TV

Lunchtable TV Talk: Hit & Miss (or why I changed my mind about Chloë Sevigny)

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Hit & Miss was the first time I heard Joy Division’s “Atmosphere” in what would be twice in two days (the second was in the stellar soundtrack to Stranger Things). Just incidental but positive.

I don’t know quite what led me to Hit & Miss. It’s a British show from 2012, so it’s not new, but I think it appeared on a recent list of “must-see” shows (which I routinely paw through looking for gems I may have overlooked in my obsessive TV viewing. Believe it or not, with the mushrooming of different platforms and their respective original programming, it’s easy for a lot of good and true-to-the-word “original” programming slip through the ever-widening cracks).

The protagonist, Mia, played by the versatile Chloë Sevigny, is a pre-op transgendered woman – and hitman/professional assassin. She’s at the top of her game in terms of successful hits when she gets word that her former girlfriend is ill with cancer and the surprising news that she has a son, Ryan. By the time Mia receives the letter and goes to her former girlfriend’s home, the woman has already died, leaving behind just her children. Mia, wanting to be there for her son and indeed for the rest of the children, takes on the entire family. The drama that ensues from here plays out over the course of six episodes is well worth watching.

Somehow, describing the plot in these bullet points makes it sound completely outlandish: any show would have more than enough story to grapple with just managing any single one of the traits/points listed. That is, a story about a transgendered woman could make a whole show. The story of a female assassin, another. The story of a former lover having to return to the past to rear a child he never knew about, another. But to combine all these and make it not just work but triumph is a real feat. Not everything about Hit & Miss was perfect, but its understated nature and careful, never-gratuitous handling of all of the difficult and sensitive subject matter nearly was. And at the core of that near-perfection was a solid, committed performance from its star, Sevigny.

Why I changed my mind: Chloë Sevigny

Sevigny was sort of an “it” girl – but a subversive one – in the 1990s, but she never embodied that overhyped concept (a concept that makes one biased immediately against someone who is overexposed in the early parts of their career). Someone like Sevigny, who has never been “mainstream” in a sense but has been prolific in her varied work, is someone I felt that bias against, both because of the overexposure/praise and because many of her sometimes daring choices seemed attention-grabbing (unsimulated oral sex in The Brown Bunny) more than professionally risky. Not to mention that many of the characters, despite being vulnerable, are almost never likeable. Often shady, scheming, not anyone you would want to be friends with or emulate. But that is Sevigny’s genius. She can make all of these negative character traits work and weave them into so many vastly different characters but at the same time make many of these characters fragile and vulnerable in ways that I have rarely seen any actor convey. Over time I have come to appreciate the growing depth of her work (I loved to hate her in Big Love; felt she added an interesting, honest, world-weary depth to the already brilliant Bloodline; was one of the few bright points in the most recent season of the increasingly bad American Horror Story). Frankly she grounded Hit & Miss, which could have been a colossal miss had it not been for her performance.

Photo (c) 2005 Cesar Bojorquez

Lunchtable TV Talk: Stranger Things

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I never imagined, when he was young (or when I was young, for that matter), that Matthew Modine would, in middle age, come to play a range of (semi-)evil masterminds. But both here in Stranger Things and in the short-lived and flat Proof, Modine is just that. He is a behind-the-scenes kind of guy, pulling all the strings. Would you have imagined that when you saw him Vision Quest or Full Metal Jacket? (Well, maybe. In his long career, he has been and done almost everything.)

That’s not really the point, though. Where Modine fits into my brief and redundant narrative is that he, having been a fringe fixture in 1980s movies, fits well into a Netflix show that revives the 80s and its entertainment, its style and its feel down to the last molecule, Stranger Things.

