Television, the Drug of the Nation

Spring 2014 Review: True Detective

I didn’t know what to expect coming in, but I’ve long been a fan of the season-long anthology format for television and was excited about any show that starred the long underrated Woody Harrelson and Matthew McConaughey in the middle of his epic comeback. After actually watching the show, even those high expectations didn’t prepare me for how much I liked the debut episode.

True Detective is posed as a season long murder mystery, a format we’ve seen a few times in the last decade, but this isn’t your grandfather’s season long murder mystery. While it’s an obviously intriguing format (there’s a reason Agatha Christie sold so many books), I’ve been biased against it ever since the somehow still alive disaster known as The Killing broke me in the final two episodes of its first season (like thinking of the Lost finale, bringing up The Killing’s first season finale is the best way to instantly anger me). The Killing has made me come into any season-long murder mystery with a wary eye, perhaps unfairly, but there’s a part of me just waiting for a let down at every step. Broadchurch, a British season-long murder mystery being adapted for an American audience was a very pleasant surprise, surprising and satisfying without being ludicrous and over the top. It was, however, a fairly typical murder mystery, investigating all the players one by one, and everything that happened in the series pretty much revolved around the murder which took place in the first two minutes of the show.

True Detective is not that and it’s much the better for it. True Detective is a murder mystery, sure. There’s a murder at the beginning and presumably the show is going to take us through on the way to solving it. But it’s much more than that and only kind of about that.

The show is told through an interesting framing device. Two cops in 2012 are interviewing two ex-cops who thought they had solved a murder 17 years ago, in 1995, in rural Louisiana. As the two cops are interviewed separately, they each take us back, through their descriptions, into the past. Scenes of them taking to their interviewers in 2012 are interwoven with much longer scenes of their investigation in 1995, overlaid with narration, which is what they’re telling the interviewers. I’ve often complained about framing devices and narration that feels gimmicky, useless, cheap, and detrimental, but this is not that. This is a clever framing device that besides being plot relevant – it seems like events related to the murder will actually happen in 2012, rather than simply being a point from which to look back – presents interesting narrative opportunities. There are lots of unreliable narrator issues – the two cops, who we learn, haven’t spoken in ten years, remember the case and each other different, and have very different perspectives of the case and of each other. The ex-detectives, neither of whom work for the police anymore, have changed dramatically over the years.

The two primary detectives, as hinted at above, are played by Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson, with McConaughey marvelously playing against type. Woody Harrelson is the good old boy partner, just trying to do his job and fit in, while McConaughey is the loner, intellectual who isn’t from Louisiana to begin with and doesn’t really belong. Unlike other shows, which would portray the McConaughey character as a reclusive genius who is brilliant at his craft but can’t fit into society (See House, Bones, and well a billion other shows), McConaughey is just another detective. He’s certainly a good one; Harrelson, who resents McConaughey for a number of reasons, certainly acknowledges that much. But he’s no genius; when he does figure out important case information it’s because he works all night because he can’t sleep. Harrelson is no dummy either and he puts up an aura of just working the job but he certainly takes his job seriously enough as a professional. The 2012 interviewers bring McConaughey and Harrelson through the details of the 1995 case but also into seemingly irrelevant details about the detectives’ relationship and personal lives, including a dinner at Harrelson’s house where McConaughey shows up drunk.

That’s the thing about True Detective. It’s about the murder mystery and it isn’t. The two detectives didn’t get incredibly far along their path to solving the crime in the first episode and I didn’t really care. Their chemistry, the charge and interaction between the two partners keeps the show moving while they slowly get around to the actual case. The show often feels more like a rumination than a murder mystery, and while the focal point is supposedly the case, it sometimes seems to fade into the background for stretches of the show, hiding behind the interplay between the two detectives.

Will I watch it again? Yes, for sure. This gets a gold star for most promising, and seems like an instant must-watch, which only comes along a couple times a year. It’s the early favorite for best new show of the spring season.

Tags: HBO, Spring 2014 TV Season, True Detective

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Categories Spring 2014 TV Season

Ranking the Shows That I Watch – 2013 Edition: 28-25

17 Jan

Here we go – first, a drama, that like Sons of Anarchy, has been consistently good but not great and had a comeback season this year. Next a couple of comedies that aired back to back but don’t have too much else in common, and finally a show that was impossible to figure out where to place because it debuted with three episodes. Here we go.

28. Boardwalk Empire

I spoke about this most recent season of Boardwalk Empire at length, which you can read here and then here if so interested. Basically, I think the fourth season was a big step up from the rather one-dimensional third season. Boardwalk still sometimes struggles with figuring out what makes it stand out from the other major dramatic anti-hero shows that have dominated the TV landscape in the past decade and in bringing more of its side characters into more fully realized form, and sometimes it spreads its wings too wide in terms of including more characters and locations rather than focusing more time on fewer great ones. Still, this paragraph should be more about praise than condemnation; this was the second best season of the series, and very close to the second season, the other contender. I didn’t love the Chicago plots, but other non-Nuckie characters stepped in a big way, as the writers created situations more interesting than everyone-against-Nuckie. As always, the filming technique and direction in Boardwalk is gorgeous. Scenes are lovingly rendered and fantastic angles and shots and drama and pathos no matter the characters, plot, or dialogue.

