So I just finished Daredevil...

... and I didn't love it the same way that everyone else seems to. Or at the very least, NPR's Peter Sagal showered love on Daredevil on Twitter, while my nerd friends showered love on it on Facebook. I didn't check Pinterest or Instagram, but I'm sure there's love being showered on it there.

And there are things to love about Daredevil! I mean, I watched 13 episodes of my own free will--and very little of what kept me going was a sense of obligation. (Though there was that too.)

(Slight digression: Why is Drew Goddard credited as "creator"? There must be an agreement or a discussion that makes sense of that credit. Someone please explain that to me.)

Here's some of the things to love:

• Vincent D'Onofrio's portrayal of a damaged Wilson Fisk, not yet the in-control Kingpin; 
• the love of friends between Wesley/Fisk, Foggy/Matt;
• some of the fight scenes.

And here's some of the things not to love:

• repetitive and trite women and children in peril storylines; 
• yet another Batman-ization of a character--the centralization of trauma;
• most of the fight scenes;
• so much empty talk.

To expand on trauma's central role in comic book characters: since the beginning of modern superheroes, creators have recognized that it takes a particular sort of person to put on a mask and hit people for justice. And often, that "particularity" takes the form of some trauma: the death of a loved one (Batman, Spiderman), exposure to some dangerous mutagen that might make normal life impossible (Fantastic Four, the Hulk).

Matt Murdoch, the Daredevil, gets a double dose of trauma in his origin story: blinded and granted heightened senses by exposure to some dangerous chemical, he also loses his father to gangsters. And yet, until Frank Miller took him over, Daredevil was something of a light-hearted character. (There was a running joke in the comics about how bad he was at keeping his secret identity, since he kept revealing himself to pretty women.)

And yes, Frank Miller did grim and gritty for Daredevil, which made a lot of sense: a street-level character dealing with police corruption and inner-city violence. (Hell's Kitchen also made a lot more sense back then. These days, every time someone in the tv show talked about how bad Hell's Kitchen was, I had to stop myself from laughing. It's the double-edged sword of Marvel using the real-world as a setting: they get the benefit and disadvantage of instant recognition.)

So the creators of the show could have pointed to Daredevil's history as a reason for either way they wanted to go: cartoony and fun or dark and heavy. No money for guessing what they did.

The problem with that, for me, isn't that I'm fatigued with grim-gritty superheroes. The problem for me is that, about half the time, they did grim-gritty in a predictable and boring way. For instance, in the opening scene Matt Murdoch talks to his priest:

"I'm not seeking penance for what I've done, Father. I'm asking for forgiveness... for what I'm about to do."

Not a bad line, unless you saw it coming from a mile away. And that sense of grimness such suffuses so much of the show, from the acting (so much heavy pauses in the speaking, as if the weight... of what you were saying... was exhausting), to the fight scenes (so many of which were muddily lit, robbing them of any excitement).

I could go on, but I want to end with just one comment on the role of women. Matt Murdoch is motivated, in part, by his father issues. (Get it--he starts the show by talking to a priest because he has father issues. Wah-wah.) Which would be fine change from being motivated by protecting women--except there's no hint of his mom at all. As if Matt sprung fully forth from Jack Murdoch's forehead.

Besides that glaring omission, we could go through the women in the show and their relation to the men, particularly Matt. The tally isn't so great. Sure, Karen Page (secretary) and Claire Temple (nurse) get at least one moment of revenge or beating someone up. (Heck, even Foggy gets one moment of beating someone up.) But most of the time, the women are objects of rescue: Karen, Claire, Vanessa (an object of rescue not for Matt, but for Fisk).

Oh god, and I didn't even get into the 80s-esque racial/crime components, particularly the inscrutable Asian gangs: the honorable Japanese ninjas (which are so Frank Miller), and the secretive Chinese drug-runners.

In short, I didn't hate the show, but it seems to have some really apparent problems and some missed opportunities.

Marvel's Agents of SHIELD, season one

The short version response: I'm not sure I'll watch the second season.

I was one of the people who was pretty excited by Marvel's Agents of SHIELD before it showed and pretty underwhelmed by the first few episodes. So I've only gotten around to watching the first season now, after I heard some reports that it really shaped up with some Whedon-esque twists later.

Uh, well, I'm glad that some people like it.

Now, I really don't want to perform hate on a bit of popular culture because (a) it's not really worth it and (b) it's really hard to make anything, let alone make anything good.

So, what's the good lesson to take from this show? The big lesson is: don't hide your light under a bushel. Or, more concretely: if there's something that makes your work interesting, don't hide it under a long setup. As the discussants at Writing Excuses have said several times--even using Agents of SHIELD as an example!--if you're writing a revolutionary take on epic fantasy but only reveal the twist in the last chapter after writing the whole book as straightforward fantasy, you will have effectively (a) driven off the people who are interested in revolutionary takes and (b) disappointed the fans of straightforward fantasy who stayed with you.

In SHIELD's case, the big twist that really energized the show (somewhat) in the second half was the revelation that SHIELD was infiltrated by Hydra, which was tied into the second Captain America film. Even a hater like me can see some logic to holding off on that reveal, both logistical (the show needs to start with the regular season of shows, but the movie only comes out later); and artistic (the big betrayals will have more punch if we see everyone pretending to be good at first).

But, oh god, if you're making a show about, say, how a 1960s ad man is really sleazy, you don't do 10 episodes of normal ad life and then show him cheating on his wife in episode 11. You end episode one with that revelation.

Or, let's take Hitchcock's famous dictum: a bomb goes off at a table and blows up two guys--how surprising! That's good and sometimes good enough if all you want is a sudden, sharp surprise. But if you show the bomb and then show the two guys talking normally--suspense!

So, if I were doing a SHIELD show (which is unlikely on a hundred different levels, but go with me), I wouldn't burn 13 episodes of mostly blah adventures, building up pretty cliche characters and pretty cliche characters' relationships. Instead of having bland adventure guy and bland hacker girl build up a relationship only to reveal the secrets, I'd much rather show bland adventure guy's secrets from the get go. That way, viewers could spend the time realizing that bland adventure guy's blandness is a put-on.