I am once again hitting a wall in terms of finding an original thing to say about it – it’s been wildly popular (so much so that it took the Netflix platform down) and thus picked apart and analyzed to death. That happens with sudden phenomena such as these that feed so many different things:

  • Winona Ryder revival: a real one this time; for those who were not around in the late 80s and early 90s, Winona was a kind of offbeat ‘it’ girl; a shoplifting conviction and a lower profile made it seem as though she disappeared. She worked steadily but had both lost some of the indie/grunge cred that ignited her earlier career and, of course, aged out of the “it girl” title. She’s appeared in the Star Trek reboot and Black Swan as well as the lauded Show Me a Hero. She never went anywhere; nostalgia and the popularity of this show have just catapulted her back into the limelight.
  • 1980s nostalgia: oh, that dreadful fashion and hair; paeans to 1980s youth adventure films; nods to 1980s classic horror
  • Sounds: That unbelievable and dreamy soundtrack.
  • Immersion therapy: We have other 80s love stories on TV (Halt & Catch Fire), which are great, but you don’t really get to immerse yourself in the time and spirit as much because it’s a weekly. Stranger Things was nothing if not an eight-hour-long time-trip into 1983. And for those of us who were there, around the ages of the boys in the show, riding their bikes all around town looking for their lost friend, Stranger Things has brought that entire era back to life believably (perhaps nowhere more than in the wardrobes and sensibilities of the teens like Barb and Nancy).

All that said, I am not one of the people who loved this and gushed about it. I liked it, I binged on it. But do I anxiously crave another installment? Not so much. I was never THAT into the 80s as they happened, hated being a kid and being around the kinds of kids who are the protagonists of this movie, and I always thought Ryder was overrated.

Lunchtable TV Talk: Places and Things – Ray Donovan & Suits

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On the surface, and in pretty much all ways, Ray Donovan and Suits are two shows that have absolutely nothing in common. Except in my mind. I find that both suffer from devices – places and things – that distract the viewer. Every single thing seems plotted in an artificial way – or at least it feels artificial.

In Ray Donovan, particularly in season one and to some extent in season two (maybe understandable as the writers and characters find their footing), I felt like the entire show was a series of mobile phone calls between the wide character list. Sure, some action took place, but the phone calls were constant – either setting the action into motion, stopping some action before it happened or adding information that would have been unavailable (in reality or as a storytelling device) in the grand old pre-mobile-phone era. I wondered while watching what they would have done with a story like this minus the phones. Could Ray Donovan even have done his job without mobiles? (And in some cases, would his job – the way he does it – even be needed?) What did films and TV shows do before cell phones saved the day or could act as a device to up the suspense (i.e., girl goes home with murderer; her sleuth-like friend figures it out and tries to call her, but the phone is downstairs, and she’s already upstairs tied to the bed about to be slaughtered; camera pans to phone ringing away on the kitchen counter)?

The show might have been better titled “Cell” or something (a double meaning: endless mobile phone use coupled with jail time and/or threat of jail) because every scene involved some phone call that was sending Ray rushing off to another crisis or phoning one of his… can we call them henchmen? and sending them off to do his bidding or keeping someone out of a jail cell. This has not changed that much – it is still prominent, but it has lessened to the degree that I don’t find that it has washed away my enjoyment of the show. (After all, in this season, I got to see Ray sing Bob Seger karaoke with a former nemesis. This did not involve a phone.)

I have grown to appreciate Ray Donovan, even when story lines languish and things that feel promising (last season’s arc with Ian McShane – under- and misused) don’t go anywhere satisfying, there is still enough here to bring me back, season after season. In fact, it keeps improving.

What is not improving and has stretched its premise thin is USA Network’s Suits. Yeah, I am still watching, yeah, it still draws me (and apparently a lot of others, as it has been renewed for season 7) and yeah, we do see more places than the well-trodden hallway between Harvey Specter and Louis Litt’s offices, but not much. We get glimpses of New York, of the principal characters’ apartments, a few shots of courtrooms, and this season a glance inside prison. But for the most part, this show is all Specter, Litt or Jessica Pearson (and occasionally Donna, Rachel and Mike) charging down this main hallway between each other’s offices to give the other crucial news, a verbal lashing or some-other-who-knows-what. But this back and forth is starting to feel tired (along with the sap and nonsense of the Mike and Rachel story, which is really starting to, as someone jokingly said to me, miscombining two phrases, “burn my goat”.

What to do about over-reliance on the same things?

Lunchtable TV Talk: Roadies

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I had no real intention of watching Roadies, and then I saw that Robyn Hitchcock would appear in an episode sooner or later. Naturally I had to watch. But how painful these hours have been. There is nothing- absolutely nothing – redeeming about this show. It drags along slowly. There is no story. It is supposed to evoke some reverence for music and life on the road and its gritty romance (it’s actually rough but, you know, you’re supposed to die and live in filth and give up your life to devote yourself to the band you love. It’s all about the music).

