TV shows

Lunchtable TV Talk: River

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It is not often that Stellan Skarsgård goes wrong in his choices. Sure, I don’t love Mamma Mia! or The Glass House, but usually his work is worth watching, even if only for his presence (Nymphomaniac comes to mind here).

For me, River is one of the best surprises of 2015. For one thing, it’s “trippy” (as The Guardian refers to it). Detective Inspector John River is a loner who is out of touch with his own feelings but is in touch with visions/hallucinations of dead people and with a deep sense of empathy. All of this is quite unusual for a TV serial “renegade cop”. It could easily be a caricature, but the acting and the storytelling ensure that it does not devolve into ridiculous territory.

Ultimately it turns out to be a study in human complexity and fragility and is engaging at every step – and it’s only a six-hour journey, meaning that it fits neatly into an evening or two (for dedicated binge-watchers). Like most “detective” shows it’s point is to seek answers. But on different layers – not just the cop mystery on the surface. There are always secrets, and having community with the dead allows a bit more insight into those secrets. Seemingly cheesy plot device, but Skarsgård and excellent supporting cast make it work.

Lunchtable TV Talk: Lilyhammer – No experience leaves you unchanged

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It’s been a long time since I watched Lilyhammer on Netflix. And a long time since I moved to Norway myself. It was not a crash-landing as rough as that experienced by protagonist “Johnny”, the alter ego of an American mobster, Frank Tagliano, who goes into witness protection in Lillehammer, Norway after testifying against his cronies. Knowing the reach of the mob and relying on his love for the “Lilyhammer” Olympics (most of us just remember the Tonya Harding–Nancy Kerrigan saga), Frank manages to get his witness protection assignment in Lillehammer, Norway – which turns out to be a major culture shock not just for him but for everyone he encounters in the community. That includes the police force, social services, his new girlfriend, the hospital system… and everyone else.

He makes a strange bunch of new friends/colleagues, opens a new nightclub and changes the rules to suit him. Through manipulation and brute force, he pushes through quite a lot of his own brand of corruption, intimidation and coercion to impose on the naive, fairness-loving Norwegians. He also forces the residents to look in the mirror (e.g., an episode that deals with racism, refugees and “inclusion” – which is timely now during the recent refugee crisis). Frank can be insensitive and totally politically incorrect (and sexist), but has his own sense of fairness that comes from living in a multicultural society – even if a very limited one like the mob – and this rubs off on everyone around him and comes full circle until he starts to realize new truths about himself as well.

But no experience leaves you unchanged. While the Norwegians eventually bend and comply – and learn – from Frank’s ways, Frank too is softened by Norwegian life.

Lilyhammer was cancelled, so no more of the fun we got for three seasons… but luckily three seasons is an easy binge watch.

Lunchtable TV Talk: Getting On

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Getting On ended its chaos-filled run after three barely noticed seasons. An entire season happened without my ever hearing of it – it was completely under the radar and got very little media attention as TV shows go. We are supposedly in this peak TV period, which could arguably let a lot of quality TV fall right through the cracks. But it would also seem that the wide range of shows would send different tastes in different directions, allowing for exposure to pretty much everything – just smaller amounts for each thing. Then again, as a recent article from The New Yorker aptly points out, Getting On is not pretty. The environment: “Even in an age of downer comedies, Getting On is a hard sell. It’s set in a failing extended-care ward, whose patients are elderly women.”

Doesn’t sound like something most would like – nor something that would be funny, but it manages to be engaging, deeply human and ridiculously funny. It’s also brutal, ugly and true – painfully true.

I recently slogged through all eight seasons of TV’s House M.D. and wrote about it and how House’s misanthropy was perfectly summed up in one of House’s monologues in the first episode, railing against the idea that a person can die with dignity: “It’s always ugly, always….You can live with dignity, we can’t die with it.” House was able to describe this, but I have never seen anything show this truth as effectively or honestly as Getting On did.

