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End of Season Report: Orange is the New Black

5 Aug

Orange Is Indeed the New Black

Orange is the New Black largely lived up to the hype.  I’m not quite ready to declare it a great show, but it’s certainly a quite good one, and one that better than any show that I can think of in recent times carefully weaves its web in the narrow spaces between comedy and drama.

In fact, what makes Orange is the New Black successful is its placement at the crossroads of comedy and drama. If it were further down on the drama end of TV’s tone spectrum, the show wouldn’t really work.  The light moments would seem inappropriate, improbable, and feel forced.  The occasionally cartoonish behavior of some of the characters would be hard to fathom, and the sense of humor which pervades Orange is the New Black isn’t the type that would transfer well to a serious show, like The Sopranos or The Wire, shows which are both funny but not silly.

If this show would farther on the comedy end of the TV’s tone spectrum, it wouldn’t really work either.  While it’s funny, in the sense that you watch it and say to yourself occasionally, “that was funny,” it’s not laugh out loud funny like Parks and Recreation or New Girl, and the dramatic subject matter and deep bonds generated between the woman in prison along with the actual gravity of their situation – prison is real, and not a joke – would be under-served by the excess humor.  Too much humor would obscure the legitimate terror Piper and the other women occasionally feel in the prison at the mercy of male guards who can be almost as vindictive as they like.

Prison is both real and absurd in the world of Orange is the New Black; it’s both a terrible, restrictive, and scary place to be and a place in which women have to manage to get by day to day, and the mix between drama and comedy suits that contrast so well.  The girls fight constantly but also stick by each other in difficult situations.  People form deeply meaningful individual relationships and get into petty squabbles.  These women aren’t just criminals who don’t have any natural home in civilian society; they’re people like you and me who made bad decisions when put in difficult situations.  While, as in real prison, the inmates are disproportionately poor and minorities, Piper is the representative for the middle class college-educated white twenty-to-forty something which is one of the prime demographics for Orange is the New Black.  People from any walk of life can make one boneheaded mistake and end up in prison.

A couple of quick notes on qualms with the show. I love the lightness and the girls working together; but occasionally the show pushes too far into whimsy for my taste.  The pageant in the final episode offered some great moments, but the notion that of course the one prisoner who had been silent up to that point saves the day with her surprisingly great voice was a little bit too Glee for me; because it’s part-comedy I’m willing to cut a lot of slack, but come on.  I like Pornstache a lot as a villain (and the great name Pornstache) , and he offers some of the best lines, but there are two problems here.  First, I get he’s an asshole, but does he really have to be so ridiculously stupid that he thinks he’s in love with Daya?.  It offers some funny moments, sure, but I think something’s lost in having a show fully of generally intelligent characters have someone just cartoonishly stupid rather than at least simply regular stupid.  Second, it’s a little bit disappointing overall that while the prisoners are portrayed with such complexities, the guard characters get a surprising lack of depth.  I understand it’s a show about the prisoners first and foremost, but a little more development wouldn’t hurt.  The prisoners, who are criminals, are largely decent people who made mistakes – are the guards all one-sided villains?

Secondly, I think the show pushes a bit too hard to make sure we know almost everyone in jail is objectively a good person, no matter how long they’ve been in prison.  The show chooses to do this with the aid of extremely sympathetic flashbacks which show the main prisoner characters and how they get to where they are now, which is prison.  These flashbacks inevitably portray this behavior in a favorable light; even if they did something wrong, they did it for an understandable reason which we can empathize with.  I think the writers were possibly afraid they couldn’t convince us that prison is loaded with pretty good people if the acts that led them there weren’t relatable, otherwise I’m not sure why they felt this was necessary.  In today’s world of complicated television (and, you know, real life), we have the mental machinery to compute that people who did bad things and made mistakes could be good people at heart. After all that’s where Piper stands and if the show thinks we can’t at least figure out that if Piper’s a pretty decent person, even though she made some mistakes, there’s a good chance some of these other women in prison are also, then the show needs to have a little more faith in itself or the viewers.

Overall, though, I don’t need to spend any more time working on what’s wrong with a show that’s such an enjoyable watch.  I plowed through the episodes, often wanting to start a new one just as a finished the previous, no matter what time it was.

