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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.

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

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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.

Lunchtable TV Talk: Sense8 – “This is the real fucking world – nothing’s fair”

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After the first episode of Netflix’s Sense8, I was disappointed and did not even want to continue watching. I am not alone in this sentiment. The show is uneven in its pace and not every thread makes sense (maybe it does not have to – that might not be the point). The cited Hitfix article praises the show as being ambitious and sometimes great despite its weaknesses, and as I made my way through the show, I felt the same way. There were many touching moments, many hilarious moments, and many concepts that struggled against the ordinary to find greatness.

I won’t get into the premise of the show – it’s scifi, it’s about strangers in different parts of the world suddenly experiencing a mind-body connection that enables them to see, hear, feel each other. If that vague idea sounds interesting, watch it to find out for yourself if it means anything to you.

Hitfix also pointed out that many of the supporting characters contributed more entertainment value and depth than supporting characters generally do. This is particularly true, just as the article says, of Freema Agyeman’s tough, clever Amanita. (She’s better known for her role as Martha Jones in Doctor Who – and for me, who has oddly never seen any of the storied Doctor Who franchise, Law & Order UK, as prosecutor Alesha Phillips.)

The same cannot be said always for the stories of some of the main characters. I found myself most irritated by the story of “Riley” – the supposedly Icelandic character. Her character cites some vaguely “Icelandic” things – half the stuff she says comes back to sentences that begin with, “In Iceland…” – but most of it is the kind of drivel spouted in tourist handbooks. At least the people Riley encounters when she returns to Iceland from her home in London are actual Icelandic people – including her father, portrayed by an Icelandic folk and blues singer, KK.

It might be that much of this show feels inauthentic in that all the characters around the world speak English. There are moments when the characters’ lives collide, and only in those moments, the characters speak in their own native languages (the Korean girl speaks Korean, the German guy speaks German, etc.), but almost immediately “adapt” to understand each other but the entire show is in this lingua franca of English. Given how much of television is now being presented in languages other than English, it feels lazy and assumes laziness to make Sense8 this way when it is otherwise, progressive and full of diverse identities. Does using English help more people in a broad audience connect to a broader spectrum of diverse characters? Does it break down barriers rather than create one in the form of language? Possibly. This show does not always hit the mark, but its sights were set high enough that adding the layer of language might have just been too complex for an already complicated story. That said, though, I feel that “original” language has added so much to other shows that I wonder what might have been added (or taken away) here. (I have already written about original language use on TV, the new subtitling revolution – and I don’t love fake accents in place of the actual language – again, the “Icelandic” girl who is actually a Brit using a put-on Icelandic accent instead of just using Icelandic with subtitles….) Lovely scenery of Iceland, though.

The show is best when it reveals its many small moments of insight – even if they are not “deep” or hidden insight – moments of clarity that reflect on the duality and universality of the main characters’ lives overlapping. One small example – in episode 9 when Lito, the Mexican soap star, states while drowning his sorrows in a bar, “I was living in two separate worlds”. He could just as well be referring to his status as a Sensate, colliding into multiple worlds although he might be talking about his public life as a famous actor and his private life as a closeted gay man and the struggles and losses that has caused for him. “A secret self”, as Lito discusses with the bartender before it degenerates into self-hating homophobia.

Ultimately the unanswered questions, the potential and the little insights may provide a path for a second season. Fingers crossed.

Lunchtable TV Talk: Rectify – When you don’t do yourself any favors

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The quiet, weird calm on Daniel Holden’s surface occasionally erupts in blind rage – leading to events he does not remember. And he never does himself any favors – either in committing these impulsive and violent acts nor in how he goes about handling them. It’s frustrating as hell as a viewer but makes for very unusual storytelling – especially for episodic tv. Things Holden did sometime in the first season of the show are only coming back to light in the third season.

This is how Rectify operates. Very slow-moving drama, following Holden and his family and the other people in the town into which he is released after 20 years in prison. It is never clear that Holden is innocent. DNA more or less exonerates him, but the town (especially its power structure) remains suspicious of him. His odd behavior, speech and mannerisms make people uncomfortable enough that they are never sure he is innocent either. In fact, neither is he.

