tv shows

The Rockford Files: The 50 dollar haircut

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I look for new ways to describe things but keep churning out the same tired words.

You know it’s a sad day when you hit up YouTube for a “classic” episode of The Rockford Files (“The Empty Frame”)

While the episode was remarkable for its place and time for featuring a gay couple without remarking on it or drawing attention to it, as chronicled in a book on the gay characters on TV, it was more remarkable for its take on socialist hypocrisy. Haha.

“We all sold out the day she got her first 50 dollar haircut, and we said we liked it!”

Lunchtable TV Talk: unREAL

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If you had told me that I would fall flat-on-my-ass in love with original programming from Lifetime, well, I would sooner have believed that I would win the lottery. Lifetime has done something unexpected by offering us unREAL, starring Shiri Appleby and Constance Zimmer. I like Zimmer a lot anyway but did not know Appleby before. The two together make the show. Some of Zimmer’s dialogue is a bit over the top but she pulls off even the witchiest of bitchiest. I read somewhere that the role was originally slated to be played by Megyn Price but I cannot imagine anyone in the role but Zimmer.

Appleby as Rachel, though, is a revelation: Tough, vulnerable, strong but put time and again into compromising positions that challenge her conscience. Even with the moral and ethical dilemmas surrounding Rachel at every turn in her work, this is not a preachy, moralizing show. Instead it explores the grey areas of human relationships and manipulations and the extremes people are willing to push themselves to. And asks at what cost – and can a person come back from the edge? Can they really feel or trust again after certain soul-crushing experiences? What better place to do this than a fictionalized behind-the-scenes look at the backstage machinations of a reality show like The Bachelor? It’s dark but not devoid of human emotion. People all live in grey zones. It’s people being ruthless even though they do, on some level, seem to care about each other. But wouldn’t it be easy to go full-on cynical after living in this world populated by artifice? In fact because the show is deeply human, it skewers without ever turning into a parody.

As often happens, I came to the unREAL game a bit late – the entire first season was over by the time I watched (all the better to binge on, my dear). I’d read glowing reviews and heard the accolades but the Lifetime stigma and the one-sentence premise about a reality-show setting screamed, “No!” I gave in, though, and I am beyond glad that I did. Let’s free ourselves from bias – creativity can come from anywhere!

Apart from showering the stars with praise – richly deserved because they breathe the life and humanity into this show – the real thanks should go to the show’s co-creators, Sarah Gertrude Shapiro, who made the brilliant Sequin Raze, the inspiration for unREAL, and the prolific Marti Noxon, a TV veteran and apparently a fellow baking aficionado who owns a flour mill. How can I not be in love with these women? (I am.)

It sounds pretty cheesy, but the long-heard Lifetime tagline, “Television for Women”, has always been condescending and limiting, but I think they finally got it right here. Television for, by and about women that should engage and entertain everyone.

HAPPYish endings

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HAPPYish took a while to grow on me, and as most entertainment media pointed out upon its debut, the world did not necessarily need another portrait of disaffected middle-aged-man at a crossroads. It didn’t always hit the mark but sometimes felt very satisfying, shining a light not just on middle-aged-man dissatisfaction but also on the disillusionment of moving away from one’s youthful dreams and clinging onto and valuing the important things you do find when you’re older and more mature… and realizing that even when you do stumble onto one or two of life’s few epiphanies, you are just as likely to forget and go on with your pettiness two minutes later. It also skewered the hollowness of the advertising industry.

In a reappraisal of the show’s first – and only, now that it has been canceled – season, I think I will miss it.

Why I changed my mind – Kathleen Robertson

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As the second season of Murder in the First comes to an end, I mostly reflect on one of its stars, Kathleen Robertson. I have enjoyed both seasons of the show so far, in large part because of a good and low-key cast (including Ian Anthony Dale, who is always fun to watch regardless of what it is – including Hawaii Five-0 and the otherwise tedious The Event). I won’t say anything more about Murder in the First except that I recommend it. Instead I will talk about why I have changed my mind about Kathleen Robertson.

It would be easy to dismiss Robertson based on what she has been best known for – playing a girl in Beverly Hills 90210. I believe she spent a few seasons as a roommate and friend to the main characters and her character also dated the “Steve” character in 90210. I was never a fan of 90210 and sometimes watched it to laugh at it. Even then, Robertson seemed a bit “fish out of water” because she seemed smarter than the show and her talent was constrained by the constraints of the show. Nevertheless, my determination had been made, however unfairly.

I never gave her much thought after 90210, although she popped up here and there.

When I finally got around to watching the short-lived but powerful Boss, a starring vehicle for Kelsey Grammer, I was consistently impressed with Robertson’s performance as political aide, Kitty O’Neill. At first I was doubtful – her character was smart, ambitious, driven but under the thumb of the oppressive Tom Kane (Grammer). The O’Neill character’s professional drive and underhandedness was something Robertson handled well, but where she excelled is in her handling of the character’s personal life. She uses her overt sexuality not to gain power but, it seems, to make herself feel better, to feel desirable, to feel powerful, even though nothing about it gives her power in the end. She attaches no emotion to her encounters – or tries not to and believes she isn’t, even though she is clearly affected (not necessarily in positive ways) by all her encounters and sometimes seeming humiliations. It is the classic powerful, single woman behaving in a sexually liberated, aggressive, detached way and she seems confused by her own evolution.

