AMC

Lunchtable TV Talk: Feed the Beast

Standard

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).

Lunchtable TV Talk: Halt and Catch Fire

Standard

Halt and Catch Fire has been hit or miss in its first two seasons, but I liked it. I feel like the show did hit its stride in some ways within the second season. Recently the show was renewed for a third. The way season two ended, it could have gone either way. It would not have felt like a tragic loss had the show not won its reprieve, but the big changes hinted at meant that a third season could be an interesting shift.

Where things went right: the exploration of women working in tech, very early in the game. It’s refreshing to see, even if unusual. I sometimes think people have expectations that are too high for television characters. I read a lot of “analysis” taking different shows to task for their lack of diversity. And when there is diversity, there’s a lot of nitpicking about whether it’s the appropriate or representative kind of diversity. And in fact, real life is not always as diverse as people would demand. Were the early 80s a hotbed of activity for women in tech development? Sure, they existed but were probably anomalous. I haven’t done any research on the topic, but I am not doing a real analysis here. I find that TV viewing (or the practice of “reviewing” as a career) is a little bit muddied but the demands critics in particular place on the stories, the characters and the richness and depth of their lives. Sure, I like that, too, but there is really only so much a character can embody and accomplish in an hour each week for ten weeks.

I suppose this is why I find Halt very satisfying. The two women leads, Donna and Cameron, are very different, working together but at very different stages of their lives. They often work at odds, and handle things very differently, but ultimately come together for a common cause (especially in the face of adversity). I was particularly interested in Donna’s development, while Cameron is supposed to attract attention as the unstable wunderkind. But because Donna has been the stable one professionally and personally, she has been the backbone of the company she co-founded with Cameron, and she has been the backbone of her marriage with Gordon. She has always been the one to work in a stable job (until taking a risk on the gaming startup) to support her husband Gordon’s crazy ideas but eventually embraces the calculated risk – probably because she has the stability and experience to know it will work for her. She is also a mother, and one of the quiet but important stories in season two was her personal and discreet choice to have an abortion. The show did not make a big deal out of it – no one did. She is a married mother of two, in a troubled marriage, deep into the chaos of her startup company, and it was bad timing. It was clearly a difficult decision but always came across as intensely personal and right for her. It was pivotal in the development of Donna’s character and delivered subtly and beautifully by actress Kerry Bishé.

While the show started off being more about Gordon and Joe and their race and personal quest to build a personal computer, it morphed into a show that parallels the story of a scrappy startup with the story of two very different women swimming upstream, forging stronger, independent identities, in the formation of this startup. It has been quite fascinating. Gordon and Joe became secondary to the story, and they are no longer driving the action forward by the end of season two.

Lunchtable TV Talk: Grandfathered

Standard

The back-to-back line-up of The Grinder and Grandfathered includes two 80s pretty boys, now middle-aged, with each character struggling with the “growing pains” of letting go of youth and relevance. In The Grinder, Rob Lowe is an actor whose long-running, popular legal drama comes to an end, and he’s lost, not knowing what to do. And while the premise is silly, the show seems to work. The chemistry among the actors, improbably, works (I wouldn’t expect Rob Lowe and Fred Savage to be likely siblings, but they play off each other well. Something I never imagined, actually, during Lowe’s pretty-boy heyday would be his ability to take his own quirkiness to the level he has cultivated and use it to mesh well with all the ensemble casts of which he has been a part). The Grinder is underperforming, though, and it probably won’t survive its low ratings.

This is sad because it’s a much better show than the other show with a tangentially related premise – John Stamos as the middle-aged guy fighting age, trying to pretend he is younger than he is – preening and vain – but he discovers that not only is he a father, he’s also a grandfather. It’s not very funny, not very entertaining, and the people in it just don’t gel together as a group. This show probably won’t survive either.

But ratings are not always the whole story, but that seems to be depend largely on the network. AMC’s Halt and Catch Fire has been renewed for a third season despite consistently low ratings. Of course, Halt has redeeming qualities, and these other two shows won’t really be missed.

Lunchtable TV Talk: AMC outliers – Low Winter Sun and Rubicon

Standard

What do you do when you’re a network like AMC, which has commanded cultural giants of creative, prestige programming like Mad Men, Breaking Bad, The Walking Dead, and smaller-scale but still edgy or unusual stuff like Halt and Catch Fire, Hell on Wheels and Humans, when you have clear outliers on your hands? You are not going to have a hit that viewers lap up, à la The Walking Dead, or a critical darling, à la Mad Men, every time. You can hope for quiet wins now and again, or the slow build of an audience that lets you tell a complete story. But sometimes, you strike out. AMC, despite its clout – or perhaps because of the weight of expectation – cannot hit it out of the park every time. Or even get a base hit.

