Transparent

Lunchtable TV Talk: Bradley Whitford, TV’s Everywhere Man

Standard

Thanks to my curiosity and love for connecting the dots, I discovered a recurring column on The AV Club website that features interviews with actors and pops questions to them about random roles they have played. I stumbled first onto the Bradley Whitford column because, while I had seen a steady Whitford presence on TV for years, lately he suddenly appeared everywhere in almost everything I was watching: the canceled-too-early Trophy Wife, the delightful and poignant Transparent, the acerbic and churlish HAPPYish, the hilarious Brooklyn Nine-Nine and satirical Alpha House. I don’t much need to highlight his presence in The West Wing or its short-lived Aaron Sorkin follow-up Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip.

A number of other actors turn up in these random role articles – some favorites, like Allison Janney – and others who turn up positively everywhere but whose real names elude me but whose faces show up everywhere. Bradley Whitford is not exactly one of those name-on-tip-of-tongue guys, especially because his roles, however small, hold such sway. His cynical realist role in HAPPYish, in particular, has been a perfect foil for Steve Coogan and exactly the counterbalance needed. Even in a guest role, such as playing Jake Peralta’s absent asshole father in Brooklyn Nine-Nine, is winning. Same applies for Whitford’s role in Transparent. It’s not big, but he makes the memorable most of it. This is why I love Mr Whitford and hope he keeps popping up everywhere. (News flash: while I was writing this I happened to be watching the film CBGB – and who appears out of nowhere? Bradley Fucking Whitford! Was not expecting that. Or his Trophy Wife trophy wife, Malin Akerman as Debbie Harry…)

Lunchtable TV Talk – Grace and Frankie: Squandered opportunity

Standard

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 – HAPPYish: “Everyone’s f—ed and they don’t even know…”

Standard

Apparently, HAPPYish on Showtime was meant to be a vehicle for Philip Seymour Hoffman’s boundless talents before his untimely death. The usually entertaining (in that obnoxious, this-rubs-me-the-wrong-way-but-I’m-still-laughing manner) Steve Coogan stepped in.

I don’t think it’s Coogan’s fault that the material feels tired, overworked, too much overprivileged middle-aged man at odds with the changing world. Coogan’s character is a senior ad exec, and much like Don Draper in Mad Men, he finds that the changing media landscape and its youth-oriented sensibilities seem to be moving on without him – even if those movements are actually illogical, loss-making bullshit. Coogan is the voice of reason but no one is listening. He’s struck by malaise – unable to be effective at work and unable to be particularly effective in his marriage. He can’t sexually perform, he tells his eager wife (Kathryn Hahn) that Prozac has robbed him of his libido but without Prozac he’d basically be horny but a miserable prick. The first episode makes Hahn seem like she is not able to say much aside from some variation of, “Are we gonna fuck (or not)?” And we were led to believe that men had the one-track minds.

The second episode focused more on Hahn’s troubled relationship with her unseen mother and her internal struggle about whether or not she should return a giant package her mother sent for her grandson. Somehow the parental conflict we don’t see just feels petty and Hahn’s character petulant and self-indulgent because we don’t really know the context. I normally like Hahn (she’s great in both Parks and Recreation and Transparent) but the writing and story here does not suit Hahn and seemingly does not suit anyone who is in this show – and there are a lot of names popping up, but everyone seems awkward.

Part of the problem, apart from trying too hard, is that we have little pieces of this same show already done better in other shows. We have the ad man-out-of-time in Mad Men. We have the hilarious parody of an industry that often seems to be blowing itself and praising its own insular nature at the expense of reality in Silicon Valley. We have the married-life rut and suburban ennui done to perfection in Togetherness. Like most critics, I think we don’t need another TV show about a dissatisfied but mostly spoiled middle-aged white dude complaining about everything he doesn’t have.

Do yourself a favor and watch those shows – not this one.

“Everyone’s fucked and they don’t even know…”

Television is the new TV – The great disconnect

Standard

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.