Looking for Justice at the 2015 Emmys

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        HBO aired the finales for its spring lineup this past Sunday, which means that the 2014-15 TV season has officially ended and the race for the Emmys is about to kick into full gear. While the actual nominations won’t be announced for another month, there’s no better time than the present to make the case for the shows and people I hope to see recognized come July 16. As I’ve mentioned in my previous Emmy wish-lists, these aren’t predictions, and given voters’ past tendencies, I imagine the majority of them have next-to-no chance of happening, but one must never despair when it comes to pop culture awards, not even in the face of inexplicable FX snubbing and Downton Abbey love. Until the final verdict comes out, possibilities for surprise abound, so if they know what’s good for them, voters should take a peek at this list:

Drama

The case: Mad Men for everything

The argument: It’s hard to think of Matthew Weiner’s iconic show about the ad industry in the 1960s as an underdog or long shot, but in recent years, its reputation as an awards darling hasn’t exactly matched with reality. Most awards bodies, like the Golden Globes and Screen Actors Guild, seem to have forgotten about its existence, last recognizing Mad Men in 2013. Even the Emmys, which often seems to lavish the show with attention out of rote habit (see: the continued noms for Christina Hendricks and Robert Morse despite the lack of actual material for both actors in the latest seasons), only gave it four nominations, and no wins, for the stellar first half of its seventh and final season. Add in the fact that not a single member of its large, hugely talented ensemble cast has ever won an Emmy, and maybe you can understand why I’m a bit nervous about Mad Men’s prospects, though it will presumably benefit from not having to compete with Breaking Bad anymore.

        It would be easy to argue that Mad Men deserves Emmy recognition simply because it’s Mad Men and it only seems proper to give such a seminal work of art one last hurrah. However, the show is too good, its merits too many, for me to resort to such a shallow, sentimental appeal. While the last seven episodes weren’t the strongest of its run, they still provided plenty of indelible moments, from Joan threatening to burn it all down to Peggy sauntering into the McCann-Erickson offices and Don driving off into the sunset, and a fitting conclusion to the saga of Don Draper and friends. As impeccably crafted as always, Mad Men stayed true to its ambiguous, elliptical nature, preferring hard-won, frequently temporary victories over immediate gratification. The dissolution of Sterling Cooper put all of the show’s major characters at crossroads and, as a result, proved to be the perfect storyline to drive home the series’ core themes of identity, change, expectations versus reality, and the unstoppable march of time. Layered performances by Jon Hamm, Elisabeth Moss and January Jones in particular ensured that Mad Men’s impending absence would be deeply felt.

The evidence: “Time and Life” (ep. 11), “Lost Horizon” (ep. 12), “Person to Person” (ep. 14)

Me to the Emmys, probably 

Halt and Catch Fire and Humanizing the Void

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             You could be forgiven for dismissing Halt and Catch Fire as second-rate Mad Men. You might even be right. After all, the sophomore AMC drama created by Christopher Cantwell and Christopher C. Rogers is hardly the masterpiece that Matthew Weiner’s acclaimed, seven-season meditation on the American Dream was even in its youth, and its resemblance to the latter borders on suspicious at times.

             To start with, it’s a period piece, though 1980s Texas doesn’t quite have the exotic, jewel-toned glamour of ‘60s Manhattan. Joe MacMillan, the central protagonist played by Lee Pace, is basically a mid-level Don Draper – a debonair, silver-tongued genius tormented by his enigmatic past; he even ends the first season by ditching his job and disappearing into the backcountry, a move not dissimilar to Don’s cross-country odyssey in the last act of Mad Men. At one point, Cameron sums Joe up with the barbed observation: “You’re just a thousand-dollar suit with nothing inside.” Sound familiar?

I mean, come on.

Speaking of Cameron, she’s the Peggy Olson of Halt and Catch Fire, an idealistic young prodigy who the hero takes under his wing; her alternately affectionate and resentful interactions with Joe recall Peggy and Don’s volatile relationship. Donna initially occupies the obligatory neglected wife role, though unlike with Betty Draper, the other characters soon learn to recognize and appreciate her value, and in a pleasantly surprising reversal, the second season has positioned Gordon as a bored house-husband while Donna gets absorbed in her work. Both shows even include amusing side-stories involving typically straitlaced women trying marijuana.

Yet, after a rather uninspired beginning, I found myself thoroughly enjoying Halt and Catch Fire as I binged the first season on Netflix (for me, “binging” means consuming 1-3 episodes a day, which I guess for some people is known as “watching TV”). I couldn’t help but succumb to Lee Pace’s haughty charisma; the dysfunctional, frequently hostile relationships; the pleasure of seeing Donna upend everybody’s expectations, including the audience’s; the coolly retro soundtrack and credits sequence. As much as I love Game of Thrones, there’s something to be said for a show that creates tension out of lost computer files.

In a way, it turned out to be the perfect rebound, filling, however incompletely, the gaping hole left in my TV-viewing heart by Mad Men. For all the aforementioned similarities, I would argue that Halt and Catch Fire is not, in fact, a cheap knockoff of the seminal ad agency drama but a rejoinder, approaching the same problems – how are people shaped by society? Is happiness possible? What is our purpose in life? – from a radically different angle.

Some Reflections on Consuming Pop Culture in Isolation

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        Last Friday night, I officially went into mourning for Jimmy Darmody. I’ve spent the last few months slowly making my way through Boardwalk Empire, the Prohibition era-set, Steve Buscemi-starring HBO drama that lasted five seasons before airing its final episode in October last year. Having never quite mastered the art of binge-watching, I sometimes go days, even weeks between episodes, so it felt like a small victory to finally complete the second season, even though I’d started the show at the end of February, which meant that it took me three months to watch a mere 24 episodes.

