Monsters of Television

“How are you still working here?”

Adorkable.

And, finally, we have the story of the cylon.

While Mac Mac and Maggie have been busy flitting about girlishly, getting themselves worked up into tizzies that big, strong men continually save them from, there is one woman at the office who has been on the fringe of the nonsense. No, not Kendra.

It’s Sloan and her Munn-Face, blue-steeling through all the emotional scenes, establishing herself as unable to feel whatever hyperbolic emotional meltdown her radioactive coworkers are in the middle of. She stares robotically as Mackenzie carries on about stuff that happened four years ago. She’s maintains a stance that she has been told she does not communicate well with humanity. She has not found herself beholden to Will at any point, which clearly means she can’t be a female in this newsroom with her name in the excruciatingly long title sequence.

Well, no more! Sloan will prove her weak womanhood once and for all by being silly on camera, all so Will can paint himself as a martyr, the penitent bully, and a more square-jawed Obi Wan all in the same episode. Girls are such a mess!

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“Just because you shot Jessie James, don’t make you Jessie James.”

You’d think that, with all that cash, Mike could get a pair of pants that does a little something for his figure.

Skyler says less than fifty words the entire episode, depending on whether or not you count non-lexical vocables as words. My pleas to the universe that she have fewer words than that during previous seasons notwithstanding, it’s important to note what’s happening to her, now that she has become a woman with her life stolen from her.

Since the beginning of the season, her part has been dominated by the overwhelming fear she feels in Walter’s presence, the boot-quaking nightmare that is having no control over the monster in her bedroom. While she’s also had her Heisenberg moments this season (particularly while ensuring Ted keeps his big, stupid mouth shut), it’s nothing compared to the speechlessness she feels while Walter tries to mitigate his farce of a family life with his increasingly powerful role.

Whether you believe Walter is actually living two compartmentalized lives, is pretending to live one as a cover, or is desperately grasping at the last ounce of humanity left in him is irrelevant. The sum of his introspective and forward-facing action is the same: Walter is become the antagonist and everyone else on the show could be the hero that contributes to his demise.

Skyler, a woman living on the edge, is just as primed as anyone to eventually break down and be the person that ends this dystopia for everyone. Jesse, Mike, Hank, even Badger could contribute to the downfall Walt so desperately needs. She conveys this during three scenes at fifty words total. Give or take. Two of them repeated several times to sweet, cheer-worthy relief.

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“Friends don’t let friends sneak into insane asylums alone.”

Do Arkham Asylum inmates only eat sliced bread and peanuts?

My first instinct was to type this whole thing in Mona Code (what Spencer would know as a basic mnemonic device) but that’s harder in practice than theory. “She lives under trees” is more inspired than you might think it is. It’s like trying to compose Don Quixote from scratch. Or terza rima in German.

But, then again, it’s a lot easier when your character can communicate in nonsense. If you have anyone past puberty brushing a doll’s hair, they can say just about anything because she is clearly cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs. In fact, I wonder what the doll industry has to say about this show. They certainly are on the forefront of establishing fake porcelain babies and tiny plastic people as the creepiest things to stumble across in the dark. Especially vast extinct necropolises ensconcing zany Rosewood asylums.

A lot of information is revealed in this episode, which usually means I’m going to hate the thing since that leaves very little room for Hanna to bust out a few choice lines (comedic brashness usually gets replaced by boring anxiety).
But this one could’ve been much worse and none of the plot that is revealed feels terribly contrived. Well, except for Nate’s weird Jenna love and Ali’s unmentioned evil bestie Cece coming to town. Couldn’t emerging characters exhibit some winsome faculties?

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“There’s no better reason than family.”