This was true of both the mediocre Low Winter Sun and the challenging but worthwhile Rubicon.

Netflix can enable addicts like me. I am addicted to watching series, and even though I had read all the bad reviews of Low Winter Sun and its plodding pace, I watched it anyway. I needed to work on something through the night, and I thought, “Why not?” After all, I wanted to see if it was as bad as I’d read/heard and also wanted something that could serve as English-language background noise without forcing any concentration from me.

Like another one-season-and-gone AMC program, Rubicon, it never found its place or time. The only difference is that Low Winter Sun was a remake of a UK miniseries; Rubicon was an original in every sense of the word “original”. Come on, recounting the premise even now (a story about government data system analysts) won’t start any fires, right?

I don’t sit around and actively miss or think about Rubicon but believe it was a show with a story to tell. Low Winter Sun, though, was just awkward. Nice to see some actors who turn up in other AMC stuff, like Breaking Bad’s David Costabile (he was the ill-fated Gale Boetticher) and The Walking Dead’s Lennie James (he’s Morgan, who has just reappeared in the last season of Dead…). I almost wanted to like Low Winter Sun just because I want to attribute some kind of trust to the AMC pedigree or wanted to be some sort of rebel and like something no one else liked, but the dialogue really hurt. It was not bad acting, not a terrible story … but somehow the pieces did not all come together and nothing people said felt very natural. And that’s where it suffered. Mad Men did not always have the more natural dialogue either, but it had other legs to stand on, bigger themes to dig into, deeper stylistics to display. Low Winter Sun had nothing else going for it, and delivered exactly what you’d expect accordingly.

Coca-Cola and “assholery”: Mad Men and HAPPYish

Standard

Coca-Cola believes it taught us to sing. Or at least it believes it is so intrinsic to our lives that we won’t even notice its ubiquitous presence in our favorite TV shows. How pervasive Coca-Cola suddenly is in two TV shows that focus on the advertising industry: Mad Men and HAPPYish. If everyone in the world is an asshole, as the TV show HAPPYish posits, then ad men are the biggest assholes in the world, selling asshole ideas to a world of susceptible asshole sheep-herd consumers.

“In this toilet of a world, the asshole is king*.” Everyone loves the asshole.

“Your problem is that you think that assholes are some sort of anomaly, some sort of aberration. Nature is an asshole factory, my friend. If you exist, you’re an asshole*.”

Throughout the latter half of the final season of Mad Men, there have been multiple references to Coca-Cola, as present as Lucky Strike was to its first season. The references are subtle – talking about Coke like it is the holy grail of advertising, what all ad men aspire to. With only one episode left, it remains to be seen whether all these mentions lead somewhere or are just planted for the sake of talking about Coke. Lucky Strike’s dominance in season one, and the ad men’s urgent campaign to wipe out the rising tide of health warnings against smoking, foreshadowed a brave-faced Betty Draper Francis being diagnosed with terminal lung cancer. Do the constant references to Coke as Mad Men winds down – the pursuit of their business – foreshadow the oncoming proliferation of diabetes, obesity and other health ills that soon overtake America? Is Matthew Weiner painting a cautionary tale in broad strokes? The vices we desire are ultimately what will kill us, but there are awfully compelling, glossy ad campaigns that make these vices appear however ad men want them to look – seductive, sexy, wholesome, beautiful, “toasted” (Don Draper’s pitch to Lucky Strike in season one) or a harbinger of world peace (“I’d like to teach the world to sing/in perfect harmony… I’d like the buy the world a Coke…”). All in the consumerist pursuit of elusive happiness and using manipulative, asshole tactics to convince us that a sugar-filled drink can accomplish anything of the kind.

Quite a different show about advertising, HAPPYish started off pretty weak and is still far from perfect. But in episode four, it started to get better. In it, the ad team at the heart of the show is pitching Coca-Cola. Much less subtle and totally over-the-top, the episode began with showing a bunch of young ad interns a parody of the original Coca-Cola “I’d like to teach the world to sing” ad. The actual Coke pre-pitch turns out to be a slap in the face to the young, Swedish upstarts trying to overtake the agency with their rejection of traditional ad campaign tactics. Oh the Swenglish sounds, spewing such corporate marketing psychobabble and insanity! One of the Swedish duo, Gottfried, exclaims, “We don’t need campaigns any more. It’s one smart idea, and it changes the world, ok? We need ideation! We need social integration. We needs events, we need moments… it wasn’t a war that started the Egyptian revolution, it was fucking Facebook.”

