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Sunday, 24 of November of 2024

Political Animals – “Pilot”

[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?”

Cast of Political Animals

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 »


Breaking Bad – “Live Free or Die”

“Yeah, bitch! Magnets!”

Walt and Jesse cook up a plan to destroy Gus's laptop at the junkyard.

“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.

Read more »


Pretty Little Liars – “That Girl is Poison”

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

Jenna and Emily approach Paige after she dips her finger into the cupcakes.

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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White Collar – “Wanted”

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

Maya and Neal gaze at a model of the New York City skyline.

“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?

Read more »


Season in Review: Lupin the Third: The Woman Called Fujiko Mine

“Now cease everything you are doing to gaze at me, only letting your heart still strum.”

Lupin the Third: The Woman Called Fujiko Mine title cardAround the sixth episode (“Prison of Love”) of Lupin The Third: The Woman Called Fujiko Mine, I started to feel slight glimmers of what the show may have been after. After the ninth episode (“Steamy Desire”), I had a bead on the series. By the end of series, I realized I had been more accurate than I thought. Fujiko Mine is, from the onset, about gazing, what that gaze is capable of, and how it entangles all of us, male and female. It’s about spectatorship (in the broad, psychoanalytic sense, not an individual’s reception) and its ability to satisfy wish-fulfillment impulses when we sit down to consume media.

I’m stating the obvious, though. The series isn’t shy about its aims (the words of this post’s epigraph are the first words you hear at the start of each episode), but despite its willingness to show how gazing and vicarious thrill rides through fiction fulfill us (or even sustain us), it still ultimately reaffirms the power and importance of the straight guy’s looking, and that’s hardly anything new.

This will be a spoiler-heavy discussion of the series, so if you’re at all interested in watching it (and you should be), come back later. I linked to the show’s Hulu page above, and you can watch it there. If you’ve already seen the series in its entirety, let’s continue. Just let me don my owl mask first. Read more »


The Newsroom – “The 112th Congress”

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

Charlie Skinner ponders the ratings slide.

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?

Read more »


Dallas – “Truth and Consequences”

“I keep letting myself fall into bad patterns.”

Dallas 2012 title cardSo I’ve fallen way behind on watching Dallas. A lot of this was due to just feeling tired on Wednesdays for some reason, and a little bit of it was just forgetting that the show was on Wednesdays in the first place. But I’m all caught up and ready to go.

Except that I’m kind of yawning a bit. The structural issue with Dallas was laid out in the premiere when it established pretty much everything it was going to do, all the schemes that were in play. The rest of the reason was always going to be how it all unraveled, and there’s something a bit dull about watching plans collapse as opposed to watching plans come into fruition. Read more »


The Newsroom – “News Night 2.0”

“That’s — not Spanish.”

Sloan and Mac talk in the newsroom.

“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?

Read more »


Pretty Little Liars – “Birds of a Feather”

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

Hanna and Aria set up a dating profile for Ella.

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.

Read more »


The Newsroom – “We Just Decided To”

“Seriously, though. I have a blog?”

Mackenzie gives hints to Will on what to say next.

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?
Read more »