I think the show does a very good job overall in displaying the difficulties in maintaining Piper and Larry’s relationship throughout her prison sentence, and blame for its struggles is apportioned all around.  She is the one with the far more difficult situation, obviously, but he didn’t sign up for this when he entered into a relationship with her.  It’s hard to really gin up sympathy for Larry until Piper decides to take up again with Alex, her ex, but that’s such a big deal that it takes a lot of the weight off Larry’s primary transgression (in terms of the relationship anyway; he can be irritating in some scenes outside of prison, like when he’s complaining to a bartender that he’s kind of but not quite hitting on), which is writing about Piper’s prison experiences without her permission.  That’s pretty bad, but her getting together with Alex is a pretty big stab in the heart as well.  In this writer’s subjective opinion, it’s one thing for Piper to cheat on Larry only in terms of sex while in prison, it’s another entirely when it’s with a woman she was in a long-term relationship with previously.  Either way, it’s clearly a topic they should have seriously discussed earlier. These escalating tensions lead to Larry calling off the engagement by the end of the first season, but at least for me, it was a slightly less emotional moment than it probably was intended to be because it seems inevitable that the two of them will reconcile, though maybe the show will surprise me.

After the first few potential villains for Piper become if not friends, people who seem to be able to at least occasionally see eye-to-eye with her, she does get a nemesis eventually in Tiffany “Pennsatucky” Doggett, and she is well, an idiot, and a character who is hard to sympathize with and who is well, wrong, in just about everything she does., The last scene is of the first season is particularly shocking, but I still felt little sympathy for Pennsatucky; all I felt was “Shit, Piper’s going to get in trouble big time for this one.”  Piper’s impulse control is extremely limited and it’s a problem.  Several times during the show she makes impulsive decisions which get her in to trouble, in situations where she may not wrong, but in which her response is not the best one at the time.  To paraphrase the Dude, sometimes you’re not wrong Piper, you’re just as asshole.  Her sense of entitlement is both a frequent source of humor and of irritation.  While I likely sympathize with it more than many, because I’m afraid I’d act the same way, sometimes I just want to shake her and tell her shut the fuck up.

What makes Orange is the New Black succeed most of all is the love and complexity it imbues its characters with and its impressive ability to display the seemingly obviously truism that  people aren’t usually all right or all wrong, but are usually a little of both. I’m not sure what the natural next phase is for the show’s second season but I’m looking forward to it.

Lastly, the theme song began to grate after watching several episodes in a short period of time; I’m on the first half of this argument, especially since I have a personal policy of never skipping a theme song, no matter how many episodes are watched in a row.

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End of Season Report: Breaking Bad, Season 4 – Part 2

31 Jul

Season 4

This is part two of a look at Breaking Bad, Season 4 – part 1 can be found here.

Gus completely owns episode 10, in which he takes Mike and Jesse down to Mexico.  Jesse shows how far he’s come when he impresses the arrogant Mexican cooks with his formula, and the big scene everybody remembers is Gus poisoning all the top brass of the cartel with tequila.  Gus bided his time and played the long game for his revenge for his partner’s death, but it certainly seemed to be sweet.  The chaotic scene in which everyone is dying from poison, outside of its plot relevance, is another brilliantly filmed set piece, of which there are so many on Breaking Bad.

I remember having more sympathy for Gus during my first viewing than I did in this rewatch.  Gus has his reasons, and there’s certainly moments when you feel good for him, such as when he has his long awaited revenge on the Don.  At the end of the day though, Gus is a villain.  He’s a great villain, and he’s hardly evil, but he’s far more bloodthirsty and calculating than Walter White.  This may explain why he’s successful, along with his lack of ego.  He doesn’t equivocate or think twice before deicing to kill; it’s not a major decision that needs to be hemmed and hawed over.  He doesn’t need a rationale.  He’s willing to and about to kill Hank, a DEA agent, before the events of the last couple of episodes.

Walt tries to convince Gus that he is steering away Hank from finding out about his meth empire however he can, and Gus has him place a tracker on his own car, to try to fool Hank.  When Walt can’t do any more to slow down the tenacious Hank, Gus, unfairly in my mind takes it out on Walt, and threatens to kill Hank (I’m not sure what Walt is actually supposed to do here to continue to prevent Hank from investigating).

