The 2010 – 2011 Caruso Awards: Lessons What I Learned, Part The Second
Normally I’d add a big opening paragraph to this, but it’s been a busy day (i.e. I’ve been on Twitter AND Facebook), so I’ll just get to the next three lessons I learned by watching bad TV over the past 13 months.
An agenda can be a bonus, but a lot of the time your show will be better if it’s not about anything
What was the point of Camelot? As far as SoC could tell, it was yet another unnecessary retelling of a tale already well-covered elsewhere. However it was apparently a metaphor for a new way of politics; I can imagine Arthur was meant to be an Obama-type, even though I’d say the last image I’d come up with if asked to picture an iconic leader is a pasty white boy who looks like he’d cry if he had to pick up a spork, let alone Excalibur. That said, I love the thought that Joe Fiennes was playing Merlin as a cross between lovable Obi-Wan and loathsome Donald Rumsfeld, and not a bald Goth with a bad case of dysentery. Maybe I should go back and finish it after all.
SoC has nothing against using a story to relate a political idea or as a metaphor for contemporary times; historical drama and sci-fi are littered with examples of such thought-provoking tales (example right off the top of my illness-addled head; everyone go read Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War immediately). One of our all-time favourite shows – Buffy the Vampire Slayer – is rich with metaphorical intent. But sometimes less is more (or, in the case of Seinfeld, nothing is more).
There are mild examples of this. Boardwalk Empire is as vulnerable to the temptation to bang us over the head with “How Things Have Changed And Yet Stayed The Same” story elements as the first season of Mad Men; hopefully that will settle down soon. Connected to that, the worst moments of the otherwise exceptional Treme come when characters spout on-the-nose info-dumps about the state of post-Katrina New Orleans. That’s more forgivable; Treme exists in part to draw attention to a subject that far too many people know nothing about. Still, on a narrative level, David Simon’s preachifying can take you out of the show.
Then there are the more noticeable examples. It’s an odd coincidence that many of SoC’s least favourite shows of the year had a metaphorical agenda. Falling Skies was created by Robert Rodat, the charming fellow who ignored the existence of the non-US Allies in Saving Private Ryan, and equated the British Redcoats in the American Revolutionary War with the Nazis in his monstrous alternative history fantasy The Patriot. This alien invasion show works as a simple survival tale like The Walking Dead or Jericho, with our heroes bravely fighting back against an evil occupation force using guerrilla tactics. It also works as a pro-NRA wank fantasy for anti-government conspiracy theorists who think we’d be better off in a world which had no electricity, but conveniently still had antibiotics.
It’s absolutely no coincidence that protagonist Professor Tom Mason is an expert on military history whose dialogue is peppered with anecdotes about military campaigns, or that the show is set in Boston not far from Lexington and Concord, or that Will Patton — the head of the 2nd Massachusetts – has a teeny-tiny ponytail as if he’s wearing an Eighteenth Century Queue. Fine, so Rodat had some left-over research from The Patriot that he wanted to use, and wasn’t afraid to draw a parallel between the arrogant invading forces of the British and a disgusting race of spider-like monsters that abducts children. But the show hints at other metaphorical meanings, most notably the nostalgic yearning for a time when your mettle was tested in the fire of battle for freedom.
The show is obsessed with two things; children and ammo. The majority of the dialogue in the pilot consists of characters discussing what ammo they need, what ammo they wish they had, ammo supplies, gun comparisons, etc. It’s not just the macho guys; women and children join in though hey, they’re not in charge or anything (let’s not go too crazy here). These survivors are so committed to the cause that they exhibit no other interests. Rodat seems to pine for a life like this, and certainly it calls back to The Patriot and Mel Gibson teaching his children how to kill dastardly Redcoats. Rather that than play video games; one facetious exchange has SoC favourite Moon Bloodgood express gratitude for the EMP blackout that has removed those AWFUL video games from the equation. (SMH)
The children occupy the rest of the show’s attention. They are abducted by the evil Skitters and forced to wear Harnesses which control their minds, turning them into slaves for the mysterious Grey overlords that control these drone forces. Falling Skies spends all ten episodes agonising about this fact, which drives almost all of the action. (It also reminds me of Tom Clancy’s books; it seems that 67% of conversations between militaristic right-wingers are about how great kids are and by the way, how’s the wife? Weird.)
On an emotional level that’s valid, but it also smacks of anti-government paranoia; the idea that our children are being brainwashed by the dark forces who control our country, and therefore we have to fight against this oppression and save our children from indoctrination. The idea of a militia to protect against invasion from outside is one thing, but Falling Skies reeks of Tea-Party anti-government fears. Steven Spielberg was involved in this? And Graham Yost, Mark Verheiden and Melinda Hsu Taylor? It’s a right-wing wet-dream hiding behind a listless sci-fi actioner, like something Newt Gingrich would cook up. It’s even more disheartening than Dexter‘s explicitly pro-capital-punishment bullshit.
As a left-winger I’m bound to find this unsavoury, but it’s not like I think these things shouldn’t be said. Dollhouse was a show that put the viewer in a very uncomfortable position, rooting (to a certain extent) for one section of a company that enslaved people and turned them into mind-wiped prostitutes. Joss Whedon, infamous male feminist, caught a lot of flak for doing that, but the show asked a lot of difficult questions and challenged the viewer. Falling Skies isn’t asking questions; it’s fapping over a copy of Jane’s Defence Weekly and adding poorly written comments about Big Government to Sarah Palin’s Facebook page. And don’t get me started on Dexter. The only question it asks, “Which execution turned you on the most, you voyeurs?”
No, my problem with making a show that’s about something is that the message can swamp the drama. It’s impossible to watch Falling Skies without thinking the showrunners are trying to push a philosophy, and no amount of heated conversations between militaristic Will Patton or kindly, non-military-but-equally-as-bloodthirsty Noah Wyle will fix that. See also alien-invasion conspiracy theory hodge-podge The Event, a show so bound up in War on Terror symbolism that its mid-season revamp turned it into a sci-fi version of 24, not to mention one that so slavishly copied the original template that episode 20 (One Will Live, One Will Die) blatantly rips off the eighth episode of 24‘s fifth day, with an attack on a shopping mall.
Compare that to Alphas which, as this review points out, is informed by the War on Terror but survives as a lively and likeable action show without being crushed under an avalanche of obnoxious meaning. Or compare it to Game of Thrones (based on the War of the Roses but not about it), orJustified, or The Vampire Diaries, or any number of shows that have a theme but no intention of banging a message into our heads; they flourish without that burden. I guess the rule is, the less general your point, the better.
Make sure you’re making the right show
Thank you to ace writers/pop-culture thinkers @AmeliaMangan and @Ruby_Stevens for their recent Twitter conversation about NBC’s swiftly-cancelled superhero show The Cape. During the discussion one of them (I think it was Amelia but please correct me if I’m wrong) noted that a show about a cop framed for supervillainy who is taught how to be a boring superhero by the head of a nefarious circus filled with petty thieves should really have been a show about a nefarious circus filled with petty thieves especially when the head of the nefarious circus filled with petty thieves is played by KEITH DAVID COME ON! [/GOB Bluth].
It’s a very good point that I hadn’t even noticed until then. Yes, I can imagine the thought of making a show like that would be pooh-poohed after the cancellation of Carnivale and the tedium of the last season of Heroes, but the alternative — focusing on a guy with a SUPERPONCHO who mopes in an attic because he misses his annoying kid — is just perverse when you’ve managed to hire Keith David and all of his vast reserves of charisma to appear in your show.
But then I guess you can never win in these matters. A lot of folks hated Lost when it gave Ben Linus more to do, but seriously, if you cast Michael Emerson and he creates such a memorable character in such a short space of time, you’d be an idiot not to capitalise on that, and fuck the haters. As it stands, The Cape is a perverse, frustrating near-miss. As a weird Darkman-homage it has some perverse charm, but it was always more of a curio than a viable series. In years to come it may only be remembered as the punchline of a joke in Community; I hope the season 2 DVD of that great show has a feature that explains what Abed thought deserved “six seasons and a movie!”
Mind you, changing direction in mid-show has mixed results. The Event was not a great show, but it had some good ideas, and the potential to explore some interesting themes. Sadly it jumped so violently from one format (sci-fi conspiracy theory show) to another (humdrum 24-esque War-on-Terror analogue) that it only succeeded in shaking off viewers. It’s a more dramatic version of the course-correction shown by Rubicon — another show that started as a conspiracy thriller and then became a cerebral version of i in later episodes — but while AMC’s cancelled show made its transition relatively easily, The Event was drenched in the flop-sweat of a dozen panicky high-level meetings. Every show undergoes a process of discovery as it progresses, but it’s rare that a show can survive such a radical overhaul at that late stage.
Whenever you can, do more drafts
Camelot was a show so poorly conceived, written and acted that even I, a man who has watched numerous seasons of shows he hates (Dexter, Heroes) couldn’t even make it through ten episodes. Much of that was down to the realisation that there wasn’t going to be enough event to keep watching, though the promise of more superscowling from SoC acting hero Joe Fiennes and occasional Mirrenesque stripping scenes from the not-unattractive Eva Green did tempt us. But no, it was too painful to see them trying so hard to make being stuck in that morass seem worthwhile. They both deserve better.
The killing blow came early in the season, with Arthur (here imagined as a wet rag with a snivel painted on it) and Guinevere (a medieval version of the most popular girl in school) bonding and flirting on a parapet in Camelot itself. Maybe it was a result of co-creator Chris Chibnall having to find an extra 10 minutes of drama compared to the 50 minute-long episodes of Torchwood that he worked on before, but in a show already heavy with padding, this scene was murderously boring to watch. The banter was stilted and contained no pertinent information about character or plot. It was just two people chatting, charmlessly.
It was as if the concept of subtext didn’t exist in Ye Olde Britaineenneee, and the result was dead air. It wasn’t the only scene to stumble like that. An earlier moment with Arthur trudging out of his family home like a less-butch D.J. Qualls visiting a Renaissance Faire was similarly devoid of oomph. His father says goodbye to him, and that’s it. There’s no drama. It could easily have been written out, or something could have been added; some ambivalence, some mystery, a set-up for a future event. Anything. But no. The show needed, for some reason, to show that Sean Pertwee would miss his seemingly consumptive child. So he says goodbye and looks sad.
There’s just one layer there. Unfortunately for Starz and the Camelot team, viewers are becoming more sophisticated, and demand something more from their drama. They need more than just a surface that iterates something that can easily be assumed. There has to be some way to bring this alive, even if it’s just a liberal dose of “Conflict” sprinkled over the top. Of course, in lesser storytelling “Conflict” becomes nothing more than yelling, and we could have ended up with little more than Sean Pertwee telling the little scrote to go back to his room, but when done right, that scene could have come alive.
It could well be that the showrunners had no time to go back and rewrite. Certainly it seems most shows are written at such a gallop that there is no time to go back and revise the work. Plus, writing sure isn’t as easy as it seems. Nevertheless, we still get complex, layered episodes of TV every week from many other sources, where each scene works on multiple layers, calling back and forth through individual hours or full seasons, as part of a larger whole or just as a single bright moment. If some showrunners can polish their scripts, then it’s possible for anyone to give it a try. Doubtless there are a million reasons why it’s difficult to do it, but if you’re not the kind of screenwriting miracle worker who knows how to add a ton of audience-satisfying subtext and complexity in the first pass, at least one more draft should be a priority.
Part the third tomorrow, as long as I don’t decide to go on LinkedIn and Google+ as well. #SocialMediaTimeSuck
The 2009-2010 Caruso Awards: Best and Worst New Shows of the Year
We’re still going, even though my attention has been completely taken over by the London Film Festival (one film down so far! Gillian Wearing’s Self-Made, a fascinating experimental movie that explores the lines drawn between reality and fiction, emotional truth and manipulation, and the way we create the narratives of our own lives. Proper brain food). The shows here are the ones that started this year and generated the strongest responses in me. The three good shows are almost tied for Best New Show, but I had to make a decision, and I think the right one won out. It’s made me easily as happy as my favourite new show of last year (Sons of Anarchy, which had a second season that dwarfed the first: not an easy task), and has already become the show I would most miss if it were cancelled. The bad shows, on the other hand, made me livid. The visceral response I got from my least favourite new show of this year was actually scary.
Best New Show: Community
One consequence of watching more shows this year is that I ended up seeing many more good shows. And yes, many more bad ones too, but let’s accentuate the positive for a moment. The Golden Age of TV got significantly goldener this year, and even though we lost some great shows, we got many more back. For how long, we do not know. Justified and Spartacus are popular enough that they’ll be around for a while, as is the case with BBC’s Sherlock and Channel 4′s Misfits. Caprica looks doomed, sadly, with its recent return to Syfy being a bit of a ratings disaster. It’ll be a one season show unless it magically picks up, but I don’t see how that can happen. My favourite new show of the year, the one that just pips the other fantastic new offerings, is in a pickle. Is Community going to stick around? Will its average ratings be enough for a show-starved NBC to stick with it? Or is the mainstream critical apathy (as evidenced by a sickening Emmy shut-out) a sign that we won’t even get to see the main characters graduate?
At least Community has already had a better run than the Greatest Non-Picked-Up Pilot Of All Time, Dan Harmon’s infamous Heat Vision and Jack. We can be thankful for that, but for those of us who have fallen in love with Community‘s ability to be a sitcom, a spoof of the sitcom genre, a celebratory pop-culture melting-pot and — with the addition of superb commentaries from creator Harmon — a dissection of comedy and storytelling, the attentions of the Cancellation Bear are not welcome. Nevertheless, I suspect Community‘s greatest moment is yet to come, and it will keep gathering in-show momentum the same way 30 Rock has. That show started out wacky and has now become it’s own mini-universe, with its own laws and common elements. Watching first season episodes of that show is discombobulating now: it has turned up the volume on its comedic voice so much that the first eleven episodes look positively humdrum. That’s inevitable: perfect examples include The Simpsons, The Office, etc. 30 Rock showed there was a way to make sure this escalation of boldness didn’t alienate fans: start out weird. Of course, fans did eventually rebel, but it held that traditional rattle-throwing nonsense off for three seasons before everyone turned on it, which is ironic as season four of 30 Rock is arguably the strongest yet. My theory on that rift between show and audience is a post for another day…
I remembered Community‘s pilot as being very broad and unafraid to be quirky, but rewatching it this week (thanks to Daisyhellcakes’ super-thoughtful birthday present: the first season boxset with tons of great bells and whistles, boxset fans), it seemed so placid compared to what follows. What’s most notable about the triumphant first season of Community is that even as the comedy becomes crazier and bolder, the characters hold true throughout. The final episode’s bombshells with Jeff, Britta and Annie are proper WTF shockers that have an emotional punch, enough that some fans were outraged (those complaints were brilliantly answered in the superb season two opener, but we’re focusing on season one here).
A common complaint about Community is that it is all about the hipster sneering and not about people, but I think that’s the most wrong thing ever said on the Internet. The ENTIRE Internet, which was, at last count, 99.9999999999999% wrong. It’s so wrong it very nearly negates the concept of Truth with the gravitational strength of its inaccuracy. The characters are heightened, peculiar, set in a world that doesn’t quite work in our own, but they’re still people who want the things we want, and get hurt the way we do. Their ups and downs, discoveries and resolutions still mean something, even when we’re presented by insane paintball competitions run riot, a sports mascot that is the stuff of nightmares, or a chicken-fingers racket that plays out like the plot of Goodfellas (complete with Layla-piano-moment). The characters still speak to us, no matter what is going on. They’re the framework for the show, well-drawn enough to make it an essential watch. They’re recognisable but not cliched: they couldn’t be more different from the crude stereotypes of many sitcoms (e.g. Modern Family), and manage to be unpredictable but consistently written and performed.
Nevertheless, its the events that are placed on the character-frame that make me love Community as if it had been on the air for years. The joy of it is that you never know what is going to come next. The confidence of the showrunners is incredible. Most other sitcoms on TV either play it safe (e.g. Modern Family), or misjudge their own tone and stretch the credibility they have previously set up (e.g. The Office), but Community is perfectly constructed to allow for any oddness to come along. With such a diverse set of main characters you’re already able to spin out situations that you would never normally get on TV (e.g. a young Muslim man with Aspergers reconnecting with his father by manipulating two of his friends into acting like two uncaring parents and then making a terrible movie which turns out to be about his parents’ divorce), but even better there are a growing set of secondary characters to enjoy. The best example of that might be nervy, enthusiastic Dean Pelton, with his fear of being seen as politically incorrect. He’s one of the most enjoyable comic creations on TV in years: kudos to Jim Rash, who is magnificent in the role.
It’s obvious it isn’t for everyone: the weird war between Community‘s fans and Modern Family‘s fans shows that. But whereas Modern Family‘s fans might see their favoured show as a well-constructed gag machine based on a very specific sitcom template that has been a staple since the beginning of the form, Community takes that as a starting point and runs off in a completely different direction. It has the same sentimentality as Modern Family, but is not as cloying, and those moments are earned instead of introduced at the format-mandated moment because of Reason X. It manages to comment on who we are as a culture with a confidence and playfulness that Modern Family often cannot due to format and tonal restrictions. It looks fresh, going for cinematic confidence over the increasingly tired faux-documentary format. It speaks to those who revel in popular culture, instead of those who don’t have time for it.
It’s vibrant, imaginative, unpredictable, and buzzes with the sense that it is new, all while picking apart the format it has grown out of, adhering to its rules just enough to be able to break them where necessary. It’s the best new sitcom of the season, the best show of the season, and one of the cultural events of the past 12 months. I urge you all to watch it so my obsession doesn’t isolate me completely from polite society.
Best Pilot: Justified – Fire in the Hole
It’s almost a shame when a show has a really great pilot. Last year Kings started off so well that it could only disappoint after: the showrunners deserve praise for keeping that disappointment to a minimum, and delivering a show that was still superior to almost every other show on network TV. Justified landed with such a satisfying thump — with the mesmerising short story adaptation Fire in the Hole: have the short story on me and Harper Collins — that it was tempting to not bother watching the rest of the season just in case it ended up becoming a disappointment. Much of the Internet chatter following its broadcast became a debate about whether it would be a procedural or a serialised long-form narrative, as if this was the difference between good and bad.
As I’ve mentioned before, if it had become a procedural it would still have been great, as its main asset was the fealty to the sassy, laidback tone of Elmore Leonard’s best work, and its fascination both with the protagonist and his various nemeses. The pilot set up the show with impressive skill. Within three minutes of it starting, we’d seen Raylan Givens meet his arch-enemy, shoot him to death, and get transferred back home against his will in order to avoid retaliation from his enemy’ employers. That’s the set-up of the entire series right there: after that thrilling download of information — as elegant and exciting a burst of exposition as you’ll ever see — the rest of the pilot is about establishing the supporting cast (some of whom disappear a few episodes later) and giving you a sense of who this attractive gunslinger really is.
Part of the joy of the pilot is revelling in the perfect casting. Timothy Olyphant’s emergence as possibly the most charming man on TV — as opposed to one of the scariest, as seen in Deadwood – is one of the biggest factors in Justified‘s success, but we shouldn’t forget that he shares screentime with terrific character actors such as Nick Searcy and Natalie Zea, not to mention SoC favourite Walton “Shane from The Shield” Goggins, cementing his reputation as an acting colossus. Later episodes would feature performances from Alan Ruck, Rick Gomez, Jere Burns, M.C. Gainey, W. Earl Brown, and Raymond J. Barry, but the core cast was already strong. I’d like to add fellow “main” characters Tim Gutterson and Rachel Brooks (Jacob Pitts and Erica Tazel), but they have almost nothing to do after the pilot. Goes to show how drastically a show can change in mid-stream, though that fact doesn’t ruin the pilot: they’re introduced with the same deftness as everyone else, so it’s not as if any time was wasted.
The key to its success, though, was the effortless pacing. For much of its running time Fire In The Hole seems to be going nowhere, as Raylan catches up with figures from his past, getting into theological debates with Boyd Crowder and emitting TV-scorching sexual chemistry with childhood sweetheart Ava Crowder. Nevertheless, there is a constant stream of relevant information in every moment, but you don’t even notice it because of the snappy dialogue and mastery of tone. It’s shocking when these seemingly lackadaisical events coalesce into the last-act shoot-outs, but when they arrive they’re exciting, well-shot by director Michael Dinner, and cleverly reveal that these seemingly dopey Southern law enforcers are actually a band of badass warriors. Our preconceptions are brilliantly scuttled in a tense ambush in the final act, as Mullen and Brooks take down some neo-Nazis, giving Raylan a chance to save the girl who, of course, does a very good job of looking after herself most of the time.
The one big flaw of the pilot is that it looks like the denouement takes Goggins out of the show, but thankfully no. Biblical doofus Boyd Crowder, one of the most entertaining and ambiguous characters on TV right now, isn’t going anywhere. If only I’d known that when watching this exceptional pilot.
Most Surprising New Show: Spartacus: Blood and Sand
When I saw the first episode of S:B&S I thought I had found my new Torchwood. It was unhinged, silly, and unabashedly derivative. It seems disingenuous to refer to the 300-esque filming style as a “nod” to Snyder and Miller’s movie: the action scenes are a straight rip, along with the elements from Gladiator and any number of other sword-and-sandals epics. Its hilariously florid dialogue draws far too much attention to itself. It’s also so violent and pornographic (for a TV show) that it becomes self-parodic almost immediately, meaning it will either be your favourite thing about the show or the factor that turns you off it for good. The lead character is forced to become passive for a long time, which seems like an odd choice on a week-to-week basis. Some of the casting is questionable: I wonder how many viewers were shocked by the incredibly broad performance from Viva Bianca in the pilot, and then silenced by the subsequent full-frontal shot. Gotta give it up for Bianca: she makes one hell of an initial impact.
Going forth from this point I expected to be making fun of the show at length on this blog. Instead my new Torchwood turned out to be the BBC’s murder-melodrama Luther, while Spartacus gradually became my new obsession, a show often derided by those who dropped out early, before it became one of the best examples of long / short arc pacing in this golden age of TV. Spartacus is a machine, with plot elements fitting together like cogs and characters set up to deliver pleasing arc resolutions when the time is right. Too many shows this year got that timing wrong, waiting for their finales to show off their results of their calculations, with some shows — Heroes and FlashForward spring to mind — being nothing more than a long series of delaying tactics in order to get to the fireworks at the end. Spartacus eclipses them by hiding its workings so well that when the arcs and set-ups pay off, almost every time it features some surprise element that you hadn’t realised was there, though it makes perfect sense that it would. Characters are written well enough that they can spring out of the boxes you think they are in, with Illythia’s hidden madness and staggering ruthlessness being a perfect example.
