TV shows

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: The Code – You are only coming through in waves

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Watching TV and films is often like riding a wave. One show or film appears, and you are carried along to the next, even if by seemingly random choice, and somehow there are always connections. Many connections between the shows, many connections to other things I have watched, whether its the appearance of various actors popping up or thematic links.

The other night in sleeplessness, I stumbled on the six-part Australian TV show The Code… I’m hit immediately by recognizable visual cues. First, the appearance of Aden Young. This is the only other place I have seen Aden Young, apart from his leading role in the underwatched Rectify. I have often wondered how he acts in other things. As the startlingly weird Daniel Holden, it is hard to imagine him in any other way. I keep expecting his actual Australian accent to come out slower and more southern, like Holden’s unmistakably deliberate drawl.

Next, I stared and stared at the actor who plays the mentally unstable hacker brother, certain that I know him from somewhere. He very vaguely reminded me of the dude who was George in Grey’s Anatomy but I KNEW it was not him. But then it hit me – Manhattan! Yes, Manhattan, which will be back soon for its second season (which ties in like a gentle wave with my recent viewing of the Norwegian production, Kampen om tungtvannet, or The Saboteurs – both deal with the race toward building a nuclear bomb).

Figures that I would accidentally select something Australian immediately after seeing the Australian film Tracks, starring Mia Wasikowska. It made me think of things I had not considered in years, such as reading one of Bruce Chatwin’s final books, The Songlines, during university. Without knowing of his appearance beforehand, there in the Australian Outback as an American National Geographic photographer is Adam Driver, from Girls.

And just the night before, I had seen Driver in While We’re Young, which is the latest output from Noah Baumbach. Fine-tuned Baumbach is great. Some of his stuff can be pretentious – not bad, per se, but makes you wonder what for. Nothing quite so true in that department than his widely praised The Squid and The Whale, which I had not thought of in years. I liked it but it’s definitely a “type” of movie. But I mention it now more because of this continuing wave of connection. The film was mentioned in Thursday’s episode of Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll, when Denis Leary’s character confuses the story of Jonah and the whale with The Squid and The Whale, which is exactly the kind of thing he’d take the piss out of (and does).

In many ways, The Code was a microcosm of the point I am trying to make – lots of disconnected threads eventually cross. The story in The Code is actually three separate threads of the same story. They cross but do not quite interweave until all the threads come together. This is a lot like what television (and film) are like – a small world full of people who inhabit many imaginary worlds. We the viewers piece them all together each time.

Lunchtable TV Talk: Israeli TV – Beyond Homeland

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Homeland is probably the only well-known reimagining of an original Israeli TV program. Americans (or anyone, really) grabbing onto an existing show – and either bastardizing it (which in television is more like stealing a scene-for-scene replay without adaptation or creativity or even cultural consideration) or redirecting it not for the better but maybe for greater perspective on a similar theme – is nothing new. The UK and US bat their respective shows across the Atlantic to make and remake like so many shuttlecocks, but adaptations from further afield are beginning to inspire. That said, just because you can watch a remake does not mean you should avoid the original. In fact, the original is usually better. The original UK version of The Office lasted only two glorious seasons. When the US made its own version, it started off slowly and tried to make a scene-by-scene copy of the original. Only when the US started to use the concept but not the play-by-play sameness did the US version of The Office find its voice – and become its own show. Both are good shows.

Don’t get me wrong. I am a fan of (most of) Homeland. It is loosely based on Israeli program Hatufim (Prisoners of War), which is considerably more complex than Homeland. I am a bigger fan of Hatufim, even if it suffers from very different production values. It feels like a human story, much more than the edgy thriller Homeland aspires to be.

But Israeli TV has also offered up some adapted gems, such as the little-watched and often frustrating (in a good way) In Treatment. In it, Gabriel Byrne played a therapist and patient. Each night of the week, he would see a patient and on the last night of the week, he would see his own therapist (Dianne Wiest). The Israeli original was called B’tipul and introduced the concept of showing one episode nightly – each one representing one patient’s appointment, i.e. each Monday was the same patient, etc. It only lasted for two seasons, but it was engaging in a way that most shows are not. You would not imagine that a show in which two people sit, talk and engage in what are fairly realistic therapy sessions would draw you in. But somehow they did. Maybe not enough, though, because the show did not last.

