Tag Archives: TV

Mad Men: Season 3 (SPOILERS!!)

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When we last left the gang at Sterling-Cooper, the firm was being acquired by a parent company in England.  Meanwhile, Don Draper’s own affairs continued to get muddier as he and his wife started drifting apart but returned together as she got pregnant.  Peggy Olson, the other REAL protagonist, continues to rise up the ranks and push imperfectly to find herself.  She had to give up a child, and finally Pete Campbell – who was the inseminator – got to hear it from her.

This third season of Mad Men could be called the series’ strongest season yet – but that is hard to say.  Moreover, this is definitely the season where a lot of the threads started to pay off.  Some of the social forces and interactions that were threatening to invade their worlds do so – and the impact on the corresponding interactions and whatnot is at its most fascinating.  Some specific observations (click on links for Season 1 and Season 2 reviews):

  1. Really the stories seem to revolve around agency.  Betty is still pretty darn weird – but the lack of agency she feels makes sense.  After all, she was raised to be a housewife or whatever constitutes virtue for a gal raised in the 40s/50s.  She is a daughter, then Don’s wife.  She owns NOTHING, and she is clearly unhappy.  However, with so few outlets to get anything done, both socially and actually – consider the advice she gets about divorce (she is pretty screwed without consent).  Her acting out makes sense.
  2. On the other hand, the catalyst for her making a move with Don was one of the stranger sequences of the year.  Indeed the entire world (within this framework) reaction to the Kennedy Assassination was one of the most significant storylines of the season.  That Betty would be shaken by it makes total sense, but Betty’s emotional reaction and the transition to her own life, all of that rang false.  Part of it is the necessary simplifying about how large events drive personal ones – but most of it is January Jones’ poor acting.
  3. Of course at the center of this is what has to be the central scene of the entire series to date – where Don confesses his reality – the whole thing – to Betty.  Her reactions here seem false, but I think a lot of that is poor acting choices more than anything.  She does not seem appropriately blown away by what Don says – and yeah while he does lie a lot, it is hard to make up a whopper like this.  The lack of tenderness she showed as he actually did pour his soul out seems to belie their relationship.  She seems very cold to me here.  Of course my wife has not revealed that she has stolen a breast cancer victim’s identity back in Northern Ohio – so what do I know?
  4. The question of agency also lingers with Joan, the well endowed Christina Hendricks.  For her, it is at home trying to stand by a man who is doing his residency and trying to become a full time surgeon.  At work – she has all sorts of power as head of the secretarial pool and office manager.  There is agency there, but at home she has to try to stand by her man, and fit into a paradigm – including leaving Sterling Cooper.  Her farewell of course leads to the most surprising and funny surprise of the whole season.  The horrible special effects were a great touch.
  5. Peggy is fighting uphill still – she DOES have ownership of her life.  It has been hard though.  In the way that she still has to keep having people take her seriously – and she is pretty clearly the best creative there of Don’s minions.  Alas, her personal life seems to have a lot of bad decisions – although the show forgets to circle back on her affair with Duck.  The dynamic between Don and Peggy is very interesting – Don clearly is very fond of her work, but is also capable of cruelty – especially when she tries to stand up for herself.
  6. It really is Don’s ugliest side – aside from possible alcoholism (though that describes a lot of the ad men) – and it hurts to watch him be cruel and short to folks like Peggy only because we see how complicated and unhappy his situation is.  He has reserves of tenderness and sadness – but when a woman comes close to having control, to “speak her mind” Don snaps back.  Really Don clearly has issues with losing control over his life and his narrative.  When he snaps back – it is not pretty.
  7. Still, the lawnmower – wow.
  8. The main business of course with Sterling Cooper was the pending sale and reforming of the firm.  How all that unfolds is one of the neat episodes of the season.  Of course it (somehow inevitably) involves Joan being in the right place at the right time.  I am still surprised so much of the band stayed together.

Breaking Bad: Season 2 (SPOILERS!!!)

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Now this, THIS is a television program.  Of course, I have written this before.  We won’t rehash the editorial feelings about the show – aside from pointing out that the show has developed on its crackling, explosive strength that it showed out of the gate – but instead ruminate on some of the developing themes, as the depths of Walter White’s life and his newfound vocation grow.  In particular, we are seduced by the idea that Walter White is turning bad – but is this really true?