The hysterical energy of the show is bound to turn off folks, and the shakier performances and insane declarations about Jupiter’s cock thrusting into poor Batiatus’ ass whenever he has a bit of bad luck are inevitably going to strike more delicate viewers as a bunch of silliness, but beneath the crazed visuals and high-pitched tone is some beautiful pacing. The result is a beautifully constructed narrative engine, something that has a satisfying purr when idling and a thrilling roar when pushed to its limits. Almost every episode could exist on its own with just a cursory “Previously” at the start and still provide an excellent hour of entertainment, but the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Former Mutant Enemy writer and show creator Steven S. DeKnight and his band of writers (which includes, at the start of the season, Andrew Chambliss and Tracy Bellomo of Dollhouse, and at the end of the season Daniel Knaupf of Carnivale) have taken great care to populate the central setting of Batiatus’ ludus with a cast of appealing characters whose close proximity allows for a web of interpersonal connections, both positive and negative, that are all doomed to go sour at exactly the right time.
The result is a series of plot twists, character revelations, and breathtaking action set-pieces that drove me screaming and cheering to the edge of my seat every week. It’s simultaneously sophisticated and low-brow, filled with fighting, fucking, and political intrigue — a perfect combination. From the fifth episode on — which ends with the stunning fight in which Spartacus and Crixus are forced to team up against the terrifying Theokoles — I became horribly obsessed. This paid off well, as the actors found their feet, the dialogue became a bit more restrained, and the ambition of the showrunners became apparent. By the time the blood-drenched and obscenely satisfying finale came around, I felt like declaring my love from the rooftops. Beyond that berserker madness, it’s the extreme effort to give the viewer a great time every week that gives me a sense of satisfaction I haven’t felt since Buffy or Angel in their heyday. I can think of no higher praise.
Worst New Show: Modern Family
Shades of Caruso tries to be as honest about its reactions to shows as possible, to approach things from a perspective of openness and acceptance, and not let other opinions get in the way. Sometimes this backfires: we’re finally getting around to watching The Wire after the rest of the TV-watching world did, and the fanaticism of its fans has inevitably had an influence on our experience. How we wish we could’ve seen it before being bombarded with the relentless cries of its fans. Try as we might, we are judging the show not on its own merits, but against the praise we’ve been exposed to for the past few years. Don’t get me wrong: it’s plainly obvious that it is a remarkable and ambitious show lovingly created by smart people, and we’re enjoying it immensely.
Regrettably, the endless praise may have had the unfortunate side-effect of making The Wire something we will admire but never really love. Still, we’re only one season in and that could change. Time will tell. The praise for Modern Family was not as intense as for The Wire, but it was just as one-note. By the time it had aired we’d had weeks of positive reviews from just about every critic around, and though I was sceptical about the showrunners’ previous work, the word on the street gave me hope. So what happened? Is my visceral reaction to the programme just a consequence of the notion that humour is subjective, and no one joke can make everyone laugh? It’s almost certainly a factor, but it’s more than thinking it’s not as funny as its fans maintain. I mean, I fucking hate this show. Real, actual HATE.
We haven’t experienced such a vast gulf between our opinion and that of critics since Studio 60 appeared, and that was a show that eventually alienated almost everyone. Even Dexter fans are a little weary of the show’s lack of emotional range after five seasons that are almost identical to each other, meaning I feel a little less alone in thinking it’s overrated trash. Modern Family appears to be the exception. It receives tongue-baths from seemingly everyone on a regular basis, as well as gaining viewers and winning awards that should be lavished upon shows like 30 Rock, Party Down, and my beloved Community. It’s on its way to becoming an institution, something as adored as Cheers or Friends. And yet, it is just unbearable. Who could’ve known that my Kryptonite would be an ostensibly modern, progressive sitcom featuring Ed O’Neill and Ty Burrell, two actors I’ve been fond of in the past?
And yet here we are. What is it about this farrago that makes my skin crawl? Not the progressive aspects of the show, or rather the progressive politics it pretends to honour. The loving gay couple of Cameron and Mitchell certainly do a lot of the things TV gay men do, such as mince, fret about furniture, and not kiss for a long long time (a situation that has finally been rectified and treated like an event when what we need to see on TV is a gay kiss that ISN’T an event). It also features a marriage between an old white patriarch and an immigrant, though luckily for the writers the wife is a hot and spicy Colombian who is just so sexy, what with her boobs and fiery demeanour and her hilarious mispronunciations. Oh how my soul withered when, during the pilot, she repeats Phil’s name as “Feel” and he thinks she is inviting him to grab her ample bosoms. This is the most celebrated sitcom of the year?
What else are we treated to? Clueless men and competent, disapproving women from the worst and most reductive dishwasher ads, hyper-smart and confident kids making fools of their parents, and a dad who thinks he’s hip and with it. It’s a standard, unimaginative and predictable multi-camera sitcom with one camera, no laugh-track, and a documentary format that never makes any sense. What’s worse than even the cobweb-coated jokes from the 90s is the acting: all of the jokes are telegraphed and accentuated by pauses that hint the show is being paced as if making room for audience laughter. Cue lots of mugging at the camera. Almost all of the cast — especially the kids — are so pleased with themselves that the air of smugness pouring out of them smothers any laughs that Burrell and O’Neill might muster. Each week it’s like watching 5 episodes of Scrubs simultaneously. That much mugging would set off a Geiger counter.
Worst of all, it is swamped in the most unconvincing sentimentality, robotically ending on group hugs, reconciliations and reassurances that only belong in snarky spoofs of the sitcom genre, yet played here as if its brand of laboratory-engineered Warmth™ is an insulation against criticism. Unfortunately the tone of obnoxious satisfaction makes every last-act burst of feel-good vibes feel as phony as the most cynical of churned-out mid-afternoon sitcom flotsam. Modern Family is treated like the future of comedy, but it feels like a slightly more ambitious version of According To Jim. For all its artificiality, it’s tempting to argue that Glee is more successful at creating an honest emotion onscreen. At least that can fall back on the occasional well-performed song (usually by the amazing Lea Michele). What does Modern Family have? Ty Burrell saying “What up, my homey?”, causing Julie Bowen to roll her eyes while Sofia Vergara natters on in the background, because you know those South Americans sure do talk fast!
Modern Family is the first programme I’ve had to stop watching so I can protect my health. I tried to stick it out, but once I got to the eleventh episode I could take it no more. Sitting through an entire episode made my stomach churn and my heart race. There was a strong possibility I would strain a muscle in my eyes from rolling them every time a lazily set-up gag would pay off in exactly the way you would expect. By the time I got to the end of that episode, I began to wonder if the show was made up of all the first draft jokes that had been deleted from the laptops of sitcom writers for the last fifteen years. Instead of being erased for good these comedy scraps found themselves beamed via delete-button into a humour-tesseract, an empty and endless and terrifying place. These jokes huddled together for warmth and companionship, and after a time realised the only way they could survive was to form themselves into a new sitcom. Filling out this miserable void, Modern Family became the most mundane universe imaginable, one in which the only effort you need to expend to fill the joke quota is to have a child act wise beyond their years, or make a dopey husband turn into a lascivious buffoon every time a vaguely attractive woman walks past him.
It’s obvious that a large proportion of the viewing public would love to live in that uninspiring world, but let’s be honest: these sitcom scraps have actually formed into a sentient blob of cloying death, a mediocre monster whose rictus grin of smug satisfaction generates pure anti-comedy. If only it could have stayed where it was, everything would be okay, but some cruel bastard cast a spell of awful Eldritch sorcery, creating a bridge between our world and the squirming black pit where lazy comedy goes to die, giving the Bastard Spawn of a Million Failed Jokes a way out of the Hell it should have stayed in. Now it squats on the highest peaks of the TV landscape, fat and tentacled like Lovecraft’s Ghatanothoa, driving anyone who sees it insane: an unusual form of insanity that manifests as a compulsion to babble incoherent streams of exaggerated praise.
The only way to kill it is to stop looking at it, to deny it the “eyeballs” that sustain it. Quick, everyone! Delete it from your TiVo or Sky+ machine! Turn over! Buy a Community boxset! Watch your old Arrested Development DVDs! Buy some 30 Rock merchandise, before it’s too late and its Elder God brethren infest the Earth!
Worst Pilot: V – “Pilot”
Yes, the pilot of V is called “Pilot”, and not “The Arrival” or “When The Big Ships Came” or “Someone Save Elizabeth Mitchell From This Farrago Because She So Fine”. V is so half-arsed that no aspect of it appears to have been thought through with any care. Every character, line, situation has been seen somewhere else, not just in the original series. It’s the worst kind of committee-written show, formulaic and unimaginative and built only to soothe the audience instead of challenging them. The entire show is like that, but it’s not like we weren’t warned. The pilot contained no energy, no sense that there would be any surprises down the road. It mechanically introduced a main cast of ciphers, added a quick plane crash so that the trailers would look a bit more exciting, and that was that. Cue 45 minutes of entirely predictable drama. It’s no wonder it was developed during the writers’ strike: the sense you get is that the showrunners just chopped up a bunch of other average scripts, threw them on the floor, and made the show out of that.
Nevertheless, there were two things about this pilot that made it just a little bit more hateful just to separate it from the many other ill-conceived first episodes broadcast last year. Firstly, it blatantly panders to the nerd demographic by casting Lost‘s Elizabeth Mitchell, The 4400‘s Joel Gretsch, and Firefly‘s Morena Baccarin and Alan Tudyk in major roles. Fair enough if you’re trying to attract those nerd eyeballs to your show, but they get very little to do. All of them (except maybe super-earnest Gretsch) are better than the material — one of the few surprises of the season was seeing the often bland Baccarin bring so much wacky energy to her part — which is more likely to annoy the nerds than please them. It merely serves to remind us of how much better those other shows were than this lowest-common denominator tripe.
Even worse is the Tea Party politics seen early on in the series, and at its worst here. Evil alien Anna gives Obama-lite speeches about change and inclusiveness, hiding her true lizard nature behind a messianic and benign face. Her message is so persuasive that even the clergy are converted to the V’s cause, and the pilot tries so hard to make the point that stupid gullible people are falling for a false prophet (just like the Dummycraps!) that it doesn’t even bother with the slowburn of the original mini-series. We go from alien arrival to global acceptance to Tea-Party resistance in the space of a single episode. Because that’s what happened with all the politics in America! You stupid bastards, don’t you understand? While you drink the Soma Juice this country is going to hell in a handcart. Only Sarah Palin and her Big Fucking Gun can save us from the Arcturan Reptiloids laying their eggs in the United Nations prayer rooms! Etc.
It’s a David Icke wet dream, and even worse than that appalling right-wing message and the insane pandering to the most unhinged of conspiracy theorists is that the show eventually ejects that aspect of it, and becomes nothing more than a tedious slog. Yes, I found the politics of the pilot to be objectionable, but there’s room to work with those ideas, perhaps even satirise them. After four episodes the show was taken off the air and tinkered with: how much funnier and more relevant could it have been if the show were used to satirise the wingnut side of American politics, or even make fun of the Obama administration from a position of sly knowingness, rather than that initial knee-jerk hostility? Instead we got a nasty pilot and a boring show, one that should have been cancelled in order to save the daft but marginally superior FlashForward.
It’s a decision that ABC must assume is pretty innocuous (or maybe lucrative), but the toll it will take on our cultural history is immeasurable. It’s as if ABC — the network that gave us Modern Family, Happy Town, and this debacle — is trying to ruin popular culture for all of us. Our collective unconscious has been irreparably tainted by this network. It would’ve been better if they’d put Leno on every night. If I were a more arrogant man I’d think they were single-handedly trying to make me give up TV by hurling so much shit at me, but little do they realise how stubborn I am. Even when I’m coated from head-to-toe in network-poop, I’ll still be watching their crummy shows. Except Modern Family. That show gave my soul a hernia.
And there’s still more to come. What! I watched 30-odd goddamn shows! I had a lot of thoughts while watching them and nowhere to put them except here! Even Twitter wasn’t interested.
What I Cried For
During the penultimate episode of Lost the main character — Jack Shephard — quietly makes a choice, accepting enormous responsibility with a quick and resigned “I’ll do it.” No one questions him, there are no histrionics. He makes his choice, and that’s that. Daisyhellcakes — who has accompanied me on this island journey – was distracted from this moment by the sound of sobbing coming from the other side of our uncomfortable and cat-clawed sofa. I was in a figurative glass case of emotion, devastated by that choice. Though it’s not the first time I’ve cried at Lost – you should have seen me at the end of the fifth season — this was the first time I seemed to be crying at something that didn’t seem that emotional on the surface. Why the hell did I cry?
I’m not ashamed to admit that I’ve been experiencing a wave of sadness that it’s almost over, but it’s not just because my favourite show — in fact possibly my favourite ever story — is about to end. Part of it is the sense of occasion: as I said to ace tweeter @iambags on Friday, this final week feels like a royal wedding, though it’s not just localised to one country. All across the world people are dealing with this in their own way, either by doing what I’m doing with this post, or by getting really creative. This fan-made trailer has it right when it calls the finale “The Most Anticipated Episode In Television History”…
If that wasn’t enough to choke me up, this nearly finished me off: a superbly edited and written love letter from The Injustice League, featuring enough clips of iconic moments to reduce any Lost fan to emotional blubber.
To outsiders (or, as that song correctly identifies non-Lost fans, Others) this post is going to seem like an absurd perspective-free joke, but Lost has been a big deal for me since the first season, which I caught on DVD while going through some stressful events five years ago. It really helped me get through the tumult, and then did the same again, earlier this year, during which we undertook The Great Lost Rewatch. It has helped me out mentally, and probably spiritually as well. As an atheist I only have the word of believers that faith is a quantifiable and recognisable part of their mental landscape. I’m probably going to unintentionally insult many by saying this, but the only event in my life (other than the experience that the humans refer to as… love?) that has given me an insight into what it is to give yourself over to something even though it could well turn out to be a mistake is the commitment I’ve shown to watching, debating, and pondering Lost.
Yes, that’s a mighty bold claim to make about a TV show, even one that I have considered to be an emotional balm, and anyone reading this who doesn’t watch it — or really love it — will think I’ve taken leave of my senses, but for many fans, sticking with the show and defending it from the tedious criticisms of people who abandoned it early on or didn’t bother because “it just looks stupid” has demanded more than the usual level of fan commitment. From the amazing pilot onwards the show has rested on certain mysteries that prop up the entire narrative structure, and in fact the show itself has not just been about faith and belief in a mysterious purpose, but is also about maintaining an air of ambiguity and mystery that demands the audience has faith and belief in the mysterious purpose of the showrunners. Just as the flashback-laden plot structure was echoed by time-travel events in later seasons, the events in the show and the fan’s relationship with the show has grown to echo each other. Our brains (Jack) say it’s just a TV show and is destined to fall apart at the last hurdle: our heart (Locke) tells us there will be a satisfying ending that will justify the wait.
For the record, I’m not comparing God to a bunch of writers who used to work on Deadwood, Buffy, and Nash Bridges, and I’m not saying my experience with Lost is comparable with someone’s experience of God (whatever that might feel like), but I am saying my enjoyment of the show relies upon my belief that it will all have been worth it, and for the most part the show has felt coherent enough and complex enough that I have been able to hold forth about it against unbelievers with great confidence and even greater obnoxiousness. Nevertheless, the sixth season has seen the largest backlash against Lost since the beginning of the third season, where the wheels seemed to be idly spinning a bit too often. This year, as every episode passes without explaining what the Hurleybird was, or why the Dharma Initiative were playing around with Skinner boxes, my fellow Lostians have become angrier and angrier.
Two of my favourite TV critics –AV Club writer Noel Murray and AVC/HitFix/LA Times blogger Todd Van Der Werff — have been objective but also thrilled by the narrative boldness on display, but other critics have not been so kind. Heather Havrilevsky made me laugh (and froth at the mouth) earlier this week when she criticised the show for letting her down: amusing considering I have never — never in the last four years at least — read a review from her that didn’t complain about the show not being fun enough. Why anyone would rather the show had been little more than an adventure romp in the jungle ending each week with a freeze-frame of the characters laughing in their cave hidey-hole instead of featuring scenes with the consciousness of a beloved character being blasted into another universe by an electromagnetic shed is beyond me.
I gather Maureen Ryan has been vocally angry about it, especially the very contentious episode Across The Sea, but I can’t even look for her recaps for fear of bursting a blood vessel (here is a post in praise of Across The Sea from Overthinking It: essential reading). I’m still pissed at her for calling out Cuse and Lindelof in an interview for daring… DARING… to include a time-travel season in THEIR show. That, and blindly defending the chaotic end of Battlestar Galactica, and spoiling the end of Mad Men in a tweet several months ago, which resulted in my angriest unfollow yet (that showed her!). Earlier this week Alan Sepinwall posted an interview with Cuse and Lindelof that made the showrunners seem like testy assholes. It’s true, they do seem to lose their tempers, but seeing as Sepinwall pretty much asks the same question (“Why is the story going in the way that it is going and why are you not doing what is expected?” or thereabouts) in 15 different ways, I’d lose my temper too.
But then I’ve found myself getting increasingly annoyed by all of this to a degree that is scaring me. I won’t lie: this season has been a rollercoaster for me too, testing my faith far too often. Seeing other people allow their disgruntlement to completely turn them against the show has been exactly the kind of thing that makes me question my own feelings. Am I fooling myself? Some critics and hardcore fans I once allied myself with have jumped ship, and I’m left behind with no life-jacket. After the amazing season opener, there have been numerous moments where doubt has crept in. The temple scenes were mostly a bust (seeing John “Sol Star” Hawkes wasted as the pointless translator Lennon really pissed me off), some of the character deaths were fudged, and some of the answers have had their effect blunted by being hinted at before they are fully answered: deadly when a fanbase will pick over every line to the degree that it does, meaning the eventual reveal comes too late.
The negativity surrounding the final season has taken a toll on me (cue violins). I couldn’t help but feel deflated when What They Died For finished, even though I had been moved on an emotional level. With only a couple of hours to go there was still too much to be explained, and no time to do it. That said, this wave of panic feels more like an intensification of the perfectly natural faith-testing doubt I already had. What galls me is that I had already tried to avoid this, and it was all for naught. I began pre-emptively ejecting questions I wanted answered even before the season started, hoping to prevent any disappointment. First to go was, “What is the source of the electromagnetic energy?” I’m happy to accept that the island is a special place with a special thing on it that makes weird shit happen. Unless Cuse and Lindelof invent a new element — Mysterianium — there is no way a concrete answer would work. It’s magical stuff, either God’s Blood or supermagnetic 4D anti-matter. In my head, that’s fine.
Nevertheless, other questions (What are the rules that Ben was talking about in The Shape of Things to Come after Alex was killed? What is the nature of the corruption that allows The Man in Black to control people? How did MiB visit Jack in LA as his father?) are being scratched off my list as well, and soon I’m going to be left with nothing. That would be fine, but this week I’ve felt like the guy who throws every bit of luggage, seating, and extraneous material from a plane running out of fuel, but we’re still going to crash into the mountain no matter what.
It’s not like Cuse and Lindelof are unaware of these concerns: apparently the DVD/Blu-Ray of season six will have a feature where they explain things that have been left out. Their common defence whenever a critic has asked why we didn’t get to see Alvar Hanso and Gerald De Groot in front of a whiteboard covered with equations that explain everything have often said that it’s the characters that matter the most, and I’ve held onto the belief that they get that right even while my concern has grown, and for the most part this season has proven me right. The sideways world has featured many satisfying moments, such as Jack letting go of his anger at his father by bonding with his own son, or Sun and Jin becoming a happy couple without Jin’s corrupted values and paranoia getting in the way.
I have no doubt that the character’s arcs will all work out: my concern with the answers to the mysteries is that I will end up trying to answer them after the final episode has aired in much the same way I railed against BSG fans when their finale left dozens of loose ends: by explaining away inconsistencies at such length that it stops being fanwank and ends up becoming fanfic. I’ve already been taking solace in the fact that a lot of questions have already been answered but people kept bringing them up because they thought the answers were so unsatisfactory that there had to be something more there (e.g. Ben’s comments about the “Magic Box” and his subsequent abrupt about-face: guess he really had been pulling Locke’s leg after all). There is a very good chance I will be waving away concerns in the next few weeks in a way I found insufferable in BSG fans. I’m dreading it. I’ve bought some crow pie just in case Lost ends up fluffing it as badly as that show, but I don’t want to eat it. Crow tastes all nasty, like.
Debate about the meaning of the show is one thing, and will follow on naturally from the discussions that have formed so much of the Lost experience over the last six years. Once it’s all over, and the final DVD has come out, we’ll all be in a better position to assess what worked and what didn’t. Nevertheless, I worry that we will be trying to connect dots that aren’t meant to go together. During the Great Lost Rewatch we were pleased to see some mysteries made more sense once we applied knowledge from later seasons, with my favourite being Locke explaining the rules of Mouse Trap in season one, foreshadowing the events in the shadow of the statue at the end of season five. This gives me hope that in the minds of the writers there is a concrete answer to almost everything, but how will we know what is on the right track and what is an error of comprehension, and how much of our own explanations will be an entirely new story that we invent ourselves that misses the point of the show?
And yet despite all of these concerns, there are some things that give me hope, and make me believe we were right to commit to the show all along. Many of the complaints have been aimed at two of the most daring episodes: Ab Aeterno and Across The Sea. Ab Aeterno ruffled some feathers by showing us a Richard Alpert that had no answers of his own, in contradiction to what people had expected (i.e. he knew everything, and his flashback episode would reveal tons of new information), but most people responded to its incredible sweeping romantic moments and thought it was probably the highlight of the season so far (an opinion I share). However, I wonder if the free passes handed to it were only because the Jacob/Man in Black episode was coming up, which would surely answer everything, right?
Wrong. The sight of two confused and very human characters stumbling through the earliest years of the story and not giving anything up other than some vague information about the Mysterianium was the final straw for many, who hilariously and melodramatically vowed not to watch the last three episodes in protest. I’ll be honest: the thought of these two characters — who many assumed were God and Satan, or thereabouts — as just a couple of confused boys who fell out over a difference of opinion is so pleasing to me I want to hug the show all over again. For a long time I have been comparing the show to Kurt Vonnegut’s The Sirens of Titan, a magnificent book which features huge events over a large period of time, but all in the service of making a tiny, seemingly insignificant thing happen (no spoilers, as everyone should read it). When Lost seemed to be introducing two demi-gods, that little absurdist element from Vonnegut’s book vanished, and I was sorry to see it go.
Happily, even though the stakes on the show have been revealed to be world-destroyingly vast, at the heart of it is still this mad idea that everyone who has been on the island has just been a normal, flawed person who has gotten in over their heads. To those who complain that the Dharma Initiative ended up meaning nothing (a viewpoint that I find absolutely baffling: the show could not have progressed without these hippie mad men in the background), I say this: they were just guys with too much money on their hands who came into contact with a magical island and made the same silly mistakes as Jacob and The Man in Black and back beyond them, probably to the dawn of thought itself. It was another iteration of this point: we’re insignificant, and vastly important, both at the same time.
