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“You let Messer get away?”
I really like Justified. Timothy Olyphant is a US marshall in backward Harlan County, Kentucky, but the show focuses at least as much on the local gang leaders. A white supremacist who finds god in prison, a plump store owner who acts as matriarch for a huge crime family, a sleazy security consultant who operates out of a caravan. It conjours its own vivid version of this sunny, rural, booze-soaked culture bristling with guns and grudges. It’s a place where even the criminals – even the idiot criminals – address everyone with a folksy politeness, and speak in colourful euphemisms. And watching it feels a little like going there, to a part of the present day that feels like an older, slower time. The store owner, Mags Bennett, was the main character of the excellent second season. The third’s just starting in the US now, and it’s already introduced some great new candidates for the role of lead antagonist. | ||
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sQUEAKYfOAMpEANUT: Hey Tom, I know this is entirely unrelated and you've been busy been a super-cool indie game developer, but have you had time to play the Mass Effect 3 demo? You're still one of my favorite gaming writers and I'd love to hear your opinions on it. I was a little disappointed, to be honest.
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Boss is the evil West Wing: a political drama about a powerful figure concealing a degenerative illness, but one in which no-one is likeable or trying to do the right thing. It’s still about smart people working hard to do their job well, they’re just terrible, terrible people with horrible, horrible jobs.
I love it. Usually not liking anyone is a problem for me, but here they’re all such Machiavellian jerks that it’s great fun to watch them try to outscrew each other. Kelsey Grammer plays the mayor, the main character, which is the main reason I checked it out. A quick calculation reveals I have watched at least 80 hours of Frasier. Impressively, given that, I saw him as that character for about 3 seconds – after that, he is unmistakably the seething, deranged, furious Tom Kane. As it goes on, Boss is getting brutal to the point of brilliant absurdity. Kane seems hopelessly screwed at every turn, but there’s always a new depth to sink to, one more sacred thing to sacrifice. The director thinks he’s being a bit more artful than he really is, and we see rather more of the sex than we strictly need to, but neither gets to be a huge problem. It’s clever, surprising and horrible. | ||
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TooNu: 1997 - 1998. Friday nights, channel 4, 2200. I think Friends was on before it.
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Pentadact: Yep! I love that we don't hear what Finn's plan is, but can infer that it's basically "dress up as ghosts and beat the stuff out of him".
Didn't find it sad, though, that lemon thing is too terrifying to pity. | ||||
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Years back, Craig linked me to a pilot for a cartoon about a boy and a shape-shifting dog voiced by Bender from Futurama. It was eight minutes long, and amazing. Here it is: It seemed far too awesome to ever get picked up, and sure enough, no-one ever mentioned it again. Until about a month ago, when someone said something about an Adventure Time T-shirt on Twitter. I was all, “Man, did that pilot go down so well people still buy stuff relating to it years later? That makes it even dumber that it definitely never got picked up, a fact I will continue to assume without ever checking.” Then I checked that assumption, and found they made FIFTY THREE EPISODES of this incredible thing and never told me. I would have bought the hell out of a DVD box set or something, but the Cartoon Network cleverly saw me coming and decided not to release one so that I would have no way of giving them money. You win this round, Cartoon Network – I’ll watch these unauthorised rips of your content on YouTube. But mark my words: one day you’ll slip up, and there’ll be a way for me to pay for Adventure Time. And on that day, you will know the wrath of my twelve to eighteen pounds. Here’s another great episode before I explain why all the episodes are great. All the episodes are great because:
I say every episode is great, but they’re not always funny: some of them are so weird or so dark – or so both – that there aren’t many jokes. But that visual imagination and the likeable heroes mean it always works as a straight story – even if it has a completely bizarre ending. It’s weird to be watching this at a time when Futurama is back, and doing gender humour that wouldn’t even get a pity laugh on an open mic night. Every time that series has bombed in recent years, it’s when it betrays its characters to attempt some weak social commentary or manufacture drama. Adventure Time shows why characters and imagination are always more important than plot or gags, even in a comedy.
More Adventure Time, Futurama
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CW: It's a good show but it can get really weird. In one episode a penguin humps the dogs face, completely out of nowhere. I don't see why this was put in...