        The finale left me a bit emotionally distraught, as I knew it would. Yet even as I typed out that off-the-cuff tweet, the part of me that wasn’t numb with sadness felt ridiculous. After all, this was a fictional character whose abrupt demise had originally taken place way back in 2011, and while I managed to avoid hearing details of the specific circumstances, I’d been aware of this particular plot point virtually since it happened, giving me plenty of time to prepare. This foreknowledge naturally colored my viewing experience, but rather than spoiling it by taking away the element of surprise as I might’ve expected, it made me appreciate Jimmy’s overall arc as well as Michael Pitt’s performance more. The prospect of his ultimate fate loomed like approaching storm clouds, imbuing his scenes with an underlying sense of dread and melancholy, and what might’ve otherwise come off as an out-of-left-field twist incorporated for shock value instead seemed all the more tragic for its inevitability.

All I wanted was more of this ruthless swagger

        Deciding what TV shows to watch, once a simple matter of flipping through a handful of channels to see what’s on at the time, has become a rather trying occupation, one that requires careful planning and time management. More than any other form of entertainment, TV demands commitment, asking viewers to devote potentially years of their lives to following a single story that in all likelihood won’t even get a proper, satisfying ending. With the rise of new technology and the medium’s reputation, there’s a greater variety of quality shows than ever before. So, options must be weighed, priorities determined, sacrifices made. However, in the age of Netflix, HBO Go, DVRs and other alternate streaming/viewing avenues, what’s sacrificed is often not a particular show, but rather, the conversation around that show.

A Conversation Comes to a Close

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        I want you to pay attention. This is the beginning of something. Those two lines opened “Time Zones”, the first episode of the seventh and final season of AMC’s complex, game-changing Mad Men. They also, in a way, summed up the show as a whole.  Demanding the kind of constant, painfully close scrutiny from viewers that made it a boon to TV critics everywhere, Mad Men was a series of beginnings – blossoming relationships, unstable mergers, forever-shifting identities, history itself all hurtling toward a terrifying yet exciting unknown – but it realized what its characters tried so hard to deny: that every birth and rebirth must be accompanied by a death. In the season four finale, Dr. Faye Miller, the latest woman to be deserted by Jon Hamm’s womanizing Don Draper, told the ad man extraordinaire that he only likes the beginnings of things. That quote rang with such truth not because Don is selfish and noncommittal, though he’s undeniably a bit of both, but because he knows that facing the end means confronting his end, becoming face-to-face with his own mortality. He fears that inevitable moment of loss and the lack of control he has over it, just as he’s afraid of change, of moving on and getting left behind, so he runs away.

        Much will be written about Mad Men between now and when that final shot, whatever it is, fades from our TV screens. People will ruminate over what it means for prestige cable shows, antiheroes and the so-called Golden Age of Television, and the vast majority of it will likely be more thorough, more precise, more insightful than this piece. I don’t say that to be self-deprecating or (just) because I don’t have the highest self-esteem, but rather, because there’s been so much fantastic writing about this show scattered across the Internet, on sites like A.V. Club, Salon, Tom + Lorenzo and just about anywhere else you can find TV criticism, that I’d be doing you a disservice if I didn’t urge you to check these recaps and analyses out.

        I can’t say I’ve been watching Mad Men from the beginning. In fact, the first episode I ever saw was the season three premiere, “Out of Town”, and considering that I had only the vaguest awareness of who the characters were and what was happening plot-wise, this was unsurprisingly a bad idea. Though I’d heard and read nothing but endless praise for the show, a stately period drama about the world of advertising didn’t exactly sound like compelling entertainment to me at the time. I couldn’t imagine not finding it stiff, slow and overly dense, and my first uninformed attempt to dive in confirmed these initial expectations firmly enough that I didn’t give it another chance until around at least two years later. Seeing that the 17-month hiatus between seasons four and five would give me plenty of time to fully catch up, I started watching in the fall of 2011, which I remember because it was my first semester of college. This time, I got hooked instantly.

        Perfectly titled “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”, the pilot exhibited many of the show’s best qualities from the beginning: the subtle wit and self-awareness of its writing; the prickly characters we would learn to both love and hate; the deliberate way it used its production design, cinematography and lighting to establish setting, mood and theme. While I obviously already knew that Don had a family when I finally watched that episode, the reveal of Betty and their children still worked as a means of telling audiences that not everything was as it appeared, that beneath the ad-glossy surface of class and glamour lay a universe of greed, deceit, ambiguity and dark secrets.

Cue “The Street Where You Live”

Looking for Goodbye

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             HBO confirmed Wednesday morning that it had canceled Looking, Michael Lannan’s dramedy series about three gay men searching for purpose and love in San Francisco. This news did not come as a surprise: the show had dismal ratings, even for premium cable, and there were ominous whispers long before the official announcement. Yet seeing this tweet from executive producer Andrew Haigh still sent a surge of despair and frustration through me:

I’m not alone. After a promising but somewhat forgettable freshman season, Looking emerged as a legitimate triumph this year, presenting ten confident, all-around sublime episodes that culminated in Sunday’s gut-punch of a finale. With the threat of cancellation looming, critics started to rally around the show, which had been more or less nonexistent in the cultural conversation aside from a smattering of controversy and contention that accompanied its debut; I’m pretty sure I’ve seen more people talk about it this week than I saw all last year. Needless to say, it was too little, too late.

             Don’t get me wrong: I’m hardly guilt-free in this regard; to be honest, I barely thought about, let alone talked about, Looking at all between the end of season one and the beginning of season two. It wasn’t until sometime around the middle of season two that I realized I didn’t just enjoy the show in the fleeting way I enjoy most comedies – I genuinely loved it. I spent a good deal of each week looking forward to the next episode. It may not have been the best show on TV, and it certainly wasn’t the most influential, but its absence leaves me feeling strangely empty.  I guess like so many of life’s greatest joys, I didn’t really appreciate it until it was gone.