I could point out some other issues (like that time that some guy gets magically killed over the phone, when the guy on the other end turns out not to be at all super-powered), but the second biggest lesson to take away here is be interesting. That's a little vague, but the show leaned heavily into some cliches, from "He's standing right behind me" to action-movie-style quips in the most inappropriate places.

Let's just all agree to write that on a card and put it over our computers: BE INTERESTING.

A Serial Killer in Every Kitchen: Hannibal and weird dialogue

As others have noted before, according to TV-reality, the US is primarily made of serial killers and sex criminals, which is a stark contrast to real reality, where we are largely made of cheese and color additives.

Hannibal takes this observation to the logical conclusion: if everyone is a serial killer, then even the people trying to stop the serial killers are going to be serial killers. Or at least incredibly unstable people with points-of-view that would make Lovecraft say, "Nah, bro, too dark."

I won't say too much because I (a) don't want to spoil it for anyone and (b) am not done with the first season myself. I will say that it is a show that really highlights how crazy American standards are for violence vs. sex. To wit: there are a lot of dead people, many naked, but we'd never see that much skin on a primetime, major network show if the body was alive and in bed rather than, say, draped over a table of antlers in a field.

It's also a show that beautifully breaks one of the cardinal rules of scriptwriting for many genres: "dialogue should be like real talk, only better"; or "... like real talk, with the boring bits removed." Many beginning screenwriters (::cough:: me ::cough::) and many beginning drafts may start with dialogue that's really helpful to the audience, but not at all realistic.

"Why did I ever listen to you when you told me that this mine held the lost diamond that would buy my family's farm back from that evil developer" is not something someone would really say. "I'm so mad at you for leaving me, especially because of my abandonment issues after my dad's plane crashed under mysterious circumstances" might work in a comedy.

Or put another way: When Han Solo brags that the Millennium Falcon is the ship that made the Kessel run in less than twelve parsecs, we in the audience don't think, "wow, I can barely get dressed and out the door in less than twelve parsecs." We think, "Boy, this guy really loves his ship / is full of shit." The content of the line gives us less information than the tone and context of the line. The beginning writer forgets that and tries to jam info into the words, usually using too many.

In Hannibal, certain characters--mostly the dangerous killer Hannibal and the unstable criminal profiler Will Graham--speak occasionally as if they've wondered in from Clark Ashton Smith or Thomas Ligotti. (Now I can use Thomas Ligotti as an example, thanks to the plagiarism brouhaha over True Detective, so--thanks, True Detective!)

And it's great precisely because it's so weird and precisely because the content of the lines is still less important than the tone and the context. Hannibal may go on about how the enclosure turns the tortoise into a god--oh, wait, that's Twitter's Hannibal at the Zoo--which doesn't really tell us anything about the tortoise, but tells us all about Hannibal's weirdness.

Midway through Arrow, season 1

When I went to a Nerdist Writer's Panel, Moira Kirkland, who works on Arrow, said something along the lines of, "Well, it's on the CW, so no matter what else is going on, our main characters have to go to a party in the third act." Which got a big laugh AND is also pretty accurate to what I've seen. Mostly, I watch the show at the gym.

I'll say this for it: Arrow makes very motivating gym watching. (It's right up there with Kacy Catanzaro's qualifying run for American Ninja Warrior.)

Before I watched an episode, I heard that Arrow was good, though a little heavy on cheesecake. To be fair, the cheesecake was a little more even-handed than usual, with Stephen Amell (Oliver Queen) sharing top-billing with his abs. Also, given the fact that WB/DC haven't had any luck with anything but the Christopher Nolan Batman movies--and the general success of more mopey YA literature--it's no surprise that this version of Oliver Queen/Green Arrow is awfully po-faced a lot of the time. Has he always been so emo?

(Also, it's funny to me to see so many actors who I recognize from other beloved and often short-lived nerdy tv shows. I'm curious to what extent casting for these roles is about getting a person that the audience will already recognize.)

But all that to the side, I'm surprised by how interesting and fun the show is. Who knew that a superheroic riff on Robin Hood would have such staying power? Of course, that's part of the appeal today: when we in our own world have to deal with massive inequality, the idea of a rich kid going after the criminal wealthy has a certain obvious resonance.

The Batmanization of Oliver also has some clear appeal, since so much of the story revolves around family issues: Oliver lost his dad and is dealing with a mother with secrets and a younger sister with issues; his best friend has trouble with his dad; his ex-girlfriend has issues with her mom and dad, etc., etc. Very smartly, all of these individual problems are interwoven; for instance, Laurel Lance's dad is a cop, so in addition to their family issues, both of them have issues with Oliver Queen AND with the Hood.

(Though I should add that I'm especially a fan of family complication stories. For instance, Smallville was not a great show by any measure, but every time Clark and his father had a heart-to-heart about their relationship, I sat up.)

So we have universal family problems, plus contemporary issues.

And some mystery. Rather than just give Oliver Queen a mind-altering exile on an island, the show has wisely made the island a big part of the story. Call this the "Lost-ization" of the show: while Oliver's life as superhero of Starling City goes on, we sometimes get stories of what happened to him on the island and what he did. Which nicely combines the pleasures of the origin story (watching a soft rich kid learn about the hard things) with the pleasure of a superhero quest/mystery story (where Oliver tries to clean up the city).

Also: there's always some big party with pretty people. So there's that going for Arrow as well.

True Detective (filmic, weird, character review)

Last time, I noted that True Detective gets a lot of adjectives applied to it, such as filmic and genius. One thing that I would like to note at the outset is that I understand both why people loved it and why people hated it. And, related, one thing that I think HBO is uniquely positioned to do is to produce this sort of mini-series that is the unique vision of a few people. That is, a typical tv show will have a bunch of writers and directors; True Detective is credited to just one writer and just one director. So the show has a real coherence in tone that not a lot of shows achieve. And if you don't like that tone/style/whatever, you won't find anything to keep you coming back, and vice versa.