When it comes to Breaking Bad, I’m always changing who I root for. I’ve steadily stopped rooting for Walt (and as this season has progressed, IN ONLY 2 EPISODES, I find him truly despicable); I’ve never liked-liked Jesse, seeing him as more a victim (which this season has only intensified so far); the rest of the White family is a bit of hit of miss (I’ve come around on Skyler, but poor Walter, Jr. just loves breakfast). Gus is likeable due to sheer performance chops, Hank is perhaps the most insanely human character on the series, and Saul is a wonderful study of a guy in over his head.

So if there’s still a character I’m actively rooting for, that I actively get a un-guilty thrill from (which is what I get from Walt now), it’s Mike. And through this episode, I was wanting him to get out of this life. I want him to relax, drink beer and Ensure, and play Hungry Hungry Hippos with his granddaughter. Even though the man is the hardest of hard-boiled assassins and P.I.s, he’s a tired and beaten down man who wishes the world would just wise the hell up and leave him alone. Read more »

“Very graceful.”

I don’t know why people were complaining so much about episode 4 of this show. Episode 5 is so much worse.

Let me rephrase that. I’m trying to temper my opinions of the show and base them on adjusted expectations. The Newsroom isn’t the serious, groundbreaking drama we thought it was. It’s not even a groundbreaking workplace comedy. But my thoughts on this are well-documented and well-shared throughout the community nerdy enough to discuss such things (one I love dearly).

Even while relieving the show of a haughty premise, “Amen” is infuriating. It makes me curious about the industrial complex at HBO surrounding Sorkin. In this new golden age of television, we have a lot of “auteurs” to whom we direct our praise and aggression but they generally collaborate heavily on a program or, at the very least, have to deal with a studio. Vince Gilligan often notes his collaboration process with his room for Breaking Bad. Matt Weiner had a much-publicized debacle with AMC between the fourth and fifth seasons of Mad Men. Shawn Ryan (The Shield) can barely get a network to stick with him long enough to grab an audience (see Terriers, The Chicago Code).

But Sorkin’s influence on this show must be more comparable to Louis C.K. on Louie, a showrunner who has the deal every young aspiring television writer in the world would love to have: complete autonomy. The reason I say that is because, just like on Louie, sometimes, stuff just doesn’t work. And those things that don’t work (to the degree that they don’t on these shows) usually don’t make it to air on programs that have a lot of studio oversight. The viewing public has given Louis C.K. the right to stumble because (a) even those stumbles are at least comedic/storytelling experiments worth trying and (b) how do you not love that ugly mug? Sorkin, however — sigh. Someone needs to tell him.

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“I’m number one even if I can’t touch her!”

I don’t post a lot about anime on here because I often don’t get to watch it in a timely manner during the American television season, and Japanese television has four television seasons each year (going with the calendar seasons) in which new series premiere and some show continue, which means there’s always so much new stuff to watch that it just gets out of hand.

But the summer affords a chance to catch up a bit, and while I haven’t had the chance to catch up on everything I’ve wanted to, I wanted to make a quick recommendation, especially for non-anime watchers, for the summer series Natsuyuki Rendezvous. It’s a romantic dramedy of sort, and it reminds me just a bit of one of my favorite movies: Truly Madly Deeply.
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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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[In Russian] “I will f— your shit up.”

After Dallas squandered my interest by becoming oh-so-very boring (the worst possible thing that can happen to any show, but I feel it’s especially deadly to soapy series), I was pleased that Political Animals stepped up and said, “Oh, you’re unhappy with the other guy? Well, why not vote for us?”

Who are the Ewings…?

Happily, I will strain this political metaphor to a breaking point: Political Animals isn’t as pitch-perfect as I was hoping, but I’m not disillusioned, and nor do I think it’s an empty suit. It’s not the Tim Pawlenty of my summer TV season (that would probably be  Perception), but if I could liken it to any candidate in recent memory, it’s likely Howard Dean. It’s big, loud, charming, prone to mistakes but not backing off from them, and is likely not to get very far (ratings weren’t great).

But I don’t care, because I really like it.  Read more »

“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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