  • I mean, you look at the first season – and we see all the things he is up against.  His son with cerebral palsy, his loving but somewhat overbearing wife, quietly emasculating in-laws, a job teaching at a high school when his peers have achieved so much more scientific fame, his lung cancer – all are obstacles and challenges that we identify with so easily.  We identify with Walter and want him to succeed.  He is sympathetic – because of what he is up against and how he wants to care for his family.  However, his decisions now are getting colder … in Season 1 when he kills a man, it feels like self defense.  This is a dangerous character – what is he to do?  However, what do we make of his relief when he sees Jesse’s girlfriend die?  What do we make of Walter’s power play with his OWN SON by the pool?  What do we make of his lying to Jesse and getting him out for a marathon cooking session?  Yeah the success in the meth field has given Walter a ton of self confidence, and given his life some meaning – indeed, look at the joy in his face when he gets to leave the hardware store to tell someone to stay off of his turf – but has it also fomented his fundamental badness?  That is, we sympathized with him because of circumstance, and still do – it is seductive how much we want him to complete the drug deals and successfully hide his cash – but how much did we really know about HIS character vs stuff we just ascribed to him because of our fundamental humanity?  Maybe he is not turning bad, but just a bad guy who never had the forum to work his black magic?
  • The above notion is underlined in other scenes.  When Walter Jr has a fundraiser for his dad and talks about Walter’s quality, we wonder not “does he know about the meth?” so much as “Walter has never seemed like that sort of dude”.  Is Walter an angel?  Has he seeemed like a father of the year, or just an ornery withdrawn sot.  It just feels like his evil turn is no accident.
  • On the other hand, Jesse’s character arc is an interesting counterpoint.  He doesn’t want to be disowned by his family.  Sure, he has chosen a rough life, but clearly he wants some acceptance, at least from his brother on a level other than drug dealer.  He finds an apartment and gets with the gorgeous gothy supervisor girl next door.  But these are all his better instincts, to have a nicer place, run his drug ring – do something positive as it were.  Indeed, he really cares about Jane.  When Walter calls him to cook, remember, he is on the way to the museum to hang out with her.  Even when he is about to do meth, he wants her to leave – to not jeopardize her recovery.  Jesse is in approximately the same miserable place as Walter – worse being in rehab and all – but he seems like he is trying to fix himself, or at least is conflicted about the hard parts.
  • The inspired addition of course is Saul Goodman by the great Bob Odenkirk, though we know him less in dramatic work.  His performance is great as the shady lawyer.  He brings a combination of oiliness and street wisdom that Walter doesn’t have.  But he seems like he is a good guy to know.  Season 3 can’t come soon enough.

Beavis and Butthead

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They’ve returned, and not a moment too soon.  Mike Judge’s Beavis and Butthead in 1994 was one of the great satires on television.  The show – so well known as to not really require recapping, followed its namesakes through their adventures as terribly underwhelming high school students in a place that bears an awfully close resemblance to Texas.  In a way Judge was a genius in how he had a show lampooning disaffected teenagers hiding in plain view nestled in the middle of MTV’s lineup.  The particular inspiration was that the show managed to both have inside jokes while the outside of the jokes stayed funny as well.  Even if you just wanted to laugh at the hijinks of these kids, there was plenty of meat.

A scant fifteen years later, the show is back as MTV ordered 22 episodes.  The format has been largely kept.  The difference is really in the video commentaries.  As any snarkpot could tell you, MTV doesn’t play videos anymore.  Indeed, with the Web, why would artists need videos on MTV?  As such MTV no longer has a current cheap video library, so more often, we are left with the boys commenting on Jersey Shore episodes.  This is a dropoff from the first version of the show – lets face it, Teen Mom has plenty to mock, but not enough actual cheesiness to be able to hoot and holler.  The reality shows are more just generally pathetic than a satirical laugh a minute.

Fortunately though, while the video interludes are no longer inspired, the stories themselves still are.  As has usually been the case, the episodes involve taking a kernel of an idea – for instance when the fellas learn about the idea of asking a father for his daughter’s hand – and riding it to a very logical conclusion, or at least logical if you are as stupid as Beavis and Butthead are.  It is a savage view of teenagers and a world borne entirely from consuming television and shitty fast food – and in its spare visual style and story lines – the point of view is so sharply seen.  In particular, the episode where they get inspired by a certain popular vampire movie is just ridiculously brilliant.

Mad Men: Season 2 (SPOILERS!!!)