In part, she has dedicated her life to the politician she works for, and in that sense, does not have time or interest in anything else. And Kane can be a Machiavellian – and emotionally abusive – boss, which would further erode Kitty’s sense of worth. But she is sexually driven, but perhaps there is a lot more behind it than is first obvious. And what makes this compelling is what Robertson brings to the role. This tough exterior with a clearly vulnerable, emotionally stunted inside. And the thing is – it was deeply relatable. I found myself transfixed many times in Kitty’s more vulnerable moments, sometimes even pushed to tears by her choices or the choices she needed to make. It’s pretty rare that I would have such a reaction.

Robertson’s role in Murder in the First is quite different, although she brings some of the same tough-on-the-outside, soft-on-the-inside approach to her role that makes her feel strong and smart – but you can feel her frustrations, her tiredness, the way she is trying to balance her demanding career with her life as a single mother.

And then to top it off, I read recently that Robertson has written a new TV project, Your Time is Up. I am looking forward to seeing what she creates.

Lunchtable TV Talk: True Detective – It would take a detective to find something good about this

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What made the first season of True Detective delightful was its sense of coming out of nowhere with something unexpected. No pretension, no weight of expectation. Sure, some of the dialogue was out there, but the unexpectedly great Matthew McConaughey delivered even the strangest dialogue.

Under the heavy weight of expectation, the second season has been bogged down in a convoluted mess pushed further into laughable territory by the presence of Vince Vaughn. I suppose he and his handlers expected a career boost or surge along the same lines as McConaughey – maybe we had all been underestimating Vaughn all these years and he had just never been given a role that allowed him to sink his teeth in. McConaughey had been perceived for many years as a one-trick pony too even though much of his long career is studded with hidden gem performances, the likes of which do not fill out Vaughn’s resume.

Every scene with Vaughn was eye rolling. The script was not great to start with – he was asked to pull off some babble that no one would ever say. But a greater actor might have been able to do it without the viewer feeling the need to laugh. And the constant lingering of Vaughn’s character’s wife (played by British actress Kelly Reilly)… what was that all about? Throughout I was expecting that maybe she would play some larger role in the end game – otherwise what other point does her constant presence and artificial brooding play? If it was just to try to humanize Vaughn’s character, it didn’t work. Their conversation is so stilted, so fake, so forced. It looks like two people who joined an “intro to acting” course at a community college and are just fumbling their way through their first scene together. NO chemistry. And hilariously in the finale, Reilly states, “You can’t act for shit. Take it from me.” Haha. Guess what? Neither one of you can act, and the script sucks!

The season ended, and those questions about her role were not answered. What purpose did Vaughn’s wife really serve other than perhaps being some kind of glorified nanny/part-time mum for Rachel McAdams’s kid? Even if the plot questions were more or less answered, the bigger question – what was the point of any of this? – was not.

The end did not satisfy and ended up being just as stupid as the rest of the seven episodes preceding its unceremonious fizzling out.

Lunchtable TV Talk: Dicte – Not the finest hour of Danish TV

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The Danish TV show, Dicte, starring Iben Hjejle (most non-Danes will recognize her only as the girlfriend from the film High Fidelity), is not a bad show, but compared to other recent Danish television, it’s not exactly great either. While Dicte (the name of the titular character) follows the same kind of investigative bent as police procedurals, it is actually a show about a journalist returning to her hometown – Aarhus, and yes that is what Aarhus looks like – after a divorce. She investigates and finds herself in a lot of trouble at times, but she has a bristly relationship with the cops.

The very popular and well-lauded show, Borgen, crosses some of the same paths in that there are several investigative journalists and journalism at the core of the story. We don’t see many shows that treat journalism with much respect or importance – at least not that I can think of. Maybe The Wire (it figures that a former journalist was responsible for bringing that show to life). I like it when “entertainment” questions the role and place of journalism, the rights of journalists and the media in general. (One reason I will miss The Daily Show with Jon Stewart so much. He called the media out all the time.) Dicte does not do much of this – quite the opposite of something like The Newsroom, which took this kind of questioning too far into ridiculously preachy territory. A balance could be struck somewhere in the middle.

Dicte, then, is a passable show with compelling enough stories, decent acting and of course the thrill of listening to the weirdness that is spoken Danish.

Lunchtable TV Talk: Major Crimes – In the wide TV universe

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Lately I have been watching Major Crimes, which is neither a good nor bad show. I never watched its predecessor, The Closer, and I am not totally sure why Major Crimes is on my viewing docket now. In any case, the only thing I have to say about it, other than poking fun at the weird pacing of Mary McDonnell’s speaking voice, is that Jonathan Del Arco, the medical examiner character in the show is one of those guys who has turned up in a lot of places … surprisingly many. I remember of course that he was in Nip/Tuck a number of times – obviously memorably so.