Somewhere along the line, while torturing myself with this dud, I saw a review someone had written; it hit the nail on the head:

“All three episodes of Roadies feel, astonishingly, like they were written by someone who has never been connected to music or real people. No matter how many hip band shirts you toss on these characters or how many references there are to The Replacements or Pearl Jam, it feels inauthentic — like actual roadies would never live this life. “How is this a Cameron Crowe series?” is a question that kept popping up with alarming frequency.”

I’d extend the “written by someone who has never been connected to music or real people” to the entire series (we’re still only at episode six at the time of writing). There is a real element of pretension trying too hard not to be pretentious here. There are some truly obnoxious characters here. And sadly it’s because of the writing and the meandering “story” that tries to make everything seem life-or-death important. But nothing about this is important.

Other recent shows that try to capture the ineffable magnetism of music and the people who make it happen (e.g., Vinyl, also a colossal failure, already canceled, despite a great cast and a few good moments) and that try to (comedically) look at the middle-aged has-been/comeback hopefuls who try to regain relevance (e.g., Sex & Drugs & Rock’n’Roll, which degenerates into a lot of cliches but also is redeemed by Denis Leary’s humor).

Now I just wish I had the presence of mind and willpower to stop watching Roadies … because there is nothing for me here, and as John Mellencamp reminds us in episode 6, life is short, even in its longest days. It’s pathetic because it is not horrendous enough to be a passionate hate-watch; it’s sad because it’s just so fucking boring.

Lunchtable TV Talk: The Night Of

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I’ve read wildly conflicting views on The Night Of, and I can see all the arguments. Me, I would watch this even if the whole thing was just John Turturro rubbing Crisco on his eczema-stricken feet and interacting with a cat. He’s a magnetic guy, and his performance here as a sort of weary sad-sack attorney trying to land a name-making case (while genuinely caring about the client) is a gem. His character is a guy who can’t just walk away and has too soft a spot for hard-luck, can’t win cases/situations… and it’s probably why he isn’t really any better at his job. Too soft to be brutal or hard-hitting.

The Night Of is far from perfect. There are a lot of things I don’t understand about this crime drama – from how and why the lead/murder suspect ends up in the situation he does, to how there seems to be no real drive, hurry or impetus for any of the parties involved to investigate the crime (i.e., if the main suspect didn’t do it, as he claims, who did? Shouldn’t his parents or his lawyer be invested in drumming up reasonable doubt?). There is a lot of emphasis on procedure, and I suppose that’s important too. Cases are won and lost on procedural points (isn’t that the whole point of A Civil Action? Yes, and surprise, surprise – both that film and The Night Of were directed by Steven Zaillian). And, with criminal investigations and signing legal clients, there is a procedure involved there too. Same with booking suspects into jail. But… is this a criminal whodunit or a tale of how a mostly naive kid is in the wrong place at the wrong time and ends up in the really wrong place (prison) and has to learn how to deal with that new reality – regardless of whether he committed a crime or not? Is this meant to be a commentary on the criminal justice system and its procedure? Is it meant to be a commentary at all? It’s hard to tell.

Lunchtable TV Talk: Hell on Wheels

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I remember seeing TV ads for Hell on Wheels when it was first being introduced on AMC many years ago. I must have been in the US on holiday, and nothing about the show appealed to me except maybe the presence of Colm Meaney (I’m a Trekker, right? No one can resist Chief O’Brien!). That was not enough to induce watching. It was a couple of years later that I picked it up, more in boredom/lack of things to watch than anything else. I was not immediately captivated, but I did immediately think that Hell on Wheels was not quite like anything we had seen before.

Ostensibly about the competition around and westward expansion of the railroads in post-Civil War America, the story, without delving too deeply into any of the details, hinted at stories of war and post-war, the end of slavery, immigration (and the haves/haves-not among immigrants, including the Chinese who came to work on the railroads), manifest destiny, religious persecution, Native Americans (both from the perspective of racist white men and those who had lived among them and understood the nuance and difference among their cultures and tribes), and so much more. I found myself most deeply engaged in the show because it did touch on so many things, overlaying a light dusting of sensitivity and thought provocation to what was nevertheless a sort of… adventure tale of one man running away from his past and his grief (with every mile of track he built, the further he got from the past) and all the mistakes he made on that run.