Skyler is focused on both laundering money through the car wash and fixing up a situation that resulted from her cooking the books for Ted.  There are two particularly excellent scenes that come up from this plotline.  First, there’s Skyler appearing to be a ditzy mistress of Ted’s who knows nothing about accounting, convincing the IRS to drop criminal charges as long as Ted pays the IRS the money their due in time.  Second, there’s the scene in which Saul has his goons convince Ted to send Skyler’s check to the IRS, making sure that Ted keeps Huell happy, which offers some great tragicomedy.

This is all leads us to the huge big epic final episodes. In episode 11, Gus has Walt driven out to the desert, tells him he’s fired, and that he’s only not being killed because Jesse won’t allow it, but that Gus thinks he can change Jesse’s mind soon, and that Hank will die, and if Walt attempts to prevent it, Walt’s family will die.  Walt is back at full helplessness mode; end times seem near.  He tries to arrange with Saul to hire Saul’s witness-protection-on-crack-disappearing guy, but it turns out Skyler has used the money he needs to have Ted pay off the IRS, a case of poor timing if ever there was, and masterful plotting by the writers.  Walt’s hysterical laughter in the crawl space once he finds out that the money is gone is the most abject display of his desperation yet, and he starts off the next episode sitting outside his house by a pool, playing with his gun, and waiting for death to come.

Walt executes his master plan, poisoning Jesse’s girlfriend’s kid, convincing Jesse that it was Gus who is responsible, and getting Jesse to distract Gus.  Walt’s first plan to blow up Gus’s car doesn’t work when Gus senses something amiss (I’m still not sure how, and I’d love an explanation, this has always been something that didn’t quite work for me, but adds to a Gus-as-superhero mythos).  Next, Walt recruits Tio, and that plan is a success, leading to the memorable explosion, zombie Gus fixing his tie, and Walt’s declaration that, “I won.”

The fourth season of Breaking Bad is no longer about regular people the way the first couple of seasons are.  Everything is on a larger scale, and Walt is no longer a regular guy trying to sell meth to pay for his medical costs, and bumbling around doing so.  The season is a 13-episode long battle between Gus and Walt, both of whom are superheroes rather than regular people in the comic book world of Breaking Bad.  When Gus walks through a storm of bullets, and doesn’t get shot, Mike rationalizes that the gunmen don’t actually want to kill Gus, but the implication to me is that Gus is simply some kind of superhero.  Mike is as well – see the cold open where he pops out of the truck to take out several cartel men by himself.  Breaking Bad, if it ever did, no longer takes place in the real world, but in a type of comic book universe.

I say this not as an insult; the fourth season is a suburb season of television, but rather to simply describe the change in the show.  What makes it work so well is slightly different from the earlier seasons; there are fewer of the moments where we can directly relate to Walt and his family.  Still, the acting is top notch, the characters are all extremely well-built, and the tension and suspense packed into nearly every episode is second to no other television show.

The plotting of the fourth season is immaculate – setting up Skyler to have to pay off the IRS so that Walt wouldn’t have the money to make his family disappear is well-timed and properly set up so that it doesn’t feel forced or like a cheap cop out that disappearing is no longer an option.  Nearly every decision characters make on the show I believe, because it’s been set up either through specific events that have transpired, and by motivations we know the characters have.  When Gus succumbs to Walt’s plan, it’s preying on the weakness we know Gus possesses, his desire for revenge.  I’ve heard complaints that Gus would never keep Walt alive after the events of the third season, and while that’s a reasonable argument, I think the show does a very solid job of setting up why he wouldn’t kill Walt; he needs a chemist, and he can’t afford to not have the superlab running at just about all times, which was alluded to over the course of the third season.

Walt is trapped for much of the season, and he fights tooth and nail for a way out for him and his family, and finally he finds it, which leads to the natural fifth season question of, you win, then what next.  His entire fourth season was defined by Gus Fring, who is now out of the picture, and he’s on top, a position that seemed exceedingly unlikely until the moment it happened.