In other words, it's the tv equivalent of Wes Anderson or someone like that: a writer-director with a particular vision. If you don't like a Wes Anderson film, it's more than likely that you won't like any of his films. (Note: "likely.") This is probably one reason why the adjective "filmic" or "cinematic" got attached to True Detective. Another reason is that the direction often lingers, especially on the landscape and panoramic scenes, which is definitely something that makes the tv show seem like it wants to be on the big screen. Honestly, if you can't tell, I think comparing this tv show to film doesn't quite hit the mark, while at the same time pointing to something real. Sure, this tv show loves this Louisiana bayou-world as much as a Western loves its Painted Desert and Monument Valley. Sure, the pace may at times be leisurely--but we can say that without falling back on some notion of "cinematicness" that is never really defined.

(Also, a moment of silence to honor the music choices of T-Bone Burnett.)

One reason why I want to emphasize the odd pacing is because the hurry-up-and-wait structure gives the scenes of action a shocking feeling, while also giving us time to watch these people in bog-standard life that isn't iconic. I mean, in a film or a tv show, we might see a happy family at dinner, which is such an iconic scene that the audience is meant to read this as "sign of happy family." But here, in between some shocking violence, we have a lot of awkward car rides and drunken discussions and family affairs of all sorts. It's enough space for the characters to breathe as characters, rather than as stereotypes and icons.

And it would be so easy for these characters to turn into stereotypes: the unhappy wife, the philandering husband, the faux-philosophical nihilist with the dark past. So how does the show prevent that? Well, first, I would argue that it doesn't entirely. As any good improv teacher will tell you, sometimes you use those stereotypes to set up the characters quickly and then complicate them. Here, we see the two detective at two different times in their lives, which gives us two different looks: Rust is a nihilist and a burn-out; Marty is a philandering husband and the comfortable PI. The show also gives us many different scenes and locations for bringing out these characters, with Rust's bizarre, penitential apartment contrasted with Marty's house--which is especially contrasted since we see them each crossing over to the other's world.

Which brings us to the notion of the world as a whole: what sort of world do we live in? Rust believes in nothing, eternal darkness, the end of all life--and possibly in the corruption of institutions by some extra-dimensional horror. (Carcosa, the Yellow King.) Marty believes in getting along to get on, in the innocence of children. Ultimately, unlike Lost or some other shows that give us no option other than the Weird, True Detective hovers on the edge: everything we see that's weird could be drug-induced or up to bizarre backwoods weirdness. But this is where the tv show really shines for me; because, in the very last moments, we're given a double view of the heavens: either the sky is all dark with only a few stars--or maybe the light is winning and banishing the dark. It's an interesting viewpoint and character switch--Rust is the one who offers the happy reading of the night sky and it's a transition into a qualified happy ending that feels earned by all the horror and weirdness that they slogged through earlier.

True Detective (summary and note on format)

True Detectives is another HBO show where I felt like everyone who was watching it was talking about it online; though, whereas Girls has its bloggers (both fans and enemies), True Detective seemed to have lots of Twitterers. So even before I watched the show, I had heard bits and pieces. (Although, I will say this: even without assiduously avoiding spoilers, I didn't see a lot online. Are people/fans growing an aversion to spoiling works for people when those works are susceptible to time-shifting?)

And when I went to LA, it seemed like everyone was talking about it--either noting it was genius (most common) or noting that it was overhyped. I also heard that it was filmic; that it was potentially a work of weird/Lovecraftian fiction; that McConaughey and Harrelson were great; and so on. So I didn't watch as a complete blank slate; but I also wasn't completely prepared for what I saw.

If you haven't seen it, here's the short(ish) version: Texan and nihilist Rustin Cohle moves to Louisiana, where he partners with happily married and philandering detective Marty Hart. (Cohle is dark as coal, Hart is caught up in affairs of the heart, if you need a mnemonic to remember them by.) Their first case is a bizarre murder in 1995, where the victim seems to be murdered in ritualistic ways, without leaving lots of evidence.

Now, here's the twist to the format: in 2012, ex-cops Rust and Marty are being interviewed separately by two different cops, who seem to have some sort of agenda. Rust and Marty haven't talked for ten years, not since some unspecified falling out in 2002. But the story they tell the new detectives may not be the whole truth, as we see some things happen on screen that don't get talked about. So we get glimpses of 1995, 2012, and some commentary on the time between. Since Rust and Cohle already solved the murder, they can give us a flashforward to the solution.

The murder investigation prompts them on a tour of all sorts of underworld and fringe communities: tent revivals and burned out churches, prostitution-centered trailer parks, bayou fishermen communities, etc. As they follow leads and discover more possible murders, we get to hear both more about these guys--Rust isn't just a nihilist for fun and he spent a lot of time on drugs while he was doing undercover work--and also get some hints about the larger conspiracies of the world. Is there a secret cult to the King in Yellow? Is that cult connected to power and wealth in Louisiana?

And then, in the last two episodes of the eight episode season, the format changes slightly: the new cops have all but accused Rust of being a serial killer, which prompts him and Marty to get together, which leads to Rust sharing his evidence with Marty, which leads the two of them to try to crack this case in 2012, 17 years after they supposedly solved it.

These last two episodes also give us a bunch of scenes from other people's points-of-view, so we see the new cops getting lost in the wilderness and we see the killer in his wilderness mansion. And that change of format I think helps change the tone somewhat. The first part of the show is all about the mystery, with some of the anticipation of what's going to happen that we already have clues about. So someone comments on the shootout Rust and Marty had with the killers, building up suspense for when we actually see it/hear the full story. When we jump to 2012, we can't have the same sort of set-up/anticipation... unless we see the bad guy's POV. It's a very nice and minor switch, that preserves a lot of the dread, while changing the focus of that dread. I mean, in episodes one-through-six, we know Rust and Marty can't die. In seven and eight, that certainty is gone.

This is getting too long; I'll continue on Wednesday's post.

Archer's great transitions

I've been pretty busy with cruise preparations, raising the question: can a Marxist go on a cruise and still call himself a Marxist?

That question aside, I was also re-watching the first season of Archer, the animated comedy about the dysfunctional and absurd spy agency while I was packing for my cruise. And, oh man, I really dig that show. You may not dig it, for any of a dozen reasons. Perhaps you find the humor a little crude, or the characters too absurd, or maybe you just don't like the animation style (with it's heavy black lines).

But even if you don't love the show, I think we all can learn something about transitions from Archer.