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The Shadow Line is finished now, and it was good until it got a bit wanky at the end. It’s nice to have something with a plot that genuinely requires some processing between episodes, and the cast has made me a fan of four of five actors I’d never seen before. But a lot of characters felt the need to laboriously explain how the plot related to the broader themes the writer intended to touch on, some could not leave a room without valedicting six to ten separate times, and more than ever before, they would not stop trying to get the words ‘shadow’ and ‘line’ into the same sentence.
OK: “I might have a shadow on a line” is part of the plot, and if you tell me that’s the real cop lingo for an inside man on a drug deal, I can’t dispute it. But it’s so close to the title that no-one can hear it without a reflexive immersion break of, “Hey, that’s like the title of the show!” And it isn’t actually the title of the show. I mean, it doesn’t explain it or give it any extra meaning. If a shadow is an inside man and a line is a drug deal or recurring drug deal, what’s a shadow line? A sentient drug deal that agrees to tell the police about itself? So it gets painful when they mix four or five of these mentions with awkward references to “crossing the line”, “finding the line”, and subsequently attempting to “walk the line”, all while having to “live in the shadows”, “run to the shadows”, or “write significant-sounding dialogue for a show named The Shadow Line. From the shadows. Line.”
More The Shadow Line
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roBurky: I didn't get through the first episode. I couldn't find anything to care about.
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Chris’s blog is reminding me I haven’t talked about what’s on in ages. Here’s what I’m watching and why.
Game of ThronesMost of PC Gamer have devoured George R R Martin’s fantasy novels whole or in part – not me. My reading habits are based on identifying the shortest possible thing worth reading, reading half of it, then forgetting it exists. So I was extra glad to have the apparently awesome series turned into shiny pictures and shouty sounds for me. It’s awesome. I was loving it even from the very slow first episode, before any characters establish themselves as particularly likeable. Now that it’s kicked off, the characters are actually more exciting than the action. It’s a series in which I can’t remember anyone’s name, but can describe who I’m talking about at work the next day in just a few words. Although in one case those words are “The guy who always sounds like he’s narrating a videogame intro” (the ex-slave trader). Everyone had told me the books were brutal, which put me off, but I see the appeal now. It has just enough heart to make you genuinely care, and just enough guts to exploit it.
The Shadow LineIntricate new BBC drama about the assassination of a drug lord and the two parties investigating it: the police and his former henchmen. I don’t know why I wasn’t expecting this to be good, but I wasn’t and it is. The deceased’s nephew plays unhinged with sociopathic ease, and Chiwetel Ejiofor (bad guy from Serenity) manages to make even an amnesia plotline darkly intriguing. Tracking two parties pursuing the same leads, it doesn’t shy away from the repetition that naturally entails. Instead it uses it as a character profiling technique: three very different men all interrogate the same two associates of a missing man, and which one they each choose to call when they hear from him tells us everything we need to know about what they fear or care about most.
The KillingA crime series that revolves entirely around one murder, based on a Danish series of the same name. I’m watching it partly out of curiosity about how well one investigation stretches over 13 hours of television, partly because it has the amazing Michelle Forbes in it, and partly because it rains a lot. Apparently that never stops feeling atmospheric. I’ll tell you what doesn’t stretch well over 13 hours of television: a character subplot whereby the main detective is juuuust about to leave for California at all times, she’s just hanging around to chase this one last lead, then she’s going, definitely this time. That starts in episode one, which is not coincidentally the same moment it starts to feel false and ridiculous.
Running WildeComedy by the creator of Arrested Development, starring Will Arnett (Gob) and occasionally Peter Serafinowicz. I’d heard little about it, and nothing positive except that The Onion didn’t think it was as unfunny as people were saying it was. Turns out it’s great. It has a lot of the same subtle wordplay and neat farces as Arrested Development – including a ridiculous number of sly references to that series – but actually makes me laugh more. It sticks more closely to its two main characters, which is good because one of them is Will Arnett. | ||
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Entropy: The best thing about Game of Thrones, for me at least though, is listening to all the non-book readers speculate. It's funny how wrong they usually are.
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Aaron Sorkin is the guy who wrote A Few Good Men, The West Wing seasons 1-4, Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, and The Social Network.