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With the Netflix subscription whirring along, thirteen episodes of AMC’s atmospheric Mad Men rather rapidly turns into twenty-six.  The art direction, set design and general look and feel for the show have not diminished since the Season 1 ramblings, so a qualitative review seems a bit pointless.  However, even if we stick to just Season 2 content and comparing it to Season 1, we’ll get quite a bit – even if it becomes an almost entirely “SPOILER ALERT” laden post.  So sue me.  Observations?

  1. One of themes that announced itself in the first season was the differing interactions with the feminist dynamics of the time.  Clearly this has continued to evolve as Peggy Olson is trying to be accepted and fluorish in this most masculine field on her own terms.  It has been hard clearly, and the show has been masterful in showing her earnestness as well as how she will in some sense always be considered “just a girl”.  The way she infiltrates an “entertainment dinner” with a customer shows the areas she has to straddle.
  2. It is neat to see real life actually work through the plot.  Sure, it is the 60s, but it is nice to see how they acknowledge it.  It was an inspiration to have the ad-guys at Sterling Cooper actually work with real companies and products that we all know.  JFK exists here, and Jackie Kennedy’s effect on female fashion.  We see the civil rights movement in the background – even so much as seeing homosexuality and interracial couples pop up.
  3. One of the interesting results of such period detail is that the show does not sugarcoat the reactions of characters to change.  Clearly, these folks have not had much exposure to well … just about anything we fancy as “diversity” in these 2011 times.  I know for some people, it can be uncomfortable – that the show is misogynist for instance.  Of course, this is not quite true – as the show is displaying characters who would feel that way.  The characters truly know what they should know and no more.  It is uncomfortable on the ears at times, but the authenticity is appreciated.
  4. The arc of Betty is the most mysterious of the characters – moreso than even Don Draper, whose layers are actually fairly accessible.  As portrayed by January Jones, Betty is very prim, proper and stiff.  It is hard to tell if Jones is performing poorly or if Betty is that wooden.  Weirdly, the effect works – as her countenance gives a perfect housewife’s mask to a lot of rage and a lot of psychoses.  Her breaches are so cold and shocking – when they occur, they seem horrible.  Of course, if she were a dude, perhaps the immorality would not be so viscerally felt.
  5. As for Don himself, obviously who is Don/Dick for realz continues to drive the show along.  What we do know is that Don yearns for control and for a measure of belonging.  He has been very successful at the firm, but you don’t see him mingling that much.  Jon Hamm makes Don’s interactions not stiff, but the practiced moves of a pro who goes home when it’s time to go home.  Guys do not know where Don goes.  Don has had a couple of affairs, sure, but there is a definite searching in his dalliances.  It is the same force that takes him to a beat show, or to just do a hippie dippie-ish sort of thing in California after he disappears on a business trip.  He shows an unease everywhere, except at the very end of the season.  Why is Mrs. Draper so good to him, and why does he connect so cleanly with her and that life?  It is the first time in two seasons we see Don at a place where he truly is natural.
  6. Pete Campbell is a tool.  That is all.

Breaking Bad – Season 1

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As the curtain goes up on Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad on AMC, we see a middle aged man in his underwear driving an RV frantically with a passed out partner, both in gas masks.  The RV hits a ditch, the man gets out takes out his camera, doffs his mask and we see a desperate message.  Is it a confession?  Is it a suicide note?  The desperation, the pace has been set up.  Yeah, we’re not sure why we are here, but the moment is gripping.  Hell yeah, THIS is a freakin’ television show.

Desperation is what crackles throughout the abbreviated first season of Breaking Bad.  There is the desperation of Walter White (Bryan Cranston), the old man we left off in the ditch back in the first paragraph.  He is a chemistry teacher in his 50s, in a loving marriage, but with a lot of bills stacking up.  As he gets a dicey cancer diagnosis, he looks at his chemistry background and access to chemicals, sees the bonanza from crystal meth – even has a DEA agent brother-in law to give him a ride to do some research, and suddenly voila!  A job opportunity.  At this stage in the game, Walter gives off a man just beaten up by life – between his bills, his family stresses and his own disease.