27. Veep

Veep’s second season was a noticeable if not revolutionary improvement over the first. It went from a show I watched but was hesitant to recommend after the first season to one I proudly throw out as ideal for relatively quick viewing after the second. Everything is tighter, the characters are surer in who they are, and because of that, the actors know how to better play each of their roles. The first season was defined by one large scale joke – that life for the Vice President, the second highest office in America, was as boring, mundane, and pointless as the lives of so many other cubicle-inhabiting Americans. The second season let the show breathe and allowed that one joke to merge more fully for the show’s love of Curb Your Enthusiasm-like situational awkwardness and miscommunication. Every one of the characters gets a couple of chances to shine, along with recurring guests Gary Cole, Kevin Dunn, and Dan Bakkedahl.

26.Girls

Girls second season was by and large a huge improvement over its first. Toned down was the fervor, both the extremely positive and negative levels that accompanied the first season, which may have been in the show’s best interest. In its place emerged a more fully formed show, that dealt with the characters in more mature and interesting ways. All four primary characters are caricatures to some extent; but they’re not that far from real people and their battles and conflicts often feel authentic (which I complimented in my article about Treme as a place that’s surprisingly hard to reach). I didn’t like the last episode which featured a couple of sappy, forced happy endings which felt like a flash-forward from what the show dissected so powerfully in the second season’s middle episodes, but I still remain quite hopeful for the third season.

25. Rick and Morty

Many times during this list I had no idea where I wanted to place shows; this basically refers to numbers maybe 6 through 39. Still, this may have been the trickiest, primarily because it’s hard to figure out how high to rate a show that has aired only three episodes not only in the year, but ever, and not three hour and a half Sherlock episodes, but three 20 minute episodes. So here it is; I probably have liked what I’ve seen enough to have it higher, but I was hesitant on how high to put a show with three episodes. Now on to why you should watch this show if you’ve never heard of it before. Rick and Morty is an animated Adult Swim show about the science fiction adventures of grandfather Rick and grandson Morty, who have a perverse Doc Brown and Marty McFly-esque relationship. Rick is an alcoholic mad genius, and Morty is a loving kid who is a awkward and not the smartest chip on the block. Rick drags Morty throughout space time on all sorts of wacky adventures, while their family, Morty’s parents and sister, occupy often equally hilarious b stories. It’s funny and it’s short and you don’t have to watch the episodes in order, but you might as well because there aren’t that many of them and they’re good. If you start with just one of the first three though, make it Anatomy Park which combines Jurassic Park, Fantastic Voyage, and John Oliver. Oh, on top of that it’s co-created by Community once-and-future head honcho Dan Harmon.

Tags: Boardwalk Empire, Girls, Ranking the Shows That I Watch 2013, Rick and Morty, Veep

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Categories Ranking The Shows That I Watch

Spring 2014 Review: Helix

15 Jan

I’ll be honest. I like science fiction as much as the next person but I’m not a hardcore sci-fi guy, and SyFy as a network has more or less flown under my radar in terms of scripted shows for the past few years, largely since BattleStar Galactica. I have been making an effort since I started this blog two and a half years ago to watch the vast majority of new scripted shows, and until now I haven’t watched a SyFy show, which speaks both to its absence in my peripheral vision and the relative lack of general buzz built up behind any of their shows while networks like FX and AMC are churning out talked about programming. SyFy finally appeared again on my radar with the debut of a show called Helix created by who else but BSG creator and showrunner Ron Moore, and I decided there was no matter time to give a SyFy show a shot. I’m not the biggest BSG fan, and I probably like it less than most people who have watched it all the way through, but it has definite merit and I’m glad I’ve seen, so I was at least intrigued to give Helix a shot.

Helix is about a super secret private science lab complex in the arctic that, because of its location, is not controlled or governed by any nation. Because of its unique position, no one exactly know what the scientists up there are doing and what kind of crazy experiments they’re conducting. It’s run by a veteran PhD, Dr. Hiroshi Hitake. Unfortunately, there’s a problem; a couple of people die from an unidentified virus and the base is concerned. The army calls on CDC expert Dr. Alan Farragut (Billy Campbell, the most famous name in a largely lesser-known cast) who brings a small team (three doctors and an army member) up with him to check out the infection, figure out what’s causing it, stop the spread, and decide how to deal with the infected. This guy is just one of a few potentially qualified experts in running these disease control operations, but he’s called upon because his brother is one of the infected.

Ron Moore’s previous SyFy hit BSG featured plenty of action, but the action in Helix is of a very different stripe. It’s a thriller-horror, most closely in the mold of John Carptner’s classic The Thing. The most basic reason for the comparison is obvious; The Thing is set in an international base in the antarctic, while Helix is set in the arctic. Helix, like the Thing, features the terrifying premise that we may not at anytime know who is infected and who isn’t, and that a strange and never before seen virus (it’s an alien in The Thing, but still) turns some of those infected against other humans, removing their humanity. Helix actually has a bit of a zombie vibe in that way as well in the way humans with the virus are programmed to infect other humans, and gain super speed and strength; think 28 Days Later.