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End of Season Report: Breaking Bad, Season 4 – Part 1

29 Jul

Season 4

A sense of helplessness and desperation pervades Breaking Bad’s fourth season.  Walter has temporarily staved off his, and Jesse’s, death, thanks to having Jesse shoot Gale, but he knows his days are numbered once Gus finds a new chemist, and he’s absolutely terrified.  Sure, he made some peace with living with seemingly terminal cancer before, but the ticking clock of cancer has nothing on the ticking clock of Gustavo Fring.  After making it through contemplative bottle episode The Fly and the end of the third season, Walt’s deep will to live and survive is renewed, and his terror is ongoing and present during the fourth season even when not at the fore.

Re-watching the season quickly was a significantly different experience than watching weekly; some parts really slowed down, and the end game, which I had remembered as lasting about four episodes only really lasted two.  It’s basically impossible to sustain the constantly abject hopelessness that the fourth season begins with for 13 episodes, fortunately for the viewer, so the tone comes out most continually in the first two and last two episodes of the season, but it’s felt throughout, and everything Walt says and does in the entire season is best viewed through this prism of outright desperation.

In case it wasn’t obvious that Gus was a man who means business and that Walt needed to be terrified of him, Gus slits his associate Victor’s throat in front of Walt in a first episode scene which occurs right where the third season left off.  It’s possible that this is punishment for Victor getting seen at the scene of the murder, but it has the added effect of showing Walt how serious he is; if he killed Victor only for this purpose then Gus is even more bloodthirsty and cutthroat than I realized.

Walt’s trying to figure out an approach to survival, and all he can think of at first are the obvious ones – killing Gus directly or getting Mike to help him out.  He buys a gun, and is foiled trying to go Gus’s house to simply walk in and shoot him.  After suggesting a plan to Mike to help get Walt in a room with Gus, Mike beats him up right in the bar where they’re meeting.  It’s a great scene, and Walt is foolish for making suggestions that he should know Mike is never going to accept.  However, I think Walt is hardly crazy.  Walt sees his own death as something that could be coming any day, any week, and he’s going to go down swinging.  While this approach shows off some Walt’s lesser qualities, it always displays one of his best; his tenacity.  One method fails; find another.  Get beat up in the process if that’s what it takes.

The immediate danger recedes after the second episode in what a way all immediate danger has to; one can only be on the absolute edge of anticipation for so long.  The feeling rather, then, settles into a dull numbness which lasts through the middle of the season, occasionally heightening after particularly frightening moments to let Walt and the audience know that he should be, and is, scared out of his mind.  The much-talked-about “I am the danger” scene is one of these moments.

A couple of incidents throughout the season show off Walt’s single biggest weakness, his ego.  What’s the point of being the best darn meth cook in the southwest if nobody knows it, and you can’t even show off your winnings.  Walt drunkenly muses that Gale’s probably not Heisenberg to Hank at a dinner party and he buys his son an expensive car, which he blows up, when his wife smartly makes him return it.  He can’t get the concept of behaving modestly in his head; someone needs to know what a great job he’s doing.  Jesse wants to be Walt’s ally, but Walt constantly mangles their relationship due to his ego and his poor social skills.  It’s extremely frustrating to watch him drive Jesse away over and over when if he would choose his words and expressions more carefully he could make his point without a fight.

Jesse begins his seasonal downward spiral in the first half of the season, the weight of shooting someone heavy on his conscience.  It’s a moral undertaking that Jesse is unequipped to bear; he doesn’t have Walt’s facility for easy rationalization.  Gus, using his talent, as we’re reminded he possesses, of reading people, sees a spark in Jesse.  Jesse’s far more malleable than Walt; with strong mentorship, Jesse has qualities that would make him a valuable asset, and might imbue with him a sense of loyalty towards whoever the mentor was.  Of course, none of this would have mattered a whit to Gus, who wanted Jesse dead, just a couple of weeks ago, if a relationship with Jesse didn’t also allow Gus to finally put the meddlesome Walt out of the picture.

Mike begins to mentor Jesse, without Jesse exactly realizing what’s going on, until Gus sets up a situation in which Jesse will either be killed, or come out triumphant with new confidence and purpose.  Walt confronts Jesse about the situation, suspecting far more presciently than he could have possibly known, that Gus staged the attack to pump up Jesse’s confidence and begin to drive Walt and Jesse apart.  However, Walt’s brilliant intuition is rendered useless due to the ham-handed way he discusses it, turning Jesse more against him than ever before.