             Here are just a few of the reasons Looking made the TV world a better place:

             It was about gay people. Crude, but true nonetheless. Even in our era of “too much of a good thing”, this is a rare phenomenon. Plenty of shows have LGBTQ characters, but few are about LGBTQ characters; even Transparent is as much about Maura’s mostly straight, cisgender children as it is about her. As AVClub’s Brandon Nowalk points out, Looking was the only current American TV show centered exclusively on the gay community, presenting them as a majority rather than a minority, insiders rather than outsiders. Although it stirred understandable discontent among some LGBTQ individuals due to its narrow focus on cisgender, predominantly white men and its normalization of homosexuality, the fact is that one show can’t be expected to represent all queer people and was never intended to. Also, the charges of homonormativity elide the nuanced, rigorous ways in which Looking examined self-acceptance, privilege, HIV and marriage as an institution, among other relevant issues; just this week, it featured a startlingly pointed conversation that challenged the legitimacy of monogamy. In a big sense, Looking was a show expressly concerned with the anxieties of progress and assimilation, subversive in its own right.

How "Arrow" Empowered the Damsel-in-Distress

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        It’s no secret that The CW, oft overlooked because it lacks the artistic edge and money to garner the prestige of cable yet is too niche to commercially compete with the “Big Four” broadcast networks, is telling some of the best superhero stories in any medium right now. After a promising yet uneven freshman season, Arrow found its voice in a confident, entertaining and emotionally compelling second season, and its spin-off show The Flash already brimmed with energy when it debuted this past fall.

        Though the two shows are tonally disparate (The Flash is bouncy and at times proudly cheesy, while Arrow’s brooding darkness is more reminiscent of Christopher Nolan’s Batman films), they work well together, as evidenced by a pair of delightful crossover episodes that aired in December. Not only do they share a creative team, anchored by creator Greg Berlanti, but they also succeed for many of the same reasons: talented, charismatic actors; sharp yet understated visual flair combined with efficient pacing; and perhaps most importantly, plots driven by characters and their relationships to each other rather than by MacGuffins or convoluted mythology. In a way, they benefit from not having the enormous budgets given to big-screen ventures, because they’re forced to employ action in the service of story instead of the other way around, and even the set pieces, of which there are still plenty, dazzle more through impressive choreography and stunt work than expensive CGI effects, particularly in Arrow. They suggest that comic books, with their installment-based structure, love of twists and cliffhangers and sprawling ensembles of characters, are much better suited to TV than film, where even the best adaptations still often feel cumbersome and incomplete.

  

 Watch and learn, Avengers. Watch and learn.

        Though both shows readily embrace their comic book origins, Arrow especially spends a lot of time playing with various stock plot and character tropes. There’s the brooding, traumatized hero, the loyal sidekick, the tech support, the protégé, and various villains and fridged characters (usually women) that primarily serve as, respectively, obstacles for conflict and motivation for the hero. Of course, the writers are good enough that all of these characters eventually become much more layered and interesting than a simple description suggests, but for the most part, they don’t radically depart from the superhero action genre’s conventions. While David Ramsey’s pragmatic, no-nonsense John Diggle and Emily Bett Rickard’s Felicity Smoak, who has evolved into the show’s moral center, have always probably been my favorite characters, the most fascinating and thoughtful narrative arc throughout the series so far belongs not to them or hero Oliver Queen, but rather to resident token love interest Laurel Lance, who’s played by a very game Katie Cassidy.

The Apocalypse Is Now

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             From the epic floods and divine battles of ancient mythology to the nuclear holocausts and alien invasions of the Cold War, humanity has been imagining its own demise since the beginning of civilization. Freud would probably attribute this obsession to the death drive, a subconscious impulse toward destruction that all people supposedly have. Apocalyptic fantasies allow us to confront our fears of mortality, time, foreigners, etc., in a safe place, distanced from the real world yet so rich with metaphorical possibilities, and especially in a visual medium like film, they provide ample opportunity to indulge audiences’ appetite for lurid spectacle.

             Recently, though, catastrophe has dominated cinema on a scale virtually unprecedented, dwarfing the ‘50s sci-fi and horror B-movie craze. In 2011, we got the art house trinity, Melancholia, The Tree of Life and, my personal favorite, Take Shelter. 2012 gave us Prometheus, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Battleship and Cloud Atlas, among others (but curiously, not the actual movie 2012, which came out way back in 2009), and 2013 had not one but two action-comedies set during the apocalypse, not to mention an avalanche of weirdly glum, monochrome-hued tent-poles. This year, there was Noah, Edge of Tomorrow, Godzilla, Transformers: Age of Extinction, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Snowpiercer, The Rover and Interstellar, as well as the usual procession of superhero flicks, which are apparently required by Hollywood Law to have Armageddon-sized stakes. You can barely go a week without seeing ads for yet another movie that threatens to destroy Earth – or at least a major metropolitan area.

             In general, blockbusters nowadays tend to revel in what Stephen Colbert once described as destruction porn, deploying wave upon wave of computer-generated explosions and wreckage in hopes of distracting viewers from their flimsy, senseless or flat-out nonexistent plots. Although the bigger-is-better brand of filmmaking isn’t necessarily anything new (Michael Bay and Roland Emmerich have been blowing shit up since the mid-1990s), only in the past few years has it felt truly, oppressively ubiquitous, soul-crushing rather than just mind-numbing. Long gone are the days when something like Back to the Future, a breezy coming-of-age tale whose biggest action set-piece consists of a skateboard chase, could be a legitimate box office hit; at some point, our definition of entertainment seems to have evolved into “watching hundreds of thousands of people get casually massacred”. Hell, even How to Train Your Dragon 2, the sequel to a PG-rated kid’s movie, is about a fascist warlord on some vague quest for world domination. 

 It’s also vaguely racist, though that’s nothing new for animation.