The show is tense and fairly terrifying. The characters don’t appear that interesting at first anyway, but honestly that’s not that important. The best shows do everything well, but shows that do even one thing well can still be well worth watching, and while Helix isn’t aces so far on characters or dialogue (don’t even talk to me about BSG characters or dialogue, but that’s for another day), the tension and pacing absolutely do the trick of making you terrified but wanting to know what happens next. Helix unfurls fairly quickly, and a bad situations continues to get worse. No one has ever seen any infection like this at all before, and for every step forward the scientists take, they seemingly end up two steps back.

There’s some science mumbo jumbo, and there’s a not particularly necessary possible romantic triangle between Farragut, his ex-wife, who is a scientist on his team (who cheated on with, of all people, his now infected brother), and his new younger protege seems to have a crush on him. This show might better be done with characters that had less previous relation to one another, without the soap angle, but while probably best removed, this doesn’t really take that much away from the show, simply because that’s not really what the show is about or why you’re watching the show to begin with.

The intrigue in Helix is real and present. I want to know what the virus is about, but less because I actually care about the meaning behind it, but because minute-to-minute I want to see if they have any chance at surviving one more episode. Additionally, unlike in the The Thing, there are villains, people actively preventing the scientists from doing the best job they can from stoping the virus. This makes their job far more difficult, makes contact with world outside the insane arctic ice complex nearly impossible, and places them in a land with no laws and men and women running around like crazed zombies. This could easily go off the rails, but it’s an intriguing premise, and good shows on this genre are hard to find on television. I love deep character studies as much as the next person (you won’t find a bigger Treme fan) but there’s a place for tense thrillers as well.

Will I watch it again? Yes. I’m very concerned the concept could get tired, or feel drawn out after a season or more, and without a set end date, it’s hard to see it ending well. But after I watched the first two (they aired back to back on the debut day), I was at least kind of hooked, which may not sound like a resounding endorsement but it’s already more than most shows.

Tags: Helix, Spring 2014 TV Season, SyFy

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Categories Spring 2014 TV Season

Ranking the Shows That I Watch – 2013 Edition: 32-29

13 Jan

Four more, 32-29 ahead. We continue our comedy streak with the next three, and continue the trend that all of these shows would have ranked higher on last year’s list. I don’t really understand why everything is lower; I think there was just a glut of really good new shows from last spring that is pushing shows down that didn’t really deserve to fall.

32: Workaholics

Workaholics I’ve praised in the past, and I’m proud that this was a show I was on board with long before it reached the level of cult popularity it currently inhabits. The modernized pop-culture friendly absurd bro-iness corporate meaningless twenty-something world this show lives in is delightful. The show is largely episodic and episode qualities varies; some high concept premises – see “Real Time” from the first half of season 3 featuring the tagline “Stay Drunk” – hit the exact spot, while some don’t have as much going for them. Workaholics is a little lower this year partly because this glut of new shows and partly because I think the overall quality was a little down in the second half of the third season compared to the first half and season 2 before it, Workaholics is a show that could easily run out of ideas, and I think is the type of show whose episode count should be well-managed; it could maybe use a year off like Louie took in 2013 just to refresh the creative juices and come back with 10 knock out episodes the next year. Still, I’m overall high on Workaholics in general, even if every episode isn’t equally good and I believe in the faith of Anders, Adam, and Blake to keep the laughs coming.

31. NTSF: SD: SUV

A stylistic spinoff to Childrens Hospital, NTSF is a general spoof on police procedural action adventure sci-fi well, anything, and if not quite as good as often as the original, still offers some wonderful silly 11 minute television. Last year’s season 3 features some series classics, including an episode where a series of Comic Con criminals are loose on a plane (Comic Con Air is the obvious but still great episode title), an episode where Lance Reddick plays the villainous head of a casual restaurant chain, and a double episode which finds the team out to prevent an assassination in San Diego’s English district (think Arrested Development’s Little Britain). It’s very silly, if slightly less whimsical than Childrens Hospital can be, and some episodes work better than others but the hit ratio is higher than when the show started. The cast generally sells borderline jokes well, upping the level of quality.

30. The Mindy Project

The Mindy Project is midway through it’s second season and though it’s still experiencing some first season issues, it’s also gotten much stronger as a show and has produced a pretty solid bunch of early second season episodes. The show is grounded in two really strong characters, Mindy herself, and also Chris Messina’s foil Danny, whose character has become an important second banana to Mindy. The show’s biggest issue has been its struggle to develop the next level of in depth characters right behind these two. Ike Barinholtz’s Morgan feels fully formed as a silly tertiary character who heads B and C plots, but the show is still trying to figure out how to use Ed Weeks, Adam Pally, and the next level of side characters. Still, episodes can be very funny and Mindy does a good job with second level jokes, with a smart mix of 30 Rock-like wordplay and humor that evades the obvious choices. Guest starts have been very solid around, and I feel better about this show than I did last year at the same time; although it’s still tinkering it’s moving in the right direction.