For instance, there's a lot of great x/not-x ironic transitions, as in "What could go wrong?" transitioning to something terrible.

There's also the x/x-in-different-context transition, as in "Look at me," Lana says, as way of arguing that Cyril won't run to another woman, transitioning to the other woman yelling "Look at me" to Cyril as part of their rough sex play.

Then there's the audio wrap-around version of that, where some character says something, then we cut to some other scene where some other character has said that in a different context. ("It's not what it looks like," says Lana, explaining how she's not about to have sex with someone to Cyril; cut to a seemingly dead body and Pam explaining to Malory Archer the same thing.)

There are other transitions, but that's a good start. Interesting that not all of the transitions here are laugh-out-loud funny, but there's a steady sense of connection and forward-movement.

Note: I am writing this while watching the episode "Skytanic," so that's where most of my examples are from.

Almost Human: Too far, too close

He's a curmudgeonly cop with a tragic backstory; his partner is a young gun from a despised minority, itching to make the world--and his partner--better; the chief has her eye out on the curmudgeon, helping to nudge him along towards health; the cute tech has an eye on the curmudgeon--but will they or won't they?; the weird tech is good comic relief; and the other cop at the precinct is kind of a jerk; and every week, some strange new murder or crime comes up that they have to solve--and some of these crimes are ripped from the headlines.

Does that sound like every cop/procedural show in existence? Probably. But I'm talking about Almost Human, the science fiction cop show where the curmudgeon goes to a "recollectionist" to recover his lost memories about an ambush that nearly killed him; and the young cop is actually a recently re-activated robot of a model that was de-activated for mental health reasons.

And the crimes they deal with every week (with spoilers):

1. evil Syndicate that ambushed the old cop tries to break into police headquarters
2. people are being skinned to use their skin on super-real sexbots
3. the cops face a hostage situation that is really a cover for a heist
4. the cops have to clear the good name of an undercover cop by tracing a new drug to its source--within the police department!
5. witness needs protection from brilliant philanthropist-killer--whose associates are all his clones! (Bonus: the witness underwent some brain-enhancing surgery which has turned her into a psychic who can talk with the dead. No, that doesn't really work)
6. black-market synthetic organs are leading to deaths
7. to get the equivalent of YouTube hits, a bomb specialist straps bombs and cameras to people and makes them do things
8. the cops track down "smart bullets" that can hit people anywhere (and that use the surveillance network)
9. a killer robot is on the loose!
10. genetically-engineered perfect kids ("chromes") die of drug overdose, connected to a normal who died of the same (because she felt too much pressure to keep up with the perfects)
11. after a smart house kills a kid (shades of Trayvon Martin), some hacker takes revenge by turning the smart houses against the people
12. an ugly man is murdering people to steal parts of their faces with nano-technology
13. --haven't seen this one yet--

So let's break it down:

• doesn't need to be science fiction at all (5): 1 (break-in), 3 (hostages), 4 (drugs and corrupt cops), 6 (botched black market surgery), 7 (thrill kill camera version of Speed), 
• doesn't really need to be science fiction (1): 9 (super-trained soldier works instead of combat robot), 
• too stupid to take seriously (3): ~5 (psychics?), 11 (tries to rip from the headlines, but ends in this ridiculous hacker-vs.-hacker story), 12 (why not just get regular plastic surgery? why do the nanobots really have to kill the people?)
• interesting use of future technology used to discuss contemporary issues (4): 2 (exploitation of women?), ~5 (cloning), 8 (surveillance), 10 (genetic alteration, haves vs. have-nots).

So out of 13 episodes (12 that I saw), roughly half don't really take advantage of the science fiction world; and only about a third do so in an interesting way.

And that's one of my big problems with this show so far. I like all the characters fine--I like all the actors more actually--but the whole show just feels too close to an ordinary buddy-cop show. It's Castle without the sexual tension or witty banter or fun secondary character tensions. I can definitely see this as a purposeful idea: rather than scare away people with weird s.f. trappings (says the producer, in my fantasy), let's keep things grounded in what they know.

But the result isn't a show that's relatable, but a show that's a little bland. Despite my newfound love for Karl Urban and Michael Ealy.

What do you think?

(For an alternative take, I think Lauren Davis makes some excellent points in this io9 post, especially about the strangely consequence-free world they seem to be living in.)

At Long Last, Gilmore Girls (Season 7)

Yes, I know the Oscars were last night; and no, I don't have any particular feeling about the winners. In fact, except for Gravity, I'm not sure I've seen any of the major nominees.

Instead of going to the movies to see ::checks online to see what's playing at the local and only theater, realizes that nothing nominated is playing:: some movie, Sarah and I recently finished the last few episodes of Gilmore Girls. And I have thoughts.

Part of me wonders what this last season would have looked like if Sherman-Palladino/Palladino were kept on as writers/producers. I... am not sure. When the season started, I thought I detected a shift in both plots and writing--some things were a little more melodramatic, while the witty banter wasn't quite as witty. And yet, I wonder if that was more my bias than any objective shift in the show. After all, sure, Sherman-Palladino had left and was a unique creative force; but it's not like the new writers had to start all over. All the actors were still there, all the crew too, probably. So when Lorelei and Rory have a walk-and-talk through the town in season seven, there's probably more things that have stayed the same than have changed.

Still, even though the last few episodes wrapped things up nicely in many regards, I'm still not entirely thrilled with the season seven treatment of Christopher.

But looking back, and after talking it over with Sarah, I think Gilmore Girls has a nearly perfect balance of low-stakes angst and low-stakes joy.

Low stakes?
I mean, there are no world-destroying storms or soul-sucking vampires. What's the worst that can happen in the Gilmore Girls world? There's no murder or rape. The worst thing that can happen is that people occasionally get into fights. And they're serious fights about serious issues and real feelings. But they're not blowing up relationships. Things will go on--at least among the main relationships, the Gilmore women.