Desperation also oozes out of Jesse, Walter’s old student who has been put out of the meth business by the DEA.  Or at least he was, until Walter finds him and makes the offer.  One of the great pleasures of the show is the humor in their exchanges.  There is a definite comedy team sort of chemistry going on, but the comedy comes as they stumble from desperate position into another.  It is one thing to start the meth business game, but how do you find customers?  Jesse can do that, but it involves dangerous folks – folks who could rough Jesse up good.  Suddenly Walter is in with these thugs who are trying to steal his formula – or even worse, kill him.  So there is another desperate situation.  But what if this gets resolved – what next?  Bodies don’t just disappear, do they?  Like any good thriller, these sorts of conflicts are dealt with at the most elemental, ground level.  We see the decisions Walter and Jesse make, and they all make sense – I am not sure I could be a meth dealer, but if I were …

The desperation is at home too.  Skylar, Walter’s wife, loves him and wants to take care of him.  But he runs off for hours at a time.  What can she do?  The family is running low on funds.  She has to worry about him and a son with Cerebral Palsy.  She is desperate too – and the family interactions are true and tense.  Everybody here loves each other, but the equipment to communicate it just isn’t there – but how hard they try.  Even Jesse is desperate, trying to reconcile with his parents, and trying to at least show something for his little brother to mentor.

This show does even more than I’ve hinted though.  We see the desperation certainly, but we also see Walter dealing with it, and working his way around both his domestic life and his newfound criminal one.  How would we deal with his situation?  Would we be able to make correct moral decisions?  Would the moral compass shift?  It’s easy to see Vito Corleone as a good man when you are just in his shoes after all.  Right now, clearly the groundwork is being laid, but especially towards the end of the season – we maybe see the birth of a man who is not exactly where Walter saw this story headed.  This is the sort of show that bursts with life and energy – something Scorsese would have directed perhaps … it is just a lot of fun.

 

Mad Men: Season 1 (SPOILERS!!!)

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As Season 1 – the season that earned the first of four consecutive Emmy awards – of Mad Men closes, we see Don Draper sitting on the landing of the stairway in his Westchester County home, wondering where things are headed.  At this point, we know that Draper has a complicated, difficult past which he has been trying to put behind him but with only limited success.  The mystery hinted at in the third episode when his own co-worker noted that nobody knows much of his past, have started to crack open, yet when I finished with the first season, Don’s mystery is far less interesting than the show’s portrayal of the challenges for women and feminism in the 1960s.

As everyone knows by this point, AMC’s flagship series covers the exploits and goings-on at Sterling and Cooper, an advertising agency trying to compete in the very competitive environs of Madison Avenue.  Draper (Jon Hamm) is the creative head.  The agency of course, is the sort of boys club that seems entirely typical of a not-particularly-reformed-yet era.  The women in the secretarial pool are doing the archetypal secretarial things such as takings calls telling people “Mr. Campbell, call on line 2″ and whatever – but also are looked at by the account executives as frankly no more than skirts.  We know during this era, feminism and civil rights will start to rise – but we’re not there yet – and so what is left is this paradigm.  The show is particularly stark and hurtful in the things that some of the guys say – when critics accuse the show of misogyny, I can’t say I do not understand the criticism – but it so clearly sees the pickle the ladies are in.  Against this backdrop the show gives us three examples of women relating to this world – one who exploits the system, one who is trying to transcend the system, and one who is being crushed by it.

In some ways, while Hamm and Draper get the plaudits – Elisabeth Moss as Peggy Olson is the real hero of the first season, her story is certainly the one that evolves the most.  She starts the season as the new addition to secretarial pool and Don Draper’s secretary.  She is trying to get ahead, and to really make the most of herself – not just (if at all) trying to get her MRS degree.  She is shown the ropes by Joan Harris the buxom (only because I can’t think of a more emphatic word, her dresses are straining to hang on to her) head secretary.  Joan seems awfully sophisticated, living in the city, tagging the partner, and oscillating her hips in a way that seems more or less entirely intentional.  I am not sure if the liberated female has appeared at her doorstep – indeed her obliviousness to her roommate is a clue – but she is clearly operating within this male dominated system.  Her eyes are wide open, but her reality is a very catch-my-man-ish one.  Her advice to Peggy is almost entirely in the vein of looks and knowing her place – it would be kind of offensive in 2011, but in 1960 it is merely good pragmatism.

For Peggy, it takes a while.  Her attempts at trying to be a skirt earlier, but then her revelation that she could really be something on par with the account exec assholes who say things about her and her fellow secretaries behind their backs is one of the triumphs of the show.  She has to fight so hard, but when she has her victory at work it is one of the nicest moments of the season.  Of course as we leave the season, she has some tough decisions ahead of her, as her choice of career vs domestic is put in stark relief.