Walt thinks of one more brilliant way to eliminate Gus.  He creates ricin, puts it in a cigarette, and convinces Jesse to look for an opportunity to put it in Gus’s food or drink whenever he has the chance.  Jesse’s reluctance and inability to do so quickly enough spurs Walt’s anger and frustration and drives the two apart.  Walt’s manner of complaining to Jesse is another example of Walt’s poor people skills.  It’s understandable why Walt is so frustrated; he thinks every opportunity Jesse misses increases the likelihood of Walt’s own impending death.  But he has trouble conveying this fear in a constructive way.

We enter what I call the Gus portion of the season, which lasts from approximately episodes 7 through 11.  For this brief span, Breaking Bad almost portrays Gus as the protagonist.  We learn some of Gus’s past, when his partner was killed by the Don and Hector “Tio” Salamanca, and his desire for revenge that has lasted decades; he returns to Tio’s nursing home to taunt Tio when his nephews die (side note: I think it’s ever so slightly cheap to allude to Gus’s mysterious past as the reason the Don doesn’t kill him and never come back to it – it’s not important enough to be a terrible omission but it’s worth mentioning).  We learn Gus’s weakness, which is his desire for revenge against Tio and the cartel.

Come back soon for part 2 of the Season 4 breakdown.

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End of Season Report: Enlightened, Season 2

17 Jul

Amy looks onAs I mentioned in my review of the first season of Enlightened, when I watched the first episode, I didn’t like it.  Even after watching both seasons and enjoying them greatly,, I still don’t think my initial impression was wrong.  The primary problem I had was that I didn’t like the main character, Laura Dern’s Amy Jellicoe.  After watching two seasons, I still don’t, in so much as she would drive me crazy if I ever had to hang out with her.  She has a number of qualities that drive me crazy, including a quasi new age outlook and never knowing when to stop talking. That said, over two seasons of really getting to know her and her life, it’s hard not to both empathize and sympathize with her.

Enlightened is about the sense of powerlessness felt by the average person into today’s modern corporate suburban world.  Amy Jellicoe struggles in a pointless office job working at mindless tasks at a computer. The only purpose of her department is to put other people out of work, and eventually to put herself and her colleagues out of work when they’ve done enough.  The series begins when after fifteen years climbing the corporate ladder, she has a breakdown, and comes back only to realize what a meaningless life she’s been living.  She’s surrounded by poor, sad individuals who have simply lost any desire or ability they once had to make something more out of their careers, led by Mike White’s Tyler, who simple gave up on trying years ago.

However, while the first season is about just how powerless the characters are, the second season instead decides to give them a fighting chance.  Every character, with the possible exception of Amy’s mother, is given a shot to actually come out of things a little bit better than they started out.  Additionally, the second season is more serial than the first, as there’s a running plotline focused around Amy trying to take down her evil corporate overlords Abaddon, headed up by CEO Chalres Szidon, played by the ultimate white collar man James Rebhorn.

Amy, high off of her ability to convince her drunk and drug-addled ex-husband to go to rehab at the conclusion of the first season, must go back to her mind-numbing day job at Abaddon.  What chances is that her one friend one the job, computer expert Tyler, knows how to crack into corporate e-mails, and with that information Amy believes she can finally do what she’s sought out to do since the beginning of the series.  Prove herself as a force for good.  Take down an evil company, lifting up the little people, and making planet Earth, on balance, a better place.  She hooks up with, both figuratively and literally, an LA Times investigative reporter, who seems initially put off by Amy but is exicted about her reputed ability to get top secret e-mails from what he’s long theorized was a criminal corporate enterprise.  As she uses her hacked computer access to contribute, he invites her to an event where she sees a woman who was able to start a website and influence the world from a position even worse than hers.  She sees world outside of herself.  One person can actually make a difference. She’s naive, but she’s not crazy.  It’s difficult not to sympathize with her wanting to actually make some positive change in her life, even if it can be occasionally cringe-inducing the way she goes about it.