Our troubles and misunderstandings shape us as much as these events of enormous scope, and though we are fools, we are also potential saviours. This aspect of the last few episodes is one of the things I have loved most about the show so far, and What They Died For continued that by having possibly the most momentous scene in the entire series be a chat during which all of the expected fireworks and melodrama were reduced to the tiniest of character moments, and what had been treated by fans as something as immutable as the carvings on the Ten Commandments tablets was “just a line of chalk in a cave.” This beautifully refined balance between the epic and the mundane is surely enough to give the show a break for almost any crime. Other than killing off Frank Lapidus. I think that’s going to annoy me no matter what happens. (We miss you Frank, you beautiful bastard!)
So it’s not all agonising for this doubting Thomas. As this week of worry has progressed, I’ve found myself taking consolation in my previous state of mind, that the story has been told so well so far, and has given me so much pleasure, that it is only fair that I forget about judging the finale as a success or a failure, and just accept whatever Cuse and Lindelof throw at me. As O.C. showrunner Josh Schwartz says in this Vulture post, when asked what advice he would give the Lost showrunners about their finale:
There is no advice that I can give to those guys. What they’re doing is on its own level. Anything goes, and I’m along for the ride. I will watch any way that they want to end the season at this point. No rules apply to this show.
He’s right: after all of this joy, how can I turn on them? I want to love the finale, so I’ll bloody well love it and that’s that. I wanted to love the end of BSG but to be honest I’d given up on it and become increasingly more annoyed by it about four episodes before the end of the second season, and only the New Caprica episodes gripped after that. Lost has never let me down, and my dip in enthusiasm this week was more to do with my worries about the imminent finale. The episode itself was great, with my favourite character Ben Linus getting to be the coldest badass he has ever been, and the scene with Jack that hit me with such force. This is a show that I don’t actually know how to hate. I just don’t know how that is possible.
So I can rationalise away my fears, and crystallise what I have loved about it, but what about the grief? And believe me, there will be grieving once the screen goes black (or white, as in the fifth season). Perhaps I can take solace in the knowledge that the show will almost certainly live on after it is over, as the debates rage. When this is all over, there will be happy fans and grouchy former fans who think the show failed, but I’d hope that everyone who has taken this journey feels it was worthwhile, if only for the mental workout it has given us. I feel bad for anyone who decides to give the show a try after the final episode airs, because they will have missed out on the slow build and the conversation between viewers and creators alike. I’d almost argue that we have all become “creators” as we watch and theorise, interacting with the show to an extent that it no longer qualifies as passive entertainment.
When I tell people one of my hobbies is watching TV I feel this swell of shame for admitting to enjoying something that doesn’t involve kayaking, but loving Lost leads to debating, interacting, studying. How telling that the final Lost ARG is Lost University: the community of like-minded people who have expanded their knowledge of the world just because of this TV show has made me feel as connected with humanity as I once felt while trapped on a small campus in the middle of the country, many years ago. We were in it together then, and bonded en masse. This feels much the same, but without the excessive drinking. It’s been humbling to see how many Lost fans are out there having the same emotional response as me; hundreds of thousands of fans on message boards, showrunners and writers and chat show hosts. Those of us who have metaphorically been touched by Jacob are in this together, and knowing I won’t be alone in feeling like crap tomorrow. Somehow the thought of a choked-up and bereft Jimmy Kimmel makes me feel better. Sorry, Mr. Kimmel.
So why did Jack’s decision make me cry? On some level I was crying because it’s almost over, but also because, maybe subconsciously, my faith was strengthened by the show’s confidence in bringing us to that point in such an emotionally satisfying way. In the face of a potentially calamitous final episode, there was a moment of quiet, perfect grace in the middle of all of this tempestuous attention, all of these end-of-season articles, complaints from former fans, and relentless promotion from ABC. Cuse and Lindelof told us the show was about character, and we all say yes, yes, what about the mysteries? But when Jack stood up to meet his destiny, the argument-for-character-drama won out. As much as I want questions answered, I know now that Lost doesn’t necessarily need two hours of exposition about every single mystery still hanging. It will win out if the Man in Black is defeated, Sawyer meets Juliet in the sideways world, Jack is redeemed in both worlds, and my boy Frank Lapidus somehow thrives. I don’t know that these things will happen, but I do know more tears will be shed, and for the first time this week I’ve been able to expect that they will be tears of joy. I’ll see you on the other side, brothers.
The 2008-2009 Caruso Awards: Miscellaneous Bits and Bobs
The new TV season is full swing, and yet here I am, still talking about last season. Of course, I’ve farted around for a couple of weeks doing very important things (not playing Halo 3: ODST, no matter what my endless tweets and Raptr updates will say), and am only now getting around to putting this up. Please forgive my tardiness.
Though I don’t want to say too much about the new season, which is just coming into shape, I will say that some shows (Fringe, House) have yet to get back to full strength, some (CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, Dollhouse, Lie To Me) have come back with a confident bang, and some new shows (Community, Flashforward) have really piqued my interest. One new show (Modern Family) made me think I will never trust another critic ever again. Unless something really dreadful comes along, I think I have my Worst New Pilot of the 2009-2010 Season winner already sewn up.
Anyway, here are my final thoughts on the 2008i-2009 season. There were originally going to be more YouTube clips on here, but I’ve had a dispiriting day watching them get taken down. Fox and NBC, sorry for infringing on your copyright, but all you did was get rid of some free publicity, as I was going to tell the world how awesome your shows were. Except for that clip from Heroes. That was up because Angela Petrelli’s insanely histrionic reaction to her son’s death was the funniest thing of the year. So I can understand that one. And now, on with the hyperbole…
Best New Show: Sons of Anarchy
If one were to be unduly harsh, you could compare the first episode of Sons of Anarchy with the pilot of The Shield. Considering that is easily one of the most impressive and instantly captivating pilots ever made, there was little chance that showrunner Kurt Sutter could ever compete. That he made a pilot as good as the one that kickstarted his biker epic is a testament to his skill as a writer, and his decision to get Sopranos director/producer Allen Coulter in to co-direct it is exactly the kind of smart move that a good showrunner should make. The first few episodes were not perfect, but the building blocks were there.
What sets Sons of Anarchy apart from every other show debuting during the 2008-2009 period — even the eventually superb Dollhouse — is how quickly changes were made, and how confidently they were put in place. By the time season highlight The Pull came around, it was already shaping up to be essential TV, but that episode propelled it onto a completely different level of excellence. Ramping up the pace of the show and throwing one or two of the less interesting characters into terrible danger / potentially ruinous moral compromise, Sons of Anarchy hinted that it could become something that will rival the mighty Shield for complexity and dramatic power. It helps that it features one of the best ensembles on TV right now, filling out its main cast (which, let’s not forget, includes Ron Perlman, an impressive star-making turn from Charlie Hunnam, and relentless magnificence from Kim Coates) with guests spots for Mitch Pileggi, Drea DeMatteo, Jay Karnes, Dayton Callie, Maggie Siff, and the incredible Ally Walker, who blows everyone else away with her terrifying warrior mentality and fearless sexuality. And in season two, we get Adam Arkin and Henry Rollins. Seriously, what’s not to love? From all accounts, the second season is even more unhinged than the first, which is saying something considering the incredible brutality and amoral shenanigans from the first. I can’t wait to dive in.
Worst New Show: Parks and Recreation
Creators Greg Daniels and Michael Schur are not idiots, obviously, but this landed with a terrible splat and couldn’t convince me to hang around long enough to see if it would improve. Part of that was because I was mad at the dip in quality over at The Office. Was it fair to blame this show for that? Probably not. Parks and Recreation has been mooted for so long (remember when it was supposed to be a straight spin-off of The Office?) that their attention has probably been divided for a long time, and the fourth season of The Office was great. Nevertheless, the energy of one show definitely seemed to have been split between two, and the result was a listless hour of supposed comedy.
I have fought with myself over whether it would have been worth hanging around to see if it got better, but then I remember little things that irked like the way the showrunners differentiated the talking head interjections from those of The Office — using two cameras for the faux-interviews instead of one — which drove me into fits of absurd rage. The Office already has trouble keeping the faux-doc format going, and this conceit draws even more attention to the fakeness of it all. Perhaps I’m just burned out on this format. ABC’s new comedy Modern Family has been heralded as the next great sitcom after just two episodes, with across the board raves. We watched last week’s pilot in a state of shock. Flamboyant gay stereotypes? Clunking, obvious jokes about the generation gap? Appalling overacting from everyone (with Julie Bowen being the worst offender)? A character misinterpreting the accent of a Columbian woman? (I say Columbian because Sofia Vergara is from Columbia. She’s probably expected to play someone from a different country in this.) Modern Family is exactly the kind of retrograde laugh-track-enhanced sitcom that seems almost archaic now, but because it’s filmed in a single camera faux-doc style, it’s treated as a cutting-edge exploration of modern American mores. Bullshit. It’s Everybody Loves Raymond. Dressing a raccoon in baseball gear doesn’t make it a baseball player. It just makes it a raccoon covered in sport gear. (Note to self: use less raccoons in metaphors. It just complicates things.)
I also remember one potentially funny scene in Parks and Recreation — involving hapless and strangely unlovable Leslie trying to convince a bunch of ill-informed citizens that her plans are worthwhile — failing to take off, and I realise that after this summer of purposely ignorant right-wing hijacking of the health-care town hall debates, this kind of scene probably won’t ever be funny again. Democracy failing to work because of the Crazification Factor getting in the way of intelligent debate is something I just can’t laugh at right now. What makes this turn of events most sad is that the concept is so full of potential, and yet it didn’t even work before the protests. I can’t figure out how you could take an idea this promising and fail to make something that mixes madness and profundity in the same way as The Office. Compare that to Knight Rider. That was always going to be shit. This should have been a potent mix of satire and ridiculousness. That’s why I have to put it in this category. Apparently it has found its stride in the second season, from what I’ve heard on the Hinternet. Sadly, the people who are saying that also keep going on about how Modern Family is hilarious. So, you know…
Best Title Sequence of the Year: Hung
The choice of music (I’ll Be Your Man by The Black Keys), the phallic objects in the background, the pace of it…
…It’s a perfect title sequence.
Best Pilot: Kings
From what I can gather, there was very little publicity for Kings when it made its way onto the screen. Many have said this was the reason for its failure to find an audience, though to be honest a literate curio like this was unlikely to ever become a breakthrough hit. Alternate histories? Playing with Biblical stories? Unappealing main characters? It just seemed like a real long shot. It was impressive to see NBC gamble on making the show in the first place, but as with the equally intelligent Journeyman, making a show and trying to make the show available to a wide audience are two different things.
To be honest, with Journeyman the hurt is greater. That show was less ambitious, but as a result was more likely to find an audience if given a chance. It also improved as it went along. Kings started off incredibly strong and then stalled a little. That’s the problem when a show gets a pilot this impressive. Written by showrunner Michael Green and directed by the underrated Francis Lawrence, Goliath (the name of the pilot) was like no other pilot I’ve ever seen. Even though it was made on a shoestring, it looked incredible. Even more appealing, it had a weird edge of fantasy even beyond the alternate earth conceit, with God interacting with certain characters in a matter of fact way even though the show did not explicitly preach Christian values.
Perhaps this more than anything alienated audiences: atheists might rebel against a show that openly debates the wishes of God, and Christians might be irked by this God not being a recognisable version of their God. While I fall into the first category, I don’t mind God turning up in fiction as long as It’s not used as a deus ex machina or Unexplainable Puppeteer (hello Battlestar Galactica) or as an accurate version of “our” God (a sky bully who gets pissed off if we don’t play by Its crazy rules). The version of God in Kings was not a big deal, but Its mysterious behaviour, and effect on the behaviour of the main characters, was fascinating.
As was the superb character King Silas Benjamin (not to mention his allies and enemies), and the superb use of New York locations (standing in for the fictional city of Shiloh) to give a sense of epic scale to the show, and the incredible cast… As I say, the show was fascinating to watch right up until its unfortunate cancellation, but it never quite lived up to the promise of that amazing pilot, simply because the pilot made you think you were watching the most amazing show ever. We weren’t, but it was damn good nevertheless. Even the slightly disappointing finished product was better than almost everything else on TV. You could practically sense the cult following develop as you watched, not to mention hear the knives coming out for it as you realise how odd the project was. We’re lucky we saw any of it, to be honest.
Worst Pilot: The Unusuals
Seemingly rushed into production as a result of the writers’ strike, The Unusuals matched an underwhelming concept with a poorly defined set of uninteresting characters, failed to find a consistent tone, and handed off directing chores to the ever-feeble Stephen Hopkins, a man who has never made even one good film (I remember liking The Ghost and the Darkness when I first saw it, but I fear I’m being kind). There was no way I was going to enjoy this.
The main reason for my annoyance is that there were some good actors in there who just couldn’t rise above the material or the execution. Some of the most interesting actors — both promising and established — flounder within the show’s poorly thought-through format, with some characters played as broad as possible and others reining in the madness. Jeremy Renner in particular looks like he’s wandered in from another show. Harold Perrineau does okay with his skittish character, while Adam Goldberg sucks all of the energy out of his scenes with a sour and unappealing demeanour, not to mention a terrible mustache. The conceit that a hypochondriac with a fear of death is partnered with a man who wants to die and yet seems blessed is one of those ideas that sounds great on the page and fails on screen.
As for Amber Tamblyn, playing a high-society girl trying to make it as a cop in the cuh-rayzee precinct, it was a more entertaining concept when rich-boy Carter turned up in E.R. That was only one of the shows this seemed to emulate. M.A.S.H., NYPD Blue, Hill Street Blues, Hooperman (for crying out loud): it was an echo of greater shows, a throwback to 80s cop dramas when they started to become more confident and complex. Sad thing is, we don’t want babysteps any more. We’ve moved on. The low ratings and inevitable cancellation of this show proved that. Let’s hope those good actors turn up in better projects now.
Best Pilot of the Year Not Selected For Series: Virtuality
I won’t go into how much I hated the Battlestar Galactica finale again, as I’m beginning to come across as a total crazy person who is obsessed with going on about it, but it did make me reconsider trying out Caprica, the Stoltzified spin-off. Why should I keep watching shows set in this universe, made by this team, who had so disappointed me throughout the last few seasons? Yes, Jane Espenson would be there too, and I love her work, but still, I cannot imagine being invested in this story any more. There is a good chance I’ll relent, because good SF is hard to find on TV at the best of times. Nevertheless, my annoyance remains.
You can imagine how uninterested I was in another Ronald D. Moore / Michael Taylor show (I was never fond of his BSG episodes), especially one that seemed so prosaic. Moore has stated in the past that he was interested in making BSG because he felt the urge to rebel against Star Trek‘s chirpy universe and its reliance on holodeck technology to change up the show, which made Virtuality — a show about space travellers who use virtual reality technology to relax — a curious proposition. I resisted this too, and then relented after seeing the feeble Defying Gravity, which seemed to be drawn from the same template. Thinking Virtuality would be nothing more than a space soap along the same lines as the other network drama, I gave it a spin, expecting little.
I love it when I’m proved wrong like this. As much as Fox’s other new SF show – Dollhouse – Virtuality is a fascinating and challenging exploration of ideas, dramatically filmed and featuring an excellent cast. In fact, the cast is even stronger than that of Dollhouse, with excellent turns from Nikolaj Coster-Waldau, Sienna Guillory, Richie Coster (who needs more work, stat), and the ever-dependable Clea DuVall. All the actors are on top form, but these four really stand out. As for the comparison with Defying Gravity, the only thing they have in common is being set in space. Virtuality is about so much more: our perception of reality and how it will inevitably be twisted by the lens we observe through, how technology can affect us emotionally, how we refuse to let it go even when it is obviously not doing us any good (an idea expressed far more clearly here than in Lee Adama’s ridiculous speech in the final BSG episode). While Defying Gravity really is a soap set in space (with one character seemingly completely defined by the pregnancy she once terminated, which is as regressive a character arc as is possible), Virtuality is about ideas. It’s proper SF.
At least, it was proper SF. Even though it was obviously incredibly ambitious and beautifully made (with top direction from Shades of Caruso favourite Peter Berg), and even though were was huge potential for relatively cheap but gripping drama, it was shelved. I’m utterly depressed by this turn of events. There was only one misstep in the whole pilot, with a nasty perception-rape sequence that made me uncomfortable. Reliance on rape plots always upsets me, but here even this most unpleasant of plot threads is used to further the show’s exploration of whether there is a gap between virtual and actual reality, and what happens to us when we lose track of the difference between the two. If the show was willing to treat something potentially exploitative as cleverly as this, we would almost certainly have seen a lot of very smart SF in the rest of the series. But no. While Whedon got lucky with Dollhouse, the Virtuality team saw their show taken away before they could go any further. The best thing I can say about it? It was better than most movies I’ve seen this year. It’s a crying shame there will be no more.
Most Unfairly Cancelled Show of the Year: Reaper
Patton Oswalt is a brilliantly funny and caustic man, but recently he broke my heart. In this interview, he explained how, while filming his turn on Reaper, he saw the crew and cast crushed by their parent network, The CW.
When I did Reaper, the episode I originally did was supposed to be the beginning of this introduction to this overall mythology, because they clearly were taking the Joss Whedon playbook: You have a monster of the week for a while, and then you start linking it all up, and you create this overarching kind of world and story. And in the middle of the week, the network just came down on them and said “No, go back to monster of the week.” And you could feel this deflation amongst the actors, because they really understood that they had to start putting mythology into things. The network was just like, “Nope!”
This is the network that, when it was The WB, cancelled Angel, so I already have a big problem with them. Now I have an even bigger one. It may have not become something more ambitious, but it was endlessly lovable, and became admirably silly in the second season. The first was funny, but at times the second season was funnier than many sitcoms. The monster-of-the-week format of the show, which had seemed so restrictive, sometimes ended up shoved into the cold open, with the rest of the episode dealing with silly relationship drama, Sock shenanigans, or sly mythology expanding business with recurring characters like Nina or Tony. This might not be as involving as Buffy, but it was never as blandly diverting as something like The Mentalist. It fell right in the middle, which is apparently deadly.
That greater focus on just being daft was working for us, but the lack of a coherent arc from week to week (other than Sam’s lacklustre efforts to get out of his contract, and the hints that he is a more important player in the battle between God and The Devil) seemed to doom it. More than any other show departing this year, this is the one we’ll miss. Goodbye to one of the most entertaining casts on TV, some of the most eccentric writing of the past few years, and most of all, goodbye to the best Devil in recent pop culture history. He may be showing up in Dollhouse, but will Ray Wise be this mischievous, charming, delightful? Ray Wise fans everywhere, please come together one last time to marvel at that beautiful, beautiful grin.
At least one of us is smiling, I guess. [Insert sad-face emoticon here]
Best New Double Act of the Year: Ray Drecker and Tanya Skagle - Hung
When compiling the list of best and worst characters, I had certain unspoken rules in place to stop myself from focusing exclusively on certain shows. Party Down‘s cast of beautifully observed characters could have dominated the first list, and Knight Rider could have dominated the second. My biggest quandary was caused by Hung, HBO’s lovable male-prostitution-and-economic-disaster comedy that has so entertained us recently. How do I get to honour two of the funniest characters of the year without breaking that rule? As ever, inventing a new category is the perfect answer. Hung is a show that has a few tonal errors (what was going on with the horribly misconceived Jessica, played with occasional delicacy by Anne Heche?) and a very loosely defined season arc (two pimps fighting over Ray and his magical dong), not to mention some wasted actors (why hire Gregg Henry and put him in about five scenes?). At times, it felt like we were watching half a show.
Nevertheless, it became appointment viewing just because of the wonderful work of Thomas Jane and Jane Adams. Their chemistry, and their relentless bickering and grudging friendship, was the thing that made Hung exceed its limitations. It also made Shades of Caruso reconsider the talents of both actors. Thomas Jane was given moments of pathos which he has never really had a chance to play before, and he excelled, especially in the season finale. Jane Adams has always played sad-sack losers, but this time she was given a chance to give Tanya some nobility even as her plans fell apart around her. Both actors also got to show off their physical comedy skills, with Adams especially amusing during her many impotent temper tantrums.
It was their interplay that really held the show together. Even as other plot threads and arcs seemed to falter or shoot off in predictable directions, watching these two actors play off each other was more than enough to save the show. It’s notable that episodes where Ray and Tanya aren’t onscreen together were the weakest of the season, whereas the ones which explored their dependent relationship and accidental exploration of each other’s personality were the most satisfying. Hopefully the show continues to throw these polar opposites together next year.
Best New Couple of the Year: Sawyer and Juliet – Lost
Ah yes, the love triangle/quadrangle. The constant refrain of Lost doubters (and some fans) is that the show is wasting its time whenever it focuses on the relationship drama of Jack, Sawyer, Kate, and Juliet. “We don’t care about that shit! Show more Faraday!” Yes yes, love drama tends to make me go to sleep as well. Many shows are hamstrung by tedious relationship dramas: House is at its dreariest when Thirteen and Foreman, or Cameron and Chase, go on and on about their coupledom; Kings ground to a halt every time David and Michelle made goo-goo eyes at each other. Hell, even the otherwise perfect Party Down was at its least interesting every time Henry and Casey got together. So there is precedent.
However, I love the relationship drama from Lost for two reasons. One: at the end of the season, we see how far Jack has fallen from grace. We thought he was the square-jawed all-American hero who would bring everyone out of the wilderness like a be-stubbled Moses, but over time we see he’s a deeply damaged, semi-psychotic loser who – as we find out in the final episode of season five – even lied about his character-defining anecdote from the very first episode. How much of a loser is he? After pushing away the woman he “loves” with his whiny attitude and various emotional breakdowns, and after years of trying to figure out what his purpose is now that his dad isn’t around to torture him, he has two choices to make a difference in his life: a) man up and seek help for his depression, all while giving up on the thought of making a go of things with Kate, or b) detonate a nuclear bomb, killing everyone on the island, in the hope that it will change history and allow Oceanic 815 to land safely in LAX so he doesn’t have to put up with the mess he made of his life. I’ve said before that one of the things I love about Lost is that it shows the psychology of its characters in minute detail, and this final touch – showing how far people will go to avoid making simple changes in their lives because of their fear of what will happen if it fails – is the perfect metaphor for how we hold onto our broken selves even when we know how to make things better.
Two: It also gave us the wonderful, tragic pairing of Sawyer and Juliet, which justifies all of the sturm and drang to get there. So far, all of the pairings that have been tried were wrong somehow. Jack and Kate didn’t work because Jack is insane. Kate and Sawyer didn’t work because Kate keeps messing with Sawyer’s head. Jack and Juliet didn’t work because Jack was not even slightly into Juliet and was just using her to get over Kate. However, as soon as the fourth season ended with a shirtless Sawyer walking out of the sea towards a drunken Juliet, I knew we would get to see something go right. And, for the most part, it did, even though it was not to be.
