Monsters of Television

“Respect the badge.”

The premise may seem really familiar by now: a group of genetically-enhanced misfits are brought together under the guidance of an idealistic doctor/psychiatrist/scientist to fight the super-powered and morally-ambiguous.  Alphas (don’t call them mutants) are under pressure from government regulation and misguided terrorist organizations to blend in or fight the power, all except for a gifted few that iterate in the gray area between the poles of intolerance.

It’s tread territory (X-Men, Heroes), particularly lately as we lump vampires into the mix of misunderstood entities of abjection (True Blood). The dynamic between Red Flag and Dr Rosen’s team of misfit toys is terribly familiar (though we don’t have a Magneto or Sylar — yet). The stakes involving government’s tenuous peace with the “good” Alphas are just as high as in the Marvel universe. The analogy to marginalized minorities is equally palpable.

That being said, Alphas (second season starting tonight) is worth your time. And I’ve got five good reasons for you to watch. None if them have anything to do with a dude with metal claws and a bad haircut.

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“I’m on a mission to civilize.”

Jeff Daniels is immune to Munn Face.

We all have a measuring stick for when we have to make the important decisions in the time we dedicate to our television watching. Okay, maybe not all of us. Some people don’t actively make decisions what to watch. Sometimes we just turn the channel or turn it off entirely rather than continue watching, a fight or flight response.

But for those of us that do consciously give a show time to convince us it’s worth our precious hour, you can’t do much better than a four-episode rule. Three and it’s barely out the gate. Five and you’re almost halfway through an HBO season and you might as well stick with it until the end. Four is a solid number.

So here we are on episode four of The Newsroom and I’m coming to terms with the fact that, even if I was going to make a decision to run, I couldn’t turn it off because of several factors, not the least of which is the pedigree of writer behind the program. So, instead of giving up on the thing, I have another decision to make.

I have to come to terms with the fact that this show isn’t what we thought it was. We’re not watching an exposé on cable news or a character study on the people that report to people about other people. This is an hour-long sit-com. And if you’re going to stick with it, it’s time you came to terms with it, too.

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“Yeah, bitch! Magnets!”

“You’re disturbing my oboe practice.”

Oh. That’s what breathless anticipation for next week feels like.

The finale last year left me a little disappointed. There wasn’t a cliffhanger in the traditional sense since Walt took care of the immediate danger looming over him. The threat was gone. There, seemingly, was nothing left for him to react against.

It turns out there are a lot of loose ends. Without an adversary to occupy his time, he’s left to deal with the repercussions of his lifestyle on his family, what’s left of his work, and his overall freedom. Last year’s “well, what now?” has turned into “Oh. Right. All that.”

After a depressing season of Mad Men that replaced any semblance of a cliffhanger with characters tumbling further down the hole of personal atrophy and irrelevance and a general apathy for the characters on The Walking Dead and Game of Thrones (except for Arya and Tyrion), it’s nice to get this show back to remind us what it feels like to painfully wait a whole week for another episode.

And it looks like Walt’s setting up a pretty breathless season for us.

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“Every time you baby squirrel Ezra, you take away his nuts.”

She just wanted a coconut. Geez, lighten up, you guys.

What? How did we go through a whole episode with that title and not hear Bell Biv DeVoe once?

Egregious absences of namesakes notwithstanding, this episode felt stronger than that past two weeks, didn’t it? It wasn’t AS cheesy or AS painful to watch. The girls are still awful to their men (or ladies as the case may be) and their schemes to get evidence/clues are still hare-brained but a lot has to be said when the writer of the episode doesn’t talk down to the audience, simultaneously assuming the characters are idiots so they would do dumb things and that the audience are idiots so they can pass off uninspired plot points and no one will be the wiser.

This show is weird in that we get a lot of information in a ham-handed way and then a better-quality breather episode with less information and more interaction. It’s like any other show with a serial storytelling except the episodes where we get a lot of information are crappy. Even the writers are trying to rush through it and hope no one thinks about what just happened.

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“The Suit’s here with Island Suit. It’s a double-barreled suit!”

“Wait until you see my Mothra suit.”

On the carpet of his office in his penultimate season, Gregory House stared at the ceiling and considered a decision that would be snap or less than snap just a few months prior.

The issue was that House could either lie to his girlfriend or let a person die. Even to a person with romantic principles, he would seem ethically-justified to betray Cuddy’s trust. But the heart of “Office Politics” is that he is put on a decision and that he’s not really mulling these options as much as he is debating whether his relationship with Cuddy is making him a lesser doctor. It was. House was being a punk.

I bring this to your attention only because White Collar has its own romance, if a little less mushy than Huddy, that raises a question of whether the participants are better or worse for their coupling. The events of last season’s finale raises the stakes but also unabashedly pushes Peter and Neal over the edge from being merely affected by each other to being changed men.

But is it for the better? And when are these crazy kids just going to do it already?

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“Do you want to play golf or do you want to fuck around?”

It’s really all Charlie’s plan to check “ruin a show with principles” off his bucket list.

Swashbuckling. That was the word Aaron Sorkin used to describe the show to Piers Morgan in a stuttering explanation for his fiction in an excuse laced with so many ums it makes you feel better that someone so famously eloquent has just as many issues with elocution as the rest of us. But the terms he threw out there for The Newsroom were important, particularly while he looked at one of the most recognizable faces of CNN, a network his show could be accused of lambasting. It’s a romantic comedy, he says. Sorkin only operates in fiction! Jeff Daniels helps him by emphasizing The Newsroom is over-the-top idealistic! Swashbuckling, however, is the word that struck me the most.