             At least 2014 offered a handful of movies that actually bothered to acknowledge the consequences of the havoc they wrecked, instead of using 9/11 imagery for easy shock value or, worse, ignoring the darkness altogether. Edge of Tomorrow, for example, is essentially a war movie in which “the enemy” happens to be aliens. Needless to say, it’s not exactly Saving Private Ryan in terms of exposing the horrors of combat and such, but Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt’s self-assured performances convey a sense of trauma rare in action movies of this magnitude (just compare Cruise here to his work in the Mission: Impossible series). Cage and Rita seem genuinely scarred by what they’ve experienced, their interactions tinged with weary desperation.  Similarly battle-hardened characters populate Dawn of the Planet of the Apes and Snowpiercer. In the former, Malcolm, played by Jason Clarke, has formed a makeshift family with his son Anthony and Keri Russell’s Ellie, who lost her daughter in the chaos that erupted after the simian flu outbreak. Like its predecessor, Dawn gives its humans thin personalities, preferring to flesh out the titular apes, but you nonetheless get the sense that there’s history between them, that they’ve been through a lot together and grown accustomed to suffering in silence. In Snowpiercer, Chris Evans’s reluctant revolutionary Curtis Everett is tormented by what he has done to survive (spoiler alert: it’s cannibalism). These films all depict personal attachments as liabilities, hindering individuals from taking the measures necessary for self-preservation and the common good; in the apocalypse, you have to sacrifice either your life or your humanity.

The Affair, The Leftovers and the Death of Normal

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        When Showtime’s The Affair premieres tonight, much will rightly be written about its experimental approach to structure, form and point of view. In its first episode, which is actually already available online, the show dives into a tale of temptation and (potential) infidelity that unfolds like a dream or a languid summer day, its serenity punctured every so often by moments of unsettling tension.

        It’s not just the unhurried pacing or the tone, calibrated to a tricky but riveting balance between meditative and disquieting, that reminded me of The Leftovers, another premium cable show that debuted this year. It’s the way they both bury deep into their characters’ psyches, lingering in the most secretive, troubled spaces and allowing that darkness to seep out and color the world around them. Though the similarities might not continue beyond The Affair’s first episode, from what I’ve seen, both shows seem intent on wrenching their characters out of their sedate, comfortable lives and hurtling them toward an undefined yet inevitable doom.

        The Leftover’s apocalypse is a literal one. Thrown into a collective existential crisis after the sudden, random disappearance of 2 percent of the world’s population, the residents of a suburban New York town must grapple with broken families, the rise of strange cults as old belief systems are shattered and new ones take hold, and the fact that, despite all common sense and the desires of many, life insists on moving on almost as if nothing had ever happened. By contrast, the concerns of The Affair are much more down-to-earth and mundane. Noah Solloway (played by the reliably good Dominic West) lives in a spacious New York City brownstone courtesy of his snobby but filthy rich father-in-law, is contentedly married (his wife is played by Maura Tierney, so you know she’s lovely) with four children, and has recently published his first book while still enjoying his day job as a public school teacher. As Noah himself admits, it’s an idyllic existence, one so often promised to everyone by politicians, Hollywood and advertisers but that few people could ever hope to achieve. Yet, all it takes is one chance encounter with a pretty waitress named Alison Lockhart (Ruth Wilson, a revelation) for him to consider throwing it all away. This premise has been done countless times before, and without a talented and, let’s be honest, attractive cast and such ambitious writing and direction, the prospect of spending every week watching privileged people being unhappy with their privilege would’ve sounded insufferable (counterargument: Mad Men).

The Leftovers and Staring into the Abyss

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            The Leftovers is not feel-good television. Initial reviews described HBO’s new drama as “some of the most desolate, despairing television on air”, “like a French arthouse series, but sadder” and “a show that will make some of its viewers want to slit their wrists” – and those are the positive ones. Perhaps realizing that waxing poetic about a show’s potential to rouse thoughts of suicide isn’t the most effective strategy for convincing people to watch it, many of these critics go out of their way to point out that The Leftovers “isn’t for everyone,” a qualification that seems not only unnecessary (nothing is “for everyone”) but also counterintuitive. If you like a piece of art, why discourage others from giving it a shot? Since when were critics responsible for accommodating audience opinions rather than simply articulating and trusting their own?

            More to the point, though, framing the show’s sorrowful mood as a caveat is like saying, “Mad Men is good, but there’s so much talking”. You’re disowning something essential to the work in question, turning its greatest strength into a negative. Precisely what gives The Leftovers its power is its commitment to exploring human emotions in all their raw messiness, its refusal to settle for false uplift and easy answers. To be sure, some people may find it too unpleasant to watch, and that’s fair enough, but for me (and, judging by the reviews, many others), it’s not a ponderous, soul-crushing exercise in mental fortitude so much as a pitch-perfect falsetto, hitting that elusive sweet note with such exquisite precision it stings. In it, I found something I hadn’t known I was yearning for: a complex, heartfelt portrait of loss.

The moment I fell in love

A Year of Antiheroes and Finding Light in the Darkness

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        People too often confuse cynicism for moral complexity. Challenging an audience’s capacity for empathy or their flexibility where ethics are concerned can produce some fantastic, intellectually and emotionally stimulating art, but declaring that human beings are horrible and life sucks isn’t inherently interesting, especially if everyone else is screaming the same thing. Great TV – or rather the shows that typically attract that label – still tends to be bleak and troubled; the apocalyptic HBO drama The Leftovers, which premiered June 29 with one of the most promising but soul-crushing pilots I’ve ever seen, should fit right in. However, I’d argue that what separates not only the good prestige TV from the bad, but also the new from the old is its ability to craft distinct yet nuanced and thoughtful worldviews, ones that complicate typical good/bad, optimistic/pessimistic binaries. Shows like True Detective and Fargo in particular felt like responses to the Machiavellian brutality of Breaking Bad and The Shield. They indulged in the same tropes even as they critiqued them and, by adding this layer of introspection and self-awareness, pushed TV as a whole in a different, exciting direction.

“The world needs bad men. We keep the other bad men from the door.”

-          Rust Cohle (Matthew McConaughey), True Detective

        That was possibly the second most quoted line by True Detective’s idiosyncratic, existentially fraught protagonist, just behind the one about time being a flat circle, but it could easily be put in the mouths of any of the corrupt cops and destructive antiheroes who populated the past decade of TV. More than anything else, these stories revolved around the idea that evil can only be defeated if people are willing to lose – or at least temporarily discard – their humanity in the process.