29. Sons of Anarchy

I really did want to reward Sons of Anarchy for putting together it’s best season in years. The show decided next season would be its last, and that freed the show, letting it finally get to it, dealing with shit that actually matters instead of getting distracted with plots that never seemed as germane and feel like stalling. Big shit went down, and most of it worked. The seasonal antagonist was the best in ages, mostly because SAMCRO was actually challenged by a force that Jax couldn’t reasonably claim to be ethically superior to, even with his twisted logic. Anyone watching the show has had more and more trouble buying any notion of SAMCRO being even nominal good guys over the years, but Jax for once was forced to actually almost confront this. Sons of Anarchy isn’t a perfect show, and there are some inherent flaws, both in the show overall, and in some of this season’s arcs, but the show went back to its strengths this year and was willing to shake up the status quo, which I praise it for. I think a lot of people who had drifted away from the show sometime in the last couple of seasons would be pleasantly surprised if they came back and wanted this season.

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Categories Ranking The Shows That I Watch

Best Albums and Songs of 2013: This Shit My Favorite Songs, You Just Don’t Know the Words

10 Jan

This is a television blog, but first and foremost it’s my blog and it should not surprise anyone that I have interests other than television (how I find time for that while watching 45 TV shows is a good question). Thus, I like to talk about them sometimes. Today, though, it’s simply to officially post my top 50 albums and top 100 songs of 2013. Sure, I may come back and realize how wrong I was and how much I hate some of these songs and albums later in the year, but now it’s on record so at least I’ll have something to compare it to.

First, in case you want to hear the list without having all the songs revealed for you – links to my top 40 songs on 8tracks

40-31
30-21
20-11
10-1

And next Spotify lists of my top 100 songs – first web based, second app-based.

Best of 2013 , Best of 2013

And now the lists – top 100 songs of 2013

Rhye – Open
Courtney Barnett – Avant Gardener
Tegan And Sara – Closer
Haim – The Wire
John Grant – GMF
Sky Ferreira – I Blame Myself
Generationals – Put a Light On
Daft Punk – Get Lucky
Charli XCX – Take My Hand
Drake – Hold On, We’re Going Home (feat. Majid Jordan)
Vampire Weekend – Unbelievers
Foxygen – No Destruction
Foals – My Number
Autre Ne Veut – Counting
Bastille – Pompeii
Empire Of The Sun – Alive
Paramore – Still Into You
CHVRCHES – We Sink
Shout Out Louds – 14th Of July
Robin Thicke (ft. TI and Pharrell) – Blurred Lines
Janelle Monáe – Primetime [feat. Miguel]
Thao & The Get Down Stay Down – We the Common (For Valerie Bolden)
Lorde – Royals
Palma Violets – Best Of Friends
Chance The Rapper – Cocoa Butter Kisses (ft. Vic Mensa & Twista)
Cults – I Can Hardly Make You Mine
Cut Copy – Free Your Mind
AlunaGeorge – Attracting Flies
James Blake – Retrograde
Speedy Ortiz – Tiger Tank
The Preatures – Is This How You Feel?
Mikal Cronin – Shout It Out
Daughn Gibson – Phantom Rider
Waxahatchee – Lips and Limbs
Summer Camp – Fresh
Suede – Barriers
Crystal Antlers – Rattlesnake
Disclosure – White Noise
Johnny Marr – The Right Thing Right
Kacey Musgraves – Follow Your Arrow
Deap Vally – End Of The World
Sleigh Bells – Bitter Rivals
Kanye West – Blood On The Leaves
Ace Hood – Bugatti
Torres – Jealousy and I
Unknown Mortal Orchestra – So Good at Being in Trouble
Superchunk – Me & You & Jackie Mittoo
Summer Camp – Everything Has Changed
Blood Orange – You’re Not Good Enough
Drake – Started From The Bottom
Parquet Courts – Stoned and Starving
Guards – Coming True
Zedd – Clarity
Emeli Sandé – Next to Me
Janelle Monáe – Dance Apocalyptic
Autre Ne Veut – Play by Play
Charli XCX – You – Ha Ha Ha
Neko Case – Night Still Comes
Arcade Fire – Reflektor
Cherub – Doses & Mimosas
Peace – Wraith
MØ – XXX 88
Brandy Clark – Pray To Jesus
Chance The Rapper – Favorite Song (ft. Childish Gambino)
Thee Oh Sees – Toe Cutter – Thumb Buster
Pusha T – King Push
A$AP Ferg – Shabba
Phosphorescent – Ride On / Right On
New Politics – Harlem
Miley Cyrus – We Can’t Stop
Rich Homie Quan – Type of Way
Empire Of The Sun – DNA
Arctic Monkeys – Why’d You Only Call Me When You’re High?
Eric Church – The Outsiders
J. Cole – Power Trip
Rhye – 3 Days
Kelela – Floor Show [Prod. Girl Unit]
Ka – Barring the Likeness
Camera Obscura – Do It Again
The Men – Half Angel Half Light
Chris Malinchak – So Good To Me
Mike Will Made It – 23
Man Man – Head On [Hold On To Your Heart]
Rihanna – Stay
Bottomless Pit – Fleece
Yuck – Rebirth
Paramore – Fast In My Car
John Grant – Pale Green Ghosts
Lorde – Tennis Court
Mount Kimbie – You Took Your Time (feat. King Krule)
The National – I Need My Girl
The Weeknd – The Town
CAZZETTE – Beam Me Up
Telekinesis – Power Lines
Youth Lagoon – Mute
The War On Drugs – Red Eyes
Kurt Vile – Wakin on a Pretty Day
Smallpools – Dreaming
C2C – Down The Road
Pittbull ft. Ke$ha – Timber