Lunchtable TV Talk: House – King of Misanthropes

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House is one of those shows with an egotistical, maniacal, damaged “genius” with special skills at the helm. It never interested me much, despite being a Hugh Laurie fan, as medical mystery procedurals don’t generally keep delivering punches after one season. They hold our interest when they are new because we like novelty – we like curmudgeonly assholes or mental cases (and I do recognize that lumping people into a superficial group like “mental cases” is insensitive and a massive and unfair generalization). There is only so much we can take of assholes, racists, addicts on TV… from Archie Bunker to Adrian Monk, from Hank Moody to almost all characters Denis Leary plays on TV. Dr Gregory House is one of the biggest of all TV jerks, and completely self-involved, self-destructive and does not care how he hurts – or how much – the people in his life. That common thread runs, to varying degrees, through all these “lovable” (or not so lovable) jerks.

I realize it is a bit late to be writing about a show like House. It’s old – it ended ages ago. I was surprised when I watched the first season to see that it was more than a decade old already. I got sucked into House recently after a long, self-imposed foreign-film festival on the homestead. I just wanted some English-language entertainment to occupy my mind only halfway. What struck me first is: how on earth do we, with our short attention spans, manage to follow or care about serialized television shows that go on for 22 or 24 episodes per season? Particularly with these kinds of shows, they run out of steam fairly quickly and become predictable (even in their lack of unpredictability). It still remained mildly entertaining, but when you’re bingeing all eight seasons at once, all 176 plus or minus, it wears out its welcome really fast. I recently read an article in which a TV critic argues that binge watching enables a show to be created expressly for the binge in mind, which means we are less likely to pick out its flaws. This applies mostly to shows created for streaming that go for a max of about 13 episodes. I agree to some extent – nothing’s perfect, whether it’s too long, too short, or skimps on process that adds to plot. These things are designed to stream and ingest all in one go. But these longer shows that get churned out season after season feel churned out. A great slog through mostly mud before occasionally hitting a few smoother streams.

Second thing that struck me, of course, as I am sensitively attuned to these things, and which is not at all a surprise: addicts possess nothing but meanness, diffuse blame and spew denial and insult whenever they can. But House is not the best portrayal of how addiction works. It occasionally illustrates (although more with unrealistic storylines and hammer-over-the-head consequences for the people House works with – his “friends”) the bad parts of addiction. House is openly an addict, and the people around him openly enable it. It is a lot more interesting and realistic to see addiction (particularly in a healthcare setting) in Nurse Jackie. (You can incidentally get a lot better and more intimate view on the work lives of nurses from Nurse Jackie and Getting On than medical shows like House, which have nothing to do with nurses, in any case.) Addiction really only comes into stark focus as season five ends and season six begins, and House goes to rehab. I suppose the “party” could not go on forever.

Third note: I think I kept watching throughout because I like the cast. And for most of the cast, I like them in these roles. I have not really liked Jennifer Morrison in much other than in her role as Dr Cameron. I really have a growing hatred for Lisa Edelstein after suffering (forcing myself to suffer, really) through each week’s increasingly horrifying episode of Girlfriends Guide to Divorce, but seeing her in House makes her look strong, intelligent, thoughtful, insightful. Girlfriends Guide strips away every last bit of the humanity and compassion that Edelstein cultivated in House. I realize the point of acting is to… act, but the characters in GG2D are so distasteful that I can’t see why someone would want to stretch their “acting chops” to stoop so low. Robert Sean Leonard is a reliably good foil, friend and enabler for Hugh Laurie’s Dr House, and Omar Epps has carved out a career of being a doctor on TV.

While there are only so many scenes of close-ups of House’s brooding, thoughtful scowl a person can take, I appreciated the opening episode of House, wherein, as an introduction to his misanthropy, in which he explains to a patient who exclaims, after being probed, prodded and tested that she just wants to “die with dignity”:

“There’s no such thing! Our bodies break down, sometimes when we’re 90, sometimes before we’re even born, but it always happens and there’s never any dignity in it. I don’t care if you can walk, see, wipe your own ass. It’s always ugly, always….You can live with dignity, we can’t die with it.”