It is the most apt in a couple different contexts. For one, the denotation would have this cast on a romantic adventure and no one could argue with that. But the connotation reminds us of pirates or some similar rogue and manly profession with a heart of gold and charged with saving damsels in distress. Why does every damsel on this show need so much saving?

Swashbuckling aside, the episode is interesting since we fast-forward through months of news in tandem with an inevitable meeting with the money side of the idealism, creating an Inception-level of metaphors. But how do you put a price on a dream?

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“That’s — not Spanish.”

“So how do I do it?” “All you have to do is relax your face and make your eyes go dead like you’ve been lobotomized and wouldn’t put up much of a fight. It’s like playing a sexy possum. That’s Munn-Face.”

When Aaron Sorkin moved to paid cable, we had no idea that what we really needed for him to do was stay on network or ad-supported cable television because those advertisements, the time we waste looking at products we’ll almost certainly never buy but fully support their presence in the middle of our programs so we don’t have to shell out unnecessary dollars on content and, instead, spend them on shoes and snacks and drugs or whatever else we please, the lapses in between the “arias” of dialogue, were essential so we didn’t feel the crushing weight of paragraphs with unpronounced punctuation that are now the mainstay of a series on which no one from studio exec to writer’s assistant seems to say no to Sorkin, which enables him to lay down as many soapboxes as can fit within the same amount of time Game of Thrones entertains several enclaves of characters spread across continents but Sorkin barely has time to tell the story of one or two or less than two characters and do it with poor, sit-com-worthy gimmicks while filling all the negative space with an incessant volley of letters that run together like a traffic jam in a commercial for his and her body spray and, by doing so, possibly torpedoing a decent premise for a show the same way he crushed a promising show about sketch comedy five years ago that turned into something political and too serious and, if I may say so, icky when it came to the Jordan/Danny relationship, an act for which he apologized to the crew, the network, and Matthew Perry in GQ (scroll down past the bad CMS garbage) so he at least insinuates that he has to know what he’s doing now, what mistakes he’s making, and how to improve on those mistakes after going down with two busted ships and one that sailed into the history of television, all of this information begging the question:

Are you in or are you out?

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“Why are you looking at pictures of bald, fat men?”

Let’s set up a profile for my mom! Wait. Do you know anything about my mom? I don’t. She’s an English teacher so she likes — art? And stuff? This profile needs more dead animal parts.

I didn’t think I was going to do a review of Pretty Little Liars this week but something needs to be said about things that are happening on this show, particularly how the show is trespassing on my faculties of reason.

You and I both know this show isn’t supposed to stand next to Breaking Bad or LOST or any show to be acclaimed by critics outside of Us Weekly. But I also once attributed subtext and whiffs of an aspiration to complex narrative for this show, even saying this is the best show you’re not watching. So that’s on me.

The thing is that Pretty Little Liars may indeed try their hand at revelatory storytelling in the shadow of LOST but they also have to consider their target demographic won’t hang on without some reveals and may be too impatient for the answer-longing that kept fans tuning in for Whiny Jack and Tag-along Kate. You have to let them have a piece of the story every once in a while, maybe more often than you would for the wider 18-49.

I’m getting it out there that I don’t hate Pretty Little Liars for dumping more information into each episode and picking up the pace a little (a lot — a lot a lot). It’s the execution that troubles me. Don’t insult me or the young girls of America. You can do better.

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“Seriously, though. I have a blog?”

It’s not the greatest show in the world —

I’m sure this will all sound glib. But that might be fitting for the subject.

Aaron Sorkin brings another series showcasing the wild, emotional chaos happening beneath a shiny veneer we as a public consume, ripping the facade off something polished and well-oiled to show all the moving parts that makes everything tick, especially if those moving parts are near clinical in self-importance and neuroses. If The Newsroom doesn’t work out, maybe Sorkin will pitch a series about how sausage is made with the most pedantic and fervent meat-handlers Johnsonville has ever put to work.

But he wouldn’t do a show about sausage workers. The shows he wants to do are about higher, shinier offices that have direct and immediate sway over a large swaths of the public. The shows he brings to series all seem to be ones that focus on vanted elements of our society, humanizing the faces and talking heads we tend to detach from the rest of us in order to get over the fact that they rose from our depths. It’s heady stuff.

But does anyone else get the feeling Sorkin churns out shows because he’s still dealing with his disappointment in Sports Night?
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“Not every little girl gets to do what they want. The world could not support that many ballerinas.”

The five partners audition for a part in Dark City. Later, Roger goes the extra mile.

That was a finale?

Call me jaded or spoiled but I expect more of a cliffhanger or at least something a little more shocking in my Mad Men season finales. There were no major shifts with the business (adding real estate doesn’t count). No head-scratching proposals. No dynamic changes at all.

With last week’s shocking (if not surprising) episode, it almost felt like we got a breather week but with nothing afterward. That’s not to say that this week’s episode wasn’t good-to-great. Upon further inspection, you can see that it wraps up the season-long thesis of loneliness. Everyone’s life sucks and they’re isolated and they’re alone because no one understands them in this world that’s leaving them behind. Come back for more!

We may leave this season without shocking revelations but we find them in greater misery than they were at the end of any other season. The show plumbs new lows in order to establish that this is the darkest timeline. And the end-of-episode montage tells me that this was the end of the season. It just doesn’t feel that way.

Let’s take a tour of the sad.

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