Angst and joy
Lorelei and Rory may be fantasy figures in several ways--all that eating, no exercise--but for most people, they're fantasy figures because of their close mother-daughter/friend-friend relationship. Not everyone has that relationship. More likely, your average viewer sees a similarity between her own mother-daughter relationship and the rather more angsty Emily-Lorelei relationship. And by giving us both relationships, the show poses us between an aggravating truth and a pleasant fantasy. We can fear that Lorelei and Rory will descend into Emily and Lorelei land; or we can hope that Emily and Lorelei will turn into Lorelei and Rory. Either way, we're engaged with our hopes and fears, between what we don't want to have (but probably do) and want to have (but probably never can really imagine).

Why does an episode of Gilmore Girls work?

Have you been watching Agents of SHIELD? No, of course you haven't--the only people I hear talking about the show make it clear that they're watching out of a sense of duty: "we're watching it because it's Marvel/Whedon and it has to get better, right?" One complaint I had--and that I've heard repeated about the show--is that it's taking its damn time to set up the interesting things... rather than actually doing the interesting things.

Now Sarah and I are in Gilmore Girls season six and one thing I've noticed about it is that things tend to go pretty slowly. So, at the end of season five, Lorelei and Rory fought because Rory wanted to take time off from Yale. Now we're in season six and it's only in the seventh episode that these two have talked to each other again--which was pretty much the core of the show (mother and daughter who are more like friends). And a lot of the episodes--in this season and earlier--share a certain form:

• we meander through a few subplots--Paris and her boyfriend/struggles, Lane and her mother and her boyfriend, Luke and Lorelei, Lorelei and Sookie, wacky happenings at the Inn, something with Taylor...
• and then at the end we get some sort of kick with the main story--Richard shows up at Lorelei's to say he was wrong to help Rory quit Yale or Lorelei proposes to [redacted], etc. 

Theory: Gilmore Girls works by being slow because so much of the pleasure is hanging around and watching our friends/people we like--which cannot be said of Agents of SHIELD or possibly any genre show, which promises plot-based excitement.

Gilmore Girls and the benefits of semi-ensemble, multiple environment plotting

I'm in season five of Gilmore Girls--so no spoilers please! But I've noticed something about the sort of hybrid structure of the episodes, somewhere between a true ensemble (like Friends or Lost) and being a more focused show (like Bewitched or Frasier).

Actually, you might read the next few paragraphs and say, "duh." I'm a little slow sometimes. But it's curious to me how a show like Gilmore Girls--or fine, even Frasier--can create a setting and then populate that with minor characters, most of whom aren't all that interesting/round. For instance, Gilmore Girls has a lot of people in the quirky town of Stars Hollow, and these people will pop up for a joke or a small subplot: Kirk is wackily interested in everything! Taylor is a terrible person, ha! Gypsy, uh, fixes cars?

But (ok, yes, much like Frasier) Gilmore Girls also invests in a number of other characters, all of whom could handle their own plots. Unsurprisingly, most of these characters are in the Gilmore family: grand-daughter Rory, daughter Lorelei, and grandparents Emily and Richard. So we can follow Lorelei dating in Stars Hollow and Emily's issues with her mother-in-law and Rory dating in college.

Which is interesting to me because Gilmore Girls seems to have succeeded in keeping interest past a life change in a way that many other shows falter with. So Buffy starts as a high school show and has a little trouble switching to college. But GG keeps a finger in so many worlds that a change to one doesn't throw the whole show out of balance. Rory goes off to college? Well, mom is still home. Lorelei opens a business? Well, her parents are still there, doing their rich people thing.

So by juggling these different characters in these different environments, the show has some robustness--a single misstep won't derail the whole thing. Even compared to Frasier, this is a pretty interesting feat. (I mean, when Frasier leaves radio for a while, doesn't the show founder a bit?)

The Wire (2002-2008)

Sarah and I finally finished watching The Wire, HBO's prestigious drama series about Baltimore's crime-and-police world and its relation to various other institutions in the city. There's unions and working men's lives at the dockyards; and teachers and their battles against the drug culture; politicians and lawyers--and all the dirty money involved there; and then, at the end, there's the newspapers, with their mix of self-interest and public service.

As many people have noted, it's an amazing show, with some very particular elements that would be hard to replicate. To wit: David Simon and Ed Burns had a lot of experience as a reporter and a cop, respectively, so when they wanted this show to be realistic, they had the chops to do that, whether that meant realistic characters (some of them versions of real-life people) or realistic dialogue (full of amazing slang and character-building phraseology). Now, I'm not saying you can't do that for your tv show about teenage assassins running wild and attempting to avoid the government--only it might be a little harder for you to get that boots-on-the-ground version of the story.

(Also, it's amazing to me that the awards shows didn't shower these actors with recognition. So many of them are so good, able to communicate so much with just a look or a little shift of the mouth. I was also glad to see people who didn't look like the standard issue we usually get on tv. I just hope that the ones interested in acting can still find work.)

That said, I don't think The Wire is completely lightning-in-a-bottle; it has at least a few, replicable elements. For instance, working at such a length, the show can dive into almost everyone's character a little, showing (realistically) how many facets people have. There's no unbelievable switches to characters, but there's still some capacity for surprise and nuance, as when cool killer Chris Partlow passionately beats a man to death.

Which brings us to another quality of The Wire: it doesn't suffer fools lightly. Or rather, it demands a certain amount of attention and thought from its audience. It doesn't spell everything out: we may suspect that Chris loses his temper because of something in his past (the man he's beating up may have abused a child, so we suspect that Chris may be a survivor of abuse himself)--but that's all we're given, with no one character reading us Chris's history.

There's other lessons to learn from The Wire, but the one I want to end on--again, good for a novel or a tv series, but maybe not for something shorter--is how we get several individual views on some inter-personal structure. So we don't just see one cop--we see lots of cops. And they're not all the cliche maverick cop or the cliche brass-polisher or the cliche rules-lawyer--though there are a few of all of those and more. (And then, as the episodes go on, we see how these cliches break down.) So we don't just see "maverick cop bucking the system" but also see what that looks like to his supervisor and to his wife and to his supervisor's wife--and to the criminals too. That's what's so interesting about The Wire: you can take one piece of the world--a corner store murder--and see how it plays out in several different worlds and for several different people.