It’s not just that the combined hottness of Sawyer and Juliet is so great that it probably melted most of the TVs in the world. It’s also not just that selfish Kate and crazy Jack were finally out of the equation. It’s even not just because seeing Sawyer and Juliet flirting while shooting people was the most awesome thing ever. It’s that there was barely any controversy in the relationship, which probably would have even survived the forthcoming Purge, somehow. It’s only when Kate returns to the island and reignites Juliet’s psychological damage (previously caused by the break-up of her parents, the infidelity of her ex-husband, and the death of her lover Goodwin) that it all goes horribly wrong. Did Sawyer still hold a candle for Kate? Probably. Did he love Juliet? I reckon yes, and I believe he would have done anything for her if she had given him the chance. All of this made the quadrangle emotionally powerful, as we finally had something to hang on to. Would Sawyer and Juliet survive the machinations of the island/Esau and Jacob? More than any other relationship in TV history (except for Fred and Wesley in Angel), my nerves were set on fire by the possibility that those kids might not make it after all. Of course…
Most Upsetting, Most Harsh, and Most Unfair Scene of the Year: The Incident finally happens – Lost
…we all know how it turned out. Nothing else this year made me cry as much as this.
Damn you, stupid TV show! Damn you for being so fucking mean! And damn you Emmy voters for not giving nominations to Elizabeth Mitchell and Josh Holloway. They were amazing all season.
Worst New Couple of the Year: Luke and Bess - In Treatment
In Treatment‘s second season deviated dramatically from its source material — the Israeli drama Be’Tipul — when it moved main character Paul Weston from Maryland to Brooklyn, allowing the show to dramatise his dislocation from his family, as well as to provide a reason for why he suddenly has so many new patients. This meant that we lost the chance to see season one patients Amy and Jake return, this time as a divorced couple fighting over their son, leading to the creation of two new patients, Luke and Bess. With their marriage in tatters and resentment flying between them, their son Oliver suffers terribly, putting on weight and falling into depression as his parents either fight for custody of him or, amazingly, against custody.
None of the characters in this show are particularly nice to Paul, but the games Luke and Bess play with him, using his advice as justification for a serious of awful, selfish choices, were worse than the usual antagonism people show their therapist. Many times during the season I was horrified by their behaviour, and by the time the season finished they were openly talking about how their lives had been ruined by their marriage and how they wanted another chance at what they had with barely any regard for Oliver’s well-being. When Paul finally loses his temper with them in episode 28, it elicited a round of applause from us. Figuratively speaking. And to be honest, he should have been even angrier with them.
Of course, this being In Treatment, these two horribly selfish people are written so well that we can see their point of view — and their humanity — clearly enough that even at their worst we cannot completely write them off. Their eventual remorse is a relief, but it’s still not enough considering how completely both parents are oblivious to the young boy’s needs. Thankfully, Paul is there to prove to Oliver that he will still be there for him, in some respect. His final scene with Oliver, talking to him via “phone” in his office, started a deluge of tears from this admittedly weepy viewer. If Oliver escapes this miserable situation with his psyche intact, it will have nothing to do with his parents.
Most Underused Character of the Year: Boyd Langton - Dollhouse
Whedon has a talent for peppering his casts with older character actors playing the “parents” to the younger crew. With Buffy we had Giles, in Angel there was Wesley (though his efficacy is doubtful; he’s arguably more flawed than any of his compatriots), and Firefly had Shepherd Book. These stern characters with hearts of gold gave their respective shows some kind of grounding when things got wacky, though Whedon wasn’t averse to making them run through some ridiculous hoops (Book’s mad hair, Wesley’s various pratfalls, Giles’ guitar playing). Sadly, while Langton got a chance to be silly in the disappointing comedy episode Echoes, he rarely got a chance to do anything interesting either. Many characters got to have interesting arcs and secrets, but Langton seemed to be getting less and less screentime as the series wore on. Making him head of security broke the student-mentor relationship between him and Echo, but then this might be Whedon trying to throw his own archetypes out, confounding our expectations. That he would give handler-duties to someone who appears to have an unhealthy sexual attraction to Echo (I’m talking about the plasticine-man known as Ballard) shows there might be something to that.
Nevertheless, it is a shame to cast someone like Harry Lennix — who has intense onscreen presence and then some — and then not give him as much to do as possible. His new role means he will interact more with Olivia Williams, meaning the two best actors on the show get to bang heads together: joy! That promotion, along with his new connection to Whiskey/Dr. Saunders, suggests he will be given more to do in the second season, but nevertheless, his relative inaction in later episodes was one of the few things I didn’t like about the improved half of the first season.
Most Entertaining Villain of the Year: Gemma Teller Morrow – Sons of Anarchy
One of the great pleasures of Sons of Anarchy is how it mixes up its Shakespeare. The debt it owes to Hamlet has been acknowledged by creator Kurt Sutter, but less attention has been paid to his shameless steal from Macbeth. Gemma Teller Morrow — former wife of SAMCRO leader John Teller — at first seems like a strong biker chick, but by the end of the pilot episode has revealed herself to be a conniving, power-hungry Queen whose sense of morality has been twisted until she will do anything to protect her family and the direction of the gang, a fact proved by her attempt at driving Jax’s junkie wife Wendy to an overdose. Later in the season she apologises to Wendy for this act, but even then she’s only doing it because she’d rather her son stay with a recovering junkie than return to his longtime sweetheart Tara. Plus, she does seem to be implicated in John’s death, possibly committed by her current husband Clay Morrow, which appears to have been done to prevent a change of direction towards legitimacy for the biker gang.
The most miraculous thing about this character is that she has dispelled my previous reservations about the talents of Katey Sagal. I’ve complained about her terrible voicework on Futurama before, where she leaves no joke intact, but I had suspected her dramatic work was not as shaky. She was great as John Locke’s departed love Helen in Lost, for example. In Sons of Anarchy, she’s even better, outacting even Ron Perlman when she’s in full flow. This display of Macchiavellian sneakiness got even more entertaining as the season progressed. There was a certain amount of character modulation during the latter half of the season, with some of her excesses toned down, and the horribly stagy confrontations between her and Tara tweaked until they sounded like actual human conversations, but even so, her Lady-Macbeth-esque manipulations of all around her were a source of delight even when she misfired a little. Gemma, as Journey almost said once, don’t stop conniving.
Least Entertaining Villain of the Year: Miguel Prado - Dexter
Dexter sure does have some crappy nemeses. In the first season, he goes up against his own brother, played with ridiculous camp evilness by Christian Camargo. In the second season, he is forced to conquer his evil girlfriend, manifested by Jaime Murray with a bag of absurd tics even more annoying than those of Dexter’s sister Debs, who is played by the equally dreadful Jennifer Carpenter. In the fourth season we’re getting John Lithgow. My memories of his madness from De Palma’s Raising Cain do not bode well for any Over-Act-O-Meters used to track the progress of this show, though I reckon he will be infinitely more entertaining than Dexter’s other “villains”.
Last year we got to see Jimmy Smits contend with the usual quota of ineptitude, improbable motivation, and mustache-twirling obviousness that comprises the Dexter Big Bad, and he made a meal of it. Amping up his intensity to sky-high levels, Miguel Prado went from saint to madman in the blink of an eye, all pretense at showing him as a morally complex human thrown out of the window with a haste even this most feeble of shows has never exhibited before. His cluelessness meant his occasional victories against Dexter relied upon our “hero”‘s IQ dropping 100 points, which is a flaw that has run through the show from the beginning. Prado would then, naturally, make a bunch of mistakes, all the while chewing scenery like a murderous Donald Sinden. I say he was the least entertaining villain of the year because watching his character arc was deeply unsatisfying, with him changing his personality from moment to moment in order to move the plot, and not vice versa, but I did get a lot of pleasure from his reaction after he finally kills a bad guy.
Nastiest Villain of the Year: Nolan – Dollhouse
I can’t make any glib observations about this. Whedon is an avowed feminist, and this new show seemed to be a peculiar expression of that worldview, drawing both perplexed condemnation and optimistic readings. The fact that the show didn’t immediately say that the Dollhouse was a bad place threw a lot of viewers (including myself), but I’m sure a lot of Whedon’s fans (again, including myself) hoped that things would be clearer in the long run.
By the end of the season it was obvious that the Dollhouse tech was meant to be The Worst Thing That Has Happened To Humanity Ever, and not just because it brings about the end of the world (or at least, the end of Humanity). The most graphic and upsetting example of this comes in the excellent episode Needs, where the Actives come to and “escape” their prison (but only because they are allowed to). Drawn to the terrible things that have made them volunteer for Activeness, we see November visiting the grave of her child, and Echo deciding to stay behind to rescue her fellow Actives (surely this should worry the Dollhouse executives a bit more). Sierra, who I’d never found to be particularly compelling, goes to see the man who has paid the Dollhouse to make her an Active. Any doubt that the Dollhouse is a force for evil is removed once we find out that Nolan (played with oily menace by Vincent Ventresca) has paid the Dollhouse to turn her — a woman who once refused him — into an Active just so that he can violate a woman her whenever he feels like it. As Couch Baron says here, there truly are no words that can describe how awful this is. It was the most potent way to show how dreadful this technology is, and upset me deeply. The bad taste remained for the rest of the season. How rare for a network show to explore this kind of moral depravity without shying away from it.
Best Cast of the Year: Party Down
Just as with this year’s Best New Double Act category, I created this category last year to give shout-out to Reaper‘s wonderful cast, which featured a host of great actors, especially Ray Wise, Tyler Labine, and Ken Marino. This year, Party Down gets a nod for featuring so many great actors, including Ken Marino. If I’d been blogging when Veronica Mars started, I probably would have highlighted the terrific cast of that show too, which would have meant discussing Ken Marino’s turn as sleazy private investigator Vinnie Van Lowe. Basically, Ken Marino seems to be my weakness. If he’s around, I am helpless.
Which is not to say Party Down worked solely because of him. As I’ve mentioned at length in my Best New Characters award list, Jane Lynch is breathtakingly good as Constance Carmell, and her replacement (Jennifer Coolidge) was just as good. Of the core cast, I’d highlight Ryan Hansen too, playing the adorably clueless Kyle Bradway — basically Dick Casablancas with a heart of gold. His vapid interactions with Jane Lynch are the highlight of many episodes, and he even manages to make tolerable the time spent with Martin Starr, here doing worryingly convincing work as the deeply unpleasant Roman DeBeers. He’s probably the weak link in the cast, though I would also become annoyed by the endless hipsterish emotional evasions of Casey Klein, played by Lizzy Caplan. (Side note: I think it’s fair to say that, thanks to real-world annoyances too numerous to count, I automatically take against any character on TV who spends all of their time on the phone instead of doing their job, or while other people are trying to talk to them. Those caveats are meant to signify that Jack Bauer is not to be considered one of these people. When he’s on the phone, he’s actually saving the world).
At the heart of this amazing ensemble is Adam Scott, formerly playing Palek the Vulcan Inseminatron from Tell Me You Love Me, and now utterly rehabilitated from that indie-movie-aping earnestness after his incredibly bold turn in Step Brothers. Here he is required to be in enormous emotional pain for the majority of the time, and it’s a credit to him that playing a completely shut-down shell of a man doesn’t mean he isn’t funny. His ability to mix up this world-weariness and emotional vulnerability with deadpan wit is essential to the success of the show. He’s Tim-from-The-Office, but even more pathetic. You weep for him in every episode.
So, they’re a fantastic core group, but they’re not the only reason Party Down wins this award. Just as with 30 Rock and Arrested Development before them, this show manages to get some of the best character actors around to populate the secondary cast. In the first season we saw Ken Jeong, J.K. Simmons, Steven Weber, Marilu Henner, Joe Lo Truglio, Mather Zickel, Joey Lauren Adams, Molly Parker, Breckin Meyer, Rob Corddry, Rick Fox (as himself), George Takei (also as himself), not to mention — for the Veronica Mars fans out there — Kristin Bell, Enrico Colantoni, Daran “Cliff McCormack” Norris, Ed Begley Jr., Alona Tal and Jason Dohring. Matched up to the best sitcom scripts of the year, there was no way this show was going to fail. Even though I’m agnostic on the appeal of Megan Mullally (drafted in to replace Jane Lynch in season two), I have a strong feeling she will be magically transformed by this most glorious of shows.
Worst Cast of the Year: Parks and Recreation
I feel a little ill, because I’m about to criticise the casting of a show that has Amy Poehler in the lead role. Amy Poehler, who was the best thing about last year’s Baby Mama. Amy Poehler, who was one of the best things about SNL for the past few years. Amy Poehler, who was one of the three things in Southland Tales that was actually great and entertaining instead of desperately bad and misery-inducing (the other two things being The Rock and Wood Harris, with whom she shared her scenes). She makes me laugh pretty much every time I see her, but not here. In that case, I’m willing to assume she was just dealt a bad hand, and given a character who is unworkable. The only times Leslie Knope comes alive and becomes more than a badly formed lump of unrealistic character flaws is when she pines over Mark Brendanawicz, her selfish and unappealing colleague played by the talented Paul Schneider. Again, another talented actor playing an unlikeable and uninteresting character. Maybe I should rethink this category. Is it the cast, or the show, that I don’t like?
Well, Aziz Ansari is in it. I’ll admit, I have not seen much of his work. He was in Funny People for a couple of minutes, and the effect he had on me was akin to having my soul Maced. Perhaps I’m wrong. This show seems to be underwritten and poorly thought through, which could account for it, but his turn as Tom Haverford is almost unwatchable. I’d say that’s more than just a glitch in the writing. The same goes for Nick Offerman as the Dwight-Schrute-esque Ron Swanson, a character that screams desperation from the writers but is not at all helped by Offerman’s flat performance. Both Haverford and Swanson seem like the kernel of a joke expanded to character-size without much thought given to whether these characters will work. As it is, they’re just belligerent. The less said about Aubrey Plaza and her pointless teenage character April Ludgate, the better. (See above for comments about affectless, oblivious characters like Ludgate and Casey from Party Down.)
Perhaps the thing I resent most is putting someone as funny as Chris Pratt opposite a comedy void like Rashida Jones. She was charming enough in The Office but wasn’t expected to be particularly funny. Here she is either a dope being manipulated by Pratt’s Andy, or she berates him, making her seem churlish and him seem like a victim, which he isn’t. Crappy couples on TV are not often fun to watch (ask any Lost fan who despairs whenever Jack and Kate get together). I’m more than willing to accept that a lot of these actors are far better in other roles. Hell, I’ve seen them be better. Pratt was hilarious in The O.C. as Che, and Paul Schneider was riveting in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. Perhaps I’m being way too harsh on these actors. Sadly, the bottom line is that, unlike The Office that came with only a couple of good characters, already based on archetypes from the UK series, and then built the supporting cast as they went along, Parks and Recreation started from scratch and got none of the characters right. Even a good cast would have trouble making this bunch of half-formed comedic scribbles come to life. In time, if it doesn’t get cancelled, perhaps this will change. Let me know when it does. Until then, I’ll stick with Community, Dan Harmon’s brilliant new sitcom, which recently started almost fully-formed and will hopefully keep getting better.
Best Guest Star of the Year: Jon Hamm - 30 Rock
For a little while, we were non-converts to the Cult of Hamm. He entertained us enough in Mad Men, but we had enough reservations about the first season that he didn’t really register in our consciousness, even after the Dick Whitman revelation gave Hamm the best acting opportunities. Perhaps we thought he was just a pretty face, and couldn’t imagine there was anything else in there. Canyon was also offended by his Brylcreemed hair. She deemed it unappealing. I wasn’t about to argue.
Then came the far superior second season, and sightings of his normal hair (adorably floppy), and then a turn on Saturday Night Live that was so confident and charming that I fully expect Hamm to eventually challenge the hosting records fought over by Christopher Walken, Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin. Dramatic excellence, perfect comic timing, a willingness to play off his image, and seriously, one of the handsomest faces on Earth; if he can sing and dance, he’s got it all. We are now members of the Cult. Wearing robes and everything. It’s proper infatuation.
His three episode run as Dr. Drew Baird on 30 Rock was joyous. It was so good that the plot of his final episode, with him coming to realise that having everyone fawn over him all the time is something that doesn’t happen to anyone else, was even alluded to in the third season of Mad Men (reacting with bemusement when Sal points out that he doesn’t get hit on by flight attendants on every flight he takes, unlike Don, who is obviously spoilt for choice). Once Mad Men is over, Hamm can pretty much pick a direction. Not many actors get to achieve stardom and show both comedic and dramatic chops. Maybe he’s more like Dr. Drew than he realises.
Most Resurrected Character of the Year: Captain Jack Harkness - Torchwood: Children of Earth
I thought I always wanted Captain Jack’s immortality to be used more, as it’s a nifty little gimmick. I don’t think that any more.
Most Surprising Directorial Work of the Year: Akiva Goldsman on Kings and Fringe
Akiva Goldsman has done some awful things. His script for Batman and Robin is rightly reviled. He’s great at simplifying complex narratives and turning them into multiplex fodder (A Beautiful Mind, I, Robot). He’s the go-to guy for big movies based on crappy thrillers by bad writers (he’s adapted John Grisham and Dan Brown). When nerds hear his name, they sob with misery. “Why is this man so beloved of Hollywood?”, they shout. “It must be proof of its awfulness, along with the career of Michael Bay!” Of course, my own feelings about Bay are not so straight-down-the-line, and now, Goldsman has begun to win me over.
All he had to do was build up his experience as a director by making two of the strongest hours of TV of the 2008-2009 season. His debut, on Kings‘ The Sabbath Queen, showed a talent for atmospherics and interesting visuals, pacing the episode beautifully and getting some good performances from even the weaker actors on the show. After that he wrote and directed Bad Dreams, one of the highlights of Fringe‘s first season. Again, the creepy atmosphere was beautifully judged, and the opening few minutes were hypnotically staged. Even better, the big finale was disturbing and tense, even as it played with some less than fresh ideas, and then we got a video clip of a young Olivia that wouldn’t have looked amiss in Hideo Nakata’s Ringu. If you’ll forgive me for cheating and ignoring my own rules, we’ve also seen his work on the first episode of the second season of Fringe, and again, it was very impressive. In time it’s obvious that he will be directing films too. I hope he finds some interesting material to work with, but even if not, I look forward to seeing what he will come up with.
Least Surprising Directorial Work of the Year: Greg Yaitanes on House and Lost
Shades of Caruso took against the TV (and occasional film) director Greg Yaitanes after some hilariously overwrought and showy work on shows such as Heroes and Drive, and we’ve yet to be convinced he deserves reappraisal. Last year he won an Emmy for his work on the first part of the House season finale, which would have been understandable when you take the logistics of the shoot into account, but is frustrating when Katie Jacobs’ work on the far more affecting final episode wasn’t even considered (and she’s listed as co-director of the Yaitanes episode too, but didn’t get a nomination). Since then, Yaitanes has been given a co-producer credit on House, and contributed numerous episodes to this season, including the shocking Simple Explanation, in which Kutner (Kal Penn) commits suicide offscreen.
I will say this: the scene where Foreman and Thirteen discover the body was brilliantly done. Unfortunately, Yaitanes had a vision for this episode and went ahead with it. Everyone at Princeton Plainsboro is obviously very depressed about Kutner’s death, so Yaitanes lights the entire episode as if all the colour has been drained from the hospital. It’s an entirely grey hour of TV, just in case you didn’t get it from the performances or dialogue or sad music all over the place. To be honest, the episode Joy, directed by an unexpectedly off-colour Deran Serafian, featured the worst direction of the season, but Yaitanes was consistently bad here, and worse elsewhere.
You see, he also managed to infect my beloved Lost with his ridiculous film-cooties. I could talk about the flashy work he did on Heroes, but to be honest he’s the least of that show’s problems, so I don’t really mind if he stays on it. Lost, however, is a totally different matter. He had worked on the show before, in the first season, and as we started rewatching the show recently, I noticed he was kinda bad then too. That was when the show was in its infancy, and was still trying to find its tone, so his attention-seeking excesses were less obvious. By now, we all know what works and what doesn’t work within the very specific Lost world, which made Yaitanes’ excesses even more noticeable than usual. We know that Ben is creepy and Sayid is scary and intimidating, which are characteristics stressed by their very specific line-readings. In He’s Our You, we see a flashback to a face-off between the two characters, and both Michael Emerson and Naveen Andrews draw out their sentences to absurd lengths, with poorly edited pauses between each shot emphasising that they are both very methodical people who hate each other.
Lost usually treats these big moments with a sense of grandeur that works well, considering the unapologetically grandiose nature of the narrative, but this scene stepped over the line between epic and ridiculous. It made my favourite show seem like a parody of itself. I don’t even want to get into the awful “interrogation” scene later (included above), which was poorly written but even more poorly directed. What was Andrews doing here? It’s all over the place. The final scene with Sayid shooting young Ben was brilliant, but it was the only bright spot in a very disappointing hour of Lost. When you compare this horrible misinterpretation of the tone of the show to the consistently impressive work of star directors Jack Bender and Stephen Williams, it just looks amateurish. I keep hoping he’ll settle down, but the latest episode of House was directed by him, and as it was about a games programmer, most shots seemed to feature arms coming out of the side of the frame towards the person being observed, just like an FPS, so it might be a while before he realises less is more.
Best Shout-Out of the Year: House
Stephen Colbert is a huge fan of House, and it seems the feeling is mutual. (It’s the photo above his shoulder, obviously.)
This is the only way Colbert is ever going to get on a Fox channel without being mischaracterised as a baby-eating Trotsky clone.
Intensity of the Year: Lance “Intensity” Reddick – Fringe
While Parks and Recreation fans, or Dexterites, or people with Unusual taste, might be mad at me for being a big meanie and saying such terrible things about their favourite shows, surely there can be no controversy here. No one else this year was so stern and scary and just fucking in charge.
I suspect Lance “Intensity” Reddick can atomise titanium just by looking at it. As with Harry Lennix on Dollhouse, Reddick is pretty under-used on Fringe. Most of the time he is onscreen he’s taking the Fringe team to various crime scenes, or giving Olivia either a bollocking or a pep talk. This is not a good use of this man’s talents. He also showed up in Lost, as the sinister Matthew Abaddon, where he stopped being sinister just before getting shot and killed. Which sucked. I hope season two of Fringe sees him doing more entertaining stuff. I’d like him to shoot one of their ridiculous monsters (a part squid, part mushroom teenager hiding under carpets, for instance), or have more screen time with Blair Brown and Her Metallic Arm. If the Fringe showrunners don’t hurry up, he could well get very bored very soon. In this AV Club interview, he says he wants to try his hand at comedy. (For the record, though he is seemingly never required to show it on TV, Mr. Reddick is fully capable of expressing amusement, and isn’t just a scarily intense man.)
If he left Fringe to do that, you know I’d be checking it out.
And that’s it for this year. In the next few weeks, some new polls or something. Maybe some chatter about the London Film Festival (I got really carried away buying tickets the other week). Stay tuned, new readers. As you can see, I may not post as often as I would like, but when I do, I tend to post big.