The show is deliberately slow and often so poetic and thoughtful in its dark and quiet explorations on different themes. As such, it does not surprise me that it is not widely watched – and not just because it lives on Sundance, not the most visible network. Cited many times by many media outlets as a hidden gem, too slow for many but worth the effort, it’s hard not to feel for and be frustrated by everyone involved – peculiar Daniel Holden, his impassioned sister, Amantha (one of many TV roles nailed by Abigail Spencer – see also the latest season of True Detective, previous seasons of Suits), his mother and stepfather and step-siblings (who have their own issues), and even his long-suffering and frustrated lawyer.

The frustration is a part of the beauty of the show and its character development. It moves more at the pace of real life, does not offer neat or happy endings and is as challenging to draw conclusions from as everyday life is. Thanks to Netflix, you don’t have to rely on reruns to see the previous seasons.

Lunchtable TV Talk – Grace and Frankie: Squandered opportunity

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The pedigree of Grace and Frankie’s cast (Jane Fonda, Lily Tomlin, Sam Waterston, Martin Sheen) should guarantee (and does on paper) that this would be at least a semi-worthwhile viewing. But then it relies entirely on the marquee names and ignores the need for compelling writing, which is tired and borderline offensive, or acting. The characters are one-dimensional caricatures – and the show is just plain boring. It’s sad. Netflix rarely misfires this badly with its original programming. But this is just lazy and not funny where it is supposed to be. Full of insensitivity and lack of believability. It misses the opportunity to handle topics, such as late-in-life divorce, late-in-life coming out, quite deftly. We saw Amazon take on a similar journey in Transparent when a senior citizen man comes out as transgender and handled the story well. Grace and Frankie also deals with the retirement-aged set and looks at characters of an age that we don’t normally see in leading roles. They usually hang out in the background as the resident grandparents. Sadly, even with this cast and the potential for groundbreaking material, this show entirely mishandles these themes horribly.

Lunchtable TV Talk – Daredevil

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There is already a lot of press about the murky, dark, dramatic, gloomy, moody and brooding Netflix offering, Daredevil. I won’t add much to it. I loved the lead, Charlie Cox, in his ill-fated role in Boardwalk Empire, and he’s almost as great here. It speaks to his abilities that I did not recognize him at first – he seemed that different from his role as Owen Sleater in Boardwalk. I can say I have never liked Rosario Dawson better. I can’t explain it, but I really liked her in this. I don’t like Deborah Ann Woll – from Jessica in True Blood onwards, she is just not a very good actress, and if anything, seems to be getting worse. Everything else occupied me to the degree that I could not stop watching until I was done with all 13 episodes.

I was ready to go to sleep at one point, but the transition between episodes five and six shows the masterful level of suspense this show can creates, which forces the whole binge-watching phenomenon (“Just to see what happens, then I will stop” or “Just one more episode”. Famous last words.)

I liked it, but maybe my enjoyment has been tempered by the fact that my USB thumb drive died – and I only managed to extract about a quarter of the data it contained. Oh, it hurts.

Lunchtable TV Talk – House of Cards and Veep – Politics

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I can’t add much to the feverish discussion surrounding the latest, much-anticipated release of House of Cards episodes on Netflix. Similarly, I won’t be eloquent about HBO comedy Veep. Both have been around for a few seasons – and in both cases, the new seasons began with the stakes higher than ever for the main characters, Frank Underwood and Selina Meyer, respectively, because both had since last season, ascended to the presidency of the United States.

House of Cards is a drama predicated on a lot of underhanded and often illegal machinations and dealmaking. Veep is a comedy predicated on the idea that vice presidents are little more than puppets who appear for photo-ops and toe the party line. Each show has its strengths – particularly their stellar and varied casts (as I have written before – I will watch things just because I like the actors in it). These shows are no exception.