Lessons from odd places: The Tick (2001)

I was a huge fan of the 1994 animated series The Tick, starring an obtuse, nigh invulnerable superhero named the Tick, who had no particular tick-related abilities besides his antennae. He was partnered with sad sack ex-accountant Arthur--who dressed in a moth suit that was continually mistaken for a bunny costume; and had several parody superhero friends, including American Maid and Der Fledermaus. When I was in high school, this show really hit hard with its evisceration of superhero tropes. For instance, when the Tick attacks a group of villains called The Idea Men, he asks them what the big scheme is behind their attempt to ransom the city's dam.

Tick: OK Idea Man! What’s the big idea?
Idea Man: Well, we thought we’d steal a lot of money, and then we’d be rich, and we wouldn’t have to work anymore!

Brilliant!

Still, I never got around to watching the 2001 live-action version of The Tick--even though I read the comics--largely because it seemed like a terrible idea. I mean, I loved the cartoon, with its mix of absurdism and (don't laugh) gritty reality. For instance, Tick once fought this terrible Soviet supervillain--which is absurd. Except since the Cold War was decades ago, this ancient supervillain was just that: ancient. Not really the villainous dynamo he once was, which is why I say it had some gritty reality mixed in. This supervillain also hung out with a man-eating cow, which could go either way.

But the comics were a little too dark for me: instead of just being an obtuse superhero, the fact of the Tick's serious issues were sometimes alluded to. I mean, here's a guy who doesn't know who he is and is probably an escapee from a mental institution. In bright, animated colors, that's funny and ignorable. But put Patrick Warburton in a big blue suit and what you basically have is the story of a mentally-challenged man-child and his overwhelmed caretaker. For instance, there's the episode where the Tick has to learn about death.

Not exactly hilarious.

And yet, the show is funny, if a little sad; and has some good lessons for writers interested in TV.

Which is what I wanted to talk about and the rest is just preamble. Which I won't cut because I love the animated Tick so.

For instance, take the episode "The License," where the Tick's identity becomes an issue: he doesn't have a superhero license, so Arthur tries to help him find his real identity. The Tick is identified as some woman's husband--which in another show would bring us to a plot about a black widow or a scheme. But no: she's just a mentally-unstable woman who is so lonely that she has delusions of being married to some men who dress up in costumes. And though the Tick still sort of thinks he's married to her, his desire to be a superhero tells him that this isn't going to work out.

But what's great about this episode is how this question of identity gets replayed in the sub-stories for the other main three characters: sidekick Arthur without the Tick is just an accountant; the American Maid-analog Captain Liberty tries to hide her superhero identity in order to date a normal; while the hyper-sexed Batmanuel tries to raise his visibility by hiring a PR agent and planting photos in the newspaper.

Now, those last two subplots don't really affect the main story (it's very much A: Tick finds wife, Arthur loses Tick; B: Captain Liberty hides suit; C: Batmanuel highlights suit), but you can see how, even in The Tick, the episode is structured by a common theme that helps unify the episode.

Sitcom slump--or tarnish of the golden age

I realize that I've talked a lot about movies here, but really, I probably spend more time watching television. Part of that is structural: when Sarah gets home from work and we eat dinner, it's easier to watch a half-hour show rather than a half-hour section of a movie.

It helps that we have lots of television to catch up on: we've just finished season four of The Wire, still haven't started Breaking Bad, and just recently caught up on Mad Men. And then there's all the sitcoms we like, like Parks and Recreation and Louie.

For an experiment, Sarah and I tried a lot of the new TV sitcoms this season, like The Goldbergs and Trophy Wife. And they're all competently done: I always get at least one chuckle or laugh from them. But none of these shows are groundbreaking and even my old favorites, like Modern Family, seem to be in something of a slump.

Or is it just that sitcoms, which mostly live on repetition of their situation, are paling next to today's dramas that aren't afraid to upset the status quo. Parks and Recreation has characters marry and deal with new issues, like Ben Wyatt starting a relationship with Leslie; and resigning in disgrace from government; and then moving on to work for a non-profit foundation.

But in Modern Family, how many times are we going to see Cameron and Mitchell get into some form of argument where Cameron goes over the top and Mitchell stays too grounded? How many times in The Goldbergs or Trophy Wife are we going to see parents having trouble connecting to their kids and their situations?

Is it just me or are sitcoms in a bit of a slump right now?

The Life and Death of a Trope: Quicksand

RadioLab recently covered an interesting database on quicksand scenes in movies. This database was compiled for that most human of reasons: sexual kink. But like all databases compiled for sex, we can analyze the data for non-sexual reasons, if we have a reason to. Or if someone just wants to and works for Slate; in fact, this analysis happened in 2010 by Dan Engber, who noted that there was a rise in cinematic quicksand until the 1960s and then a drop-off. He also noted that metaphoric quicksand had a peak in the 1960s too, with Vietnam being "quicksand" the US was stuck in, to worries about lunar quicksand faced by the Apollo. So the 1960s were a particularly anxious time for America, quicksandily-speaking.

Which seems like a good observation until he undermines his own thesis by noting how quicksand has had a long, pre-cinematic life during the Age of Discovery. He even notes (without graphs, unfortunately) that quicksand dotted the frontier of Manifest Destiny literature. So, from there, we move on to the theory that quicksand symbolizes something about unknown areas: about the way that explorers might get swallowed up by the wilderness they sought to explore. When you push the limits of the known world, sometimes the unknown world pushes back--by pulling you further in. That's a fun idea, a sort of exploration-judo, where the unknown uses our own pushing against us.

So really, the 1960s weren't "peak quicksand"; only that our worry about engulfment and quagmire shifted from African jungle to Vietnamese jungle and lunar wilderness; and that we had a particular visual medium that was very friendly to the slow sinking action of quicksand. (Quicksand in a movie--exciting and incremental and inexorable. Quicksand in a comic book--what is that, dirty water?)

But then we're back to the first question: why did we have so many adventurers in quicksand in the 1960s and why did it drop off? And, additionally, where did it go? Engber talks about the drop in sandboxes as part of our loss of the quicksand trope, but it seems to me that we need to think about generations as the only way to describe how a trope falls out of favor in a particular medium.

That is, in the same way that a serious use of a trope will precede its parody, so a trope that thrilled us as kids may well get more play when we're the ones making the movies; and so the trope that we're invested in may well seem dated to our kids. (The loss of sandboxes in NYC will only have some effect on what's being made out in LA.) We also have to take into account the way different media absorb and deform certain tropes.