        It’s not hard to understand the appeal of these disillusionment narratives. They contain ample amounts of both external and internal conflict and are pretty much obligated to focus on a complicated, unpredictable protagonist, even if too many writers mistake glowering machismo for charisma. Imbued with a sense of paranoia that forebodes an inevitably tragic conclusion, these stories reflect and speak to a world that feels constantly on the verge of exploding, a reality defined by economic crises, global conflicts and power struggles, and environmental disasters. They tell us that the institutions we rely on are broken and corrupt, that the idealized heroes we’re forever waiting on will never show up, that human beings are heartbreakingly, almost irredeemably flawed. As depressing as that sounds, there’s something comforting about art that confirms our doubts and fears, just as it can be cathartic – or, at least, beguiling – to follow characters who don’t feel bound to the same legal and ethical codes as the rest of us. It’s no coincidence that antiheroes are almost exclusively white men, not just because that demographic is by far the most represented in media in general, but because they have traditionally been accorded more power in Western societies and, therefore, are allowed more freedom to flaunt the rules. The best shows, like Mad Men with its Great Gatsby-esque deconstruction of the American Dream, interrogate the notions of strength, dominance and entitlement associated with whiteness and masculinity, instead of merely glorifying or reveling in it.

Death, Taxes and Community

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            Yesterday was not a particularly good day. First, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled in favor of Hobby Lobby, essentially stating that corporations are allowed to refuse birth control coverage for female employees due to religious objections. Then, Noah Berlatsky, a writer I’d previously respected, published an article in The Atlantic arguing that Orange Is the New Black doesn’t pay enough attention to men, despite the fact that the show is set specifically in a women’s prison and therefore has no reason to represent male convicts (if anything, I wish it didn’t care so much about its male characters, but that’s another discussion entirely). And as if that wasn’t enough, Community got renewed by Yahoo! (yes, that Yahoo!) for a last-minute sixth season.

For many people, the revival of NBC’s beloved cult comedy, following its cancelation earlier this year, is a cause for celebration. But when I saw the news, I felt a jolt of irrational exasperation. Of all the acclaimed, prematurely axed shows, from Terriers to Enlightenment to this season’s Enlisted, why is this the one that gets a second chance?

            Once upon a time, I did genuinely like Community. Although many fans consider the first season the show’s weakest, I’ve always had a soft spot for its zany, idiosyncratic, relatively unassuming brand of humor interspersed with moments of surprising sweetness (I might or might not have cried during Abed’s family reconciliation video). Season two earned its hype with consistently hilarious episodes that delighted in subverting sitcom conventions, pop culture tropes and audience expectations without abandoning its characters (see: “Mixology Certification”, “Critical Film Studies”, etc.). I was as anxious as anybody waiting to see how long it would survive despite middling ratings.

            The third season started out uneven at best, though episodes like “Remedial Chaos Theory” and “Foosball and Nocturnal Vigilantism” were enough to keep me invested. It wasn’t until some vague point after the infamous 2012 hiatus that I realized I didn’t enjoy Community anymore; in fact, the show was actively getting on my nerves. Where the meta commentary and obscure references once felt fresh and clever, they now came across as smug, trite and self-indulgent, and where the madcap energy had once been balanced out by a commitment to emotional realism, it now veered into outright chaos, as if Greendale had been transported from a parallel dimension to a completely separate universe where the basic rules of narrative structure and logic no longer existed. I hated everything the show did with Britta, from pairing her with Troy to gradually dumbing her down. Most people approved of the change as far as I could tell, but personally, I’d rather have the intelligent, idealistic, if self-serious Britta of season one than the walking, talking blonde joke of season three. It bothered me how the other characters treated her, constantly making fun of her values and telling her to be quiet; the “fun vampire” quip was amusing until it occurred to me how closely it mirrored the way feminists and other social justice advocates are viewed in real life, dismissed as humorless extremists trying to ruin everyone else’s party.

 Don’t even get me started.

Let's Talk About the Children: War and the Loss of Innocence in Game of Thrones

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            When watching Game of Thrones, HBO’s contentious, wildly popular fantasy series, it’s easy to get caught up in the Big Moments, the ones that light up social media and generate a week’s worth of think pieces: Ned Stark’s beheading; the Battle of Blackwater; the Red Wedding; so many deaths. But the show isn’t all about shock and awe. In fact, some of the best, most memorable moments this season have been the quiet ones, often involving nothing more than characters talking. There’s the circuitous beetle-crushing anecdote that Tyrion tells Jaime in “The Mountain and the Viper,” delivered with tortured intensity by Peter Dinklage, just before the climactic, explosive duel scene. Daenerys’s flirtation with Daario in “Mockingbird.” Any scene between Missandei and Grey Worm, whose tender relationship is perhaps the show’s most welcome addition to George R.R. Martin’s novels.

            There’s a reason why, even in a season teeming with game-changing, water-cooler-ready incidents, “First of His Name” remains my favorite episode. Although relatively uneventful, it contains a wealth of perfect little moments that might seem inconsequential on the surface, but actually have profound implications for the characters and their world. Take, for instance, the scene where Podrick Payne confesses to Brienne, “I killed a man.” It’s a simple, four-word line, but for a character that had previously functioned as little more than comic relief, it constitutes a miniature, heartbreaking revelation. Pod may be hopelessly earnest and awkward, but he’s far from the naïve simpleton we and Brienne thought he was; despite his lack of formal training and experience, he’s just as capable of taking a person’s life as a knight of the Kingsguard.