Taking inspiration from an Israeli source does not always work – most likely when major American networks get their claws into the idea. The recent attempt to adapt Israeli program, The Gordin Cell, into a spy thriller, Allegiance, did not work at all. In this case, it seems it was less about trying to create a quality show and more about trying to capitalize on the critical praise heaped on The Americans. I assume NBC thought they could jump on the “Russian spy story” bandwagon, but it’s not as simple as that. Just as Mad Men’s popularity and critical acclaim did not transfer automatically to other 1960s period dramas with thin plots, like Pan Am and The Playboy Club, among others. Further evidence that major networks are usually followers, not leaders. Sometimes that works; usually it doesn’t.

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: The Walking Dead

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I never wanted to watch The Walking Dead – a “zombie show” hardly sounded on the surface like my thing. The Walking Dead has been talked and written about to such an extent that there is no reason on earth that I need to write more. I never imagined I would be someone who became addicted to the show, but I succumbed.

I got hooked like everyone else, but I suppose the real draw, apart from the idea of how people move forward after something catastrophic (whatever it is), is how individuals change and break out of the roles they play in life, continuing to evolve and toughen. Extraordinary circumstances bring out the extraordinary in people. This is the clearest “lesson” of The Walking Dead… all of the characters change to adapt to the new hardships, but some people become all new people in what is essentially an all new world. This is truest of Carol. It is probably also true of Michonne, the woman with the sword. We meet her when she is a fierce warrior, silent, all walls up and defensive. She becomes a caretaker for Andrea but our view into her past and the more sensitive woman she had been only comes into view later. In the latest season, we see her soften and move further in that direction. Everyone in The Walking Dead goes on a journey that changes them. It is inevitable.

But Carol… she has evolved completely throughout the course of the show. In the beginning, her meek and weak demeanor, and beaten-down, helpless woman persona drove me nuts. Every week I wished the zombies would get their hands on her. In a field full of other characters it seemed like Carol was just dead weight… an abused woman who embodies the worst traits of the abused woman. Not that you blame an abused person for “following the script” – and in that, Melissa McBride was outstanding. You pity her but hate her at the same time because, in light of the changed world, she seemed weaker, more helpless and more pathetic than ever. How can you whine and seem THAT petty when nothing around you is about you or your individual life any longer? Carol was still under her husband’s thumb when things started, and even once he was gone, she was still bound by the fear instilled in her through all the years of abuse. She also loses her daughter, and this is probably the last straw that turns Carol into the force she comes to be reckoned with. She ends up being one of the toughest, most ruthless, most calculating, most logical parts of the group – her earlier weakness filtered into a resilience that surpasses everyone else’s in the entire group. You end up respecting Carol more deeply than almost anyone else – in large part because of the journey she has taken, the growth she’s displayed (while letting go of some of the humanity that made her as sensitive as she once was).

Carol really came into her own in the most recent season of The Walking Dead, hiding in plain sight by “impersonating” her former self. Carol, as independent and tough as she has become, is fiercely protective and even maternal in her drive to take care of her own. Seeing her personal journey, along with the journeys of other cast favorites (such as Daryl), has been one of the most rewarding parts of sticking with the show.

Lunchtable TV Talk: King & Maxwell – Chasing the beaver

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The first episode of the defunct show, King & Maxwell, started with a car chase. If I recall, Rebecca Romijn‘s character was chasing someone dressed in a beaver costume. The silly opener was followed by what was singularly one of the most boring hours of television I’ve ever seen. Note to all: just starting something off with a car chase is still not enough to make people want to continue watching.

Perhaps its boredom-inducing spell became a kind of aphrodisiac, sending viewers subliminal messages screaming silently, “There is nothing else to do but turn to sex! Save yourself the misery of continuing to watch!” Yes, randy gents the world over, if you want to get your girl in bed – indulge in this inaugural boring episode of King & Maxwell, one of TV’s least interesting offerings. She will not be able to resist.