End Of Season Review: Reaper
Best US Alternative Rock Album Produced Between 1990 And 1994. Prettiest Cast Member In Friday Night Lights. Most Powdery Wig In Britain 1752. These are hotly contested titles. Unlike the title of Best New US Show Of The Season 2007-8, which was more like the contest to win England Footballer Of The Year 2007 – all the potential contenders seemed to underperform deliberately, giving the impression it was an accolade no-one wanted to win.
Reaper takes it, although the victory owes more to what the show wasn’t than to what it was. It wasn’t high-gloss, soapy schlock about a bunch of hateful bastards; it wasn’t a rehash of tired sci-fi tropes aimed lazily at a supposedly easily-pleased audience; and it didn’t coast on a thin premise while besotted with its own insufferable quirkiness. It may not have been perfect, but Reaper remained reliably entertaining throughout its run, while demonstrating the importance of a solid concept and a strong cast.
One of the reasons I watched Reaper in the first place was its superficial similarity to one of the greatest TV shows of my lifetime, in which a seemingly ordinary young person reluctantly assumes responsibility for combating the threat of supernatural nasties. But Reaper is certainly not Buffy, and signalled this by having Kevin Smith direct its pilot. It’s as much about a bunch of guys hanging out talking shit as it is about evil hellspawn. Almost every episode sees Sam, Sock and Ben drinking pints at the bar, suggesting that for them beer is nearly as important as serving the Devil by trapping escaped souls and returning them to the underworld. And that is my kinda show.
This attitude underpins Reaper’s whole ethos. Sam may struggle with the burdens of his obligations to the Devil, but he still finds time to goof around at the Work Bench. Ben is thrust into life-endangering situations weekly, but he still loves to daydream about his perfect woman (who of course is independently wealthy, enjoys mixed martial arts and reads Sue Grafton novels). And Sock refuses to take anything seriously – work, the Devil, Sam’s romantic problems – unless it involves his mother. The show’s ambling, amiable spirit feeds into what Admiral Neck diagnosed back in November as Futurama Syndrome – the odd pacing that sees the main plot often wrapped up with ten or more minutes of episode still to unfold. While this was intially weird and unsettling, before long it came to feel familiar and natural, with the realisation that Sam’s adventures in recapturing souls aren’t what Reaper is about. Rather, it’s about Sam’s troubles in balancing his obligations, his responsibilities to friends, family, Andi and work – the problems we all go through when making the transition to adulthood. Their occasionally unearthly nature notwithstanding, Sam’s problems are instantly recognisable for all of us, as is the half-arsed way he goes about trying to solve them. Well, it’s about that and a bunch of guys hanging out talking shit.
Reaper’s main drawback was that for a long time it didn’t appear to be going anywhere: the guys just bumbled from week to week, being equally inept at bounty hunting, retail and affairs of the heart. This was an unusually long establishing period, and only when Sam stumbled (a) into another relationship that ignited Andi’s feelings for him and (b) on a demonkind plot against the Devil was any significant progress made. An ongoing problem – a surprising one, seeing as Reaper is one of the few shows on US TV created by women – is the female characters: Andi is little more than a vessel for Sam’s hopes and desires, only developing a personality in the final third of the season (and even then it’s mainly a ‘one of the guys’ personality); as for Josie, both her femaleness and her blackness feel tokenistic given that she appears only when soul-trapping brushes up against the law or when a Sock-related C-plot is needed; and when Ben finally gets to have a relationship it’s with the shrewish Sara, who manipulates him, steals all his money and leaves him in jail pining for the Grafton-reading fantasy girl Cassidy.
The way Sara was written wasn’t her only problem. I did a little cheer when I saw Lucy Davis’s name in the credits but sadly she was dreadful in the role, all eye-rolling and silly tics and incomprehensible muttering. For someone whose major career role has been on the radio, it’s astonishing how poor her diction is (see also Shaun Of The Dead, if for some reason you haven’t). Fortunately this was just about the only casting misstep Reaper made. The guest spots were a delight, from Melinda Clarke as the lonely mistress of the Devil to Jeff Kober as a hardworking neighbourhood demon, but the best was Ken Marino, essaying his usual easy charm as practical, sweet-natured ex-angel Tony.
But the near-perfect guest casting was no surprise considering the success of Reaper’s main cast. Rick Gonzalez might not be the finest actor on TV but his artless, affable presence is perfect for the sweet-natured Ben. Bret Harrison stands out from any number of blandly handsome puppyish actors not only for his physical comedy skillz – he can take a pummelling like a champ – but also for his hapless ability to inspire sympathy. But these two might have floundered without Tyler Labine, whose energy and gung-ho commitment give Reaper an anarchic edge. Despite his innate – and often hilarious – selfishness, it is Sock who usually provokes the team into action (Sam and Ben would surely remain hopelessly static without him), and Labine has the manic charisma to make this believable.
Labine may prove to be the breakout star of the show, but its ace in the hole is without question Ray Wise. My co-bloggers have already eulogised about his magnificent grin, but the key to the role is Wise’s astonishing ability to switch between avuncular and sinister in a microsecond. He also brings a subtle poignancy at times, inviting you to feel sympathy for the Devil’s inability to enjoy food or his isolation, before doing something gleefully horrible to remind you – hey! He’s the frickin’ Devil! Evidently Anthony Head auditioned for the part, but although he has a certain roguishness, I doubt even Giles could have managed Wise’s devastating combination of authority, playfulness and outright malice. Ah, fuck it – let’s face it, Head couldn’t have emulated this.
Like Friday Night Lights, Reaper has benefited from the lack of new dramas in season 2008-9 and been recommissioned (for 13 episodes at least), despite its mediocre ratings. Although it’s been enjoyable until now, it’ll be fascinating to see where it goes from here. Because while it’s a good show, I’m not convinced it can ever be great. Whether deliberately or not, it has virtually no emotional impact, and no evident ambition to make any; even the apparent death of Sam’s dad in the season finale didn’t quite disrupt the good-humoured atmosphere. I’m sure it can go on being an engaging, lovable show with charm to spare, which is far more than many manage. But if that’s the limit of its aspirations, that’s a shame – and it may not be enough to keep Reaper alive.
Another Apology Re: Torchwood
In previous posts on this thread, we may have given the impression that what had once been seemingly beyond salvaging had become a potentially interesting show. Titles such as “I Can’t Believe It’s Not Torchwood“, “Martha Makes Everything Better”, and “I May Not Like The Taste Of Humble Pie But I’ll Happily Eat It” may have given the impression that what once had been the canker sore on the lip of British TV drama had become a soilbed from which challenging and intelligent sci-fi might one day spring.
We now realise that those flawed but interesting moments were an aberration, not a newly established status quo, and the usual standards of the show would be restored as soon as an opening was found. Future post titles such as “If In Doubt, Having A Character Wave A Gun About Will Fill A Minute Of Screentime”, “Dear God, Will Someone Inject Some Dignity Into This Debacle?”, and “Does Anyone On This Show Understand The Concept Of Plagiarism?” will hopefully restore normality to this blog. Thank you for your patience. (Again, apologies to Private Eye.)
I’m in two minds about this. It was great seeing the show stretch a little during the Martha Trilogy, but it wasn’t really enough for it to become “appointment TV” (oh how I hate that phrase), so I felt like the TV village idiot had been rehabilitated Flowers-For-Algernon-style, and I had no one to laugh at and throw rocks at anymore (though we do intend to start watching CSI: Miami again pretty soon). Last week’s “terrestrial” episode, Something Borrowed, was a return to previous shoddy form, giving Meat a run for its money, and brazenly referring to its own unoriginality in its title. Well, I reckon Something Stolen and Ineptly Rehashed would be closer to the mark, but you get my point.
Any seriousness of purpose the show might have built up over the patchy but promising Martha Trilogy was stripped away, replaced with knuckle-chewingly inane comedy, staggering contrivance, a total dismissal of all logic, replacement of human motivation with plot-furthering stupidity, poorly executed Evil Dead homages, and inept action moments. I can’t decide which is worse: Meat, this, or the season opener with James Marsters and his big fat paycheck.
What was so poor about it? Perhaps it was because it was a Gwen-centric episode. I’m really not crazy about the character at all, and couldn’t give two shits for her relationship with Jack. I also find it odd that she is suddenly cast as the comedy relief in the show, being sidelined almost entirely during the ostensibly more dramatic episodes of the Martha Trilogy. Maybe it’s a temporary thing, or just because this was the comedy episode of the season, but her line-readings and gestures were very very peculiar in this, as broad as you can possibly imagine.
Comedy episodes of most dramatic shows are to be avoided, unless of course the show has a strong comedic element already (Buffy, Angel, and Firefly did this better than most). Even a very dramatic show can pull it off. Lost did it with Expose and, arguably, Tricia Tanaka Is Dead, despite the oft-humourless tone of the show. By comparison, Torchwood is obviously under the impression that it’s already very funny, but the odd comedic line is either childish, obvious, or poorly delivered, and sometimes all three at once, so imagine the pain caused by an episode that concentrates solely on this kind of broad silliness. I know appreciation of what is funny or not is subjective, but how anyone could find this ineptly staged juvenile nonsense a joy to watch is a mystery to me.
So, in a effort to ensure that the overall internet opinion about this show doesn’t skew exclusively towards the positive, I present The Ten Worst Things About Something Borrowed, by Admiral Neck, aged 5 1/4.
10. The Pointless Editing In The First Scene.
After flashing back to Jack’s bizarre reaction to Gwen’s engagement from the season opener, we cut to a depressing Cardiff nightclub and two depressingly loud and obnoxious women in cowboy hats greeting Gwen with a depressing song about her having anal sex. Yay, hen nights! Is there anything more entertaining than drunk women talking about sex at the top of their lungs and then cackling? Still, I bet there’s a stripper.
This then cuts to Gwen chasing a shapeshifting alien, which is exciting! And then back to the hen night, where a stripper arrives! And then back to the exciting chase! And then back to the hen night! And then… You get the picture.
Firstly, as Rhys points out later, Jack’s an asshole for sending her out to kill aliens on the night before her wedding. Second, Gwen has friends? When did this happen? Third, while chasing the alien she gets bitten by it, which is the inciting incident. (I can imagine it was referred to as that during script meetings.) This fact is subtly revealed when one of Gwen’s gobby friends asks her what the time is, and Gwen suddenly unveils the biggest pre-wedding bandage you’ve ever seen.
What’s that on her arm, the viewer thinks. I wonder how she got that! Like this.
Look at the size of those space gnashers! Jack shows up to save Gwen (so he was obviously available for alien hunting, which once more begs the question as to why Gwen was getting into danger), and his reaction to this enormous wound is, “Owen should take a look at that.” You think?
He obviously doesn’t check it very closely, as she ends up getting pregnant from it. Stupid dead doctor. Anyway, though there are several things about this dire opening that annoyed me, it’s the editing that irked me the most. Is it a suspense scene? No, because we keep seeing Gwen alive and relatively healthy during that scene. Is the storytelling device useful for teasing us with hints about Gwen’s night and then paying it off with reveals? No, because we don’t have to wait very long to find out. Is it used to generate the funny? Next question. Is it just another way of showing the contrast between Gwen’s social life, which is the same as most lairy boozed-up people of her age, and her secret life chasing aliens and getting knocked up by them. Almost certainly, but we spent the entire first season doing this, and getting Rhys involved in Torchwood’s affairs should have drawn a veil over that (geddit?). Instead, we’re still banging away at that point. When I realised the show was slipping back into its bad habits I started to hear warning bells about the loss of momentum from the Martha Trilogy. Time elapsed: 3 minutes 15 seconds.
9. Alien Impregnation? Really?
For an start, it’s a cliched idea. Even a show I loved, Angel, featured Cordelia getting knocked up twice by demons (okay, so the second time was a way to get around her real-life pregnancy, and it did bring about the excellent season four arc with Jasmine, but still). Even the relatively tame Star Trek: The Nextest Generation had Troy get pregnantised by a glowing light; a Hallmark Card way to have a character raped.
Just on a personal level, stories about women being impregnated by aliens don’t really appeal to me much, mostly because it reduces the woman to a reproductive system that is vulnerable to invasion, and it’s icky and tasteless and kind of insulting. Admittedly it can be done well (Alien 3 handled it with the appropriate seriousness), but most often it’s done really really badly (I’m thinking Species II here; a despicable film, and poorly made to boot). I get the “appeal” of the concept, and my love of Cronenberg should give you an idea of my stance on body horror (short version; yay!), but done wrong these stories treat something very serious in an exploitative and distasteful way. It makes me feel very uncomfortable.
So imagine how I feel when it’s played for laughs. For fuck’s sake, Gwen has an alien egg in her belly! Only when the team realise childbirth involves her evisceration do they take it seriously. No amount of over-the-top pickle-chomping and high-larious wedding-day tantrum-throwing will disguise the fact that Gwen’s body has been invaded.
She’s gorging herself on phallic objects! My sides are splitting! Because I am the host for an alien foetus, obviously.
8. Gwen’s Desperation About Getting Married Blinding Her To The Consequences Of Such A Decision.
So, Gwen is the host for the egg of a shapeshifting alien. It’s the day of the wedding. Jack is concerned for her health, obviously, as he doesn’t know what the alien gestation is like (useless former Time Agent!), and both he and Owen strongly suggest she postpone the wedding while they figure things out. But Gwen really wants to get married anyway. So they let her.
It’s very generous of everyone to let Gwen do what she wants, and certainly it’s a tradition that the wedding day, while special for everyone, is even more special for the bride, but there’s a line to be drawn there. Right across her enormous pregnant belly. Why would anyone in the world think that this was a good idea? Jack and Owen and Rhys all know this is a bad idea, but she blunders on anyway, using yelling and weird acting tics do her arguing for her.
What’s worse is we tried to give the show the benefit of the doubt, and entertained the idea that this could be explained away as possible brainwashing by the alien in her body, that in its culture the birth demands some kind of ceremony, and it was making Gwen desire a wedding so that it could be born properly. The alternative was that Gwen is a halfwit. Sadly, she really is. She’s just a girl that wants her wedding day and won’t even postpone for a couple of days to sort out the whole possibly-deadly-egg-in-the-belly thing. Even worse, later on Tosh tells her she made the right decision, which means the guys are pragmatic about the whole impregnation thing, but the women are all about the pretty dresses and the wonder of the wedding day princess thing. Those dames sure do love a good wedding!
Seems like the writer, Phil Ford (more on him later) was aware that he was making Gwen do stupid things, as Gwen suddenly realises (after telling her parents that she is pregnant and then realising they’re excited about a grandchild that will never exist) that perhaps she is doing the wrong thing, but bringing attention to it doesn’t get rid of the fact that the episode was written to show a wedding framed within the format of Torchwood, using the alien pregnancy as a heavy-handed way to metaphorically dramatise the effect of Gwen’s wedding ceremony on our characters, and to get to that point it was necessary to remove all semblance of logical human behaviour from the show. It’s contrivance, pure and simple, and is utterly unforgivable. By now I realised the show was back to its usual dreadful state, and the scene that convinced me, featuring Gwen’s overjoyed parents and her sudden realisation that she’s made a mistake, is only eleven minutes into the episode, and the worst is yet to come.
7. Comedy Relief!
Gwen and Rhys’ friends are clumsily introduced (though I think I remember Rhys referring to Mervyn or Banana Boat in a previous episode. I should remember, as I usually hang on his every word), mostly to fill the cast out a bit, but also to provide laughs in this most amusing of comedy episodes.
All of them are lecherous jerks, which means they’ll probably be joining the Torchwood team very soon. It was all very depressing for the actors, especially Jonathan Lewis Owen, who plays Banana Boat as a cross between Prince William, a Welsh chav, and a lobotomised sex-addict.
He had to bumble through some awful dialogue, which wasn’t his fault, but I so dearly wanted him to die horribly. Sorry Jonathan Lewis Owen! I’m sure you’re a lovely chap in real life. However, he kept chatting up Tosh (of all people), and even managed to molest her while trapped inside a web of bin bags weaved by the alien. Here are the bin bags…
…and here is Banana Boat’s face as his genitals are crushed by Tosh in annoyance over his lechery and loudness.
Sadly, he was not to be killed in a terrible fashion. Instead it was the turn of Mervyn, the other lecherous wanker, who leered at the alien…
…and then got his genitals chomped off by her during what he thought was going to be a sexxy sex act.
So, men are mindless sex-obsessed beered-up pigs, and women want to get married despite alien inpregnation, the heartbreak of their parents, and terrible danger. They will also happily damage the gonads of any man in range. And gay men?
They buy wedding dresses. I can bet the Stonewall Awards judges will be thrilled.
(Yes yes, this is all played for laughs, and if I was going to be really generous I would say it could be an un-PC spoof of the show’s usual admirably PC stance, but I think they were just going for easy gags. Let’s not go overestimating the intelligence of anyone involved in making Torchwood, okay?)
6. Tosh.
In Mad Men, Betty Draper memorably (and anvilliciously) asked a pertinent question about her husband; “Who is Don Draper?” (The answer to which is, “Don Draper is Dick Whitman!”) Well, I ask, who is Tosh? And should I care? (The answer to which is, “no”.) Early on in the episode she stalks Owen again, in an attempt to get him to attend the wedding. She keeps on that it isn’t a date, but obviously she thinks it is, what with her continual simpering and annoying passive-aggressiveness.
Five minutes later, she’s beating up Banana Boat and mouthing tough guy dialogue.
Oh my God! It’s like McKee says! Reveal the true character through action and not dialogue! So she’s a tough guy at heart, really. Except she’s all jittery and sentimental when she’s talking to Gwen about the wedding.
So what is Tosh? Whatever the scene needs at any given point. She’s just a cipher, and as such means nothing. That’s a criticism of Tosh and the lack of show bible that I’ve already gone on about in the past, and not a criticism of Naoki Mori. Rumour has it she’s being written out at the end of the season. Hopefully in future she’ll get a chance to bring to life a coherent character instead of this nebulous gap where a recognisable human should be.
5. What To Do With Dead Owen.
Having turned Owen into the only character other than Jack that’s not just a boring human who’s obsessed with sex, the show ran riot with the concept for two episodes (one of which was okay, the other was less so but still littered with interesting moments). Now? Well, it was a Gwen episode, so there wasn’t really anything for him to do. Other than wear badges for no apparent reason.
I can understand it. I don’t really have a problem with it, and the rumour about Tosh leaving extends to him too. A shame, as Burn Gorman has been growing on us, and we won’t get to experience his gun machismo. It’s often the episode highlight.
I really have to find a way to get his Countrycide effort on here. It was the funniest thing on TV in 2007 that didn’t include Alec Baldwin or Tracy Morgan.
4. Worst. Shapechanging Carnivorous Alien Antagonist. Ever.
Annoying enough that Cap’n Jack’s alien expertise is so incomplete that he doesn’t immediately realise the nature of the creature they’re up against despite having been alive for hundreds or dozens or however many years he’s been around, thus putting Gwen and her family in danger (yet more obnoxious contrivance). It’s up to Owen and his badges to figure out that it is a Nostrovite, which will kill Gwen to get hold of the egg.
Even worse was that the first shapeshifter they go up against is easily killed by a bullet and the second one becomes enraged with an alien babycraziness that makes it almost invincible, which is the sort of empty and contrived expositional nonsense used to justify plot developments that I often refer to as Reason X (“If we’re going to save the President’s daughter we have to disguise ourselves as nuns because [Reason X]!”). It’s like a MacGuffin, but even more contrived.
Worst of all is just how crap the alien is, convenient invulnerability notwithstanding. It’s killed one person and trapped two others in its non-biodegradable web, so does it change shape in order to ensure it will not be caught? Nope. It stands around with the same face, making no effort to find the woman carrying its child, and when confronted by human intervention in the shape of Tosh, it does this. Also, note that even though Jack and Tosh are equipped with normal guns, for some reason they sound like the old toy gun I had as a kid that had four different laser sound settings.
It then gives itself away by turning into someone at the wedding, i.e. Rhys’ mother, played by Nerys Hughes, abandoning all her dignity to run around with fake gnashers and bad fingers. It would be a good ploy, to become someone that the host of its egg knows so it can get closer to her. Sadly, it doesn’t go after Gwen, choosing instead to mingle and chat with Gwen’s mother, though Jack and co. assume it would go after Gwen. Because that makes sense. Instead, it just sets up this case of mistaken identity, which might be the worst ninety seconds of TV this year.
“Come to Mama!” That, my friends, is Nostrovite for EPIC FAIL!
3. Jack And Gwen, Sitting In A Tree…
I used a hammer on my head to try to unremember the first season of Torchwood, so I might be wrong here, but did Jack and Gwen spend as much time drooling over each other as they do in the second season?
It seems to be the emotional core of the show, this love story between the human and the immortal ::coughCordyandAngelcough::, and it’s worked in other shows, so why not here? Well, because they have no chemistry, and Jack’s got a cavalier attitude to relationships anyway which undermines his sudden sadness here, and Gwen is now happily betraying her husband while pretending to be loyal which makes her seem less like a sympathetic and tortured heroine and more like a bit of a cow, and Jack is frigging immortal and should have higher standards. For God’s sake, he was in love with the Doctor! He’s the ideal man for him, because they are equally galactic. You’re telling me Jack’s been around the cosmos and he’s getting depressed because a Suzi Quatro lookalike is getting married to this guy?
No accounting for taste, I guess. Still, that’s a failure of the series in general, but in this episode she barely acknowledges her lovepain for Jack until defending her decision to get married with an egg in her belly, where she says something along the lines of, “I’m marrying Rhys because he will have me and no one else will. No one. Right? No one at all. Eh Jack? No one at all.” Rhys is standing there the whole time and misses the coded signals and thinks she’s saying nice things about him, which proves what a dope he is. Even stupider, this entire scene, where Gwen seems to forget that speech about loving Rhys with barely any prompting, which leads to this hair-eating insanity.
Best thing I can say about it is that it gives John Barrowman his best acting opportunities, as shown by his inner turmoil here.
One day you’re going to be a big head in a jar, but it’s a long time to be sulking over Gwen. Oh Captain Jack! When will you be fun again?
2. Cliche, Plagiarism, and Laziness.
I’ve already pointed out that alien impregnation has been done before, and alien shapechangers or chameleons are staples of sci-fi, so if you’re willing to be generous to the show (and I know a lot of people are), you could say it’s unfair to criticise the show for using these popular plots. Okay. I’ll grudgingly give you that. But can I please rail against the wedding sequence in the middle of the episode, where Jack, Ianto and Owen race to the wedding to save Gwen from the Nostrovite and Jack bursts in two seconds after the vicar asks if anyone has any objection to the marriage going ahead? Can I? Please? Because that shit is just unacceptable.