And my top 50 albums of 2013:

Autre Ne Veut – Anxiety
Chance the Rapper –Acid Rap
CharliXCX – True Romance
Vampire Weekend – Modern Vampires of the City
Drake – Nothing Was the Same
Speedy Ortiz – Major Arcana
Sky Ferreira – Night Time, My Time
Foxygen – We Are The 21st Century Ambassadors Of Peace & Magic
Haim – Days are Gone
Paramore – Paramore
Chvrches – The Bones of What You Believe
AlunaGeorge – Body Music
Kacey Musgraves – Same Trailer Different Park
Kanye West – Yeezus
Pusha T – My Name is My Name
Summer Camp – Summer Camp
Waxahatchee – Cerulean Salt
Arcade Fire – Reflektor
Rhye – Women
Daughn Gibson – Me Moan
Deap Valley – Sistronix
Suede – Bloodsports
Johnny Marr – The Messenger
Empire of the Sun – Ice on the Dune
Cults – Statis
Thao and the Get Down Stay Down – We the Common
Bastille – Bad Blood
Kurt Vile – Walkin on a Pretty Daze
Kelela – CUT 4 ME
Ka – The Night’s Gambit
Daft Punk – Random Access Memories
John Grant – Pale Green Ghosts
Janelle Monae – The Electric Lady
Blood Orange – Cupid Deluxe
Camera Obscura – Desire Lines
Shout Out Louds – Opitca
Foals – Holy Fire
Unknown Mortal Orchestra – II
Yuck – Glow & Behold
Majical Cloudz – Impersonator
Disclosure – Settle
Fear of Men – Early Fragments
Guards – In Guards We Trust
The Men – New Moon
Torres – Torres
David Bowie – The Next Day
Justin Timberlake – The 20-20 Experience
Phosphorescent – Muchcacho
Lucius -Wildewoman
The Weeknd – Kiss Land

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Categories Miscellany

End of Series Report: Treme

8 Jan

You are about to read a nearly unabashed review for Treme, but before I get to the praise I’ll dismiss with the one caveat I believe it’s important to note.

David Simon’s first masterpiece, The Wire, was rich with occasionally heavy-handed political commentary, particularly in the fifth season, mostly along the lines of power corrupts, bureaucracy is broken, the system no longer works. Treme lays this on fairly thick as well; not quite fifth season thick, but at least as much as the rest of The Wire. It’s not a problem for me, but I can imagine some eye-rolling from those who found that aspect of The Wire irritating after a while. Now, moving on.

Nobody, and I mean Nobody, writes real, honest characters, better than David Simon, and proof is located throughout Treme. All of our best recent television shows explore humanity in a deep and interesting way, but none of them since maybe Six Feet Under explores just regular everyday people in such an honest and authentic fashion.

Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and Game of Thrones are all true to themselves but none of them show real people; they’re exaggerated by their circumstances and place and time; truth through something other everyday life.

Treme deals with characters who are real people facing real problems; on the job, with their relationships, with occasional death and disease (and one pretty big hurricane) struggling to make a difference and just to make it at all. It’s not as grand as all that though. It’s not made out to be more than it is, but you get to know and love the characters that you invest yourself in their lives.

Simon is always putting his characters in difficult situations; when there’s an enemy it’s often some version of the system, which could have been seen as a cheap out but instead just feels true to the reality of the lives that New Orleans residents but even all city dwellers deal with on a daily basis. Conflict in Treme is authentic rather than forced. Sure, things feel easy compared to The Wire, but not every show needs to have an equally bleak outlook. Like The Wire, Treme celebrates its characters, but unlike the Wire it seems like a couple of them end up in a better place than they started.

A few of the lesser characters don’t really get the screen time to be developed and stand in more for their roles in other people’s and generla New Orleans stories (Chris Coy’s journalist may be the best example) but even they feel like people, and not stock characters, even with the lack of storyline that they get. A vast majority of the main characters have real in depth character arcs and personalities that resonate strongly whether you like them or hate them, or anywhere in between. There aren’t obvious favorite characters, and when characters get together or break up, the conflicts are complex and not simply one person’s fault or the other (usually). Characters grow, but it doesn’t feel forced. Antoine Baptiste’s ride from occasionally working trombonist to bona fide school band teacher and mentor is tirumpant and feels absolutely earned and true to the character, while Davis more or less ends up right where he started, and that isn’t seen as failure either.

Treme is a love letter to New Orleans in the best possible way. It feels authentic; it’s hard for me to say that with any authority, as a New Yorker who has been to New Orleans once in my life over a decade ago, but everything I’ve read seems to support it. Aside from the authenticity (which I do think matters somewhat in the way Simon is attempting to portray the show but is impossible for me to judge) the show makes me, who has only been to New Orleans once in his life with his family over a decade ago, absolutely fall in love with New Orleans. I don’t particularly care about jazz; it’s one of the music forms I’ve never been able to get into, and many of the forms of pop music featured in Treme aren’t strictly to my taste. Treme is filled with this; music is a huge theme in the show; and if you had described this to me ahead of time, I’d think I’d have no to little interest in the show or at least be bored by the music scenes. But I wasn’t. Instead of my lack of interest in that music turning me off of the show, the show’s sheer love and appreciation of the music won me over. It’s like contagious laughter; the appreciation and love for the music and the rest of New Orleans culture is contagious.

