lunchtable TV talk

Lunchtable TV Talk: Black Mirror

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It was not that long ago that I finally got wrapped up in the existing episodes of the genius, twisty, unsettling Black Mirror. And then it was announced that it would be back as a Netflix production. I won’t ramble about what made Black Mirror genius – it entertained at the same time as being terrifying, thinking about how we’re probably only a step away from the kinds of invasive technology that disrupted, destroyed and in many case ruined the characters’ lives in the effectively standalone vignettes presented in the few episodes that exist. All the “conveniences” that we embrace without thinking how they expose us and monitor us 24/7, not at all unlike the cautionary tale of all cautionary tales that is 1984. But in a world where people volunteer to put every minute detail of their lives on (reality) TV in the name of some kind of misguided fame, can I be surprised?

The other thing that surprised me was learning that Charlie Brooker, Black Mirror’s creator/writer, also co-wrote the Sky1 police-drama spoof, A Touch of Cloth, starring the dazzlingly clear-spoken Scot John Hannah, actor and would-be proprietor of the John Hannah School of English. Who would have guessed?

Lunchtable TV Talk: Doll & Em

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Doll & Em is back for a second season. I tried to like the first season – there were some genuinely funny and sometimes sad moments. But mostly I found both of the leads to be shrill, unlikable and over-the-top in ways that can’t be overlooked in a way that would inspire me to watch the second season.

For me, the jury is out on Emily Mortimer. In some things, I really like her (in films, mostly, and in her guest role in 30 Rock; in others, such as Doll & Em and especially The Newsroom, there’s no ambivalence at all – I can’t stand her). As for Dolly Wells, what can I say? She is like the walking embodiment of the most annoying British people I have ever met, all smashed into one. She’s pretty much the same sort of thing in the Patrick Stewart vehicle, Blunt Talk. But then again, she has her moments. And they are both just people with feelings (and they are great at putting this on display in Doll & Em… hence my ambivalence about the show).

The only strong thread holding the show together for me is the equal pull of strength and pain in the friendship between the two leads. Both are blinded by their own egos within the friendship, feeling somehow entitled or ignored in turn, causing a giant rift in their near-lifelong friendship. Having endured these kinds of troubles in friendship, I related to this and thought the show represented it well. Just not sure I can get past the rest of the nonsense…

Lunchtable TV Talk: The West Wing

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I force-fed myself seven annoying seasons of The Gilmore Girls recently, thinking it could play unassumingly in the background while I did other things. But it was so annoying with too many fast-talking, high-pitched, histrionic characters that I could neither concentrate on and absorb it nor concentrate on everything else I was meant to be doing.

The West Wing, also seven seasons long, 22 episodes per season, is the opposite. (Hard to believe that it has been almost ten years since it ended!) It’s equally fast-talking and sometimes a bit preachy, but it is designed in a way that I can pay attention to it and do whatever else I need to do and get the most from both. I even heard Rob Lowe exclaim in exasperation, “Good night, nurse!” – an expression I had only ever heard my grandmother (and the character Mike Sloan in the long-gone but much-loved show Homefront) use (most people don’t believe me when I tell them that yes, in fact, this is a real expression).

I had seen isolated episodes of The West Wing during its original run, but most of it happened during a period when I did not watch much telly, much less ingest it like a pig at the trough as I do now. I was always impressed with The West Wing – its stories, its cast, its pace – but only now, thanks to Netflix, am I watching it from end to end. And it’s providing sheer contentment. I haven’t reached the point yet where Rob Lowe leaves or where John Spencer dies, depriving the show of one of its greatest assets.

Can you argue with a show that at its worst seems a little like a “very special episode” on some issue – but never overdoes it, really? And at its best, weaves words like “ensorcelled” into the script? Or with a show that during its run had a stellar leading cast and unparalleled caliber of guest stars (Oliver Platt, Edward James Olmos – he’s Admiral Adama now and forever for me, or Jaime Escalante!, Mary Louise Parker, John Larroquette, – great in his recent role in The Brink, Marlee Matlin, Gerald McRaney – who turns up everywhere, usually as a former or current military guy – and an insane, bursting list of others) but many others who were virtually unknown at the time but went on to other, big things (Ty Burrell of Modern Family, Evan Handler of Sex and the City and Californication, Nick Offerman of Parks & Recreation, Clark Gregg of Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Danny Pudi of Community, Felicity Huffman of Desperate Housewives and American Crime, Lisa Edelstein of House and the mercilessly shitty Girlfriends Guide to Divorce, Jorja Fox of CSI, Lance Reddick of The Wire and Fringe and Connie Britton, looking teenager-young, of Friday Night Lights, American Horror Story and Nashville…). And more… so many more.