Lunchtable TV Talk: Survivor’s Remorse

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While I never heard of it and find the title a bit strange (survivor’s guilt? buyer’s remorse? I can sort of see the strains of this… but somehow it seems like its title would be better for the underrated and already canceled Getting On, while this show could easily be called Getting On…) for a basketball drama, I decided to dig in and watch after Survivor’s Remorse appeared on a few 2015 best-of lists. I would not go so far as to put it atop any best lists, but it’s rather entertaining.

The show riffs a bit on the family drama – a gifted young athlete becomes an almost overnight millionaire and his family tags along when he moves to the Atlanta team. We’ve seen stuff like this, but most dramas explore the exploitative aspects of the family (the family milks the athlete for all he is worth). You get a taste of that here, but mostly the family is close and the strength of that keeps it all together.

Nice to see the actress, Teyonah Parris, who played Mad Men’s first black secretary, Dawn, land here in a big supporting role. The show is ostensibly a comedy but quite handily deals with some serious issues, making light of divisive matters. Comedy flows, sometimes from the strangest places, but nowhere is it more consistent and hilarious than with the family uncle, Julius. Julius is a bit of a loser/hanger-on but always tells it like it is (usually in a way that’s comical). I won’t cite examples – it’s worth you watching yourself to see him ride with local police to chase down a ne’er-do-well bicycle thief, to watch him using his nephew’s new fame to score with a bunch of women or to see him go to a store to find a “dog repellent” and find one called “K Nein”.

I can’t say that the main character inspires much interest at all – but everyone around him is worth viewing, from the aforementioned uncle to the main character’s sister, Mary Charles, from crazy DeShauwn to the Chinese shoe “captain of industry” Da Chen Bao. They are worth watching.

Lunchtable TV Talk: Jane the Virgin

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I cannot count the times I nearly gave up on Jane the Virgin. When I get annoyed, somehow it reels itself back in. I can’t explain why – it’s not really my style. The overly theatrical craziness of the telenovela style doesn’t do much for me, which I suppose is why these kinds of shows (Jane the Virgin now and Ugly Betty a few years ago) bind themselves tightly with down-to-earth family stories that keep them from going completely off the rails. (Although all of the stories are crazy.)

The show routinely makes it onto a lot of year-end-best lists, and I can’t quite give it that level of approval. I keep watching, improbably, because most of the characters are likeable and when the show decides to ground certain things in reality (and there are remarkably few of these things), it goes all out. Jane’s struggles with new motherhood, for example, are pretty realistic. Her tiredness, her going days without taking a shower, the complete and exclusive concentration on her baby (to the detriment of her friendships) feel very real and well-timed (that is, her baby did not grow into a giant two-year-old boy in the course of half a season, and her struggles in each week’s episode feel well-paced enough to coincide with real milestones in her baby’s development and her development as a mother). Perhaps these are not reasons to keep watching a show, but there is definitely something compelling enough that I keep watching it while letting several other shows (such as, Empire) drift off my watch list.

Lunchtable TV Talk: Review

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Forrest MacNeil rivals my own knowledge of zip codes! He proudly declares sometime in season two that he knows all the zip codes, which makes his co-host roll her eyes (as she often does), and mutter, “That’s weird.” And yeah, it is. But sometimes it is moments like these that flip the switch for me – I like something but really decide I like it in small moments like that. Our zip code kinship sealed the deal.

I had been hearing about Review with Forrest MacNeil for a good while and could never find it to watch online (until now). Taunted by its presence in a list of TV’s 35 best shows (and my inability to see it), I sought it out and have now finally, greedily, watched it all. It’s been a trip into really committed absurdity. I’ve had a few laughs. More importantly, I’ve seen something here that I have not quite seen before. It is full of, as a recent article in The Atlantic describes, “cringe-inducing” humor, always imbuing the viewer with that dreaded sense that all best and earnest intentions are bound to go wrong coupled with a few visual gags that provide a juvenile chuckle or two. As the same article in The Atlantic points out as well, it is a show about a very average, milquetoast man who believes his opinions are important and in this belief transcends the limitations of his suburbanite timidity and dullness: “Like so many average men, Forrest thinks his opinions are important, a seemingly harmless belief the show carries to extreme conclusions.”