In other words, the reason why quicksand had a bump in the 1960s probably has more to do with the adventure serials of the '30s and '40s. It's easy to fit a quicksand scene into an episodic narrative. "Did you see Episode 12, where they get caught in quicksand? It was amazing!" But try to put that quicksand into a film and it fades a little in importance: what's more frightening, the quicksand that couldn't move to get the hero at the 30-minute mark; or the cannibal tribe that chased him at the 32-minute mark?

So people who were entranced by serial quicksand in the '30s and '40s start putting it into movies in the '60s--it's still good for a cheap thrill. But the kids in the '60s aren't so worried about quicksand and so it filters down into the cartoons and tv of the 1980s, either as momentary problem or as comic relief.

And this is also why, I would guess, quicksand hasn't made a huge comeback in video games as a serious threat. There are moments of quicksand in some Mario games and others, but seriously: in a medium that prizes interactivity, how much use will creators get out of a trope that works to take agency away from the character?

What we can learn from Mad Men, Season 5

I recently realized I could watch Mad Men season 6 online, but only for the next few weeks, so Sarah and I raced through season 5, which I guess we'd forgotten about. (If Matthew Weiner ever reads this blog, then he'll have to take that backhanded compliment.)

Now, there's a lot that goes into a show that we don't even notice until it goes wrong, which includes everything from the technical side to the research side. (Historical fiction is hard.) Conversely, there's all the flashy acting that we see, which rightly gets a lot of attention. So much of the action of Mad Men takes place on Don's face. And for all that we have a romantic view of writing as a personal expression of one person, we have to recognize the collaborative efforts that go into this sort of work.

This goes doubly, probably, for a show that skirts the edge of being an ensemble. Sure, the argument could be made that Don is the protagonist or that he shares the role with Peggy--her rise contrasted with his fall, a la Dreiser's Sister Carrie. Really--and spoilers abound from here on out--so many of the main characters get some arc or moment to shine, dramatically, whether it's the ongoing money troubles that lead Lane to embezzlement, which leads him to suicide; or the less-defined arc of Roger Sterling dealing with the emptiness of his life.

Looked at as a serial, one of the benefits of this ensemble cast is that you can seed elements in in small portions. So we don't have an entire episode dedicated to Lane's money troubles until we've seen a little issue here and a little issue there.

There's also something to be said for the ensemble cast providing multiple points of view: Roger Sterling is always ready with a quip, but he'd make a terrible viewpoint character because his selfishness makes him hard to relate to; we get to see Peggy's triumphs and lows contrasted with Don's, both in work and at home; Stan may be a relatively minor character--we don't learn much about him--but he gets to sit in on the meetings and voice the viewer's thoughts without having to embody all of the viewer's issues (which he couldn't because he's from a different time period); etc.

Which brings me to my final thought (in this first batch of thoughts), which is that Mad Men excels at mixing tones: tragedy and comedy, light and dark, satisfaction and creeping desolation. So in almost any scene, there's a certain ambiguity about whether it will turn out for the better or for the worse for the characters.

Joss Whedon's Dollhouse: Post-Mortem (season one)

Maybe I'll add more to this if I can get through season two. Let that line mark the tenor of this post: I've rewatched season one of Dollhouse primarily because I wanted to rewatch something and 26 episodes of that seemed a lot more manageable than 144 of Buffy or 110 of Angel.

If you haven't watched Dollhouse, don't think I'll make you in order to read this post. Here's the gist: in contemporary L.A., there's a super-science organization that can create people by imprinting personalities onto empty people--Actives or dolls. They get those dolls through a few different ways; the main character Caroline/Echo was caught breaking into a Rossum Corporation lab and needs to sign up to get away from the law (I guess). Meanwhile, FBI Agent Paul Ballard is the only person who thinks the "dollhouse" is real and tries to track it down.

So there's a fun premise, but it never really works out. Even with a little dollop of that "artificial family" thing that Joss Whedon seems to like so much, none of these characters really gets all that interesting. First reason is the obvious: half of the cast has no personality, identity, or desires. Second, the "crusader fighting to find the truth" has some fun moments, but is very cliche and uninteresting. Does he want to find the truth or save the girl? Blah. Also at the end of season one, he gets some leverage over the Dollhouse and uses that to free the doll who was used to manipulate him--the woman who probably signed up to get away from her grief over her dead child. How is that helping anyone?

There's also the central nonsensical elements: there's this super secret organization that has dozens of regular people who just help out, like the masseurs who take care of the dolls. How is that secret? The central idea of blank Actives waiting for admins to fill them up has interesting parallels with actors waiting for writers/directors; but there's something that doesn't quite fit with how they talk about bodies having some residual soul or the personality being the soul.

That said, there are some excellent moments, most of them having to do with the "real" characters of the Dollhouse: quirky lonely genius Topher (it's wonderful and sad when he "makes a friend" for his birthday), hard-edged but soft-hearted Adelle, the mysterious Doctor Saunders. There's some parallels here with other Whedon stories, like: Whedon enjoys when old people act inappropriately, as they do here in "Echoes" or in Buffy's "Band Candy." There's also some great moments when some of the dolls get imprinted with personalities of other actors, which gives them some opportunities to act. (See also Buffy "Who Are You.")

I do want to single out the last episode of season one, which takes a radical departure and shows the future apocalypse that results from this technology, for both a radical and interesting idea; and a really terrible execution. Here's just one issue: if the world ends sometime between 2009 and 2019 and the issue is stolen or lost identity, how long would it take for people to start using cyberpunk/apocalypse names like Mag and Zone? It's a dumb allegiance to the trope of cyberpunk apocalypse without any real thought.

Netflix, Kickstarter, and New Hollywood

I confess: I'm not a professional movie or television maker. And yet, that hasn't stopped a lot of people from commenting on Netflix's recent foray into television production with House of Cards or the use of Kickstarter to raise capital for Veronica Mars: The Movie. (Dollars to donuts, the movie is going to involve rape or attempted rape in some capacity.)