It didn’t moralize or dig deeply into the issues it touched upon, which was probably more a strength than a weakness. However, touching on all the things it did, many people found it unsatisfying because it could seem at times to lack focus. Be that as it may, the loose storytelling and casual mention of the wide range of things one would encounter on the western frontier, for me at least, evoked the sense of boundlessness – both opportunity and danger – that seemed to fire the imagination of most people who moved west.

Populating that vast landscape, a set of vibrant and diverse characters, memorable in their imperfection, roamed and also seemed to run from checkered or unhappy pasts. The aforementioned Meaney as villain Thomas Durant; the lead, Anson Mount as Cullen Bohannon, a Civil War veteran and former slave owner who initially sets out to seek revenge on Union soldiers who had killed his wife, but as he struggles and suffers, eventually makes new mistakes and also manages to let go of the past and his anger; the troubled whore-turned-madam, Eva, with her Indian facial markings and lost love with former slave (and one-time series regular, Elam Ferguson (Common))… and no one more entertaining, horrifying or even tragic than “The Swede”, Thor Gundersen (the incomparable Christopher Heyerdahl).

It seems strange to say that a show I never even wanted to watch is something I will most miss, even if I am absolutely sure that the show is ending at the right time and on a high note.

Lunchtable TV Talk: Billions

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We got rid of Nicholas Brody in Homeland, which could not have come sooner. It saved Homeland, and in exchange, we got Damian Lewis as self-made billionaire and financial wizard/criminal Bobby Axelrod in Billions. (FYI: Lewis is okay, but he is the least interesting thing about the show.) Is Billions great, on par with lauded fare like Mad Men or Breaking Bad? No. But is it interesting? Yeah, more than marginally. We get Malin Åkerman, who was so mercilessly set adrift after Trophy Wife was canceled, and she is unexpectedly fantastic as Lara, the bitchy, cutthroat, scheming, fiercely loyal wife of Bobby. We also get doses of Maggie Siff, who is always great (Mad Men, Nip/Tuck, Sons of Anarchy), as Wendy Rhoades, the person who is actually closest to Bobby, who has worked for him for an eternity and kept him “sane”, and who happens to be (improbably) married to the man who has made it his life’s mission to destroy Bobby. That man is US Attorney Chuck Rhoades, played by Paul Giamatti, who is also always great, especially because he does fundamentally unlikable and complicated so well. His role here is no different, even if his character’s more stubborn than a dog with a bone – so hellbent on some kind of twisted sense of justice that he will let it destroy his marriage, his peace of mind, possibly his career and sanity, taking along with it his entire life and everything he values (taking a page from Les Misérables’s Inspector Javert, chasing this “villain” for his entire life – villain or no, the moral of the story – since there always is one – is that he only hurts himself in his dogged and endless pursuit).

There are other stories, characters, actors here, but there four form the real core of the show, what drives it forward and what keeps me watching. The rivalry between Bobby and Chuck – the stupid bravado driving both forward with what seem petty motivations in many cases, and the damage this does to everyone around them – from colleagues and employees to their families and loved ones – is the real driving force of the show. Also why I will continue to consume another season when it returns.

Lunchtable TV Talk: Heartbeat

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I wrote a bit the other day about how there is a glut of medical drama on tv and wondered about why some of it works, hits its stride, gains an audience (ER, Grey’s Anatomy, Chicago Hope, Chicago Med, The Night Shift…) while other stuff fails (Monday Mornings, A Gifted Man, Off the Map and a bunch more…). There are other shows that fall into the medical category but I would not put them in the broad “medical drama” category, for example, Scrubs was a long-running and successful comedy; The Knick is an exceptional prestige period piece on Cinemax – an entirely different breed from the churned-out, regurgitated medical-drama-of-the-week delivered on network TV; House was less about medicine and more about a troubled man; Nurse Jackie was a lot like House – medicine was the backdrop but Jackie as a woman trying to balance addiction, work, family was what brought the house down.

