A Conversation Comes to a Close

StarGazer

        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

WordMaster

             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.

Another Great, Gone Too Soon

WordMaster

            Today was unusual, since I didn’t turn on my computer until after two o’clock in the afternoon. I started to go through the usual motions, checking my e-mail and such, but when I went onto Facebook, I was startled to see at the top of my feed an IMDb headline that read: “Philip Seymour Hoffman Found Dead in New York”.

            My first thought was, Wait – that’s not the Philip Seymour Hoffman. Not the talented, electrifying thespian who I first witnessed in Bennett Miller’s feature-length film debut Capote and then in such diverse fare as Paul Thomas Anderson’s Magnolia, last year’s Catching Fire and even Mike Nichols’s recent Broadway revival of Death of a Salesman. It couldn’t possibly be him. But a glance at the article’s blurb, which contained the words “Oscar-winning actor”, quickly confirmed what my brain couldn’t (or wouldn’t) register. Hoffman, who just yesterday I noticed was gearing up for his sophomore directorial effort with the Jake Gyllenhaal and Amy Adams-starring Prohibition-era drama Ezekiel Moss, had died.

            I jumped over to Twitter, both because I needed to say something and because some part of me was still in denial, still hoping that this would turn out to be some cruel, elaborate hoax. Of course, it wasn’t. My timeline was overflowing with reactions that felt simultaneously predictable and heartfelt – expressions of disbelief and sorrow, condolences, links to obituaries and clips, praise for an actor who so consistently lit up the screen with memorable, dynamic performances that towards the end, it was almost easy to take him for granted. I thought about a line from 2012’s The Master, penned by director Paul Thomas Anderson and spoken by Hoffman with his signature gravitas: “If you figure out a way to live without a master, any master, be sure to let the rest of us know, for you would be the first in the history of the world.” And I cried.

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.

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?