But the strangest realization (and I had to find this by looking him up) was that he was “Hugh” in the Star Trek: Next Generation episode “I, Borg” – one of the episodes in which an individual Borg begins to show individual thought and behavior. It should not be a “strange realization”, I guess, but it is just one of those things that seems really surprising once you make the connection.

Major Crimes is full of people who have past near-iconic performances, from Major Crimes’s Raymond Cruz, who might be more memorable as Breaking Bad (and Better Call Saul)’s Tuco Salamanca, and from Mary McDonnell and her long acting history – and memorable role as Laura Roslin in cult favorite Battlestar Galactica. But these are more present, more visible than Del Arco. I am happy to see that he is in the midst of a long and interesting career.

Lunchtable TV Talk: Welcome to Sweden: Vi kommer att sakna dig

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The vagaries of TV-show renewal decisionmaking never fail to confuse. It’s disappointing to see that a unique, funny show like Welcome to Sweden is canceled almost before its second season has a chance to gain momentum. I suppose that is the way network TV works, and WTS was definitely an unusual presence on network TV in the first place. The good stuff almost never lasts there, which I suppose should be a stamp of approval in some ways. Most creators and writers would hope their shows would find popularity and a broad audience, but if a show like WTS doesn’t, I am sure there are enough ardent and vocal fans of the show to make it clear that it was loved. We know how American audiences are, after all, with “foreign” and subtitled stuff. Americans seem to embrace non-English entertainment with greater patience, but I daresay that maybe NBC hasn’t.

As a happy resident of western Sweden, I love my views of the forest and west coast, but seeing views once a week of one of the world’s loveliest cities, Stockholm, will also be missed.

Lunchtable TV Talk: Deutschland83

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Four-three-two-one… earth below us…

I have been blown away by the German eight-part spy drama, Deutschland83. I love Germany, and Berlin in particular, but I cannot say I have ever understood German tastes. And when it comes to TV, it’s not like the Germans churn out anything that anyone outside of the German-speaking world wants to watch or copy. As I wrote the other day, the US and UK seem to travel on a fast-track highway of exchanging each other’s entertainment. The Nordic countries have infiltrated, exporting both their “Nordic Noir” dramas and the ideas behind them (to be adapted and redone to varying degrees of success). And even France has joined the fray, offering up stuff like Les Revenants, already remade into The Returned, and Engrenages (Spiral), and Les témoins (Witnesses). And Israel is a rich source of inspiration. But Germany? Not so much. Don’t believe me? I’m not the only one to think so.

“For decades, German TV drama was seen as reflecting the kind of cultural tastes that made David Hasselhoff a nation’s rock god: trite, unadventurous, psychologically challenging only when the lead actor of one particularly long-running detective show was outed as a former SS member.”

Until now.

The premise: a young East German guy, Martin, is forced to become a Stasi operative in West Germany as a West German military officer named Moritz. His aunt is an upper-level Stasi operative herself, and she recruits him, against his will, and uses carrots (the promise of an apartment and car) and sticks (indirectly threatens her sister, his mother) to keep him in line. The story is taut and aligned with real events from the early 1980s. I am totally disappointed that it is only eight episodes long, but I was duly impressed with not just the pacing and storytelling at work but with the way the period is handled – so many of the events and fears of the moment (everything from nuclear annihilation to AIDS), so much of the music (“99 Luftballons” of course!), the “high-tech” developments of the time that young people today would be as clueless about as Martin is when he encounters them (he goes to steal a document and instead only finds a little plastic square with a hole in it – a floppy disk!).

I can’t recommend the show enough. I wrote about it the other day, highlighting the fact that it is the first program to be shown in the US with English subtitles for its almost exclusively German-language script. Even when an American military general appears in the story and starts to talk, you’d expect everything to switch to English (he is an American after all!), everything continues in German. International programming has more to offer than ever, and while one could say that the content was always there and we were not paying attention, I doubt it. It’s a lot like US programming… as distribution has changed and major networks are not the only channels through which content is available, creativity is being unleashed everywhere.

Even in Hasselhoff’s Germany.

Lunchtable TV Talk: Borgia v The Borgias

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A rich and varied tale and time period it may be, but the late 1400s and the rise to power of the Borgia family does not seem like material that would make for two (quite different) series.

The Borgias on Showtime went for a bigger name at the head – Jeremy Irons – and aimed for more salacious and sexual (although Borgia is not far behind). Not unlike the other period pieces Showtime has pushed. Like history won’t be interesting unless it’s presented with boobs.

Borgia is something different – it actually takes a bit more time to explain the context in which the story fits into the world. No huge names here – and it is hard to buy John Doman as Rodrigo Borgia. He’s really such a … cop or corrupt cop or bad guy, you know. He was central to The Wire, and in general is just so American that it is not easy to see past. He shows up everywhere and in a lot of different roles, but as a cardinal/pope in this particular time period? No. Jeremy Irons pulls this off, and while Doman’s a talented guy, he is a man out of place here. The rest of the acting is terrible – an international cast that speaks questionable English even though it’s an English-language production… heavens, please.

I cannot say, even though I sat through both series, that I would recommend either.