This show encapsulates Aaron Sorkin‘s golden age. America wasn’t ready for him or his style in the too-clever but too-soon Sports Night, and he went too far with the overblown The Newsroom. But The West Wing was the pinnacle.

Lunchtable TV Talk: Longmire on Netflix

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Damn that Gerald McRaney! Evil as the late Branch Connally’s father – and we’re pretty sure he killed his own son to save his own skin as Longmire came to its cliffhanger ending on A&E last year? (Does anyone disagree that A&E makes dumb programming decisions?) Hard to see McRaney be evil (although he is pretty convincing as a scheming, conservative businessman and/or politician later in his career – earlier as Major Dad and one of the Simon brothers in Simon & Simon, he usually played someone else – usually someone else who had been a US Marine).

Happily, thanks to Netflix, we do not have to live with that eternal cliffhanger. A&E cancelled Longmire after three successful seasons – not because it had a small audience or because it was critically panned but because they did not like that the respectable audience Longmire attracted skewed too old. Are you fucking kidding me? The biggest population with the most money (to which advertisers should be catering) is the Baby Boom generation – and who is the coolest cat of this generation than Sheriff Walt Longmire as played by Robert Taylor? (Or Gerald McRaney’s character for god’s sake!).

There’s a bit of something for everyone in Longmire – Baby Boomer characters, a rich variety of characters with interesting back stories, mystery without being a standard cop/law and order show, wry and understated sarcasm and humor alongside some light cowboy-in-Wyoming goodness as well as some focus on contemporary Native American issues. And Wyoming itself – America’s least populated but an undeniably beautiful state, and almost entirely invisible apart from the fact that a tiny part of it touches Yellowstone National Park. Do we ever hear about Wyoming on TV except in Longmire, which is set there, or in Hell on Wheels, which tells a wild, wonderful tale of the westward building of rail lines?

I really wanted to focus on some work and other projects but Netflix had to taunt me into binge watching – once again. I reluctantly waltzed several years ago into watching the first season of Longmire. Like everyone else, I didn’t assume I was the target demographic – and a “cowboy cop show” theme didn’t hold much promise for me. But, if you know me, you know I check out a lot of things to which I initially declare “never”. A stellar cast sucked me in – this includes Lou Diamond Phillips (someone my brother, in childhood, once claimed he’d like to invite over for Thanksgiving?!) and Katee Sackhoff (and let’s face it – as a Battlestar Galactica junkie in withdrawal, I kind of watch anything with any of the former cast, which is usually very much a waste of time – see Killer Women with Tricia Helfer or much of what Jamie Bamber has done since, while Sackhoff has made some solid choices. And I started watching Hawaii Five-0 for Grace Park but stay for the Danno and McGarrett love story). Then the writing in Longmire has been swift, clever and engaging. It’s hard to find something not to like, even if you don’t find a passionate affinity for the show.

But I found my affinity and will binge my way through season four tonight. I suggest to anyone in doubt to do the same (or at least sample it and see). A&E might have abandoned the show because the people who watched it were too old for their liking, but luckily Netflix is not as biased or short-sighted.

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.

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: The Daily Show – Goodbye, Jon Stewart

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The Daily Show will go on, and it might be entertaining and topical, but I don’t know if I have the flexibility to continue watching. Jon Stewart should not necessarily define what The Daily Show was. After all, he was not working on it alone. Plenty of other comedians, and most importantly, writers and other behind-the-scenes talent, made The Daily Show work on many levels. But Stewart led the way, and he led for pretty much the entirety of my adult life. Seeing him “retire” from the show is like one of those shifts that you don’t even realize the significance of until they are upon you. Someone who was there for almost two decades acting as the voice of reason, eviscerating ridiculousness with humor, is suddenly gone. There’s a void. There will be a void. Going to miss Stewart. A lot.

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.