Me being the glutton for visual and virtual punishment that I am, though, I gave the show another go. Yes, I put myself through that. Oddly enough, though the first episode started up slowly, the next episodes were a lot more entertaining. The playful repartee between the two titular leads, King and Maxwell, played respectively by Jon Tenney and Rebecca Romijn, leads the show, and perhaps if it had been given a bit more opportunity to get off the ground, it might have gained an audience. I don’t know. It was a fairly standard PI procedural, so nothing groundbreaking. Plenty of deserving shows never make it past a first season. I question all the time, for example, how something vanilla-average, like the Debra Messing vehicle, The Mysteries of Laura, gets renewed for a second season, while something with a lot more personality and promise, like Battle Creek, gets the shaft. You tell me.

It was a bit harder to discern, but I think King & Maxwell may have had some promise. The aforementioned sarcastic spark between Tenney and Romijn and the unusual character played by Ryan Hurst (also seen in unique roles in Sons of Anarchy and Bates Motel) sometimes transcended the limitations of the show’s decidedly limited walls.

Lunchtable TV Talk: Outlander – Tha mo chas air ceann mo naimhdean

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A time-travel-based romance novel on TV is not really my thing. The time period in which Outlander takes place (1743) is equally uninteresting. I have an interest in the American Revolutionary War period, which is just a few years later and on another continent, and the slightly later French Revolution, which rounded out the 1700s. But the 1700s are otherwise not my time.

Outlander is no exception. Regardless of my love for Scotland and listening to the crazy accents there, Outlander gives me no pleasure. Each episode seems to drag on for an eternity, and its heroine is either a bad actress or has mediocre material to work with – or both. In fact the duo leading the cast, Irish actress Caitriona Balfe and Scottish actor Sam Heughan, is dismal. The acting here is a lot of overwrought facial expressions – really laying it on thick – and a lot of silences or very slow responses to build drama. I am sure some of this is the bread and butter of the genre, but some of it is just that neither of these two can act (although I am sure casting required a lot of finding two people who could perform nearly softcore porn on a weekly basis and look appealing doing it, in which case these two fit the bill). (Tobias Menzies is probably the best actor of the bunch in his dual role, but one of his characters is such a subhuman monster that his performance is painful to watch.) The mix of language/accent, the scenery and people’s willingness to get lost in the Scottish history, the romance, the time travel or some combination of all of it means that the acting doesn’t have to pass muster.

I slept through a few episodes but was awakened by some loud, gratuitous sex scenes – and I suppose that is one of the things that draws a fairly… ardent audience. Also, everyone loves the underdog – and is there a greater underdog (albeit a long, hard loss) story than that of Scotland versus England? (It plays out on the political stage to this day!)

What improbably caused me to continue watching is my fascination not just with unsubtitled TV (there’s plenty of unsubtitled Scottish Gaelic here, which may be the show’s best part) but also small and/or endangered languages. The show has apparently ignited an interest in the Scottish Gaelic language. Not by any means an easy or particularly accessible language to learn, I am heartened by movements and tools that encourage the learning and use of the world’s most unusual languages. If Outlander manages to create Gaelic-language awareness, well, then, more power to it.

Lunchtable TV Talk: A Touch of Cloth – The John Hannah School of English

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Firewall and I have created the imaginary John Hannah School of English to acknowledge Hannah’s brand of exaggerated, overenunciated English as spoken by a Scot – that’s John Hannah! I love it. We love when his voice suddenly comes on in a voiceover. In this show, the voice is matched only by the determined (but intentionally overacted) intensity on Hannah’s face.

In much the same way that Hannah’s way of speaking is a kind of parody of actual English, A Touch of Cloth spoofs procedural police dramas. Virtually every action, every word they say is an inside joke, a reference (“You’re nicked.”) to something else (often within the same genre) or over-the-top parody of the Law & Orders (and other shows like it) that have long saturated the airwaves.

Also, the boss, Tom Boss (of course), looked familiar – finally I realized he is one of the prisoners in the Australian show, Banished.

But what else is there to say except to concede perhaps that the cop investigation and justice system procedural has gone too far, if something like this show is possible? (Indeed, in interviews, Hannah has said as much. He asked his agent to stop sending him cop procedural scripts but changed his mind when he got the Touch of Cloth script. Why wouldn’t he, considering that it blows up the whole genre and laughs at it?)

