are not as likely to look beyond the surface. And on a general level, most people are judging on appearance.)

How I Fell in Love with Richard Schiff: He Has a Quality

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When I sat down to inhale The West Wing – only ten years after it ended – I didn’t realize that I would fall in love with Richard Schiff. Or at least partly Schiff and partly the character he embodied, the beleaguered, smart Toby Ziegler. The whole cast is stunning – and every episode is packed with smart dialogue, consistent treatment of issues and so many guest stars that I can’t count them. But by the end, Schiff stood out for me. A show conceived as a starring vehicle for Rob Lowe, who saw less and less action until he finally exited the show in the fourth season, it did not occur to me that of the strong ensemble, Lowe would be the least interesting part of the show. I have always loved Allison Janney, and Bradley Whitford’s performance launched him into the lead, in which we care deeply about his character and story. Sure, none of it would work without the ensemble, but these were standouts. And Schiff is one of those pieces of the ensemble. He is a part of the group, close to all the players, but still stands apart – negative, a voice of reason but never quite a part, sometimes going renegade and doing things someone would never expect from Toby Ziegler.

I read recently that Schiff felt strongly that Toby would not have done what he did in the final season of The West Wing. He might be right, but considering that he was principled almost to a fault and might break other confidences and principles for greater principles, and he was grieving in his own quiet/angry Toby Ziegler way at the time, the result did not feel completely out of left field.

I only write about this because I devoured all of The West Wing in about a week, and as much as I enjoyed so many characters and related to them, Schiff’s Toby stood out to me as my favorite (even if dealing with the guy would probably have been totally infuriating in reality).

And somehow, maybe because he is just so good at blending into what he is doing as an outsider, and does not mind not being well-liked, I had already forgotten that he was in the initial season of Manhattan, which I really enjoyed. He was not a nice guy and not the flashiest (John Benjamin Hickey and Olivia Williams as the Winter couple provide this flash), but fit so well into his role as interrogator and another kind of fish-out-of-water. He also did a stint in Murder in the First, which I have also enjoyed.

And next up, he has a recurring role in The Affair… one of those shows that had a lot of promise and only turned itself around a little bit in the end. I liked the two sides of the same story, told from two different perspectives. I liked the cast but somehow the idea of an affair does not appeal in the long term as a long-running television show. I don’t know what Schiff will do in the second season, much as I do not know what the second season can cover – the titular affair is over, the main character left his wife (at least that’s how it seems in the end of season one). Where can it possibly go from here?

But who cares? Schiff is in it – he has a quality!