The show’s main character, Steve Coogan’s Thom Payne replies, “And the Egyptian revolutionaries.”

Bradley Whitford, the manager of the agency, grows more irate: “I don’t think Egypt is the best case study for the long-term effectiveness of social media.”

Gottfried: “It’s like you told me when we first met about Al Qaeda. They’re a great brand but what makes them a great brand? They don’t make campaigns – they make events: 9/11, 7/7, Charlie Hebdo…” ?!

Whitford’s Jonathan exclaims in angry exasperation: “THIS IS COCA-fucking-COLA! They couldn’t be less insurgent-like if they fucking tried!*”

The idiotic Swedish upstart interjects his “end of campaigns” BS and tries to tell Coke they can be an insurgent. After the Swedish wunderkind makes an ass of himself pitching the death of advertising, Bradley Whitford’s Jonathan jumps in to pitch Coca-Cola on a level it will understand: domination… in the form of the programmed, hyperdetailed, 600+ page 1933 Nazi organization brand bible: “This is what Coke needs” – the book that, Jonathan claims, makes Mein Kampf look like child’s play. He urges them to embrace global dominance the way the Nazis did – as no brand has ever been as powerful as the Nazi brand, not even Coke. “Domination is the same goal no matter what you’re selling. Coca-Cola is not a brand: it’s an uber-brand; it’s a movement that deserves a fanatical devotion*.”

HAPPYish’s antihero, Payne, ends up declaring, after the Coca-Cola pitch nightmare and a conversation about how society has cast philosophy and insight aside to look for wisdom in advertising and in retail therapy (“It’s not hard to be a genius in a world that looks to shopping bags for insights.”): “If I hadn’t met Lee (Payne’s wife), it wouldn’t be funny at all. We’re the only ones on earth that the other one can stand. Maybe that’s all you can ask for on this planet. One non-asshole. After all, the pursuit of happiness is the source of all unhappiness. You know who said that? LuLu Fucking Lemon. Here on planet asshole, the shopping bag knows all.”

Mad Men and its revelation-via-ad-campaign has echoed these same reflections, questions and explorations in its characters’ pursuit of happiness. It is a subtler, quieter evaluation of happiness and man’s wants in life. But it is further evidence of what HAPPYish hammered home – everyone is an asshole, which has been proven time and again in seven seasons of Mad Men.

*All quotes from season 1, episode 4 of Showtime’s HAPPYish

Lunchtable TV Talk – Better Call Saul: ’sall good, man…

Standard

I often wondered, as I watched Better Call Saul from its debut to its freshman season finale: Would we watch if it weren’t the prequel to Breaking Bad? Is it good or engaging outside the explicit context of Breaking Bad? We cut it some slack and keep watching because we really liked Saul Goodman in Breaking Bad. And who doesn’t like Bob Odenkirk in just about everything he has done? Giving him a leading role in a one-hour, “dark dramedy” would seem either a genius move for which we would all reap the rewards or an overblown failure. Maybe this curiosity made us want more and made us ask the question: how did Saul Goodman come to be? (I like the small nods, winks and tips of the hat to Breaking Bad that subtly appear throughout Better Call Saul.)

But as to whether I felt the show could stand on its own merits, until the end, I was not entirely sure. In the final two episodes, during which Jimmy (the given name of our titular antihero) puts together an almost airtight class action lawsuit, despite all the factors stacked against him, he ends up finding out who has really been standing in his way all along. That storytelling and slow building of a character won me over. Seeing Jimmy struggle, take care of his brother Chuck, strive to make a name for himself, continue to try to do the right thing, only to have his efforts slapped down, illustrates exactly how Jimmy cast aside an aspirationally “good” self to aspire to – and succeed – at being his “bad” self.

At the crux of this transformation is the painful and heartbreaking relationship Jimmy has with his brother, Chuck (played to perfection by Michael McKean). A bitter and probably overdue confrontation ensues, in which Chuck spews a hateful monologue about Jimmy’s incompetence and propensity to fuck up, mocking his law degree as “not real”.

Chuck explodes: “I know you. I know what you were. What you are. People don’t change. You’re ‘Slippin’ Jimmy’.” From here, Chuck delivers perhaps the most quoted and heartbreaking line of all, citing Jimmy’s conman past: “Slippin’ Jimmy I can handle just fine, but Slippin’ Jimmy with a law degree is like a chimp with a machine gun.”

With that, the relationship is broken, and Jimmy is never turning back. The final episode of the inaugural season begins to hint at and chart Jimmy’s new course, which will eventually lead us to the Saul Goodman he becomes.