Kevin Spacey and Robin Wright head a cast that includes quite a few great performers. I happen to love Molly Parker, and her Jackie Sharp seems genuinely conflicted at times about balancing the need for honesty and humanity against the requirement to lie and scheme to achieve upper-echelon power. Michael Kelly’s continued portrayal of Doug Stamper as a shady operator, willing to do whatever it takes, has been riveting. I also enjoyed seeing Lars Mikkelsen (brother of Mads Mikkelsen of Hannibal fame) playing the Russian president to idiomatic perfection – “it’s a lot of work being a Dane trying to do a Russian accent” (naturally adding a tick in the checklist of even more Scandinavian men appearing on TV). There is a lot of drama, a lot of intrigue, and there are many unlikable people and actions here.

In that sense, I didn’t always enjoy the latest season. Wright’s performance as the First Lady is as commendable as her spot-on work throughout the series – she commits to and embodies Claire Underwood completely. But the story about her husband naming her as US Ambassador to the UN felt a bit half-baked to me. Even if such a move is possible, it seems so unrealistic and highly risky given the stakes pitted against her inexperience. Her demand that the president yield to her, reasoning that it is “her time”, might be authentic, if petulant and crybaby in tone, but the outcome feels forced. Nothing good comes of it.

Meanwhile the troubling trajectory Doug Stamper is on feels quite genuine, even if unrealistic, and Kelly embraces it with aplomb. He doesn’t just lie down and die when the president distances himself. When he is no longer in the inner circle, he finds ways to ensure he will get back there. Not pleasant ways, but sometimes chilling and always manipulative schemes to get him the information, leverage and power he needs to return to the president’s side.

Veep is of course, for the most part, a horse of another color. Despite superficial similarities, the shows – their casts, their tones, their drive, their stories, their purposes – could not be more different. In previous seasons, all the characters bring something special, comedic (sometimes embarrassingly comedic) to the table and present a farcical take on (vice) presidential politics. Headed up by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who is really in her element here, as vice president (now president) Selina Meyer, the cast is made up of characters both overly driven and egotistical who compete with each other to try to win favor with the VP, as is the case with Anna Chlumsky and Reid Scott. Both are smart and want to be at the forefront of Meyer’s campaigns and staff – and often ended up, for lack of a better term, “eating shit” on Meyer’s behalf. Tons of other great characters played by great actors – nothing more notable that I can add. (I am so happy to see Patton Oswalt on the show as the new VP’s chief of staff. Oswalt’s showing up everywhere these days, and I love it: Justified, a hilarious episode of the beleaguered Battle Creek, voiceover in The Goldbergs, voice work in BoJack Horseman, a role in Brooklyn Nine-Nine… and he is still something to miss about United States of Tara!). It’s a funny show, and keeps getting funnier – while House of Cards feels like it’s sliding.

All of that said and done, if you want the best political drama ever to be on TV, it’s Danish and includes the aforementioned Lars Mikkelsen: Borgen.

Subtitled entertainment – Language realism on TV

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As a person who often multitasks while “watching” television, I don’t always pay close attention to every moment of action. (That is, I hear all the dialogue but don’t always catch the visuals going with it.) Particularly with some of the dumber shows I watch, such as The Following or The Slap, this does not bother me much. I pay closer attention to shows I enjoy. But then there is a growing middle category: subtitled entertainment.

When I watch a foreign (non-English-language) film, I already know there will be subtitles, and I don’t watch something like that until I am ready to focus. But television is starting to introduce more and more subtitled content. In a sense it’s an era of language realism. In most films and TV of the past, we’d be treated to unrealistic and frankly stupid dialogue in which the actors (English speakers) adopted some kind of vaguely similar regional accent representing the place they were supposed to be from… and very little of the actual local language would appear.

Now, in a further change to content development – language is adding to the realism of many TV shows. The Americans probably leads the way, with a liberal mix of English and Russian. An article has even been written on how the writers decide when to use Russian. Hint: The choice comes down to authenticity. In The Americans, it makes perfect sense. Russians working within a Soviet institution in the United States are not going to speak to each other in English.

Another show where the blend makes perfect sense is the US version of The Bridge. It takes place on the US-Mexico border, and US police and working closely with Mexican police.

