Since I watched way more television this year than I did movies, it seems fair to make a parallel list: shows I watched this year, ranked, with season(s) and episodes watched noted. Many of the shows are new, but a few are catalog titles. I’m mixing those in anyway. This list is highly approximate. (Duh.)
(James Yoshimura)
Be careful what you wish for, I guess. I wanted plot, and what the Treme writers gave me was LaDonna being brutally raped in her own bar even though she saw the problem coming and had seemed to head it off at the pass. That’s not what I was hoping for, but the suspenseful pacing of the scene, the terror on Khandi Alexander’s face (contrasted with her usual “don’t give me that bullshit” expression), the way everything was shrouded in shadow to heighten the anonymous and random nature of the crime … this was well done. (It’s hard to figure out a way to congratulate a show for doing brutal violence well. “Enjoy” is obviously not the right word for how I feel about it. Ahem. I guess this: it felt real.)
The rest of the episode was fine — the shot of Albert’s beaming face at the Road Home office when the functionary told him that all his paperwork was in order was a highlight. He’s a grumpy old man (not without justification!), so I liked that the audience got its reward for sticking with Albert through these 13 hours of bullshit he’s been through — the warmth and general feeling of peace emanating from Clarke Peters’s face was a sight.
Sonny finally seems to have a story, which is nice — in the same episode, we got proof that the stories about him doing rescue work after the storm were true (I’m not sure if it was intentional, but I always wondered if the discomfort on his face when people talked about that was because it’d been made up or exaggerated) and a path forward for him, as he’s going to audition for Antoine’s band. (The jokes about how all the guitarists in town are white and can only play white music were a little on-the-nose, but Wendell Pierce sold it, as always — the man is a genius. Motherfucker.)
I’m still annoyed with the chef character in New York — Anthony Bourdain knows a whole lot more about high-powered NYC kitchens than I do, but Brulard feels like a caricature. Yes, some bosses (especially temperamental artist chefs) will be assholes about people dealing with personal stuff, but this on top of throwing plates and telling Janette to listen to her fish? Ugh. There’s no humanity, and the only proof we have that any of this is worth it was that little line they gave Ziggy1 back in the first episode about how he’s an asshole but “he’s a great cook.” At least Janette got to make fun of the guy to Jacques. (JACQUES! Janette has to come back to New Orleans, if only so we can have more Jacques. I love that guy.)
Apparently the character’s real name is Nick, but fuck that — James Ransone is Ziggy forevermore, amen. ↩
(David Simon)
The most revered man in television managed, in the course of this hour, to dispel all the good feelings that Eric Overmyer’s season premiere imparted. Simon amped up the preachy tone and worse-than-a-bad-documentary exposition (they fired all the teachers! Bobby Jindal’s going to be the governor! The bridge shootings were the fault of the higher-ups, not the cops on the ground!) and only rarely let actions speak louder than words (and, in one of the few examples of showing instead of telling, chose to do it in a pointlessly ostentatious fashion, shooting the Davis vs. station manager fight in near-silence from the safety of the DJ booth).
The points Simon wants to make are good, and should be said, and should be a part of the culture in the same way that The Wire’s tales of urban decay have become a touchstone, but when did he lose his ability to tell a story? To give characters goals and obstacles in both the short and long term?
Take Antoine: he has a goal to put together a band. That’s a nice medium-term goal, one that he should achieve a couple of episodes into the season so that the rest of the year can play out with the challenges of getting gigs, cutting a record, and so forth. In this episode, his challenge was that a potential trumpet player was locked up with another band. He resolved to talk to the other band’s leader. He talked to the other band’s leader. Problem solved. How could anyone think this was compelling storytelling? What struggle does Antoine have such that the audience can get invested in his attempts to overcome?
(Michael Chamoy)
I am rather free with plot details here, and since it just aired on Monday, I think it’s fair to issue a spoiler alert.
The A story of this week’s Alphas, about Garret Dillahunt’s religious leader whose Alpha ability involves making people have visions, sustained about three acts worth of interest. It took us an act to get to him, but this still left the last 15 minutes or so of the show a little dull, especially since the B story (Rachel tries to get her father to go to the doctor when she smells that he has cancer) pretty much dropped away. I think the problem was over-escalation of the action — Dillahunt’s preacher was menacing throughout the episode, but the shift from “these people might die because he won’t let Dr. Rosen treat them properly” to “these people might die because he’s going to burn down the entire house with them still in it” was too sharp and did not match the subdued tone of the battle between Rosen and the preacher.
Still, there were things to like about the hour — a Rosen-feature episode let David Strathairn loose, I always enjoy watching Dillahunt, the effect that the preacher’s power had on Bill’s ability to “amp up” was a nice touch, and the Nina-Cameron sex scene was hilarious and very Syfy. (I guess that last isn’t really a good thing in the same way as the others.) Also, Dr. Rosen shot the dude, which will hopefully have repercussions far beyond this episode — Alphas isn’t a great show by any means, but I’d like to think we can count on it to have Rosen’s choice to fire the gun at the end be meaningful beyond a line or two of remorse scattered here or there.
(Eric Overmeyer, story also by Anthony Bourdain)
Apparently Anthony Bourdain is getting story-by credits on TV shows now for consulting on how a tyrannical overlord in a New York restaurant acts.