What is fresh and refreshing about the show is that you could watch it a few times over and catch new things each time. In the first episode, for example, Hannah’s character, DI Jack Cloth, gets irrationally angry and violent (a la Elliot Stabler in Law & Order: Special Victims Unit) in the interrogation room with a potential suspect – to the point that even he admits in a worked-up frenzy that he doesn’t know what he is doing. Afterwards, he realizes that the suspect is probably innocent, but his boss forces him to arrest the guy anyway. Cloth goes to the local pub, where his partner (Anne Oldman, pronounced repeatedly as “an old man”) meets him; he complains, “Yeah I always come here when we lock up and innocent man, helps me forget everything.” His partner: “You in here a lot then?” Cloth: “Have no idea.” And the bartender hands Cloth Cloth’s mail. Haha. Then the female partner gets a phone call, and her ring tone is kd lang’s “Constant Craving” – as if to beat us over the head with the “lesbian cop” trope. Here I don’t really mind because that’s the point, right? Every single minute of this show is something equally as ridiculous. If it weren’t quite this ridiculous, it might be offensive. But when it doesn’t hit, it seems stupid but innocuous, and when it does, it’s quite funny – in the same vein of, for example, Airplane!.

Lunchtable TV Talk: The Brink

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Eager to find out how The Brink, a satirical comedy focused on a geopolitical crisis that ignites in Pakistan, ends, I keep watching. It’s a relatively funny journey – not too taxing or challenging given the political story (which can bog down shows attempting to be “light”, as this one aims to be). What sets this show apart is its stellar ensemble cast. Just when I get pulled into the scenes with the incorrigible, frenetic Jack Black and his driver, played by the multitalented Aasif Mandvi, the shift focuses to the sex-obsessed, liberal but never-taking-his-eye-off-the-ball US Secretary of State, played to perfection by Tim Robbins. But the show also has somewhat smaller but still standout roles for Pablo Schreiber, Carla Gugino (who also turned in a good performance recently in Wayward Pines) and John Larroquette.

On an entirely unrelated note, Larroquette’s presence sent me off on a nostalgic mental parade of past television, including Larroquette on the 80s sitcom classic, Night Court, of which he was the best part. But Night Court also included Harry Anderson, a most non-descript guy who nevertheless carved out a niche for himself as a magic aficionado and as a night-court judge, as a frequent guest star in Cheers and in the 80s/90s sitcom Dave’s World, based on the life of comedy writer, Dave Barry. And my twisted obituary-laced brain immediately recalls that Dave’s World’s Meshach Taylor (also famous for his turn as Anthony the ex-con in Designing Women) is dead – too young. Going back to Night Court, once again, whatever happened to Markie Post, the female lead in the show? Back in the 1990s she was in a little-watched but nevertheless entertaining Hearts Afire with the late John Ritter. (Of course my brain would lead me here – always the grim reaper.) Hearts Afire ended up being about a married couple working on a hometown newspaper in the south, but it started off being thematically not too different from Alpha House and The Brink – without the farce, of course. Incidentally, Hearts Afire also starred Billy Bob Thornton. But people were not quite ready for Billy Bob yet.

In some ways, ensemble shows like The Brink, as topical and sharp as they are, end up making me more interested in making connections – playing some kind of six-degrees-of-Kevin Bacon connect-the-dots. Obviously. Nothing about the unfolding crisis and underhanded political rivalries playing out in high-stakes, behind-the-scenes conflicts should lead someone to forgotten two-season sitcoms like Hearts Afire. But for a TV-crazed lunatic like me, they do.

Lunchtable TV Talk: Key & Peele

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I read that Key & Peele ends at the end of the current season. It’s sad but it goes out on a high. Will miss it and the instantly recognizable Reggie Watts sound of the theme music.

Where else will we see an over-the-top skit where two dudes go nuts praising “Liam Neesons” and follow-up in their onstage repartee with, “Why do we love Liam Neeson so much?” “I’ll tell you what… Ethan Frome – that’s my jam right there!” HAHA. Does anyone even remember that film version of the book?

Until overdosing on the most recent season I had completely forgotten that Key and Peele were in the first season of TV’s Fargo.

At least there’s a new season of Fargo coming up.