If only there was a Wikipedia page listing all the times that plot development has been used, though I wonder if there is enough server space in the world. Pretty much every soap wedding features this moment, as well as every crappy romantic comedy made between 1980 and 1999, at the very least. It’s like littering. Just because everyone does it every so often doesn’t make it right. (For the record, I don’t litter. Not even that one time when I hid the polybag down the side of a Tube seat. That was someone else entirely.)
Even worse than that, the show plagiarises itself! A few weeks back, in Reset, Owen has to use a nifty gadget called a Singularity Scalpel to burn away the insects infesting Martha’s body, though he is not entirely sure how to use the machine. After a couple of near misses that blow up things around him, he succeeds in destroying the lifeform without blowing out her spine. This week, because his one hand is knackered (a consequence of his continuing status as a dead person), he can’t operate the scalpel, and has to hand it over to Rhys. The set up is acceptable, and it’s a nice reference to Owen’s new shortcomings, so I have no trouble with that. What does annoy me is that this means Rhys has to go through exactly the same thing Owen did just three episodes previously, with the panic and near-misses. Does BBC Wales think we have amnesia?
Just to make things even more annoying, during the dance scene at the end, Jack cuts in on Gwen and Rhys’ dance just so he can have a moment alone with her, which is yet another convention of this kind of plot, and then Ianto shows up to cut in as well, but he doesn’t ask for Gwen’s hand. He wants to dance with his boyfriend! It’s not the most amazing moment ever, but it’s easily the episode highlight, and a pleasing twist on that cliche.
So they can do it if they try. One of the best things about Buffy and Angel is that it would set up the potentially cliched plot early on, and then subvert it at least once if not more during the episode. It amazed me that they could keep doing that on a weekly basis. If the Torchwood showrunners are going to steal anything from Mutant Enemy, why can’t they steal that philosophy? It would instantly improve the show 1000%.
2.5. Ripping Off The Evil Dead.
Connected to that complaint, another pop culture legend stolen by the show came toward the end, with Rhys preparing to attack the shapeshifter, disguised as his mother, with a chainsaw, prior to it being blown up by Jack and his big gun, leading to black blood goop flying everywhere. Sounds like The Evil Dead? Jack agrees.
It definitely seems that this episode was meant to be a homage to that hyper-real Sam Raimi style of horror comedy, as well as the big silly sci-fi B-movies I grew up with, and I’ll bet Phil Ford is a fan of such and figured this was his chance to pay homage to that with over-the-top action, sex jokes, violence and exploding bodies. Of course, that’s all well and good in practice, but 1) pointing it out in dialogue is a failure of nerve, and 2) the show might have the confidence to think it can pull something like this off, but it doesn’t have the ability.
It’s the kind of amateurish stuff teenagers dream of filming, and I know when I was young I imagined myself as a West Midlands Peter Jackson, making horror movies with lots of aliens exploding and men standing around posing with big guns, because that’s what happened in all of my favourite films. There are so many of these plagiaristic films made on shoestring budgets littering the sci-fi/horror sections of HMV’s DVD shelves that we really really don’t need any more, especially if they have nothing new to offer. This certainly didn’t. And that gun looks stupid. And even if it didn’t look stupid, no one on this show looks cool with guns.
Torchwood showrunners, watch Planet Terror to see how it’s done. I may have parted ways with Robert Rodriguez in recent years, but that was a massive return to form, and exactly the kind of crazy horror blow-out Torchwood thought it was for one whole week. The gulf in quality between the two is vast, and it’s not a consequence of the BBC show having a smaller budget. It’s the lack of imagination that dooms the show, not the lack of pounds.
1. The Retcon Finale.
At the end of the episode, much to Jack’s displeasure, Gwen finally gets to have her happy moment with Rhys, alien egg disintegrated and everything back to a semblance of normality. The families watch with joyous faces as Gwen and Rhys share their vows, and Canyon and I assumed Jack had gone around to everyone with Retcon pills and erased their memories of the terrible day. BTW, I know the Retcon pills are a dreadful ripoff of the Neuraliser from Men In Black, but boldly calling them Retcon pills made me very happy as a comic nerd, reminding me of Dan Slott’s boldly named Retroactive Cannon (AKA Ret-Can) from She-Hulk.
We then cut to everyone having the dance and meal afterwards, and everything seems hunkydory, until suddenly the assembled guests start falling asleep. Turns out Jack has administered the retcon pills after the wedding ceremony, and not before.
So what they’re saying is that once the Nostrovite was defeated and Gwen returned to non-pregnant normality, the guests just accepted this turn of events, and went about celebrating the wedding. Even though they had been terrorised by a shapechanging alien threatening to kill the mother of the bride. Even though several of the guests had been running around with guns. Even though the best man’s dismembered corpse was lying in pieces in a room upstairs!!!
To make things worse, Jack’s use of the retcon pills robs everyone of their memories of the wedding. Perhaps there is a way for them to talk to the guests and make them think they saw it, as shown in Men In Black when J and K interrogate people post-neuralisation, but still, why not do it before the ceremony so that they can still have the full memory of the wedding and forget the gunfights and shootings and aliens and half-eaten best men for fuck’s sake!?!?!? There is no reason other than monumental stupidity on the part of the writer, director and showrunner. How can this be considered logical or defensible? How is this not insulting the intelligence of the viewers? I call super-colossal-gigantic BULLSHIT on the whole thing.
The thing that makes me most angry, though, is that this was written by Phil Ford, who was pretty much solely responsible for the scripts on the recent excellent revamp of Captain Scarlet, which was the most interesting and intelligent early-teen-targeted show on TV until ITV predictably got cold feet and cancelled it. Those scripts were tight and serious and sometimes shocking. I thoroughly recommend it to everyone.
I’ll grant that this episode was obviously conceived as a way to comment on real life using the trappings of sci-fi in the same way that Buffy and Angel used horror conventions to do the same thing, and as such Something Borrowed was chock-full of metaphors for marriage-as-horror-nightmare, but they were either crashingly obvious (mother-in-law jokes), half-baked (could the shapeshifter have represented the way your friends change their opinion of you once you get into a relationship? Or am I giving the show too much credit?), or severely malfunctioning (the impregnation could have represented the second thoughts she was having about marrying Rhys because of her love for Jack, but why dramatise that as subtext when it comes up as text over and over again towards the end of the episode?). That said, even if it did work, that contrivance at the end with the retcon pill kills the episode deader than dead. It’s just unforgivable.
So, once more, any fans wandering in here will ask why I’m still watching. Well, the next episode, already screened on BBC Three, is written by P.J. Hammond, who I’ve gone on about before. The preview looked peculiar, which is what we want and what he does very very well (if you get a chance, watch his wholly original sci-fi/horror series Sapphire and Steel to see him at full quirky strength). I have high hopes for it. But the next three episodes? All written by Chris Chibnall? Let’s just say I’m looking forward to them for different reasons. Look away if you don’t want to see the spoilers from the BBC Press Office.
When a local teenager disappears, Gwen is drawn into an investigation that reveals a darker side of Torchwood, as Doctor Who writer Russell T Davies’s award-winning drama continues. Hundreds of people have disappeared without trace, but Jack is obstructing attempts to find them. The answer seems to lie in the rift – literally – and as Gwen follows the trail, she makes a shocking discovery.
That sounds intriguing, I have to say, but Chibnall will find a way to screw it up. Making it another Gwen-centric episode is already a bad start. As for the next episode…
A booby-trapped building explodes and knocks the team unconscious, as Doctor Who writer Russell T Davies’s award-winning drama continues. As each team member’s life flashes before their eyes, viewers learn how each of them was recruited to Torchwood: Captain Jack was initiated into a shocked Victorian Torchwood in 1899; Toshiko went on a daring mission to trade alien technology for her mother’s life; Ianto wooed Jack with coffee and a flair for alien-catching; and Owen had a medical revelation that changed how he saw the world.
…::coughOutofGasfromFireflycough:: Also, Ianto woos Jack with coffee? I can’t wait for that! I wonder if he will mention his girlfriend Lisa, who got cybermanned in the first season. I seem to recall him mourning her for the majority of that season. If she doesn’t get even namechecked, I will certainly poke fun of it here. Oh boy, a special treat for the finale!
Captain John Hart returns to have his revenge on Torchwood in the concluding episode of Doctor Who writer Russell Davies’s award-winning drama. Taking Captain Jack prisoner, he sends him back in time for a long overdue reunion. Without their leader, Torchwood are faced with a city flooded with Weevils, on the brink of destruction. But who is Captain John really working for? Can anyone trust him? And how great a price must Torchwood pay to save the city?
Weevils everywhere! James Marsters! A great price to be paid that might feature the removal of two major characters if the rumours I heard are true! Don’t forget, it’s on tomorrow night and Good Friday. Set your PVRs, Torchwood fans!
Sci-Fi Season Premiere Face/Off! (Torchwood)
I’ll come right out and admit this to get it out of the way. I cannot stand Torchwood. It’s silly to get actively annoyed by something as innocuous as a TV show, but I reserve the right to be pissed at a spin-off from a very good show that not only fails to live up to the standards of the original, but fails at being competent entertainment with such a capital FAIL that it insults its “parent” and makes the entire genre look like a muddy-faced schoolboy pooing his pants and laughing like a drunken donkey. It galls me that people consider this a great example of the genre and of British TV, that this is as good as it gets. It’s an insult to anyone who tries to make anything of lasting value within the mostly ignored and derided sci-fi ghetto, and knowing that Russell T. Davies has said that it is Angel to Doctor Who‘s Buffy makes me even angrier. If Doctor Who is Buffy, Torchwood is Angel fanfic written by the 8 year old lovechild of Jilly Cooper and Harry Knowles. As I’ve said before in other venues, it’s the Welsh CSI: Miami. And that’s why my hatred is so tied up with my urge to never stop watching, even as it metaphorically shits where it eats.
It’s bad. It’s an insult to the genre. It’s also unintentionally hilarious, and it could conceivably work if it is overhauled extensively. The first season was galactically dire, but coming from a background of such imagination and intelligence, it could surely absorb some of that quality. Knowing that shows have often improved in their second season gave me hope, as did the news that not only would James “Spike” Marsters be featured but also we would see the triumphant return of the magnificent, the wondrous, the astonishing MARTHA JONES! She’s got class, she’s got sass, she’s got a lovely playfulness about her. So can this second season pull out of the nosedive that started very soon into the original?
In a word, don’t bet on it. Scripted not by series creator Russell T. Davies but by showrunner Chris Chibnall, within five minutes of beginning it was evident that rumours of an improvement were way way off (I’m looking at you, resident Guardian Guide nerd Phelim O’Neill). Captain Jack Harkness, played by John Barrowman with lovable gusto on Doctor Who, and with tedious earnestness and random explosions of camp on Torchwood, is missing at the beginning of the series, which starts with a fish alien driving a sports car around Cardiff suburbs. In lukewarm pursuit are our witless sex-crazed adolescent heroes, Gwen, Tosh, Owen, and the risible Ianto, all bickering in an expositional stylee about the lack of Jack. Some of this is played for laughs, and it almost comes off for the first time, though there are some peculiar moments from Gwen, introduced in the first season as an audience surrogate taken from her boring life and thrust into a world of intergalactic absurdity. In this first scene Owen is all grumpy, tightly-wound machismo, and she tells a couple of jokes to keep the tone “light”. Instead, because of a weird lighting choice, Gwen looks demonic.
One of the things that makes it hard to watch BBC sci-fi without cringing is the bizarre insistence on macho posing that runs through it all like gristle through a nice steak. This embarrassing fixation on the gun-fetishism that plagued James Cameron’s Aliens is one of the many reasons I hated Red Dwarf (the main one being that it wasn’t even slightly funny). Now, Aliens is one of my favourite movies, but the monster it created, this fanboy obsession with “cool” aggressive sci-fi, almost makes me hate it. Other genres manage to pull off the cool thing really well, usually by playing it much calmer, but British (and some US) sci-fi cannot get past the idea of the heroes being gun-toting badasses with legs akimbo, doing the two-handed gun grip and jumping out from behind walls, shouting “Freeze, motherfucker!” like kids playing cops and robbers. Sadly, it never looks right.
In the first season of Torchwood, they were particularly bad, but this time it seemed like the cast had been sent to gun training or something. Owen (played with his usual brand of oily sneering menace by Burn Gorman) leans out of the window of the Torchwoodmobile (complete with redundant flashing lights that the cameras can’t pick up properly) and blasts the tyres out from under the fish alien’s sports car. Except for a silly manoeuvre where he aims like a parody of a tough guy, he looks convincing as a dead-shot but then he ruins it by arrogantly blowing the “smoke” from his gun. Dick.
Still, despite his obnoxious display he does indeed get Mr. Fish to stop his car, in a suburban cul-de-sac, where he rushes out, breaks into a house, shoots some poor innocent bloke and takes a girl hostage. This is the modus operandi of Torchwood; make a bad situation infinitely worse and then when things have calmed down chalk it up as a victory. They rush into the room with all the grace and skill of the characters from the old Viz comic strip S.W.A.N.T. (Special Weapons and No Tactics), with Owen bellowing absurdly complicated instructions to the team. Tosh then scans Mr. Fish using a gizmo dotted with the same blue lights that looked so wrong on the Torchwoodmobile, sees he’s on coke, and very seriously says, “This fish is wired!” An early contender for stupidest anti-comedy line of the year.
It’s immediately superceded by the following expositional monologue from Mr. Fish, included in the show as Chris Chibnall obviously feels that getting the information out quickly and early is better than getting it out slowly and elegantly.
So, this is Team Torchwood, the teacher’s pets. But teacher’s gone, hasn’t he, leaving the kiddie kids all alone. And look at you, trying so hard to be all grown up. The doctor, with his hands full of blood [cut to shot of Owen with his hands full of blood]. The carer, with her oh so beating heart. The technician, with her cold devices [cut to shot of Tosh holding a cold device]. Which leaves me with the office boy, promoted beyond his measure. All of you, lost without your master. All of you, pretending to be brave. All of you, so scared. [evil laugh] So, what about it, minion? Can you do it? How good are you? How sharp is your aim? What if you kill her? What if I kill her first? Can you shoot before I do? Can you? Dare you? Would you? Won’t you?
That is apocalyptically bad writing, and even the best acting and directing couldn’t salvage it. Just to make things worse, this show does not even feature competent acting or directing, and so it approaches toxic levels of wretchedness. I’m serious, it’s this kind of inept and shitty sci-fi that dooms the entire genre. Thankfully Jack arrives (with no explanation of how he found them all) and shoots Mr. Fish (even though he is standing directly behind useless Ianto and therefore has no line of sight), before grinning his goddamn handsome face off. Wow, John Barrowman might not be the best actor on earth, but he has infinitely more charisma than the amateurish replicants around him. Look at him. You would, wouldn’t you.
Back at Torchwood HQ (a waterlogged sewer complex with a couple of computers, a fancy door stolen from Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and a pet pterodactyl) Gwen whines and moans at Jack for leaving them all, as if he’s her property. Goddamn, get over yourself, woman. Which one is the boss here? Jack soppily admits he was in the wrong, and gets all gooey-eyed when he talks about finding the Doctor, as shown in the last three episodes of Doctor Who season three. Owen’s line reading of, “Did he fix you?”, is straight out of a Mills and Boon adaptation. To be honest, considering how obsessed Jack is with his dick, getting fixed might not have been that bad an idea. Here’s Owen looking pompous and dreamy.
I really do not like Owen and his silly expressions, his seething “intensity” which comes across as dyspepsia, and his supposed animal magnetism. Definitely the Torchwood Gupta, despite stiff competition from Gwen. Anyway, while Jack’s getting a hard time for leaving (::cough:: Angelseasontwo ::cough::), in a car park across town a burst of glowy light heralds the arrival of guest star James Marsters, fresh from a Buffy convention.
He arrives through the rift that sits under Cardiff (::cough:: Hellmouth ::cough::), and is an Adam-Ant-esque dandy. Actually, he looks like he’s wearing a Harry Flashman fancy dress costume, but whatever the idea was, he looks dashing. As soon as he starts talking in his “English” accent, I was incredibly pleased. Spike had some bad moments, but overall I luffed him, especially towards the end of season 5 Angel, where his banter with the eponymous hero was at its best. Within two seconds of arriving he has thrown someone off the roof of the car park, and then gone to a nightclub to order various carousers around and then scare everyone off with his guns. His dialogue (“Go. Stay. Go. Go. Go. Go. Stay. Go. Go. Ooooh, stay stay stay! Go. Go. The rest of you, go.”) leaves a lot to be desired, but who cares? It’s James Marsters! The only actor on the show who knows how to hold a gun.
Meanwhile, our band of horseasses investigate the death of the car park guy, even though there doesn’t seem to be any reason for them to be there, just as Jack’s wriststrap goes off. A hologram of Marsters appears, asking Jack to come and find him, before signing off with, “Help me Obi Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope.” You know what? I’m declaring a goddamn moratorium on the use of that phrase. It’s. Not. Funny. Anymore. The only time I’ve seen it used well over the past year or so was when Carrie Fisher said, “Help me Liz Lemon, you’re my only hope!” in 30 Rock, but that’s because it was Carrie Fisher saying it. It’s been used too goddamn often, and especially on Torchwood, it invites comparisons between the show and Star Wars that really aren’t in their best interests.
Jack departs hurriedly, telling the team not to follow him, which they do immediately, all the time whining about what an asshole he is for leaving them behind (::cough cough cough:: Angelseasontwo ::cough cough cough::). While they piss and moan like a bunch of aggrieved kids, Jack arrives at the club and gets some full-on facetime with Marsters, kissing him with admirable gusto. And then they fight a lot. It’s one of the few scenes in the show that has been choreographed and filmed with some effort, so kudos for that, I guess, but dear God, I declare another moratorium, this time on the use of Song Two by Blur, which woo-hoos in the background throughout. Has anyone involved in this show got any new ideas? At all? That shit was tired one summer after the song came out and it got used on Match of the Day 68 trillion times, so imagine how tired it must be now.
After kissing and fighting and pointing their guns at each other and making daft jokes about Jack working his way up the ranks and how grateful the ranks must have been (an allusion to sex, I’ll wager, what with this being an adult show), they pretend to drink a lot of alcohol and bond over their past as time agents, a plot thread that I thought would have been explored in the previous season but was ignored in favour of gaseous sex aliens, ill-thought-out time travel plots, and Fight Club rip-offs, much to my disgust. After announcing his name is now Captain John Hart (adopting other identities appears to be de riguer for these chaps), Marsters/Hart reveals that the agency that runs the time agents (which, Canyon pointed out, is imaginatively called The Time Agency) has been shut down, meaning there are only seven time agents left altogether. I look forward to future appearances by Captain Judah Hogwonk, Captain Jeff Hepatitis, Captain Joe Hoho, Captain Jerry Heinousface, and Captain Jasper Humperdinck.
Eventually the rest of the team arrive and pose with their guns (by this point almost every scene appears to feature some gun posing), and Jack explains at length who everyone is and what they do, and for five minutes we get a solid, unbreakable and tedious wall of exposition either about the team or Hart’s reason for being in Cardiff, which seems to be something about radiation bombs hidden around Cardiff by a woman Hart knew who is now dead. There is also some horseplay about the size of their wriststraps, which I suspect might be a joke about the length and strength of their penises. Jack has spent the scene hinting that Hart is completely untrustworthy, but the thought of Earth getting destroyed by these bombs forces his hand, and offers to help Hart back at Torchwood HQ, located under the Millennium Centre. And yes, he pointlessly enters the complex using the superfluous paving stone lift. Though I’m no fan of the show, the effects work by The Mill is almost always exemplary, and something for everyone involved to be proud of. Here, though, is one of their rare missteps, a terribly shaky greenscreen shot. I know the budget of the show has been cut (this episode features a lot less flashy moments than last season), but still, it’s a shame it looks so wrong.
Upon reaching the bottom, Jack asks Hart to hand over his guns, and after he hands over his large pistols and his sword, he asks him to hand over all of his other weapons, which Hart denies having (::cough:: everyTVshowandfilmevermade ::cough::). Gwen ruins his subterfuge with her blue-light scanner, revealing that, of course, he has a lot of guns, and a “laser knife”, that looks like, well, a knife. Perhaps “Laser” is the brand name. Like Ginsu, only futuristical.
Gwen takes Jack to one side, because even if you thought she had already nagged at Jack a lot about him leaving, she hasn’t even started yet, mister. She pointedly tells him that leaving them all behind was a dick move, and he swallows what must be a natural impulse to shout, “You’re not the boss of me, you big-eyed control freak!” to explain that he really missed her and came back because hey, Cardiff? Place to be! Then he realises she is wearing a wedding ring, and when he points this out, Gwen looks astonished.
Turns out, in a weird passive/aggressive response to Jack’s departure at the end of season one, she got engaged to drab boyfriend Rhys, and when imparting this information to her boss, Gwen looks startled.
Jack congratulates her with some kind of confusing sadness stone stuck in his throat, and asks if Rhys got down on one knee, and she says he tried, but his back gave out. Ha ha ha! Stupid Rhys! What a prosaic loser, unlike her sexy colleagues. While recounting this story, and commenting that no one else would have her, Gwen looks self-pitying.
Finally, they reconcile and hug, and Gwen looks pretty damn well orgasmic.
That’s some range Eve Myles is showing there, not unlike the range exhibited by Sonya Walger. The worst thing about this scene is that some viewers will end up hoping these two get together. Why would Jack, who has had sex with the majority of the universe, be upset about not getting a chance with dreary old Gwen? It would boggle the mind, if I hadn’t already come to the conclusion that it’s just a load of contrivance to generate some emotional frisson in a show as shallow, juvenile, and exploitative as this one.
After the deeply touching moment, the team meets in a conference room to debate tactics, and Gwen suggests they split into teams to cover Cardiff more efficiently. She offers to go with Hart and begins flirting with him, setting Jack off on a new convulsion of snitty attitude, which Gwen subdues by explaining she is flirting with Hart to gain his trust and find out what he is really up to. Jack warns her not to kiss him, but this being Torchwood, that’s how most of the characters communicate with each other, so it’s silly advice.
Gwen and Hart travel to some loading area filled with shipping containers, and begin looking for the first radiation bomb. It’s night-time, and as ever, the director has chosen to film things with as little light as possible. For the next three or four minutes of screentime either one or the other character is obscured by shadows. It’s a baffling directorial decision. The screenshot below is not a fluke capture; that’s what the scene looks like.
While randomly opening shipping containers, hiding in shadows, and talking about this mysterious dead woman with the bombs, Gwen’s phone goes off. It’s Rhys, with the great news that he has a new job as manager of something called Harwoods, which is probably to DIY what Torchwood is to gunplay and alien investigation. Daisyhellcakes said she would rather hear more about the job interview than watch the rest of the show, and she has a good point, but sadly we have to stick with Gwen and her exciting glamorous life hanging out with nerd-fave actors and getting off with her scary looking colleagues.