When it comes down to it, the only thing that ties every character in Treme together is their pull and their tie to New Orleans. These aren’t people who are living lives that could just be replicated in any other city. From the musicians, to the culinary world, to the super local Indian culture (that I’ve read about on the internet, watched four seasons of this show and still don’t really get), they spoke to the love-hate relationship of New Orleans residents to their city. They are constantly frustrated about the disappointments of their city, but for most of them (though not all) there’s no other place they’d rather live.

I’m a huge proponent of on-site filming. I admit it’s not always practical or necessary – it wouldn’t make sense or matter for Parks & Recreation to be filmed in Indiana – but it really does make a difference for shows like Treme. Of course, without David Simon and Eric Overmyer’s writing and characters, the setting doesn’t make a whit of difference. But as I’m sure they’d agree, the setting (while not a character – anyone who says the setting is a character should be shot on sight) really places the viewer there into these people’s lives in a way that sets just wouldn’t.

I’ve made the claim before that people who love Friday Night Lights should love Treme, as they’re both shows that deal with real people helping real people, the good that lies deep inside most people no matter what screwed up things they do, and the strength of the bonds of families, friends, and other relationships to withstand difficulties. I’m unquestionably a big Friday Night Lights fan but sometimes plots felt forced, as if there had to be, say, a steroids arc, because it’s football. Treme does hit on all the obvious big New Orleans post-Katrina subjects, but it never feels forced. The world, one of my favorite parts of The Wire as well, feels so large, as characters fly around in the background; minor characters who would be ignored in other shows get lines that don’t matter for the plot but just make Treme’s world feel bigger. Treme doesn’t feel contained; it feels like the real world, which is one of the highest compliments I can give.

It’s too late, unfortunately for Treme. It’s never coming back, and we’ll never learn more about Antoine and Janette and Ladonna and Annie. Still, I’m thankful I got three and a half seasons of a show absolutely nobody watched. Please, tell someone you love to watch this show and have the pleasure of enjoying it for the first time..

Tags: End of Season Report, End of Series Report, HBO, Treme

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Categories End of Season Report

Ranking the Shows That I Watch – 2013 Edition: 36-33

6 Jan

We start off our next chunk of four with a couple of dramas, followed by a couple of comedies part of a very close group that moves into the next four.

36. Black Mirror

Black Mirror is a British science fiction anthology series, similar thematically to The Twilight Zone or The Outer Limits with hour long episodes focusing on the challenges of modern technology. Because it’s British there are just three episodes a season, and two seasons, the second which aired last year. Occasionally the episodes can be a little bit on the nose in terms of the danger technology poses, but there’s generally at least enough of a twist or unexpected plot directions to ensure the episodes remain interesting and fulfilling. Particularly, in the second episode of the most recent season, the episode appears to be going in a predictable and overdone direction between a reveal dramatically changes the point of view.

35. The Walking Dead

I consider myself, and I’m still surprised by this, a relative supporter of The Walking Dead at this point in the show’s life span. It’s been an incredibly rocky road, up and down, with some peaks, and some deep valleys. The second season was a slow, poorly-paced affair, punctuated by a couple of high spots but the show has improved, if in a three steps forward, two steps back fashion, since then. The season half of the third season had more good episodes than bad, as did the first half of the fourth season, with the biggest downside in both being the writers decisions to overplay their use of the Governor, a good villain with limitations the show didn’t choose to see. The show still has issues. It can be on the nose, and many of the characters aren’t as richly constructed as they should be, a problem a show that cycles through hcaracters as quickly as The Walking Dead does is bound to have. Still, I’m still watching which I wasn’t sure I would be at times in the second season.

34. Wilfred

Elijah Wood stars in this relatively under-the-radar FX show based on an Australian show of the same name about a man who sees his neighbor’s talk as a man in a dog suit who talks. There’s a lot of different ways to go with that premise, but Wilfred mostly sticks to the lighter side, going for humorously absurdist rather than dark. One or two episodes a year attempt to examine the darker implications of the fact that Wood sees a dog as a human, and those episodes have a very mixed record. The third season was largely on the same level as the first. The episodes can get somewhat repetitive and there’s a formula, in which the dog is kind of a manic pixie dream dog who screws up Wood’s life but often ends up advising him for the better. Still, it works decently well, and the occasional super out there episodes hit at a higher percentage than the others.

33. It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia just reached 100 episodes last fall in its ninth season, an amount of seasons still hard for me to fathom. The show has long since become a hit and then faded somewhat into the background between newer, hotter shows, but it’s still churning out its brand of comedy, setting all its characters against one another for some stupid non-consequential reason, or against innocent Philadelphians. It’s a concept that could easily run out of ideas, and it’s impressive that the writers have done as good as job as they have, although it does occasionally feel like it’s retreating the same ground. It was a very hit or miss season with the best episode possibly being “Mac Day” where Mac got to control everything the gang did for the day.