            At its heart, season four is a narrative of disillusionment, watching as each character is deprived of his or her innocence. In the premiere, Arya Stark, not yet a teenager, sticks her newly reclaimed Needle into Polliver’s throat to avenge her friend, Lommy Greenhands. A contemptuous smirk lingers on her face even as her victim chokes to death on his own blood, yet whatever catharsis this death brings is only temporary. Arya doesn’t hesitate to revel in her victory; instead, she simply wipes her sword clean and continues on her journey with the Hound. In an interview, Maisie Williams says that Arya is “being eaten from the inside out… She's got a hole in her heart. She fills it with all these eyes that she's going to shut forever, and she's just turning black from the inside out.” Ultimately, killing Polliver is not the act of a girl obtaining justice for her fallen friend; it’s the act of a girl who has lost – or is in the process of losing – her soul. A deliberate, cold-blooded murder, devoid of feeling, performed with matter-of-fact calmness. With this, Arya has officially been indoctrinated into the culture of violence that reigns over Westeros.

True Detective, Diversity and a Medium Coming of Age

WordMaster

The Internet was abuzz yesterday after Huffington Post TV critic Maureen Ryan published a thorough – and thoroughly depressing, if unsurprising – assessment of behind-the-scenes diversity on cable dramas. Though the article focuses on HBO, home of critically-acclaimed shows like The Sopranos, The Wire and Game of Thrones, Ryan also looks at AMC, FX, Showtime and Netflix, which all combine to form the forefront of modern-day so-called prestige television.

             Long story short, it’s not good. To summarize:

• Over the past 40 years, HBO has aired precisely one original, hour-long drama series created by a woman (Cynthia Mort’s Tell Me You Love Me).
• Since 2008, HBO has not aired a single one-hour drama or mini-series with a creator or “narrative architect” that is female or non-white.
• In the last 12 years at the five aforementioned outlets, only 12% of drama series creators and narrative architects have been women.

Essentially, we’re not experiencing the Golden Age of TV so much as the Golden Age of White Male TV. If you asked someone what the best shows of the past decade were, he or she would probably rattle off a list that includes The Sopranos, The Wire, Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad and Mad Men, all of which not only revolve around central male protagonists but are also produced, written and directed predominantly by men. This is not to diminish the artistic quality and cultural significance of those shows in any way; even though I have my personal preferences (Mad Men forever!), few would deny that they have all, to some extent, altered the way we view, think about and discuss the medium, elevating it from “fun” escapism for mass audiences to something more refined and ambitious.

TV and the Question of Racial Diversity

StarGazer

        Over the past week, the television industry has gathered in Los Angeles for the winter Television Critics Association (or TCA) meetings, which are essentially an opportunity for both broadcast and cable networks to show off their upcoming projects to the press. No show so far has caused more of a stir than HBO’s Girls panel, perhaps not a surprise given that the Judd Apatow-produced dramedy has been a controversy magnet ever since it debuted in April 2012. While the majority of the media’s attention has focused on the panel’s antagonistic response to a clumsy, bordering on offensive question about creator and star Lena Dunham’s proclivity for onscreen nudity, an inquiry regarding the show’s racial diversity – or, more accurately, its lack thereof – is arguably more deserving of widespread discussion. The responses were telling not only of this particular show’s attitude toward race, but also of how urgent the issue still is in the TV and entertainment world as a whole.

        A refreshingly considerate Dunham allowed that they were still grappling with how to adequately address such concerns within the show and said that she has learned a lot, thanks to the conversation that Girls has helped open up. Unfortunately, her clear willingness to listen and learn was overshadowed by Apatow’s much more dismissive answer, which boiled down to not wanting to feel pressured into including a more racially diverse cast and looking for ways to make it feel “organic”. Without getting too caught up in the specifics of what he said, it’s a disappointing display of ignorance and white male privilege. Of course someone with no personal stake in the matter would see increasing diversity as cool but optional, something subject to the whims of artistic desire and inspiration. I can only wish someone had asked him to explain the difference between organic and inorganic POC inclusion; it’s not like we’re talking about whether they should incorporate dragons into the show, though that would also be awesome. What Apatow and, sadly, too many of his colleagues in the entertainment industry don’t understand is that diversity isn’t about being politically correct or not alienating different audiences, though the latter is important, but rather about reflecting the world we live in more faithfully and acknowledging that people have wildly different backgrounds, perspectives and experiences. They should care about diversity because it’s good for art and will open up a wide range of new creative and storytelling possibilities, not out of a resentful sense of obligation.

My 2013 Emmy Wish-List

StarGazer

        Another year of TV has come and gone. The 2012-13 season was an eventful one, as it marked the end of such landmark shows as The Office, Gossip Girl and 30 Rock, and introduced the world to new attractions like Hannibal, Orphan Black and 1600 Penn (hey, I didn’t say they were all good). Along with the impending final season of Breaking Bad and whatever else the summer TV slate has in store, this warmer weather signals the approach of those all-important Emmy nominations, which will be announced three days from now on July 18^th. This means I get to make another list of things I’d love to see the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences do.

        Like last time, keep in mind that I’ve only watched so many TV shows, so I know there’s a lot of good stuff out there that I won’t mention, and these are things I want to happen, rather than things I think will happen. Also, there are a couple of wishes from last year that carry over to this year, like my feeble hope that the Emmys will give Fringe some recognition and my desire to see Walton Goggins and Vincent Kartheiser included in the Supporting Actor in a Drama category, but in an effort to avoid being repetitive, I won’t put them on my new list. Lastly, I feel the need to confess that I don’t actually put much – or, really, any – stock into the Emmys, but they provide a good excuse for me to gush about the TV shows I love. So, without further ado, let’s get this show underway:

Drama

        Hannibal for Outstanding Drama Series. With so many perennial contenders for this category still jousting for a slot (Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones and Downton Abbey, just to name a few), it would be easy to go with familiar names and overlook the handful of worthy new shows that emerged over the past year. Foremost among these rookie challengers, probably along with BBC’s Orphan Black, is Hannibal. I’ll be the first to admit that, when I heard NBC had picked up a show based on the younger years of the iconic, people-eating villain, I rolled my eyes and quickly declared the idea depressingly unoriginal, a massive failure just waiting to happen. Besides, it would be impossible to find an actor who could fill Anthony Hopkins’s Oscar-winning shoes for the title role. As it turned out, I was wrong. Although I still prefer Hopkins’s openly menacing yet charming take on the character over Mads Mikkelsen’s perpetually unruffled, debonair inscrutability, the show itself ended up being a dark, twisted psychological thriller with its own unique voice. Showrunner Bryan Fuller gives it just enough stylized flair to keep the procedural format from growing too monotonous and populates the world initially created by author Thomas Harris with complex, unpredictable characters brought to life by a talented group of actors. For my money, Laurence Fishburne, who plays Jack Crawford in a tour-de-force performance and was weirdly, disappointingly not submitted for Emmy consideration, and Lara Jean Chorostecki as the mysterious crime reporter Freddie Lounds are especially impressive. Touching on themes of identity, mental health and the nature and effects of violence, the first season of Hannibal provided a strong bedrock for what could hopefully become one of the next great TV shows in an age bursting at the seams with great television.

