Falling Skies

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: Falling Skies

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I am combing through a long list of TV I have watched … a lot of it. It should not have, but it did stun me when I realized I had seen 30 of 35 of the best shows of 2015 (according to Vox). The Vox list was a longer version of other recently published 2015 reviews, most of which cite similar lists. I think it’s easy to forget some of the really good stuff that happened earlier in the year (like Better Call Saul – it was not perfect but it was so much better than a lot of stuff on TV) because we are so spoiled by a constant stream of high quality programming. It is easy to leave out stuff that felt new and exciting, felt groundbreaking, or really just felt like something powerful. Because there is just too much of the stuff.

With that in mind, I wanted to say just one or two words about Falling Skies, which ended this year without much fanfare. It was never going to make anyone’s top-ten or even top-35 shows. It was over the top and too much for most of its run – but it had its moments. It went too far and squandered its potential most of the time. Some of the storylines about infighting among humans were just… overwrought and took away from the bigger stories, which might have been explored with better handling had there not been so much wasted time. After all, we are sometimes brought down by the enemy within or near – pettiness, power struggles, etc. – and external enemies can just stand on the sidelines and watch us tear ourselves and each other apart.

I can’t say, even at the end, that things became particularly clear. What was the point of this show? It was a less well-executed version of The Walking Dead – a group of people running, hiding and fighting an enemy greater than itself. Sure, in The Walking Dead, it’s an enemy that is greater only in number. In Falling Skies, the enemy is extraterrestrial invaders with exponentially superior firepower who destroy almost everything except some kind of fighting spirit in the humans who remain. (There was way too much thinly veiled American-style patriotism here, with the protagonist being a former history professor who cites tales of Revolutionary War “heroes” and battles while backed up by a few actual military personnel, who have together formed a new militia, making the whole show feel a bit like a post-apocalyptic Revolutionary War re-enactment. I suppose this was by design, but it felt heavy-handed at best and inauthentic at worst.)

What did the show get right? Questions of suspicion and trust. Who do you trust when your back is against the wall, when survival is at stake? In this case, aliens invade. But when a different group of aliens arrives and offers to help, claiming that the original invaders are a shared enemy, do you cautiously accept their help and choose to trust them or reject all outsiders, anyone not like you, because it is more likely to be a trap? These kinds of themes are timely in an era where American presidential candidates want to do things like create databases of Muslims in America and shut out all new Muslim entrants?! Fundamentally, who is the outsider, and by what definition or authority is it okay to suspect everyone for the heinous actions of a few?

The show, improbably, shows the power of the collective. When a group of people band together in solidarity for a single purpose, they can achieve the impossible. The odds were against them. But the group, for the most part, survived. But the show also reveals (much as we have seen in The Walking Dead) that survival is only part of the equation. It’s not going to happen without losses, and no one gets out unchanged.

Maybe they were able to pick it back up again, but in this case at least, the sky really was falling.

Lunchtable TV talk: Steven Weber is everywhere – “What do you think you’re doing here? Waiting for the Village People to make a comeback?”

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I make no secret of or apologies for my TV addiction. I find it delightful when I can make connections with other people based on shared love or hate for particular TV shows. I am equally delighted when I watch a handful of very different shows and find a favorite actor popping up frequently. Sometimes these actors are well-known, accessible to memory only by mentioning their name. Sometimes, though, despite how ubiquitous they are, their names alone are not enough. I won’t go so far as to say that such actors are undervalued because they clearly are turning up everywhere – but at the same time, they are next to anonymous.

Steven Weber is one of these actors.

Most recently appearing in Helix, House of Lies, Falling Skies, Murder in the First and Web Therapy (I know there are plenty more in the last two or three years that I did not see) – and in the past in everything from my former go-to love-to-hate Brothers & Sisters and one of my all-time, hands-down favorites, Wings, there is very little that Weber can’t do.

Here’s one of my favorite episodes of Wings. Hilarious blast from the past. And nice to have discovered The Daly Show, featuring Weber with former Wings costar, Tim Daly. “We were in there talking and we decided that we were not born yesterday.”