While her quest to get a muckraking expose published certainly provides Amy with the feeling that she can actually do something, several times over the season it feels as if Amy is in over her head. Amy forms a romantic relationship with the reporter, which goes sour when the reporter dismisses her before the story is published because of the appearance of  impropriety it might create, noting that both he and Amy knew what their relationship was. Amy didn’t.  Amy actually gets an incredible opportunity she’s always wanted towards the end of the season when she gets to meet with the CEO of Abaddon and is offered a position designed around making company socially responsible.  While it seems like Amy’s acceptance of this position should be the dream ending, it’s a cruel tease.  By this point in the season, it’s too late for this half-measure of working within the corporate structure. The expose on Abaddon that specifically mentions Amy is about to come out and there’s no putting on the breaks on it just because she’s gotten an opportunity which offers her the potential to make change and be financially stable at the same time.  You can’t have everything though, and it would have felt like a little bit of both a cop out and a sell out for Amy to accept at this point, even if she could.  She made her bed with her choice to reach up and a grab a chance to make a deeper permanent mark at the price of sacrificing a potential comfortable position and for better or worse, though hopefully better, she now has to lie in it.

Vastly needed comic relief comes in the form of wonderful boss character Dougie Daniels played by Til Death’s Timm Sharp.  He’s hilarious throughout as the douchey, tech-savvy boss of Amy’s basement unit, who thinks a lot more of himself than just about anyone else does.  He’s all about following the corporate order until he finds out the corporate order is about to fire his ass, at which point he’s all about revenge.  While Amy persuades him to help her out with her espionage mission in pursuit high-minded ideals, Dougie is willing to go only as far as simply to screw the fuckers who are letting him go.

Luke Wilson’s Levi Callow doesn’t get a ton of time to shine in the second season, but he uses the time he gets well.  The third episode, which focuses on his plight attending rehab in Hawaii, is one of the better episodes of the season, if not the best, and features Christopher Abbott of Girls fame having a lot more fun than he ever does in Girls.  For people who can’t get into the show due to Amy’s character, I would highly recommend a viewing of this episode even without context, for the powerful storytelling and writing Enlightened brings to the table.

Mike White’s Tyler also gets an unexpected opportunity for happiness.  He interacts with executive secretary Eileen, played by Molly Shannon, as part of the conspirators’ attempts to gain access to some deeply hidden documents, but ends up falling in love.  Tyler’s quest to bond with another human is lonelier but just as moving if not moreso than Amy’s.  It seems like guaranteed tragedy once Eileen learns why Tyler ran into her in the first place. Surprisingly, however for this show, this potential disaster is turned around when Amy’s insistence that Tyler wasn’t in on the down and dirty details of the conspiracy brings the two of them back together.  No one on the deserves a happy ending more than Tyler.

And that brings me what was remarkable about the second season. Enlightened, one of the most depressing shows in the past few years to air on television, actually has a happy ending.    In some ways it’s certainly unexpected for a show that sometimes just feels like it’s beating you down, letting you get slightly back up, and then bating you down again, but it doesn’t feel cheap.  Amy doesn’t have a great time over the course of the series, but she earns the peace of mind she gets at the end.  I’m not sure how much of an idea series creator Mike White had that this would be the final season, but even though I’d prefer more episodes, it’s hard to believe if there were more, it wouldn’t end at a lower point.

In the last episode, Amy, when her identity as the source of scandalous leaked documents breaks out, is pulled out of her job and brought up to see the CEO and a bevy of executives and lawyers.  She’s fired of course, among other negative consequences, but they’ll sue her brains out if she doesn’t tell them exactly what documents were leaked.  I half-expected Amy to fold, realizing she had made a mess of what could have been a great situation for her.  She doesn’t though.  This is Amy’s moment of triumph.  It’s to her advantage here to be a little person.  Sue away, she says.  She doesn’t own anything and is deeply in debt.  For a moment, her terrible situation is turned into an asset.  Only someone who had been in her position of hopelessness could have had the desperation to topple this corrupt CEO.  And about that, she wasn’t wrong either.  The CEO really did do some terrible things, and she really is the one to be responsible for restoring a little balance to the world.  Seeing her photo on the cover, she earned that.

Amy is annoying.  Amy is irritating.  That never really changes over the course of the show; she never curbs all the activities that drive me crazy when watching her.  That said, her life is rough.  She had a marriage fall apart after a miscarriage, she has a depressed mom, and the person she thinks as her best friend kind of hates her, and well.  She deserves a win, and it’s gratifying to see her get one.

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