       CHECK IT OUT: “Potage” (Ep. 3), “Entrée” (Ep. 6), “Savoureux” (Ep. 13)     

The Wonder of Not Being Spoiled

StarGazer

***THAR BE SPOILERS AHEAD***

                For the following:

Psycho

Game of Thrones

Iron Man 3

        I hate spoilers with a burning, fiery passion. On a list of things I hate most in the world, spoilers are probably number three, right behind war and bigotry. Okay, well, that’s a bit of an exaggeration (my priorities aren’t that messed up), but let’s just say that I’m the kind of person who’ll cover my ears and start yelling “Lalalala” at the top of my lungs whenever someone starts talking about a movie or TV show episode that I haven’t seen yet.

        In this day and age, though, it’s impossible to avoid spoilers completely, especially if you’re an entertainment junkie like me. Between social media sites like Twitter and Tumblr that allow people to instantly share and dissect information, increasingly pervasive advertising campaigns and the general Internet Age mentality of “Tell me everything!” rather than “Surprise me!”, it has become easier to find out whatever you might want to know about a given movie, TV show, book etc., along with a bunch of stuff you don’t want to know or don’t care about. You can figure out whether something’s supposed to be good weeks – sometimes even months – before actually seeing it, thanks to film festivals and advanced screenings, and the sheer amount of coverage given to nearly every step of a major project’s development process, from casting rumors and tidbits about the plot or characters to publicity stills and on-set photos, has left little room for mystery. If you haven’t seen a movie in its first week of release or the latest TV episode within a day or so of when it first airs, going Internet-free – or at least shunning entertainment and social media websites – would be advisable. Had Hitchcock’s Psycho come out now, it’s hard to imagine that he would’ve been able to keep Janet Leigh’s sudden, first-act demise a secret the way he did when it was released in 1960.

         All of this makes it even more impressive when a piece of art or entertainment does actually manage to surprise audiences. Take, for instance, the penultimate episode in season three of HBO’s Game of Thrones, titled “The Rains of Castamere”. As someone who had devoured the A Song of Ice and Fire books years ago, I was both eagerly anticipating and quietly dreading this episode, which readers of the books knew would contain an event that came to define the series and traumatized nerds everywhere when A Storm of Swords was published in 2000. Known by the moniker “The Red Wedding” in canon, this event is so infamous and demanded so much secrecy that, while filming, the cast and crew referred to it only as the “Scene Which Shall Not Be Named”. What’s more, fans who had already been initiated into the horrors of the Red Wedding displayed some astounding dedication to keeping show-only newbies blissfully unaware of what was in store. Of course, there were exceptions, as has to be expected given that spoilers are a simple Google search away and there are always going to be some people who let a spoiler or two slip to a newbie, either in a deliberate jerk move or unwittingly. Still, the majority of readers played along, minimizing possible hints of the scene to coy winks and smirks.

The Office Finally Comes to a Bittersweet End

StarGazer

        2013 has been a tough one for me on the TV front so far. Sure, the midseason premieres birthed a handful of promising new shows, like Hannibal, The Americans and BBC America’s Orphan Black, that I might enjoy once I actually get around to checking them out, but the casualties have far outweighed the new recruits. In addition to Fringe and 30 Rock ending in January, ABC unsurprisingly canceled Happy Endings, whose virtues I extolled in my last blog post, and two of the other shows I recently discovered – The Hour and Enlightened – were also given the boot. That’s not even counting shows I don’t watch, like Dexter and Breaking Bad, which are both airing their final seasons over this summer. Yet, arguably no show’s impending absence will be more deeply felt by more people than The Office. After an astounding nine seasons, the NBC workplace comedy mainstay, the show that broke new ground for American sitcoms with its single-camera, mockumentary approach and paved the way for such hits as Parks and Recreation, Modern Family and perhaps even 30 Rock, is at last going off the air forever with a one hour series finale at 9 P.M. tonight.

        Unlike with the ends of Fringe and 30 Rock or the cancellations of those other shows, the close of The Office doesn’t particularly sadden me; in fact, it feels more like a relief, like when you finally leave your dead-end job so you can set off and do what you really want to do with your life. Let’s be real here: it’s been a good long while since The Office was actually, genuinely worth watching. At its best, the show was hilarious and relatable with moments of real poignancy to balance out the sometimes almost painful awkwardness, but somewhere around season 5, it took a nosedive into mediocrity and, like most TV shows, especially sitcoms, that last for more than a few seasons, gradually turned into a tired shadow of its former self. Still, while it’s no longer at its best and probably should’ve ended much sooner, The Office was a hallmark of modern television, and when the doors of Dunder Mifflin close for one last time tonight, it will feel like the end of an era.

10 Reasons to Watch Happy Endings

StarGazer

       ABC has become the new NBC. A year ago, the peacock network infamously jerked around the cult favorite TV show Community by putting it on indefinite hiatus, then bringing it back and renewing it for a fourth season, only to fire its creator and creative mastermind Dan Harmon and push back its premiere from an already-late October date to February. The network’s behavior displayed an open disregard for fan opinion and the show itself and with brand new show-runners on board, it apparently just hasn’t been the same, though personally, I think the show dropped off well before Harmon left and NBC started messing with its schedule.