Tags: Black Mirror, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Ranking the Shows That I Watch 2013, The Walking Dead, Wilfred

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Categories Ranking The Shows That I Watch

Fall 2013 Review: Alpha House

3 Jan

With Netflix this past year showing that television can come from, well, the internet instead of television, Amazon, desperate to be a player in the streaming video scene, said “me too.” The more visible of Amazon’s initial two efforts is Alpha House, because it stars the well-known and consistently excellent John Goodman (and less visibly The Wire and Homicide veteran Clark Johnson) and is created by long-time Doonesbury scribe Gary Trudeau. I’m not particularly familiar with Doonesbury other than knowing that it contained political satire with a liberal bent and caught fire in the ’70s. Reading it was daunting because it felt like you needed decades of catching up to figure out what was going on, and when I read comics as a kid I remember seeing a walking cigarette, saying what the fuck, and not ever trying again.

Still, I thought with what I knew about Trudeau and what I knew about Alpha House – that it’s about four Republican senators who live together in a house in DC – it would be a cutting satire. It’s certainly a satire, but it’s not particularly cutting, and I don’t mean this as a negative. The show actual shows a begrudging warmth if not entirely respect for its main characters, at least in the first episode.

It’s warm and more occasionally smile-inducing than laugh out loud funny. There are bits that feel like they should be funnier; I get the joke but they don’t necessarily click. Unlike other shows from this fall where the jokes don’t work (see my review of The Michael J. Fox Show), I don’t think they’re that far off. The jokes are in the right direction, and the cast is generally winning in their delivery. The funniest moment, still, is due to an uncredited Stephen Colbert cameo playing over the end credits.

The show is a much more stylistic parody of the inanity of the Washington DC political culture, than a mundane real life more accurate portrayal in Veep, the most logical television comparison, and a show which shares some similarities and sensibilities. The target of most of the specific barbs are the tea party types; the Republican main characters could be viewed, from their actions, as empty hypocrites, but it’s not how they come off. They certainly seem partly absurd but also partly sensible, having to adjust to the ridiculous whims of their constituents just to ensure they get to come back and do it again. Veep is purposefully free of American political parties, which allows it to explore certain aspects of Washington culture in a richer way while neglecting others. Alpha House does not shy away from partisan politics, and while that and other choices probably take this show farther from Veep’s take on day-to-day Beltway life, it allows a surprisingly gentle but still apt satire of American political culture.

It’s not great but it is decently well done, and due to my personal preferences I probably like this better than other comedies with pilots of similar quality because of its subject matter and style. There’s a lot of room for growth, but unlike many other so-so shows, it’s fairly easy to see where that growth could come from.

Will I watch it again? Maybe. It’s not a top priority and I certainly didn’t finish the episode just wanting to immediately see the next, as happens with the best pilots. Still, I grew more fond of the show as it went along and it’s conceivable that I could marathon this in a spare moment later in the year – I do enjoy political comedy when done well.

Tags: Alpha House, Amazon, Fall 2013 TV Season

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Categories Fall 2013 TV Season

Ranking the Shows That I Watch – 2013 Edition: 40-37

1 Jan

Okay, we’re full on into shows I actually like. There’s a lot of good tv out there these days, eh? Being in the 30s doesn’t mean a show is bad, it simply means I watch too much television.

40. The Bridge

The Bridge is the last show on this list that I have genuinely mixed feelings about; everything above it is pretty safely in the like camp for now. A new 2013 entrant with an up and down, up and down first season, I liked a lot and I didn’t like a lot about The Bridge. The show was strangely paced, sometimes greatly to its benefit, sometimes to its detriment. There are loads of good ideas but the writers sometimes didn’t know which plots to focus on and which characters were the most interesting. Matthew Lillard was one of the better returning characters and I hope he’ll be sticking around. The primary two actors are very good and they’re at their best when they transcend the standard police murder mystery stuff and dig deeper which they do, well, sometimes. I left the season not having any idea how confident to be about the second season but I’ll at least watch.

39. House of Cards

This is not a great show, but it is a good pot boiler that keeps you watching through the end – the all-at-once netflix format serves it well. The show is a bit nutty and goes a little off the rails, but while the plot doesn’t totally make sense, it makes enough sense that you can follows the convoluted steps in your head if you don’t think too hard about. Not every angle truly works and a tad more restraint may have pushed it a little higher. It’s an absolutely credit that the plot, which could have fallen apart easily and is pretty pivotal to the show, actually worked enough to make it a success, and credit the Netflix system and the guarantee of 13 episodes for giving it any chance at all to pace itself the way the writers wanted it. Does it all make sense? Well, enough, and that’s exactly enough. Kevin Spacey’s southern accent is equal parts grating and delightful and while I’m not on the edge of my seat awaiting the second season, I’m going to watch it. Corey Stoll’s role as a troubled Pennsylvania congressman was one of the season’s highlights.

38. Siberia

As I mentioned above, I genuinely enjoyed Siberia and the fact it’s #38 simply says more about the amount of good tv out there than about Siberia itself. I’m fairly sure I know the only three people who watched this show. It’s based on a strange, brilliant, high-concept idea of making a scripted reality competition show, and the creators actually kind of delivered on the idea. It was trippy, weird, campy, and it didn’t always work but it was surprisingly fun. I honestly think this is the type of show that really deserved a little cult that simply never developed around it. It did a much better job of mimicking reality show types and the bad acting that accompanies them than any comedy I’ve seen. One day, I’ll make a shirt with the revealer on it and walk around with it and absolutely no one in New York City will ever recognize it. If you have a day when you’re snowed in and doing nothing, marathon this guy. It’s not an all time series by any measure and there are no brilliant deeper layers but I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised. As long as you don’t take it too seriously, it’s an awful lot of fun.