Heartbeat is another one of these that absolutely didn’t work. I don’t even know how to count the ways it did not work. But here are some reasons:

  • Melissa George (in general in the role – beyond her reach; in the role – too over-the-top and trying too hard/overacting)
  • The love triangle
  • The head of the hospital: Not believable as head of hospital; it’s like casting decided that they needed a hot, young, non-white/”ethnic” woman in a leadership role and checked that box off a list. It’s not that the actress was bad, just that the whole setup was stupid.
  • The flashbacks: Added no value, tried to build some meaning but just wasted time.
  • The outlandish medical stories (this was meant to be the hook, I guess)
  • The outlandish scenes (dance party in the hospital, some kind of off-site race, a flash mob in the hospital, etc.)
  • Gimmicky
  • Poor writing and even poorer dialogue: It was abjectly stupid

I could elaborate on these points, but it would waste even more time (and I already wasted enough by watching the ten or so episodes of this that existed).

Lunchtable TV Talk: Homeland

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Not all shows are blessed with sheer perfection. In fact, most aren’t. Even the best shows have uneven episodes or seasons and threads or characters that don’t quite pan out.

One of the most uneven shows, Homeland, saw a revitalization last season as its troubled protagonist, Carrie (Claire Danes), left the CIA and worked in Berlin. Of course her path never strays far from her CIA officer life and its characters, even when she tried everything to escape. It’s part of who she is, even when she formed an identity and family life outside of it. The most recent season revived the show – and my interest – even if there were bits I did not care for (Carrie going off her meds again!)

If anything, this new life for Homeland, without Nicholas Brody and that whole mess with which Homeland was introduced to viewers, shows that you can’t really write some things off, even if they seem to have expired. After delivering a knockout punch with its first season, Homeland should probably have taken a different tack. It became progressively more difficult to deal with season by season until it reinvented itself with the last season. With an unbelievably talented cast, you just need some stellar storytelling to get back on track.

And, ultimately, as Carrie herself learns, you can go home again.

Now let’s see what Homeland’s fifth season, which will begin in early 2017, brings. (I realize I have/had nothing new to write about the show – it’s been written about and analyzed ad nauseam by professionals and others… and I don’t need to add to the cacophony. As usual, though, I am just cataloging my viewing experiences for my own sake.)

Lunchtable TV Talk: The Catch

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Decisions on whether to cancel or renew TV shows are fundamentally mysterious to me. Loads of good TV gets canceled (and sometimes not even because of poor ratings) while crap gets renewed. Maybe there are monetary or political considerations at work in these decisions. A good example of this, for me, is the show The Catch. It’s the fourth of Shonda Rhimes’s shows to be on the air at the same time. Her grip on network television feels almost dictator-like, as the trio of her hit shows – Grey’s Anatomy, Scandal and How to Get Away with Murder, dominate. The long-running Grey’s has hit a creative renaissance, while (for me) Scandal and How to Get… suffer. Scandal grows increasingly ridiculous while How to Get hit a popular nerve in its first season, but seemed to grow less interesting in its second season. Maybe it was just me, but I grew weary and considered whether I should even continue (especially because it lost its magnetism for me).

Given this backdrop, The Catch was pitched as some kind of sexy mystery caper. Helmed by the usually solid Mireille Enos as Alice, it is immediately obvious that this show is not the right vehicle for Enos … or frankly for anyone in the show, including Peter Krause, who plays Enos’s conman fiance. He has conned her and her investigative firm, but doesn’t disappear into thin air afterwards because he has, apparently, actually fallen in love with his mark. The premise is flawed because it’s like it was written for the span of an eight-episode mini-series, not for a multi-season regular tv show. But it was nevertheless renewed for a second season, despite the weakness of the plot and the apparent discomfort of all the players in the play, so to speak. The script and story make all the characters look foolish and dumb, not at all the clever, canny, intuitive people we’d expect to be successful heads of major investigative firms or successful swindlers and con artists. I am prepared to buy into things that are not necessarily believable premises, but things like The Catch – with its bad plots, bad writing and overglamourizing its main characters – isn’t one of those things.

It’s boring; it’s a story that has been told multiple times before; it’s not even got a hook to differentiate it from stories like it before.