It has appeared more and more in various shows recently, such as Allegiance and The Blacklist. Interesting, it appears in shows in which the plot involves a lot of international intrigue. No big surprise. Language realism also appears in shows like Jane the Virgin, in which the grandmother speaks exclusively in Spanish, but understands English perfectly. She always speaks Spanish with her daughter, Xiomara, and granddaughter, Jane, but they almost always answer her in English.

The same kind of mix has appeared in Netflix’s Lilyhammer. An American organized criminal, exiled in witness protection in Lillehammer, Norway, navigates Norwegian language and society – the longer the show goes on, the more it’s conducted in Norwegian, mirroring the main character’s “integration” (which never quite happens fully).

These are all one-hour dramas, and somehow the language realism feels more expected in that setting. But it’s also happening more and more in the half-hour sitcom format, which feels strange in that I can’t imagine people having the attention span required to read the screen. But strangely – they do. The best example of this I can come up with is Welcome to Sweden, in which a fairly typical American guy moves to Stockholm with his Swedish girlfriend. His comical trials feature prominently – often in Swedish (particularly interactions with his in-laws). I did not even think about it when I recommended it to someone who only speaks English. He was going to watch it using my Swedish Netflix account, which did not offer subtitles in English.

It seems remarkable that as foreign language is receiving less emphasis than ever in US schools, language and culture diversity is appearing in a bigger way than ever on America’s TV shows. And it has jumped from just the occasional bit of Spanish, which has arguably been the most common second language on US TV, to reflect a slightly wider range of language diversity.

Lunchtable TV Talk – Bloodline

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“I don’t want to fuck with your case, Clay. Go have a sunshiny day.” -John Rayburn (Kyle Chandler) in Bloodline

Sometimes you start watching a show or a movie and immediately know you are going to love it. Bloodline is not one of these shows. I knew that I would see it through, though, no matter what. Mostly, I knew I would watch because of star Kyle Chandler. I have been an enthusiastic Kyle Chandler cheerleader and champion since the early years – back when Chandler played Jeff Metcalf in the critically acclaimed but little-seen, little-remembered Homefront* back in the early 1990s. Chandler has appeared in many more shows over the years – most notably Early Edition and Friday Night Lights (the latter of which is an exceptional show). Chandler embodies Coach Eric Taylor from Friday Night Lights to the extent that it is almost impossible to imagine him in any other role. In most roles he has been a just but cranky and lovable but curmudgeonly man. In Bloodline it becomes clear he is still the moral compass of his difficult family, working in law enforcement, but he is troubled, and his performance in the final episode is like nothing I have ever seen Chandler do. (Also, the fact that Chandler’s character uses the word “fuck” or some variation of it almost every other word he says is a bit disarming. He’s Coach Taylor, and he doesn’t talk like that! Haha.)

Having already determined that I would follow through with the entire series (which was made available in full on Netflix), I do admit that the first five episodes didn’t inspire a whole lot of confidence about the show in its entirety. It moved slowly, moved around in time so that it was not clear when things were happening and thus was not clear what things were happening. It focuses on the dysfunctional Rayburn family; they own an inn in the Florida Keys. It is a somewhat complicated tale that weaves together past grievances with current problems and strained family relationships that all come to a head when Danny (played to menacing, psychopathic perfection by Australian actor Ben Mendelsohn), the black sheep of the family, returns.

Things pick up around the fifth episode. The story starts to tighten and the excellent cast helps the story to crystallize and brings it to life – even those in the smallest roles. By the end, I was riveted and very impressed by how the story unfolded. After the pieces of the story start to gel, all of the story’s mystery and pacing feel necessary and masterful. Luckily, the show will be back for a second season. I can’t wait – both because the storytelling preserves suspense – and there’s got to be more of that coming – and because I can always use another Kyle Chandler fix.

*Want to see Chandler before Coach Taylor, John Slattery before Roger Sterling (Mad Men), Ken Jenkins before Dr Kelso (Scrubs) or Chick (Cougar Town) or Mimi Kennedy before Abby (Dharma & Greg) or Marjorie (Mom)? Homefront is where you can see them all circa 1992-93.