37. Family Tree

Light and delightful and fun. I’m not the biggest cult fan of Christopher Guest’s mockumentaries but I do generally enjoy them and I felt the same way about this show. If you like those movies you’ll love it, if you hate those movies, you’ll hate it, and if you’re somewhere in the middle I think you’ll be like me. Chris O’Dowd is an eminently liekable star and it’s just a cute and generally feel good piece of media about a man trying to discover his ancestry to learn more about himself after a break up. It’s awkward and weird but unlike British Ricky Gervais awkward it’s the kind of awkward that more often than not (albeit not always) works out all right in the end. It’s generally innocent and weird and well-meaning rather than vicious. There aren’t a ton of laugh out loud moments, but there are a few, and there’s more moments that just make you smile.

Tags: Family Tree, House of Cards, Ranking the Shows That I Watch 2013, Siberia, The Bridge

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Categories Ranking The Shows That I Watch

Ranking the Shows That I Watch – 2013 Edition: 44-41

30 Dec

Next four up – we inch towards shows that I actually like! A note that I may have forgotten to make early – differences between one show and the next are often slight; sometimes it’s the difference of which side of the bed I got up in the morning; if two shows are next to each other, which one I like more may switch on the day; if one show is 15 higher, I probably like it more. Moving on.

44. Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.

You know that feeling, when you really just want a show to be better? I mean, of course you want every show you watch to be better, but some feel like they’re worse for a reason, or it would be more difficult to make them better, or they’re just tired out and honestly, although you want some new ideas, you don’t really have any either. And then there are those shows that just well, should be better, and it honestly shouldn’t be that hard to make them better, and that’s what makes them so frustrating. Marvel’s Agents of Shield is a new show with definite promise from the Whedon empire. There are seeds of interesting characters, but a disappointing lack of characterization and wit which have marked all TV shows Whedon has previously been associated with. It’s delivered on juuuust enough promise that I’m going to continue to watch because I decided I would at least until the end of the first season. After that, well, I’d rather just hope and say I’m glad I don’t have to make that call now. Be better, Marvel’s Angets of Shield. I know you can be.

43. Community

If you read the internet, you know the basic deal surrounding Community this past season (and this upcoming one). Creator and genius Dan Harmon fired, but show kept on the air, taken over by new show-runners. Opinions of the fourth season range from mediocre to unspeakably make-you-want-to-kill-yourself bad, and Dan Harmon isn’t the only one to share that latter end of the spectrum. It’s not a good season and it’s worse because it’s Community, because it’s the characters and the universe we fanboys and fangirls (so few people actually watch Community that you’re a fanboy or fangirl by definition if you do) care so much about and are so deeply invested in. Still, I lean towards the season being mediocre. It’s not good; and it’s vastly disappointing but it’s not like it’s actually awful by regular TV standards, just by the high standards we’ve grown accustomed to as Community fans. More than bad, it’s just off; the tone felt different and not in a good way. The great cast made it watchable even when they could have used better material to work with. Still, let’s get excited for this year. Three years ago, I never thought Community would see a fifth season.

42. Downton Abbey

This has become one of those shows that I think I might stop watching, start watching a couple months after the season started, get just engulfed enough to finish the episodes pretty quickly, and then promptly forget pretty quickly after finishing. That sums up where Downton Abbey is at this point. It’s a soap that doesn’t have a huge amount of long-term thought-provoking value, but it does have redeeming qualities, and though I won’t think about it for a while and probably won’t watch any of the episodes remotely around when they air, I will actually watch them before the next season comes around. We Americans may mock the UK left and right for its aristocracy and royalty, and with good reason, but we can also admit to being mildly enchanted by it, and honestly, more than anything by the amazing buildings in which they seem to live and their endless sheer amount of rooms. As long as Maggie Smith remains, I’m probably not going anywhere.

41. Homeland

I’ve expounded on this in great depth so I’ll spare you the grisly details. But suffice to say, I viewed this season as something of a make or break. I gave the show a partial mulligan for Season 2’s disappointment. They had stuck themselves in a tough place and I wanted to give them a chance to start something new with a clean slate. The writers chose not to go in that direction and instead retread old ground in not particularly interesting and more so not particularly convincing ways. They had a chance to start anew, to be different, to accept the successes of the first season but move on, realizing they couldn’t reach those highs the same way again. If they had gone in that direction, it might not have worked, but it would have been a real attempt. Instead, Homeland moved another step towards 24, which wouldn’t be a bad thing if it didn’t want so badly to be more than that and I didn’t know that it once was. It’s still above some other shows because the acting is very good and even in the disappointing season there are isolated strong moments and plotlines. But it’s little solace from a show with one of the best debut seasons out there.

Tags: Community, Downton Abbey, Homeland, Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Ranking the Shows That I Watch 2013

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Categories Ranking The Shows That I Watch

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