Anyway, Treme is what it is, I’ve accepted, and the power of that acceptance / lowering of my expectations is mighty. Whereas I spent the entire first season of the show frustrated with its glacial pace, lengthy musical interludes that existed merely to exist, and polemical tone, the second season premiere, which we managed to put off watching for four full months, felt fine. The episode showed us where its characters are (Janette’s in New York with the aforementioned tyrant, Annie’s musical career is on the rise), introduced us to some new ones (the dude from Victoria’s cousin and David Morse, not new, but newly elevated to series regular), and set out the theme of the season: crime. Now, it did some of these things in its typical heavy-handed fashion (strip club shooting where Sonny happened to be hanging out, white woman murdered for her purse in a tourist part of town, Morse yelling on the phone to the New York Times about crime and then exclaiming afterward that they’re just eating up the New Orleans carnage), but, as I said, I was expecting this.
Morse’s character brings a new element to the show, I think, that hopefully serves it well as the second season plays out:1 his character is beleaguered, as everyone in New Orleans is beleaguered, but his energy is different. He doesn’t have the anger of Albert, the irrepressibility of Antoine, the knife’s-edge danger of LaDonna, the defeatism of Creighton. He’s closest in temperament to Toni (hence the inevitability of their boning), but she’s more frenetic than Morse’s Colson, and more willing to put on a public face that’s brighter than she really feels. Adding a new character to an already large ensemble, even accounting for a subtraction from the first season, can be difficult if that character hits the same character or story notes as an existing player. I think David Simon & crew have done a good job of adding a distinct voice to the crowd, although one certainly wonders if the Annie-Davis conversation about the size of the band toward the end of the episode (“How do they put that all together?” “This is New Orleans, we put everything together. Do you know what gumbo ya-ya really means? Everyone talks at once.”) was meant to be as obviously a parallel to the show itself as the Creighton lines they chose to close the Season 1 recap (about not thinking about beginnings and ends).
The phrasing of that implies that the show is still ongoing, but I don’t know how else to write it as I’m watching months after the fact. Maybe I’d know better if I read more of the retrospective recaps that the AV Club and HitFix specialize in. ↩
(Gennifer Hutchison, 8/21/11)
Even in the hands of the show’s script coordinator, Breaking Bad continues to be the only show on TV that actually makes me feel bad when characters are awful to each other. This episode’s Bogdan-Walt showdown at the handoff of the car wash keys was a classic example — Bogdan is bitter and angry about having to sell the business, so he spends the meeting getting digs in about Walt’s work ethic and his reliance on his wife. Walt responds with typical passive-aggressive pettiness, demanding that Bogdan not take his framed “first dollar ever made” with him, then, the capper, with Bogdan not even in the room, he uses the dollar to buy a Coke. We know Walt well enough to understand how quickly the satisfaction of the gesture will fade, though.
The most hilariously perfect line of the episode, though, comes in the Jesse-Walt discussion on the grounds of the laundry: “It’s about me!” says Walt, having a remarkable narcissistic epiphany. Is it a little bit of an obvious joke, turning Walt’s self-involvement around, mining humor from the fact that it’s actually true this time, but the sheer disbelief that plays across Aaron Paul’s face as Walt is lost in his own fantasies absolutely sells the line, and the scene.
As I read through my month-old backlog of Nikki Finke articles, a series of WTFs, “!!!”s and others that are basically tweets, except here I can (a) not spam you; (b) use links; (c) not feel ridiculous for tweeting month-old news.
Nellie Andreeva, Staffing Season Highlights: Who Got Hottest Jobs, Which Shows Attracted Most Writers, Deadline Hollywood, 6/21/11.
Could we maybe get them an interesting show to write on? These are, after all, the creators of Reaper. I’d like to think they have more like that in them. (And you leave your Dollhouse jokes at the door, dammit. They did a fine job.)
Andy Greenwald, Regarding the Crazy Thing That Happened on Last Night’s Game of Thrones, Grantland, June 13, 2011.
That last part is key. No HBO exec can go screaming to a showrunner that killing your protagonist is just insane and what are you doing and do you even have a plan because hell yes there’s a plan! It’s right there in the books! (Some of the Twitterinos posited that perhaps leaving Ned alive was where the show would break from the books, but with the execution having come to pass after all, I think we can put aside any notion of liberties.)
Granted that it’s not every book series that kills its supposed protagonist at the end of the first novel either, I’ll wake up from my nap and declare TV to be in a new anything-goes-creatively mode when you tell me about an original television show (i.e. not an adaptation) that pulls something like this.
Which also serves as my “do shut up” to the people who are whining that they don’t want to watch the show anymore with Ned dead. That’s silly. You know the writers are working from a book series, right? And you know that book series is widely beloved by straight-up fans and the more critically minded alike, right? And yet you still don’t think everything’s going to be fine?
Look, I get people who are like “I love Ned! How can I watch this show without Ned!” What bothers me are the fans who, speaking for themselves, try to put across some pseudo-critical nonsense about how the writers don’t understand that in TV, there has to be strong central characters and how can they expect me to keep watching if they’re going to kill them and leave me wondering who I’m going to follow? I don’t know! Don’t worry about it! Why don’t you just decide for yourself if you want to stick with the show and do it instead of turning everything into critical commentary!
Jace Lacob, The Littlest Finger: More Than One Way to Skin a Deer on Game of Thrones
Maybe the reason you can’t shake it is because that’s exactly what she says! I mean, what?