Television is the new TV – The great disconnect

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A few years ago when I worked in the tech industry, there was a lot of noise about “cord cutting” and how internet technologies could enable consumers to bypass expensive and inflexible cable companies. The vision at the time was just that – a vision that had not quite caught up to reality. But now we’re living in a slightly-different-than-imagined version of that reality. I know a lot of people who don’t have relationships with a cable company, and all their entertainment comes in some form of streaming and they can pick and choose, smörgåsbord style, what they want to buy into (or not). Of course there are still some constraints in terms of internet connectivity – with many people held hostage by the lack of choice in ISPs. But there has never been quite as much freedom to choose content and content source as there is today.

This got me to thinking, though, that even if we are essentially looking at content that we’d traditionally refer to as “television” – the sudden lack of “programming”, the ability to watch whenever and wherever, the ability to avoid advertising (or succumb to more targeted ads), the shift toward creating truly amazing stories and the elevation of “TV” shows to high art or at least something that surpasses two-hour film format storytelling by adding richness, depth, character building and production value – all of this means that we are witnessing the birth of something quite new. (One writer calls it “complex TV” but I would go so far as to argue that it is not TV at all.)

Can we call what we are watching “TV” just because it vaguely follows the same format? When streaming and binge-watching are becoming de facto – and shows are not necessarily created with traditional advertising streams in mind, tethers to certain templates are broken. Creativity is unleashed in new ways and places. We see small-scale, independent online production and exclusively online productions to complement traditional programming. We see “networks” creating original content, which was novel enough when it was no longer the big three American networks – Fox had been in the game for some time. But when paid cable got into the game, quality and diversity (and risk taking) became important. Ratings and audience share became less important. And when ratings still posed a challenge for some shows in one channel, it has grown likelier for another outlet to pick up the production in one way or another (some examples of this include Netflix running with long-dead Arrested Development to produce new episodes and a collaboration between different, non-traditional partners to continue producing critically lauded but ratings-challenged Friday Night Lights and Damages.) Online outlets got involved to become their own kind of networks – with Netflix leading the way and disrupting the whole model of keeping viewers on the hook for months as a story played out week after week on television. Where home entertainment, like DVD boxsets, unleashed the “binge watching”/marathon phenomenon, Netflix and later Amazon Prime were able to produce and release full seasons of high quality content whenever they wanted to (not beholden to any traditional “TV season”). Kicking that up a notch more recently has been Yahoo!’s step into the ring – reviving former NBC, perpetually on-the-bubble comedy weirdness Community.

This is still called “TV content”. But is it? When Netflix or Yahoo! bring an actual TV show from a network back to life through their own channels, is it still TV just because the show came from there? This week’s episode of Black-ish has the four kids talking in horror about how, in the old days, you had to watch content when it was scheduled or miss it forever. No pause button! No choices!

Are the methods by which we watch influencing how these shows are made, when they are released? And if this is not TV any longer, what is it? It’s not programming in the traditional television sense. And when a content provider releases entire seasons at one time, they have changed the entire production process. The content is not consumed, perceived or even built in the same way.

I recently read about how “television writers” are forced to evolve and create an end-to-end story when dealing with a full-season streaming show that is released all at once, while traditional network shows can alter the trajectory of a storyline that does not perform well or is unpopular with viewers (e.g. the storyline in which Kalinda’s husband shows up on The Good Wife. It was not well-received, so the writers scrapped it at their first opportunity). But there are no U-turns or detours when Amazon gives us an entire season of Transparent. In that way, full-season, binge-bait “content dumping” is like the release of a film, only a film is maybe two hours, and a show is 12 or 13 hours (or half that, in the case of half-hour shows) – assuming that any of these content creators decide in the long run to stick with the semi-traditional “duration” lengths. This could change, too. It already has changed to some degree.

As we disconnect from traditional methods of content consumption, we are consuming new things in new ways – we are not watching television any longer, even if we are watching our content ON an actual television.