This is obviously meant to play as a comment on how mundane Rhys’ life is, but if the intention is to play up the contrast between them, it fails miserably, serving only to make poor cuckolded Rhys look like a pathetic, oblivious idiot. When she gets off the phone Hart has disappeared. What could he be doing? Where is he? Turns out he is still hanging around, but hey, another minute of screentime is filled up by Gwen flitting around with her gun drawn in a weak attempt to conjure up some suspense, so kudos for that.
Upon finding the correct container, Hart grabs Gwen and kisses her. The perpetually horny cad! Turns out he was actually poisoning her with paralysing lip gloss, which might account for his disappearance in the previous scene, but I’m not convinced. As Gwen slumps to the floor he gloats that she has two hours to live, and as he leaves the container he bleats on about Jack, saying, “He won’t stay with you! He and I shared something.” Considering he’s just sentenced her to a horrible death, that’s just unneccessary. He shuts the container door and throws her phone away, and as if the shitty lighting wasn’t amateurish enough, the mic picks up the sound of it clanging against a container and then clattering across the floor as Hart ambles away. It’s like something made by the Children’s Film Foundation, only clumsier.
Across town, and Owen and Tosh are doing their stupid gun/flashlight thing in a warehouse somewhere. It’s big and messy, prompting Owen to complain, “How are we gonna find anything in all of this tut?” What the hell is tut? Is it the Welsh version of tat? While wandering aimlessly around, Tosh whines about not being out on the town, and Owen admits he’s given up his womanising ways, and says he looking for a good woman he has a lot in common with. Tosh’s “subtle” reaction (i.e. eye-rolling and practically passing out) “hints” at her lust for his scrawny “body”.
Despite the daunting task ahead of them, they find the bomb a couple of minutes later even though they only have tiny flashlights, and right on time the newly-revealed EvilHart appears and headbutts Tosh. Maybe a bonk on the head will cure her of her ill-advised crush on Owen, who probably has lots of space diseases what with his rampant and credibility-straining womanising. Owen gets his tough guy on and threatens to kill Hart if he hurts Tosh. This is so threatening that Hart shoots Owen, but before we can delight in the sight of him blown backwards as if hit by an exploding cannonball, we cut away. Tease!
While several million viewers chew their nails off over this turn of events, Jack and Ianto arrive at an office building to look for another bomb, where Jack gives an unconvincing soliloquy about the allure of office work (it’s a place for disastrous office romances and photocopying your genitals, because, you know, adult), Ianto’s grumpy responses clue Jack in on yet more sulking about his departure. Dude, you can never go home, especially if home is a wet sewer complex filled with ungrateful jerks. Jack dances around the fact that if he came back for a specific reason, it probably wasn’t the pity-sex he was having with sad-sack Ianto, but when he pouts Jack tries to defuse the situation by asking Ianto for a date. He even manages to smile while doing it, knowing that it will probably end up being a disaster, with Ianto crying over his dead cyber-girlfriend Lisa from the first season. How do you like that office romance, you dashing fool?
They split up, with Jack heading to the roof, giving Hart the chance to lure Ianto over to the lifts, where he threatens him with a gun, repeatedly refers to him as “Eye candy”, (which made both of us WTF for a few minutes), and brags about putting the rest of the team out of commission.
Ordering him to go and find them before they die, the lift doors shut, and a tannoy says, “Going down”, to which Hart responds, apropos of nothing, “Going down, yes please.” Again, I have a suspicion there is a double meaning here. Hart goes after Jack, who has just found the “bomb”, which is by now, obviously not a bomb. Hart says Jack should be in space among the stars, which is a heinous diss against the glories of Cardiff. But no, Jack is not to be swayed, and slags off Hart for getting old and not growing up. Then he childishly throws the canister / bomb / MacGuffin off the roof, and mid-gloat gets pushed off himself.
Hopefully the drop gives Jack time to rue his decision to help Hart, who has been blatantly evil from the moment he appeared onscreen. Jokes about attending murder rehab might have been a clue. Perhaps this is Chibnall and co.’s way of making the Torchwoodiverse seem dangerous and morally grey and filled with threatening yet seductive characters, but actually it just makes our protagonists look like slack-jawed halfwits.
Speaking of which, Ianto finds Tosh patching Owen up with some bandages, and even though he’s obviously lost a lot of blood and might be suffering a grievous internal injury, they rush out to find Gwen. In the meantime, Hart gets all maudlin over Jack’s death, probably not helped by the very extensive groin thrust adopted by Jack’s corpse.
Thankfully Chibnall resists the temptation to have Hart make some lewd comment about this, which means we actually get about four minutes of screentime without a double entendre or feeble come-on. Back in Containerville the Three Stooges are looking for Gwen, which involves lots of dull running around and improbable detective work involving the blue-light doohickey used throughout the show, before they locate her dying body. At this point, with probably milliseconds left to live, Gwen looks stiff. And badly lit.
As she still has a pulse but can’t move, they figure she has been poisoned, but without any other information about what has happened to her, they promptly swab her lips and test it for toxins. How did they know she was poisoned like that? Hart never mentioned it. It could have been a needle, or a gas, or a deadly suppository, but no, they go straight to the lips. It could very well be the shoddiest plotting I’ve ever seen in a modern TV show that isn’t Chuck or CSI: Miami. To make things even more improbable, they have the exact antidote. Pretty smart stuff, considering how dense they appear from Gwen’s point of view.
Hart goes back to Torchwood HQ, and ransacks the corpse of Mr. Fish, who has another part of the MacGuffin in his pocket. So the pre-credits “action” scene was connected to the rest of the show after all! Before he can put all the pieces back together our heroes appear and cock their plastic guns threateningly. Again, where the hell is the sound department? Oddly worried that one of the water pistols will go off and get his nice tunic wet, Hart musters one last gloat over Jack’s death, only to go limp-faced with shock as Jack walks in, unharmed, and cocks his leg up for a big fart. At least, that’s what it looks like.
Turns out, under cross-examination, Hart killed the woman who owned the MacGuffin (which he thinks is a space diamond of some worth), because he is a low down dirty son of a bitch, which comes as no surprise to anyone who has watched any fiction within the last 150 years. Under the supervision of the team, he puts the pieces together and a hologram of the dead woman appears. I can’t help but imagine someone had to forcibly stop Chibnall from making the hologram say, “Help me Obi Wan you’re my only hope!”.
Turns out she’s a smart cookie, and the MacGuffin is actually a bomb that is attracted to the DNA of the person who killed her. Of course, how it has access to this DNA in the first place is not explained, but we were more annoyed by the stretching out of an episode that really should have been done and dusted by now. The bomb zips across the room and sticks to Hart’s chest, not unlike the Scarab machine in Guillermo Del Toro’s creepy vampire film Cronos.
Space crime never pays, you dandy! When the team appear uninterested in helping him and instead intend to throw him back into the rift, he grabs Gwen and handcuffs himself to her. I love the sci-fi touch that the cuffs are made of “hypersteel”, but this is undercut by the annoyance caused by Tosh’s declaration that the rift has a crack in it. A rift is a crack. How can a crack have a crack in it? Does Chibnall understand English?
Owen comes up with a great plan to save Gwen. While the others drive Gwen and Hart him to the (crack in the) rift in their SUV, Jack and Owen get blood samples of the entire team (lucky they had them just lying around) and make a blood cocktail using a centrifuge prop so cheap that they have to swish it around by hand. Editing tries to obscure this cheapness, but it’s obvious it’s just being pushed.
Even though the SUV leaves minutes before them, Jack and Owen still catch up as they use Mr. Fish’s sports car. Is it jet-powered? With just seconds to go before the bomb explodes, Jack injects him in the heart with the blood cocktail, which confuses the bomb. How? Does it alter his DNA? If that’s the case, then blood transfusions should lead to the recipient’s hair and eyes changing colour. Or it’s just terrible terrible science from someone who seems to have only had a primary school education followed by years of watching and absorbing bad TV. Despite making a nonsense of the rules just laid down a couple of minutes before, this ridiculous plan works, making the bomb fall off. Jack heroically flings it into the rift, creating a big explosion effect.
For no narrative reason, this sends them back in time to the moment when Hart arrived. As the science of the rift (and the crack in the rift) has never been clearly explained, this is potentially possible with a bit of exposition, but what’s the point of it? And was the only narrative reason for the blood injection so Hart could make a comment about a part of them being in him? Hopefully this leads to something later on in the series, because otherwise it’s unforgivably silly. No matter. For his terrible skullduggery, he gets a smack in the chops from Gwen. She looks pissed.
Finally he leaves, with much glowy effects, but not before kissing on Jack with some verve, making more comments about wriststrap size (Jack’s reaction really strengthens my “penis metaphor” theory) and offhandedly mentioning that he has found someone called Grey, which triggers an explosion of facial acting and heavy breathing from Jack, which suggests that maybe this is big news for him. Luckily, the team are too stupid to notice this, and the fifteen hour long episode finally ends. But! First we get a preview of the rest of the season. Explosions, gun posing, Alan Dale as what seems to be an evil scientist, more James Marsters, yet more jokes about having sex with each other, and OH YEAH! MARTHA JONES! Coming to bring some class to the proceedings, unless she has her post-Who awesomeness polluted by the transfer to this risible show.
So, in conclusion, not the worst episode yet. Almost an improvement, in fact.
Sci-Fi Season Premiere Face/Off! (Terminator: TSCC)
Until the hopefully triumphant return of my favourite sci-fi TV show ever (and no, it’s not Sci-Fi Channel’s Flash Gordon), I’ve had to forgo experiencing that genre in a TV format. Well, I could have watched Stargate: Atlantis, but I have no love of either that show or its progenitor. I also could have watched Bionical Woman, and did for a while, but I just couldn’t face its relentless idiocy after the first few weeks. It really was a disaster from conception onwards, and I can’t imagine how even an infusion of talent could have made it work. As for Battlestar Galactica, all we’ve had since the silly season finale is the Razor TV movie, and we tried to watch it a couple of weeks ago but got so distracted by our cats jumping around trying to catch toy mice that we didn’t finish it. We will, though. I did get to see ace FX unit Zoic go mental with much wobbly-camera space destruction, and no one started singing Stuck Inside of Mobile With The Memphis Blues Again, so I’m going back there soon, with bells on.
This week, though, saw the season premieres of two sci-fi shows, spinning off from other established concepts. Torchwood, the “adult” spin-off of BBC’s newly enwonderfulised Doctor Who, is now on its second season, attempting to prove that it has learned from the mistakes of the first season (which were legion). On Fox in the US, War of the Worlds screenwriter Josh Friedman has developed a non-James-Cameron-sanctioned spin-off from the first two Terminator movies, with the cumbersome title Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (or as Masticator and Masticatrix have abbreviated it, The Sarah Conicles). Chances are I will watch both until the end of the season, but which one am I excited about, and which one is a mistake? FACE/OFF TIME!
When I heard that the Terminator movies were being picked apart for scraps yet again, my heart sank. The first two movies are kind of perfect, and while I prefer the original (and remember my childhood adoration of it as clearly as if it were yesterday), I love that the second is more than just an action film. It’s a pacifist, pro-disarmament action movie containing lots of destruction and mayhem, and yet there is no contradiction between the two halves of its whole. Plus, it features Arnie’s one great performance. His scenes with Edward Furlong are superbly done, quiet and naturalistic and devoid of his usual distracting gurning. I often distrust director’s cuts, but the longer version of T2 meant we got to see more of those scenes, and they were all superb. James Cameron doesn’t get enough credit for getting that performance out of him.
T2 is a brilliant sequel, and the final shot is so wonderfully uplifting and moving and final, that when Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines came out, I was incensed. The story was so completely over that any resurrection of the franchise smacked of pure cynicism. Also, it came out at the wrong time; not close enough to keep up the momentum of the other films, and not far enough away that people would have a nostalgic wish to see more of that story (see also Ghostbusters 2, which came out five years after the original and did poorly at the box office). It did okay, but I was more concerned with its effect on the other two movies. Would it invalidate that wonderful finale, where Sarah and John go through hell in order to change the future?
Turns out it didn’t seem to care about that. Whereas in T2 the chronology and genesis of Cyberdyne, SkyNet, Miles Dyson and Judgement Day are all worked out rigorously, in T3 SkyNet comes back just because that shit is inevitable and that’s that. Perhaps I’m remembering it wrong, and if so someone correct me, but that’s the sum of it. It’s a horrible cheat after all of the work Cameron did on the first two. I get riled by badly thought-out time travel stories. I’ll grant that they’re incredibly hard to do, but they can be done right. Back to The Future 2, Primer, Gregory Benford’s Timescape; they do exist.
Other than that, T3 is visually flat (thanks for that, Jonathan Mostow), undercut with cringeworthy comedy moments, horribly designed, pointless, and cast in a distracting way (having Nick Stahl and Claire Danes running around firing guns was perhaps a bold choice, but a disastrous one for suspension of disbelief). That said, what an ending. It wasn’t quite worth all of the nasty scenes featuring plastic toy Hunter-Killers and T-1s to get to that, but still, kudos where necessary. It was very clever and quite affecting.
But why go back again? Surely the moment has more than passed, right? And wouldn’t continuing the story after T3 (apocalypse on a grand scale) cost billions of dollars? Ah, but there is always a way, and Josh Friedman came up with one. Set in a timeline separate from that of T3, and following on a couple of years after T2, Sarah Connor is still on the run from the FBI, having been accused of the murder of poor Miles Dyson. She’s also predictably plagued by dreams, which means we get an action blowout in the first scene, filled with apocalyptic imagery of Terminators and mushroom clouds, which is all borrowed from the films.
So it has got some strikes against it from the get-go; starting with a frigging dream sequence presented as reality, following the visual template of the films too slavishly, and recasting Sarah Connor with Lena Headey, an actress I’ve never been too keen on, and who committed one of the many crimes against acting perpetrated in 300, a film that, as I have said elsewhere in the past, is the worst acted mainstream movie I think I’ve ever seen. I really didn’t like the idea of casting her in such an iconic role, and was prepared to be very annoyed.
I was wrong, at least to a certain extent. In the middle of the scene (which, credit to director David Nutter, is exciting and well-edited), John gets shot in the back by the not-Arnie Terminator, and Sarah reacts by begging it to kill her too as she has no reason to live now her son is dead. Her reaction is believably overwrought, and I warmed to her quickly. During the episode she perhaps goes too far now and again, but over the course of the season perhaps she will get the tone right. I could also do with less of the voiceovers at the beginning and end, but that’s as much Friedman’s fault as hers.
It matters little. The opening worked brilliantly for one very important reason. Right there Friedman sets out her character elegantly, and from here I can imagine there are places to go with her. It’s not called The Sarah Connor Chronicles for no reason. The first movie was all about her, and the second took the focus off her a bit (by making her borderline insane) but it made sure to keep her as a major protagonist, and we got to follow her on her sad journey. The original concept was to have an ordinary woman transformed by circumstances beyond her control, and T2 took that to the logical conclusion. T3‘s major flaw was to get rid of her altogether, with the excuse that she had died of leukemia, off camera, which was an appallingly lazy and dismissive way to go about it. Here Friedman convinced me he was going to do right by her, and immediately the barriers of distrust fell. I knew there would be no Arnie, no huge battle scenes, and possibly no adherence to canon, but he was trying to do right by one of my favourite movie characters ever, and for that I was grateful.
Since we last saw her, she has become involved with an EMT tech called Charley, played by Dean Winters, who was so memorable as Liz Lemon’s feckless boyfriend Dennis in 30 Rock. Whereas there he was the worst partner ever, here he is besotted and devoted, proposing marriage to Sarah (in bed after just waking up, which is one of the few missteps and sillinesses of the episode). This freaks her out, and so she gathers up future saviour of mankind John and drags him out of there. John (played by Thomas Dekker, formerly the almost-gay friend of Claire Bennett in half a season of Heroes) is miffed, having bonded with Charley, and correctly blaming his mother’s commitment-phobia for her departure and not her paranoid belief that they will get caught, which is another bit of writing I liked.
Unfortunately for them both, Charley loves Sarah enough to report her disappearance to the police, and there just happens to be an FBI agent, James Ellison, hanging around with a ton of information about Sarah, now hiding under the alias Sarah Reese. It’s been pointed out on AICN that it may not be the best name to hide under, but is a touch that made me beam with nerd-glee, and a tantrum later on in the episode shows she’s keeping it out of an obsessive need to keep the name of her future lover alive, so it works. Ellison (played, so far, with some anonymity by Richard T. Lewis) tells Charley about Sarah’s crazy past (in a quick bit of exposition that doesn’t slow the show down too much), and even whips out a photo of Dyson. Note that he is not played by Brother From Another Planet Joe Morton, but by Phil “Jackie Chiles” Morris, thus keeping the Dyson-casting awesomeness going strong.
Cleverly, not only does this quick scene give a bunch of information about the first two movies and the events that have happened since, as well as setting up the relationships between all four of these characters, it allows Sarah’s identity to be compromised and placed in the FBI database, which is being monitored by a Terminator sleeper agent, who then goes on the rampage and chases our heroes. It’s not the best writing in the history of storytelling, but it is excellent exposition conveyed between characters who have been purposely kept in the dark as well as advancing the plot. I’ll be getting to an example of bad exposition in the next part of this Face/Off.
John and Sarah head off to a new town to try to avoid all of the guys trying to make Sarah fall in love with them, apparently, and while at school John ends up getting stalked by none other than River Tam, aka Summer Glau. Now, I’ve often thought of River as one of the weakest links in the Fireflyniverse, mostly because the one writing tic Whedon has that I don’t like is the crazy talking, which was passably funny with Drusilla, annoying with Buffy season 7 Spike, and just flat out horrible with River. For almost all of Glau’s time on that show she had to put up with a bunch of nonsensical and frustrating madness chatter that added up to very little. Only at the end of Serenity did I warm to her at all, but that was the end of that, sadly. Also, when on Angel, she was a spell-addled ghost-thing that had to talk with a Russian accent, so I had no idea what she could be like talking like a human. Weirdly, the first time you see her, even though you will probably already know she is a new kind of Terminator, she gives what might be her first approximation of a non-quirky humanity.
Her responses, such as laughing too hard at John’s lame jokes, are ever-so-slightly heightened. It works well, as if her emotional programming (which, I assume, is the thing that she hints makes her different from other Terminators) is not quite right, but it’s her curiousness and ability to evoke confusion that work best. She looks perpetually befuddled by things around her (other than combat situations), and while this is not a new concept, it’s pulled off with some charm. She’s pretty goddamn great in this, and I’m thrilled that Friedman had her cast in the role. Her physicality works well too, and she puts that to use in an early scene where an evil Terminator shows up at school and tries to kill John.
Herc, from AICN, has railed against this scene, but he neglects to mention the new habit of naming the Terminators. Glau plays Cameron, a weird nod to the creator of the Terminator franchise, considering he has nothing to do with it any more now that ex-wife Linda Hamilton has sold the rights to Andrew Vajna and Mario Kassar. Even stupider, the evil Terminator (played by Owain Yeoman) is called Cromartie. Is this because his endoskeleton is covered with chrome? In that case, is his actual name Marty?
Whatever. He reveals himself while trying to kill John (using a gun he had ickily hidden in his thigh, under his skin), at which point both he and Cameron start talking and moving like robots, which they didn’t do before. It looks stupid, but thankfully they also tend to throw each other around, demolish walls, get hit by cars, and take a bullet hit to the chest like a champ, which is what you want from a couple of Terminators. Cameron saves John using a truck (which has been done to death, but what else was she going to use?), and then says the second thing that made me drop my critical defences, and if you have seen the other movies, you know the line she says.
With a new robotic bodyguard in charge, John drives off to find his mom, who has turned up at the school to find him, instead encountering Cromartie (dang, that name never gets any less stupid), who kicks her around a bit. Realising he has no idea where John is, Sarah does the third thing I loved in this episode; pulls out a gun and tries to kill herself so that she can’t be used as leverage against her son. It’s a badass moment, all right.
Of course, she doesn’t get to go through with it, but Chromey talks to John on the phone, imitates Sarah using his cyber-throat, and gets him to go back to the house. Yes yes, just like in the movies. So not only has this show borrowed the format and look of the movies, but it’s reusing the old tricks. A strike against it, I thought, until John arrives at the house in a face-obscuring hoodie, only to get shot in the head by Chromey, and yet no! It was Cameron pretending to be John using her own cyber-throat to fool him! A nice touch. There follows a big fight scene with robots pushing each other through walls and floors, shotguns, a weapons cache hidden in a wall, electrification and, if the exposition a few scenes later is anything to be believed, a chair lined with kevlar just in case a Terminator shows up. A lot of viewers appear to have hated that, but I thought it was in keeping with Sarah’s way of thinking. Anyway, it’s a tight little scene, and quite thrilling.
After that we get some exposition between Sarah and Cameron as she gets to almost show some robo-boobies while pulling bullets out of her clavicle, and we find out that Skynet still gets built despite the events of T2. Pretty obvious, what with all the robots walking around, but whereas in T3 it’s not explained how the Air Force (who build Skynet after the destruction of Cyberdyne) develop the technology, and we had to just like it or lump it, here Cameron admits she doesn’t know how it happened, but as the episode rolls on, it becomes clear that the whole point of the show is finding out who builds Skynet. We’re going to spend the rest of the series finding out what’s going on, which is a far more promising approach.
Hopefully the real reason will not be a disappointment as in T3, though considering T3 seemed uninterested in a lot of what happened in the first two movies, this show earns many kudos for having Sarah take John and Cameron back to see Miles Dyson’s widow, where she reveals there is no way his work still exists anywhere in the world. It’s nice that they felt the need to revisit that character, especially as we get to see her sadness. Dyson’s death in the movie is already memorable, and it’s great to see that pathos carry forward into the series. Again, I am impressed. There then follows some more action, and the ‘splodey. Eat flame, you doucheinator!
At this point I was enjoying myself, but the next scenes feature a big plothole, with Sarah shot in the shoulder and getting maudlin over the possible loss of her son. I wonder if I watched the wrong version of this pilot, because the scene seems out of place, what with Sarah walking around next day as if nothing happened, and not having a wound on her arm at the end of the episode. Whatever is the reason, the scene serves very little purpose. We know she’s a badass who is good at dealing with pain and blood loss, and that she’s scared of John leaving her, though perhaps this is the first time she’s voiced the worry that he’ll just choose to leave instead of getting killed by a Terminator. Still, it’s the one bit of flab in the whole episode, and as such is annoying.
Also worrying me at this point was the feeling that the show was going to just be The Fugitive with robots, which works fine in a movie format, but has been overdone as a concept on TV. Though I liked this so far, would I eventually just get tired? How much could they do with the concept of the three saviours of mankind trying to destroy and electronics firm? Thankfully, Friedman must have had the same concerns, and throws an outrageous twist in right at the end. Cameron takes John and Sarah to a bank built in 1963, and stages a robbery that gets them into a vault tricked out with lots of sciencey stuff. There’s a gun that looks like a copper-wired, nuclear-powered tommy gun that kills Terminators, and a time machine made from 1960s parts that was built by someone sent back from the future by John Connor (we assume). It’s such a bizarre moment that the viewer can either go, “Screw this, I’m gonna watch American Gladiators instead,” or, “I’m sticking with this because that is some crazy shit!” I chose the latter option.