       How does this relate to ABC? Well, let’s start with a show called Don’t Trust the B---- in Apt. 23. Starring Krysten Ritter as a con-artist and party girl in New York City who strikes up a unique friendship with her new roommate, it was supposedly a pretty damn good show, albeit with a small fanbase, and had started to hit its stride when ABC abruptly, though not unexpectedly, pulled it from their schedule with eight episodes left in the season, announcing that it was officially canceled not long afterwards. To be fair, the show had pretty ugly ratings, but what do you expect to happen when you not only air episodes out of order, but multiple seasons simultaneously?  The cancellation of Apt. 23 naturally prompted fears regarding the fate of its constant Tuesday night companion, the slightly-higher-rated and excellent Happy Endings. Like Apt. 23, the kinda-sorta Friends-esque comedy aired episodes out-of-order (including having a “lost” episode) and has experienced a roller-coaster ride when it comes to scheduling, frequently getting preempted or yanked for little apparent reason, adding an additional timeslot in the same week, airing multiple episodes a day and getting cut out of the March schedule to make room for Dancing with the Stars. Eventually, the show mysteriously vanished from TV after its back-to-back January 29^th episodes before the network finally told everyone that it had been moved to Friday nights (a.k.a. where TV shows go to die) in favor of reality shows Celebrity Wife Swap and The Taste and wouldn’t be returning until March 29^th.

        I understand that TV is a business, and the networks can only be expected to do so much when a show does pulls in crappy ratings; one silver lining of NBC being so incompetent they can’t even beat Univision anymore is that shows like Community, Parks and Rec. and even 30 Rock, when it was still around, have likely only survived for as long as they have because there isn’t anything better to put in their place, and at least they have hardcore, devoted fans. I get the sense, though, that ABC might not be quite as patient or have such low standards. The fact that the network has started a “save the show” campaign (either a comforting or cynical move, depending on how you look at it) and that it’s only one season away from syndication gives me some hope that Happy Endings might get one last renewal, but if more people don’t start tuning in, which seems unlikely to happen given the timeslot, it’s headed straight toward cancellation.

        If you’re one of the many, many people who hasn’t seen Happy Endings, you should know that it’s an ah-mah-zing show. Revolving around a group of friends in the nicer side of urban Chicago, it brings consistent laughs and features one of the best (and most unheralded) casts in any comedy – or any kind of show, for that matter – working on TV today. Even better, it’s never too late to jump on the bandwagon, and its return at 8:00 PM EST tonight provides a perfect opening for newcomers. So, without further ado, here are ten reasons why you should tune in (I apologize in advance for the wall of text):

Keep 30 Rocking On

StarGazer

          On Thursday January 31^st, NBC will air the last 30 Rock episode ever. In many ways, the Tina Fey/Alec Baldwin comedy has become easy to take for granted. What was once an edgy and trendy, albeit niche, show has, over seven seasons, evolved into as much of a sturdy, comforting bedrock for NBC as its more awkward and popular cousin, The Office; no matter what else was going on, you could count on seeing the show somewhere in NBC’s Thursday night comedy lineup. This isn’t to say that 30 Rock has lost its edge. Though it has undoubtedly passed its peak (which occurred during seasons two and three) and is much more hit-and-miss than it used to be, it still produces laughs at a reliable rate. However, with more and more quirky sitcoms – from Parks and Rec and Community to Happy Endings and the experimental Louie – picking up audiences and cultural cachet, it’s easy to forget just how damn good 30 Rock is.

            As the end nears, I’ve begun to realize – to remember – how much I truly love this show and how much I’ll miss it when it’s gone. Unlike for most of my other favorite shows, I can’t quite recall when I first started watching it. My parents followed it, so between that and reruns that popped up on various channels, I saw more than a handful of episodes every now and then before I finally became a regular viewer at some point during the fourth season. As often seems to happen with me, this was just past when the show was at its best, though I only really noticed the difference in quality after running through the first three seasons on Netflix last year. Still, back then, I wasn’t nearly as immersed in the communal aspect of entertainment – the blogs, social network sites, Internet message boards and all that – and couldn’t care less that 30 Rock was starting to get that weird, groupthink backlash (the result of a slight dip in excellence and people tired of it winning so many Emmys) that every show experiences if it runs for long enough. All I knew was that I really enjoyed watching it and looked forward to a new episode each week.

My Very Favorite Thing: A Fringe Farewell

StarGazer

        You probably can’t tell by reading this blog, but I find it hard to write about things I love. When writing about something you despise or don’t feel strongly about, it’s easy to just spew out some words and never think twice about it; perhaps that’s why irony and vitriol are so prolific on the internet. When it’s something I love, though, I feel a responsibility to not just describe it or share my opinion, but to convey an experience, to make readers fully understand my devotion and to maybe pass some of that emotion onto them. I want to do the movie/TV show/whatever justice, but I lack the mastery of writing needed to do so. No words seem to articulate my thoughts and emotions as effectively as keyboard mashing, hysterical and incoherent babbling and, most of all, this gif. Such is the case with Fringe.

       It started with “The Box”. For those that don’t know, that’s the second episode of the third season, so obviously, I’m not one of those blessed few who can claim that they stuck with this show from the start. I didn’t know much going in, just that there were parallel universes involved, that John Noble had been egregiously snubbed by the Emmys the previous season and that, at one point, they had a noir-musical episode. Though I didn’t understand what was going on in “The Box” (I chose this episode to jump in simply because it was the earliest one they had available on Hulu), something about it hooked me almost instantly. I wish I had some really poignant and personal story explaining why I was able to connect with this particular show, but I don’t. Suffice it to say that I was still suffering from some pretty severe Lost withdrawal, and I suppose Fringe was the most natural successor to that landmark show, with its blend of sci-fi escapism and more intimate drama. What I saw in that first episode was promising, featuring characters that seemed likable and interesting and a nice balance of fun and more serious, emotional moments.

 After all, when the cold open features this and people’s heads exploding, how can you not want to watch more?