But I did study the history of Hollywood once, so, I'll be honest: we've seen these sorts of fundamental shake-ups before. In the 00s, it was adding narrative to film, in the 30s, it was the Hays Code and the introduction of sound; in the 50s, it was competition with television and the introduction over various -scopes to compete; in the 60-70s, it was the American New Wave, like Scorsese, Coppola, etc. and the special effects revolution and the creation of the blockbuster and the tie-in (Jaws, Star Wars, etc.); in the 90s, it was the indie movement. Things change, things stay the same, especially if your name is "Woody Allen."

I was thinking of this recently when listening to an episode of Scriptnotes, a podcast with John August and Craig Mazin where they discussed Kickstarter. Putting aside for a moment that Craig Mazin doesn't seem to understand Kickstarter (he doesn't understand the reward tiers and that investors get something back--that, in many cases, supporting a project on Kickstarter is a lot like pre-ordering an item, not donating money to a corporation), I don't think he's wrong when he says there's some potential for waste, fraud, and abuse in Kickstarting intellectual property that belongs to corporations. That is: there's potential. Why does the WB need help funding a Veronica Mars movie if they wanted to make one? Will Kickstarter just be a way to publicly fund ventures that are privately profitable? Will studios turn to the public, hat in one hand and gun to the head of a beloved show in another?

Eh, all things are possible in the future, but I don't see this potential for abuse becoming a major factor in creative ventures. We long ago entered a new phase of entertainment where something that dies can be revived, whether tv-to-movie (Firefly to Serenity), tv-to-tv-following-cult-popularity (Futurama, Family Guy--both revived after cancelation due to excellent DVD sales and rerun ratings), or tv-to-something-else (comic book continuations of Angel and Buffy, Netflix reviving Arrested Development). And all of these revivals had less to do with Kickstarter (fans ponying up cash up front) than with the corporate forecasting that said fans would line up for these later. If Kickstarter takes some of the worry out of this equation by letting fans pre-order tickets, that won't radically change the way things are done.

To further address one of Mazin's worries, that corporations will use Kickstarter as blackmail ("fund this season or we kill your favorite show"), I'm afraid that doesn't really make sense. Fans have always had ways of making their commitment known--before Kickstarter there were letter-writing campaigns. And any corporation that ignores viewers seems to be working against their own interest: if I'm already watching your show, you're making money off of me through advertising revenue. Trying to squeeze more out of your viewers will just make you enemies.

Now, will Kickstarter help accelerate second lives for cancelled intellectual property? That's the real shift here that may happen in the future, though as I noted, this sort of thing has been happening more even without Kickstarter. And as we saw with the attempt to Kickstart an Inspector Space Time show (a Doctor Who-esque show within the Community universe), sometimes corporations like to hold on to their IP even when they're not using it.

Super Short Review: Girls, Season Two (still on-going)

Yeah, my "Super Shorts" have been expanding, but here's a foolproof way to scale them back: review something I haven't finished yet, like the second season of Girls. Honestly, I'm not even caught up with the episodes that have been released. And, double honestly, whenever we watch the opening--the HBO logo and the static start--I sing the Game of Thrones theme song. So I might not be the best person or in the best position to review this show. But here goes.

When it started, Girls inspired a lot of talk on the internet--was it diverse enough (racially, politically, economically), honest enough, honest enough, particular/generic enough, etc. I think those are all valid avenues to explore; and I agree that Girls failed in some ways--the ways that most entertainment fail (race, class, gender). But it still was mostly funny and carefully walked the line between kind identification with its characters and acid-eyed observation of their faults. So Hannah's approach towards her gay ex-boyfriend might've been cringe-inducing but it was understandable: we could judge her missteps and feel bad for her position at the same time.

This second season seems to have started differently. The bad decisions are still there--Hannah doing cocaine for a freelance story, Marnie getting involved with an emotionally-twisted artist, etc.--but the viewer's position feels less secure on that fence between judgment and understanding. That is, the narrative seems to be more gleeful, more on the side of the people making the bad decisions. Maybe that's just because we're halfway in to the season. Maybe the show will come to radically challenge what we think are good decisions for 20-year-olds. But right now it seems more like a celebration of being privileged. These are people who, institutionally, can survive bad decisions.

Going on: Community without Dan Harmon, Cheers without Shelley Long

This past week saw the return of Community for the first of its post-Harmon shows. If you're not a comedy nerd (everything I do, I nerd out about), the backstory is that show creator Dan Harmon was removed as showrunner for this season, and two new people were brought in to run the show. There was lots of hand-wringing by fans over this move, because people who loved the quirk of Community felt that a lot it came from Harmon, who is crazy according to everyone who works with him. Would the new showrunners bring in a laugh track, some cheap sexual tension, or otherwise blandify Community?

Well, not exactly: the showrunners and writers clearly lean into the controversy here, starting off with a laugh track that isn't for the show, but for the imaginary show that's running in Abed's mind, the kind of show that Community would never become (we fervently hope). It's the kind of joke that Harmon might have used. And yet, despite using many of the same types of Harmonic jokes, there's a tonal shift that makes the jokes stumble as they land. For instance, a "Don't ask" line gets pointlessly followed up by a pro-forma "Don't tell."

I can't blame the new showrunners wholly for this; lots of ongoing shows find themselves descending into re-use that verges on self-parody. One of my comp teachers likened this sort of thing to wanna-be basketball stars imitating Michael Jordan's tongue-moves rather than his basketball moves. Or we could switch it: if you're just going through the basic motions, you might miss the charm of the inessential.

And I was thinking about this slight disappointment when my girlfriend and I began season six of Cheers, the first season that sees Shelley Long's brittle, beautiful Diane replaced by Kirstie Alley's hard, sharp Rebecca. Many of the jokes survive the transition--Carla is mean, Woody is dumb, Sam is a womanizer--but the feeling is off. Sam's womanizing, which often carried an undercurrent of loneliness and depression, has become outward-focused as anger and meanness. It's the same sort of joke, but it's no longer as funny. And I cringe at the upcoming attempt to make Rebecca and Sam an item.

So, Community season 4 and Cheers season 6 are only starting for me, so maybe it will take a few episodes to iron out the issues, as with many a new show. But it reminds me that sometimes, the dynamic of multi-part machines likes this is not repeatable, even when the jokes are.