Betty Draper, Don’s wife, has made the housewife choice.  She is trying to fit into the 1960s model of a good wife, making roasts, taking care of the children, and giving up her share of the meat when the partner at her husband’s firm decides to invite himself over for dinner.  But she is not comfortable – we see this with tremors in her hands and with sudden odd releases of tension, such as her reaction to a threat to her dog from a neighbor.  January Jones’ work here is either brilliant invisible or incompetent – but she shows a wooden woman, or a woman who has been taught to not have feelings other than standing by her man.

The theme of the women go even further – as the differentiation in the male characters is very much in terms of how women serve in their lives.  We know most of the account executives are boorish, but Don Draper some how is not.  He is not without guilt, especially a couple of really grievous missteps, but he does hear Peggy’s ability to do things, and resists her overtures to be a good secretary.  Pete Campbell, a jealous account exec, is boorish, but the boorishness that comes from the frustration at being too nice a guy to be the asshole that he wants to be (if you know what I mean – it is more obvious if you watch the program).  The show covers all of this territory deftly – within the context of the 1960s patriarchal world and spectacular art direction that really makes it seem like the 1960s. (I am reminded in this respect as Far from Heaven)  Overall – definitely enough here to dive in to season 2.

Chopped

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Ah, another sleepy Tuesday night in this beautiful hamlet I call home, and that can only mean one thing: Chopped.  Nobody can accuse the show of being profound.  It is schmaltzy, it embraces many of the stupid conventions of reality television, and it continues The Food Network’s descent from a channel dedicated to you and me cooking, to a channel about you and me staring at food.  At the same time though, Chopped with machine-like precision, takes all of the core elements of everything that works in television – competition, schmaltz, watching food being prepared, a time limit that makes the contestants really nervous, trash talking confessionals, and makes into something which produces consistent entertainment.  Almost no network sitcom can brag about as reliable a product.  It is like watching a ballgame without the ballgame.

The concept behind Chopped, like many things that turn into good television, is ridiculously simple.  Starting with four chefs, they are given a basket of absurdly matched mystery ingredients (oranges, bacon, corn flakes and venison loin could be one), which they have to convert into an appetizer, entree, dessert in absurdly short amounts of time (20 minutes for the former, 30 for the rest).  And then, we watch them sweat, think, worry and cook.  Meanwhile there are judges who offer commentary of dubious value – and catty comments when the food is tasted.  (Geoffrey Zakarian is particularly snooty, and Alex something or other looks like a frog – literally)  Almost always the chefs use every second of time – so we get the suspense of “will he or she finish on time”, and the chance to either be nervous for the chef or happy that a douchy chef took a defeat.     The chefs, who are as Type-A as ever -it’s why Top Chef works so well – are invariably crushed when they lose – often having schmaltzy goals in the competition, which of course is also great television.  You don’t have to be smart to like the show – but you’d have to be dumb not to.

PS: What is interesting – as a postscript is that the channel has launched Sweet Genius, the same concept but with pastry chefs.  I think from this show and the Just Desserts one, that clearly the world of pastry cooking is inhabited by people with head injuries.l

Hoarding: Buried Alive

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I am a messy person.  I have always been a messy person.  Note – this is not mean that I am dirty, but clutter?  Laundry that does not make it to baskets?  Mail piling up?  Stuff like that?  Guilty as charged.  I know my parents shuddered at what would become of me as a grown-up (or more accurately, a kid without the legal justification of “hey, I’m a kid”) with my proclivities.  This is the sort of show where my parents can take some assurance – if they were not running in terror from the experience.  Considering that TLC is a channel that portrays wanton copulation, polygamy, and stage mothering, Hoarding: Buried Alive might be the most transfixing hour on television.  Starting with initially discovering the show on some sort of weekend marathon, I have been at intervals horrified, appalled, horrified, bemused, disbelieving, horrified, and hypnotized by the magnitude of the inability of these folks to throw … anything, and I mean ANYTHING, away.  I am not sure if transfixing is a compliment.  Surely there are a lot of “wrong reasons” working here.  Time obsessing over shows like this can rip me away from telling loved ones I love them, or perhaps becoming better at a legitimate life skill – but what can I do but honestly report the truth?