The show ends with our naked trio turning up in 2007, where they are assumed to be dead, on a search for Skynet, with Cameron learning about humanity, and John and Sarah dealing with the weirdness of the future (the second episode, which is also very good, shows John confused by the new technology that has sprung up in eight years, and Sarah learning about 9/11). Plus, Chromey is still running around despite his head getting blown off his robotic shoulders by Sarah’s tommy gun, James Ellison is looking for Sarah, and John is trying to reestablish contact with Charley even though he is now married to Lost and Tell Me You Love Me And Not The Mother Of The Saviour of All Mankind veteran, Sonya Walger, of all people. It’s a very very promising set-up.
It didn’t all work. Mostly the performances were okay, but it was touch and go every now and then. Thomas Dekker appears to be both less obnoxious and less likeable than Edward Furlong, and needs to stop with the frigging whining. One or two scenes were superfluous, some of the actors look a little unsure with the guns, the Terminators often seemed very stupid, and the dialogue was a little rough at times, but the homages to the original movies show an affection for them, which counts for a lot. For instance, the next episode also acknowledges Sarah’s cancer from T3 and weaves it into the plot, which is a great touch even though I hated that it ever happened in the first place. It’s not just following that format, though. So far the little quirks and twists display an urge to come up with new ideas, or to push the old ideas as far as they can go.
Plus, I loved the hints that Cameron is a different kind of Terminator whose behaviour, while still recognisably not human, has enough humanity to it to confuse poor hormonal John, who obviously has the hots for her. This is brilliantly shown in the second episode, where she touches him to assess his mental and physical state through an analysis of his body and sweat, and he interprets it as a sign of affection. all that and a soundtrack that has nods to Brad Feidel’s original iconic theme. It has real potential, and I can’t wait to see what happens next.
This Week in TV: Week 11 (Part 1)
Considering there were less shows on TV this week, I actually have more to wonk on about than usual, what with the “volume” finale of Heroes, the reunion of To Live and Die in LA legends Billy Peterson and Billy Friedkin, and two episodes of Ugly Betty (not because two were aired, but because we missed one). So, I’m splitting this in two, so I can finish the rest of it tomorrow and get to bed (I have no choice; Man-Thing is on Sky Movies and I can’t find the remote). Anyway, let’s get this out of the way right now, because I bet the suspense is killing you.
Grin of the Week:
Ray Wise!
That’s never changing. Get used to it.
Canyon’s Highlight of the Week:
Reaper has gone from being our favourite new show of the season to a show we greatly enjoy but tend to forget about not long after, but this week saw all of the elements fit together pleasingly, with the non-female cast at their best, the female cast finally getting suspicious of Sam and his reaping buddies (though it took a ridiculously long time to happen, at least it finally is), Donavon “Ted the douche” Stinson getting a finger broken by an angry bookie (funnier than it sounds), and an interesting new plot element coming into play; Sam’s new girlfriend Cady, played by Jessica Stroup.
Is she the Devil’s daughter? As she seems to kill everything she touches, including the doomed goldfish shown above, it seems like that might be the case. It’s hard to say too much about the show most of the time, as what it does well is play off the chemistry of the leads, with a lot of the heavy lifting done by Tyler Labine. Sock is one of the most appealing characters of the new season, a cross between Shaggy and Jack Black, which is enough to make many people stay away. A shame, as his timing and delivery is pitch-perfect. As good as Bret Harrison and Rick Gonzalez are (and even though they’re improving every week), they are still straight men to Labine, who controls the screen every time he’s around.
Only Ray Wise is more lovable than him, but that goes without saying.
My Highlight of the Week:
Controversially, it was the “volume” finale of Heroes, which was packed with plotholes and tonal errors and silly dialogue and silly deaths and all sorts of nonsense, but was much more propulsive than the rest of the season put together, and managed to make the first season finale look even worse than it already did. Though the show is seemingly broken beyond repair (unless a new writing team is brought in, and sharpish), this did have its good points. Hiro’s revenge on “Adam Monroe” was excellent, Sylar’s Popeye moment was hilarious, and Elle’s realisation that she can be a good person if she tries hard enough was nicely handled. It’s the first time this entire season that I’ve been glad Kristen Bell has been around.
Partially, my heightened enjoyment was attributable to my new relaxed approach to watching it. Knowing it will probably suck has made it a more entertaining viewing experience, as I have now stopped trying to compare it to season one’s highpoints (which, as Canyon pointed out during this episode, were actually fewer than I remember). It’s a fun show, but it’s not ever going to compare with our real favourites. I remain fond of it, though. Canyon, on the other hand, seems to actively dread it now, and while my mocking is affectionate, hers has become ruthless. She even dissed Matt and Peter’s think-off, which I loved, silly expressions, fish-eye lenses and all.
Bzzzzzzt! I’m thinking the hurty words at you! With my face!
Zzzzzzzzzzzzzing! I’m thinking them right back, two times! To the bridge!
Lowlight of the Week:
Due to our trip to the US, we dropped the ball on what was screened each week, meaning we missed an episode of Ugly Betty (this strike isn’t helping matters. With The Office gone for a while and other shows reaching the end of their runs, we don’t know what’s going on). Upon realising this we were overjoyed. Ugly Betty! We love it! Silly transitional wipes and all! And then we watched the missed episode, and our hearts sank. Truly, this was a fresh hell. How bad? Trying to make Alan Dale the comic relief. He’s a fun serious actor, but even The O.C. knew not to do that.
Though it might sound like I’ve completely lost all perspective and entered the world of the Internet Crazies when I say this, it is scary when a beloved show misfires so completely that there are no saving graces left. Case in point: Alias was, for two seasons, one of the best shows on TV. It had some problems, but often they were fixed quickly, and each week offered something of quality. The first season was especially good, as good as any network show I’ve ever seen. Even the show reboot that happened midway through the second season worked well, and was kicked off by possibly the best Alias episode ever, Phase One. And then the third season started with a two-year leap forward that removed all dramatic tension from the show, added a multitude of dreary questions, and changed every character into a blander version of themselves. It was catastrophic, and even though I tried, I just couldn’t muster any further interest in the show. (I know, I was talking about Ugly Betty. This will all make sense soon, I promise.)
There were no warning signs that Alias was about to spin off the tracks, but suddenly it was a shadow of its former self. Did the show fall asleep next to a pod and wake up with no emotions? What’s scary is that this can obviously happen to any show we like, and this episode of Ugly Betty, filled with dead lines, shameless mugging, desperate plotting, obvious tricksiness, and Dirty-Sexy-Money-level writing, made us fear for the worst. I just checked the credits of the horrid episode again, after IMDb conflicted with my memory. The show credits say the writer is Charles Pratt Jr., a veteran soap writer who worked on General Hospital among others, but IMDb is telling me it was Bill Wrubel. Whoever it was, I can’t imagine them wanting to own up to having written this. Joke after joke fell flat, to the point that we could barely watch actors we enjoy trying to find the laugh. It even unfunnyised Amanda. Amanda for God’s sake!
It was so wrong and Bizarro-World inept that it made us think the show was broken. Stupid really, considering the writer’s strike has meant they’re dragging in producers to write episodes (the same thing happened with the dreadful Wicked advert they aired a few weeks ago), but for a moment, it was as if the show was never going to get back to its normal self. And it upset us. Yes, there are far worse things in the world than a show going bad, but one of the things I love about TV shows is realising the showrunners, the producers, the writing staff, and sometimes even the network execs, have reached a point where they know exactly what kind of show they’re making, what stories they can tell, what points they can make.
Suddenly a show that’s good reaches the next level, with jokes and plots written for the actors, arcs clicking into place, continuity increasing in complexity; it can be really satisfying. Classic example: the arrival of Spike and Angelus in Buffy turned it from a diversion to the best show on TV (EVER!!!). Journeyman started off okay, but when Dan’s stash of stolen money started to play a bigger part in the show, it leapt to that next level, and became our favourite new show of the season. Pushing Daisies has done the same recently, and is a huge joy.
Sadly, the opposite is also true. A good writer leaves, a new producer comes on, cast members fall out or get big heads, networks start to fiddle with the format. When Bryan Fuller left Heroes, it hobbled it. When Ron Moore began developing Caprica, his focus left Battlestar Galactica and the show began to fall apart. When Josh Schwartz began developing new shows for Fox (on their say-so, the big jerks) and took his best writers to help him out, The O.C.‘s third season became an endurance test, haemorrhaging viewers and good will. Goddamn, that show sucked for 25 whole weeks, improving only once Marissa died a horrible death, and that was in the very last scene of the whole season. Dammit Fox, just let your showrunners do one show at a time! Slavedrivers!!!
So, was this the beginning of the end for Ugly Betty? Can you bear the suspense? Of course not! The following week, written by reliable writers Jon Kinnally and Tracy Poust, was not the best episode ever, but it had some amazing moments, tons of laughs, and a paintball sequence that featured Rebecca Romijn-Stamos-O’Connell dressed like a cross between Barbarella and Tina Turner in Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome. It was top notch.
So I worried for nothing. And wrote about it at length. Please believe me, I do have some perspective on things. I’m not one of the Crazies. For instance, I do not wish death on Jennifer Garner. This exempts me. Because I say so.
Performance of the Week:
Not much to say, really, other than that Jesse Plemons is bringing it every week, and the murder storyline, created by the showrunners to showcase his talent, is justified for that reason alone. He has been staggeringly good.
And Glenn Morshower, as his father, has been every bit as good. That said, no one else on TV this week has done anything as heartrending as Plemons’ final scene, with Landry not charged for the murder of the evil rapist, but still haunted by his guilt. Impressive stuff.
Most Badass Moment of the Week:
Striding into Primatech Paper HQ, Pisspoor Peter Petrelli and Sark (sorry, David Anders is so linked to that role in Alias that I can’t separate him from it) chewed bubblegum and kicked ass, sans bubblegum. Peter fired lightning bolts and telekinetically hurled previously unseen Company henchmen around, and Sark tripped some guys up with Hiro’s sword. Even the potentially moment-ruining sight of a stuntman ineptly bracing himself for a telekinesis-caused somersault for a good few seconds before leaping into the air didn’t ruin things.
In the scheme of things it was not the most nerdcool moment ever, but it did what this show should always be doing; having the superpowered people do superpowered things. As a kid I would despair when Lou Ferrigno only got a couple of minutes screentime in The Incredible Hulk, or KITT didn’t even do a big jump in Knight Rider. Now that I’m older I understand about budget constraints and how cool moments mean nothing without good writing and well-developed characters, but my God, we’re talking about a show with about a dozen superpowered navel-gazers moping about. Surely one or two of them could do something fun or badass each week. I’m not even talking about my previous rant, where I called for more heroics (though that’s still a valid complaint). If you can’t have the characters saving others or helping them out, just have them doing wacky powery stuff. This action sequence was hardly the most complicated thing to shoot. Just throw a couple of people at a wall, blow up a couple of small objects, add a CG effect or two, and the viewers will be happy. Damn, if a little thing like that can make Milo Ventimiglia and David Anders look like the coolest motherfuckers on the planet, it’s worth the expenditure and effort.
Worst Guest Star of the Week:
Who was your favourite Slayer? Buffy? Hell no, go to the back of the class and suck an egg. Kendra? Nice try, but WRONG! The correct answer, of course, is Faith, the bad Slayer who tortured Wesley, killed a human, got stabbed by Buffy prior to throwing herself off a roof onto a barrel on the back of a moving truck, and begged Angel to kill during a fight in the rain in the finest moment of Angel season one. Eliza Dushku was so good in that role that it’s probable she’ll never get out from Faith’s shadow. Though Buffy and Angel were shows that handled both drama and comedy brilliantly, she was almost exclusively asked to do drama. During the series-worst episode of Ugly Betty we found out why.
She cannot do comedy. At least, she can’t do broad comedy. It was as if I’d finally achieved my dream of making my own film, and had kindly cast a good friend of mine for a lark, only to find that they thought the key to being funny is flapping their arms, rolling their eyes, and screaming their dialogue as if their vocal cords were on fire and only expelling a lot of air would put it out. I’ve slated Samaire Armstrong’s obnoxious comedic performance in Dirty Sexy Money before, but Dushku made her look like Groucho Marx. Hopefully Whedon will be able to fix this, play to her strengths, and harness some snarky humour talent out of her in his new show Dollhouse, coming to a TV screen near you in a million years when the strike is over (blame the producers, who are assholes just like Will Graham said).
Nearly The Worst, But Ultimately Very Funny Guest Star of the Week:
When James Carville turned up to give Alec Baldwin advice on how to stay together with Edi Falco on 30 Rock, it felt like obnoxious and unfunny stunt casting, especially with his laboured and overused catchphrase “Cajun style!” Canyon has recently expressed some frustration with the show, thinking it a bit laboured, and this appearance threatened to make me agree with her.
Cut to the next scene, with Toofer and Frank imitating each other in a war of identity, and I had forgotten it already. And then, to my immense displeasure, Carville and his cadaver face walked past, and that catchphrase came up again and again, going from mildly funny to unfunny to desperate and then (thank Neo!), back to funny, and with his final shot, hand deep inside a vending machine, all the way up to hilarious (at least in my humble opinion).
Canyon did like Pete’s special lunch treat to himself, though. Bento box, the lesbian scene from Mulholland Drive, and the office to himself. Until Kenneth invites his kids around.
Screen capture. Cajun style.
Best Guest Star of the Week:
As if to make up for making us temporarily hate Eliza Dushku (which, along with every other flaw in that terrible episode, ensured that episode of Ugly Betty gets onto the Worst of the Year Caruso Award shortlist), the next episode featured an inspired appearance by Betty White, playing off her positive public profile and gay fanbase by screwing over Wilhemina, bitching about Golden Girls lesbian fanfic, and fighting a rat for her severed finger (offscreen, sadly, but the imagination works wonders).
She was so natural and funny and charming it made Dushku’s appearance seem even more wrong. Damn, I really hated that episode.
Okay, tomorrow, the best directed scene of the week, the most over-directed scene by a notoriously arrogant director of the week, and a glimpse at a sight no human can ever forget. And I’m not talking about Viggo Mortenson’s balls (that’s old news. Keep up, granddad).
This Week In TV: Week 7
My first attempt at writing this post (on my brand new and gorgeous Tytn II, and no I won’t stop going on about it) went massively awry, spinning off into a sustained rant against a couple of new shows, and so I’ll save that for another time. Let’s keep this short and sweet. It was a good week, with a couple of shows missing and only a couple of real low points (ahem Bionical Woman ahem), so instead of spending hours writing a long post about every episode, let’s do this easy digest style, bitches! (Apologies for errors, coding screw-ups and spelling mistakes; I’m in a hurry here.)
Show of the Week:
House, continuing this most amazing of seasons with style. Our anti-hero is pressganged into saving a CIA agent suffering from what looks like a case of Topical Radiation Poisoning (topical in that it’s ripped from the headlines), Foreman outsmarts all of the new Cottages, Brennan gets kicked out of the team for poisoning this week’s other patient with thallium, and a new and sassy love interest is introduced; Dr. Terzi, played by Michael Michele, who had to contend with the grumpy Dr. Benton in E.R., so this should be easy.
It featured more cutting dialogue, bitchery, and belly laughs than anything else this week except for 30 Rock, which comes a very close second in the Show of the Week stakes. How long can House maintain this run of brilliance?
Best Line of the Week:
House (to Dr. Terzi): You know, I happen to have a position available on my penis. Wait a second, I just screwed up that joke.
Second Best Line of the Week:
House (to Wilson, who is amazed that House really is at CIA HQ in Langley): You’ve gotta get down here. They’ve got a satellite aimed directly into Cuddy’s vagina. I told them the chances of invasion are slim to none, but…
Actually, that whole scene was utter genius. It generated more hearty laughs than the entire season of Chuck to date, times 5.
Nightmarish Image of the Week:
Liz Lemon vomiting on a demon and then tucking into a cup cake.
It’s haunted me all week, though it’s worse with the wet, squidgy sound effect of the barf. Oh Liz Lemon, you made me feel so very ill.
Weapon of the Week:
In an otherwise lacklustre episode of The Office, I was happy to see an Oriental sword getting a bit of screentime in the horrid sweaty hands of Dwight. Let’s hope he gets a chance to brandish it sometime soon, hopefully in order to get rid of the ever-and-always vile Ryan.
Question of the Week:
Who has the widest shoulders? Michelle Ryan from Bionical Woman?
Or Reaper‘s Missy Peregrym?
Brave and the Bold-esque Team Up of the Week:
In a frustrating (for us) piece of cross-franchise promotion, Bruckheimer Industries chose to give Without A Trace a ratings bump by having series protagonist Jack Malone show up in Vegas investigating a missing child. Great for fans of both shows, a bit distancing for those of us yet to succumb to the charms of Anthony LaPaglia and his sticky-out top lip.
Actually, that’s just mean. I have nothing against LaPaglia, who was fantastic in Ray Laurence’s superb Lantana as Leon Zat (and was the best thing about Murder One‘s second season). We just felt a bit left out as lines directed at his character were obviously loaded with significance that we could not understand. At one point Doc Robbins asks him if he has kids, and his depressed face hinted at some great sadness we were not in a position to appreciate, though Wikipedia did get us up to speed later. That said, it was still a very strong episode, with Malone being a colossal dick, fronting on Hodges and bitching about Gil’s office. However, we’re going to have to watch the next episode of Without A Trace, because this was a two-parter, and evil murdering rapist scumbag John “Sol Star from Deadwood” Hawkes is still on the loose. What I’ve seen of Without A Trace didn’t impress me much, but as it has a fan base as rabid and as ignored and maligned as the CSI fanbase, I should give it another chance.
Guest Star of the Week:
Canyon and I are among that small subsection of humanity that doesn’t hate David Schwimmer. In fact, by the end of Friends, he was the only actor who still made us laugh on a regular basis. His appearance on 30 Rock as Greenzo, the demented manifestation of rabid ecological awareness, was inspired.
“Good job. Leave all the lights on for the invisible people.” He’s everything I would become if I didn’t try so hard to keep my eco-fear under control.
Musical Moment of the Week:
Amanda SummersDaughterofFeySummers, nee Tanen, distracting a grumpy wedding crowd with an impromptu version of Milkshake, complete with pipe organ backing and random choral embellishment, in the latest twist-packed installment of Ugly Betty (with only one reference to Wicked this week!).
Is Becki Newton the best comedic actress on TV? It’s a toss up between her and Tina Fey right now.
Saddest Scene of the Week:
Friday Night Lights‘ Jason Street (Scott Porter) is one of the best-written characters on TV, but has been in a rut for several weeks now, with a catastrophic trip to Mexico behind him, and much angst over his future. For a teenager with no movement below his chest, he’s doing well, with the love of his entire town, a job coaching, and a loving family, but still he’s searching for something. Tough news for Coach, who has to grudgingly accept his resignation, but good news for us, as we get to see more of his journey, and yet more of the best writing and acting on TV right now.
I’m not ashamed to say that this scene left me with a moon-sized lump in my throat, with both Coach and Street expressing their respect for each other, and fear that they have let each other down. I have yet to get tired of saying how incredible this show is. Apologies if you, the reader, have become tired instead.
Stunt of the Week:
Bionical Woman returned to conquer TV with its flat dialogue and unimaginative plotting, but did happily feature a great moment with Jamie grabbing some French terrorist by the ankle, swinging him over her head, and slamming him down on to a table.
The fact that she only has one bionical arm and no bionical spine and thus would have been snapped in two by such a maneuver can be ignored, as can the fact that her Xander-lookalike partner doesn’t think it odd that his supposedly 100% organic love interest just hurled a guy through a 180 degree arc without breaking a sweat. It was a great physical stunt performed with style and shot prettily. Thumbs up for that, showrunners! And thumbs down for everything else.
Most Wasted Former Mutant Enemy Actor of the Week:
For once, it wasn’t Adam Baldwin in Chuck. Reaper had a small role for Mercedes McNab this week, playing an immortal bad girl.
She was great, but didn’t get much screen time or many funny lines. Anyone who’s seen her in Buffy and Angel knows how hilarious she can be, so this was immensely frustrating.
Stupidest Moment of the Week:
In this week’s Bionical Woman our wide-shouldered heroine was on the trail of an ill-defined terrorist in possession of a list of some nebulous import. As this terrorist was played by Cylon scumbag Callum Keith Rennie we hoped for some improvement over the usual shittiness, but instead we got this horribly set up scenario involving plastic surgery. The first time we properly see him is a photo of him with the most outrageous aviator mustache in history. Good disguise, CKR!
It’s still recognisably him, though, which makes later scenes utterly ridiculous. Jamie and her wide shoulders go to a ball in Paris to intercept him, though she doesn’t wear an old man mask or spray infrared spray on the back of anyone’s head as in Mission: Impossible. The gimmick here is that CKR now looks so different from his Biggles photo due to extensive plastic surgery that only a Jamie-Eye-Cam picture of his iris is good enough to identify him, so she goes around the room scanning all of the guest’s eyes, until she comes across CKR, sans mustache. Even though he looks almost exactly the same, the only thing that makes her suspect he is the terrorist is that he won’t meet her gaze.
Firstly, why? He doesn’t know she’s Bionical, so why is he looking away? Secondly, HE LOOKS LIKE THE PHOTO!!! Those screen caps are not out of context; that’s exactly how the big cosmetic change was shown on screen. Just arrest him, dammit! But no, instead Jamie and the Xander clone follow him and allow him to lock them in a closet. Semi-Xander is so pissed he doesn’t notice Jamie has super-strength, either when she breaks down a metal door or when she flips a guy up in the air, over her head, and then back down again. If all of these covert operatives are this unobservant, no wonder terrorists can avoid capture with nothing more than alterations to their face fuzz.
The “You’ve Arrived, Sir!” Acting Triumph of the Week:
Glenn Morshower has been stoic and noble and great in several series of 24, mostly just acting as an audience surrogate in the presence of the super-heroic David Palmer. In Friday Night Lights, he broke hearts left, right and centre this week, compromising himself by burning evidence in an effort to keep his son, Landry, out of jail for murder.
It was all the worse for being such a doomed effort, and while we’ve been fretting over the future of our beloved Landry for weeks now, it seems we’re going to have to add his dad to our list of things to be concerned over. Still, now we’ve seen what Morshower can do. Let’s hope he gets cast in juicier roles than Secret Service Agent #5 in various dull action shows (not counting 24, obviously).
Grin of the Week:
Ray Wise!
Of course Ray Wise. What the hell did you think I was going to say?
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Shades of Caruso Mini-Blog- Listmania ’11! The Best Movies Of The Year December 31, 2011