Forrest MacNeil is fictional tv show host who reviews life rather than tv shows or movies, and with considerable earnestness of his own and manipulative coaxing from his producer, pushes absurd viewer questions into insane territory… and ridiculous, insane consequences result. In fact, tragic results, if they weren’t so completely ridiculous. From taking an ultimately tragic space flight to leading a cult, Forrest MacNeil’s explorations on behalf of other people’s curiosity are preposterous (and seem to adversely affect those he loves most of all – from ruining his marriage and his ex’s future happiness to destroying all his father’s homes) – and his own complete obliviousness, disregard for anyone else’s feelings or for what is appropriate (in the name of his “mission”) lead to disaster.

I do wonder: is Forrest MacNeil a psychopath? Hard to tell – he’s an insecure guy who does love and wants to be loved. But constantly putting his show ahead of his own well-being and the well-being of those he loves has made him blind to consequences. He nearly dies a dozen times and descends into lunacy. And just as he decides to delve into what it’s like to believe in a conspiracy theory, he decides the show’s producer, Grant, is the villain who has conspired to kill him through his show’s review process. Until Grant slyly shoots down the theories with:

“People are constantly asking you to review dangerous things because they already know what the easy stuff is like. They can do that themselves. Living on the edge like this, things will go wrong and people get hurt.”

In some ways this feels a bit like a meditation/commentary on reality TV and how as a society, our craving for more – both living vicariously through others and demanding the most extreme actions through them – has pushed the edges of normalcy and decency to … abnormal and indecent territory.

All in the name of entertainment… the show must go on, right?

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: Treme

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It’s hard to characterize Treme, a little-watched, slow and critically praised show that sometimes felt like it lost its way, even if it never had one. It meandered, and in many ways, that felt quite intentional. Much more like real life than the way television moves forward with unrealistic plot points and devices that are thrown in not to serve the story but to keep drama churning. But do you need non-stop drama to keep you caring?

Treme never had the slow-burning intensity or high stakes that its creator’s masterpiece predecessor, The Wire, did but it was also an entirely different story, a different kind of story. Could a collection of loosely interwoven tales of people’s lives in post-Katrina (I struggle with the fact that this was already more than ten years ago – it seems like yesterday, and I imagine it feels recent for people dealing with its ongoing aftermath) New Orleans hold together tightly enough to make people watch? Perhaps not – but Treme gave us a reminder that there still are serious after-effects of the storm as well as memorable characters from all walks of life who live with those after-effects day in and day out.

Perhaps that is the characterization: the show is about characters a lot more than it is about stories. Very gritty and real-seeming characters whose lives are in no way tidy or “decided”. Everyone is as ambiguous as real people are. There are no moral epiphanies and black-and-white rights and wrongs here (in that sense it is very much the rightful successor to The Wire, which brought us moral and legal ambiguity in a host of different shades).

Lunchtable TV Talk: Wilfred

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A long time ago I saw the first season of Wilfred and although I liked it, I forgot all about it. Recently I binged my way through the subsequent seasons during an equally all-encompassing baking binge and was surprised by how poignant a show it turned out to be. Questioning our sometimes tenuous links with reality, the quality of our relationships and the very meaning of existence at times, Wilfred never delivers answers and seems only to pose more questions. Its absurdity drives its stories and is its engine while its heart is as cruel, as manipulative, as misleading, as deceptive, as multilayered but ultimately as soft as … humanity. And that seems to be the point.Humanity and our relationships with other humans (or humanized canines!) is cruel and manipulative, among other things. And perhaps worst of all, our own minds can be playing tricks on us – and as Wilfred asks more than once, how can you tell the difference?

Given that answers are all left open to interpretation, Wilfred leaves you with a few laughs, some frustration and a lot of triggers for emotional response and analysis.

The premise – depressive and suicidal young man begins having conversations with his neighbor’s anthropomorphized dog, Wilfred. No one else can see the dog in this form. And from this basic and frankly silly idea, there is a lot more under the surface – and continuing the awkward and ill-formed analogy – a lot of bones to dig up and chew on.

It’s no masterpiece, but Wilfred felt like a quiet but powerful wave. I was easily sucked in, never once felt taxed or bored and was left with a lot to think about.