TLC’s show over the hour, follows two different hoarding cases in parallel.  When I mean hoarding as a real problem, I am not sure I can overstate it.  We are talking about cases where entire rooms are unusable – and not just rooms, but things like kitchens and bathrooms.  I have experience working around lacking a working dishwasher for instance, but a sink with a permanent clog (like one of the protagonists suffered) – how do you live?  Somehow, these people do … more than that, they often have families and love ones.

Of the marathon I got to see, all of the episodes were fascinating, but one in particular crystalized what the show could be.  In this episode – the focus was on Berkeley, California and the sort of couple that reality shows in general are made for.  The lady (the hoarder) was this apparent hippie (or not – but given the location I feel like generalizing) who is not a young lady anymore – and decidedly ornery.  The poor home was totally bursting with stuff.  The kitchen was full of stuff, and the living room seemed to be less a room than a giant walk in closet.  Hell, all of the rooms felt like walk in closets.  Her sitting areas seemed like carved out lanes to places.  Her boyfriend was miffed at the condition, though he seemed a bit henpecked on this sort of thing.  She was giving no quarter.  In her defense, she rhapsodized about surrounding herself with things that made her comfortable – such as her collections of BANANAS.  I have no idea if she was oven drying them or just collecting them as-is.  I am not sure what value a 1989 Chiquita winter original would fetch her.  The episode goes through the normal paces.  We learn of her conflict – she doesn’t think there is a problem.  Then she meets with a shrink and we get to some childhood wound or whatnot that has explained her sudden inability to throw anything away.  After that, a professional organizer comes in …

Really, I am not sure if I can recommend this without feeling icky.  But when you take the sheer magnitude of the mess, sprinkle in the psychodrama that is so crucial in reality television, and see how powerfully these people resist the possibility of junk leaving their homes … I can’t turn away.  If you feel a sudden compulsion to dust your entire home after watching, I can hardly blame you.

TBS Late Night – The End of Lopez Tonight

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Certainly, George Lopez’s ouster at TBS was not a surprise.  Lopez Tonight was supposed to be the network’s flagship late night program, trying to vie for a space in what is a ridiculously crowded field of contenders – but the folks at Turner justifiably got starry eyed when a certain red-headed free agent came on the market.  Turner thought there was a comedy dream team for late night that they could ride into the dual-revenue nirvana of more viewers and higher subscriber rates.  Alas, the thing so far hasn’t worked.  After the good numbers that come with any hyped new venture, the ratings have sagged to the point where Conan is running fourth behind both Chelsea Handler and the Comedy Central powers.  Does this mean that the TBS venture has been a failure?  That I don’t know – and TV ratings for late night have sagged in general as DVRs and the Internet have made staying up to watch a TV program seem kind of stupid.

That said, it feels like Conan O’Brien and George Lopez individually, and Turner generally have serious mishandled what is necessary to survive in a more democratized entertainment environment.  George Lopez’ show, especially in its post Conan incarnation succeeded in just being very unmemorable and lined with some Latino stereotype imagery and humor (all the way back to the “Lowrider” theme) that seemed to plunder some very hackneyed Hollywood territory.  As the comic Lucas Molandes writes:

Yeah, Lopez was the first Latino late night talk show host. Yeah, some people see his playful jabs at culture – no matter how cliche – as being necessary for not taking ourselves too seriously. But there’s an irresponsibility to what Lopez did on Lopez Tonight: he created a nationally televised precedent for ignorance to perpetuate itself. No matter how harmless his stereotyping was, he still validated the idea that you can judge a book by its skin tone; you can see heritage as caricature and not as humanity. I’m brown, but I’ve never used my skin color to give me a free-pass for a cheap reaction. The way I see it, just because we have the same color skin doesn’t mean you’re exempt from being racist.

But Lopez traded all of his opportunities to be a role-model in for the magic beans of personal success in show business. And guess what?Ultimately, it didn’t work. And what’s his legacy? He’ll be a trivia question on Jeopardy in a few years. Who was the first Hispanic talk show host in America? Lopez could have been a role model, but he was no better than a brown faced Al Jolson. Lopez Tonight was our minstrel show.

Basically, it was fairly hacky, Jay Leno sort of mainstream stuff.  Lopez was trying to fight for that “ethnic next door” title which DL Hughley seems to be auditioning for every single year.  While his show did attract some guests who you don’t see as often (like boxers), there was never a sense that Lopez’s own talent level was at risk in the show he was producing.  This could have been a show produced by anybody in the machine-pressed Tonight Show sort of format.

Conan, while certainly not being the trailblazer that Lopez is (at least demographically), seems to be slipping down the same path.  Hey, I felt bad for O’Brien and the fate he suffered at NBC.  I tuned in to his program a lot since the TBS launch.  However, what you see is just not inspired.  It is basically your standard issue late night chat show, with Conan producing a monologue with a laugh or two – some sort of bit, and then a guest parade.  Where were the zanier items that marked the better parts of his NBC tenure (like the Year 2000 notions)?  It still feels like Conan is trying to capture a broad audience as well as the younger folks who formed what constitutes his “core” audience.  But what I don’t get is – in this diffuse age, can just producing a standard issue talk show like Letterman or Leno (and with a non-edge closer to Leno) really capture and keep a core audience?

This leads to the fundamental mistake TBS has made this entire time.  On cable, niche has succeeded.  Chelsea Handler succeeds with people whom I’ve never met, while Stewart and Colbert succeed with superb writing.  I read that on BET, Mo’Nique has some sort of show also that clearly people watch.  Jimmy Kimmel is more frat-boyish, but hey … it’s something.  Adult Swim becomes a bastion of insanity.  All of these entertainments have particular audiences, but they are delivering superior entertainment to audiences that are craving it.  What is TBS doing?  To me, it seems like it is just a repeat of network television formulas, formulas which network TV hosts still do better.  Why is Conan doing a basic guest driven chat show on cable, when Jay Leno gets the big guests easier, and David Letterman is a far better handler?  Conan is playing in a shark tank that not only he can’t win in the long run – but antithetical to the best aspect of cable – the democracy.  TBS and Conan have to seriously explore how they can form their own space – and not be so reliant on network paradigms.  This is the sort of lazy bullshit that has turned CNN, another Turner venture, into a place where other network anchors go to die.  Conan is brilliant in his absurdist best, and it would behoove him to double down on it.

Louie

Posted by Sriram in Uncategorized and tagged with , , , , , ,

I have to admit that I cannot review this show without admitting that I am a huge Louis CK fan.  Is he the funniest man working today?  That is certainly debatable – but with Chris Rock on the sideline for the time being, Louie is definitely in any conversation or bucket you’d put Aziz Ansari in for instance.  Louie had his time in the sun with the fairly uneven but interesting HBO sitcom Lucky Louie.  That show might have had a good run if it did not get canceled after its only season – but fortunately it led to FX’s series Louie - which is the best comedy show on television right now.  What Louie CK has managed to fashion in the show is something fairly similar to what he has fashioned in his own comedy – a mixture of family observational comedy and absurdist touches, deftly alternating between very high art and well … something else.

The show is an interesting format.  At first, it bears a resemblance to Seinfeld in its early days – Louie intersperses the acting part of the deal with some cuts of stand-up performance.  However, the comedy is not meant to be a wrapper necessarily for the action (which here is sketch not true sitcom) – it’s just a chance to hear him be funny.  Louie is a virtuoso with timing – his everyday observation is funny in a way that can only be fully appreciated in person.  However, the meat of the deal is in the sketches.  What is striking about the sketches – which are directed and edited by Louie himself, is how high quality they are.  The original music choices and production quality are top notch – the scenes actually look fairly top shelf, much more akin to an independent film (the good kind) than a sketch show.

One good example comes from this season’s premiere episode.  The main story starts with Louie at home with his girls.  We see him cutting the vegetables, preparing dinner.  The cuts, the music here are all darn near artful – it looks like an upper class twit product ad of some kind.  The funny dinner sequence gets interrupted by a surprise a visit from Louie’s extremely pregnant sister.  Louie’s sister and Louie have a dialogue exchange about their mutual past which is funny, and surprisingly warm – there is some credibility established.  This sets up the scene that night when she is in pain and needs to be rushed to the hospital.  She is screaming and wailing, and for a second, her character is fully sympathetic with us.  The screaming is painful, and you can see the pandemonium of the scene – it is a convincing dramatic scene.  We are put off guard as she is rushed to the hospital – I mean this is a bleepin sketch show, and we are caring about the scene – what is going to happen to the character?  I had no idea where this sketch was going – and isn’t that the best test of writing?  The punch line blindsides us – and I’d be loathe to divulge it.  It is worth seeking out.  That sort of unpredictability is evident when Louie has encounters with Joan Rivers and Dane Cook.  The scenes play as effective drama – or more accurately the SETUPS of the jokes are established with total realism – and so the laughs, when they arrive are ever huger.