Graham: I’m reading the pilot script for Sorkin’s new show. I will send it to you, but as a preview, simply close your eyes and imagine that Aaron Sorkin was writing a TV show. Bingo! You now have all the contents of this script in your head. Me: Wow, awesome. What’s it about? Before I read your response, I’m going to write a synopsis of what I think it’ll be like.
Graham: Paragraphs 2, 3 and 4 are spot on. 5 doesn’t quite happen, but not far from it, 6 doesn’t happen but will in future episodes, 7 probably does happen but I haven’t finished reading it yet. It’s called “More As The Story Develops”. It’s set behind the scenes at a cable news program. It’s partially inspired by Keith Olbermann. It stars Jeff Daniels as the brilliant but kind of assholish news pundit. The show-within-the-show is on a fictional network called UBS, which is the network from Network (and the network Studio 60 was on, until NBC picked up the pilot and changed the name to NBS). Events happen, Jeff Daniels ends up in crisis – has been in crisis – and the person who comes to help him turns out to be a brilliant woman with whom he had a romantic relationship. It also stars a mixture of Dana from Sports Night and Jordan from Studio 60, Isaac from Sports Night, Natalie from Sports Night. Not the actors, just those characters. Also there’s a young guy who is kind of a cross between Jeremy from Sports Night and Sam from The West Wing. But it’s on HBO, so sometimes people say “fuck”. That’s new.
Me, writing a blog post after reading the script: Yeah. It’s so unmistakably Sorkin, you almost wonder if it’s not Sorkin but a Sorkin stalker who’s devoted his life to perfectly mimicking every trope and character Sorkin has ever written. Early on, I was thinking, “I know why this is funny, I know why it’s engaging me, I recognise all the Sorkin tricks and understand why they work.” It’s a rhythmic and always slightly absurd interplay between smart characters who are smart in different ways, and angry, exasperated or cynical about those differences. He can repeat that formula as much as he likes, I’m never going to stop enjoying it. These are my buttons, he has found them. Towards the end, though, it becomes more than the offspring of Sports Night and Studio 60. As step 7. kicks in and starts to resolve step 4., Sorkin adds some basic stage directions about what the score should be doing. I’m not hearing the score, he doesn’t tell me what it would sound like, he just says what kind of mood it should reflect. And each time, it’s a perfect description of the mood I’m already starting to feel from the script. Without even being played, the score is somehow reinforcing and boosting that escalating sense of excitement, and by the absolute climax of the action – which is an ordinary goddamn news report – I am tingling. It’s the emotional high of seeing characters you care about overcome obstacles to do important and difficult work incredibly well. Unlike the smaller Sorkinisms, I know what’s happening but I don’t know how he’s doing it. As long as he can keep doing it, More Story is going to be great. | ||
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SportsNight Lover: So Sorkin's gonna keep writin' SportsNight till he gets it right?
Wow, impressive. So the last episode of season 1 will be called, "What Kind of Day It's Been," Joshua Malina will show up, there will be a slew of Gilbert & Sullivan references, at some point someone will paraphrase Thomas Merton and go, "'I don't always know what the right thing to do is, my Lord, but I think the fact that I want to please you pleases you." Someone will be in the tall weeds Someone will decide that, "ordinarily it takes hours for someone to realize I'm not quaified..." Oooh, maybe he could throw back in the Three Dog Night songs and see if someone else still hasn't slept with someone in Spain because they've never been to Spain. Yes, I'm looking forward to it! | ||||
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“Based on what these people saw in those two episodes, the FX-centric viewer just rated it lower in areas such as intensity, suspense, sexiness. When you talk to the USA-type viewer, they rate it lower than their favorite shows because it’s not a land in which every babe is hot, and the sky is incredibly blue, and everybody lives in an apartment three times as big as they could legitimately afford, and everything comes out great in the end. What we ended up with—and this is a much more nuanced and complicated answer—was a show that somehow fell between two brands.”
Depressing as that is, it’s nice to see the president of the whole network take significant time to explain the exact logic by which they axed Terriers. And while it is a bad name, and showing anything dog-related inevitably hurt it, he’s a pretty clear thinker about statistics and their significance. There’s even something refreshingly scientific about the way he breaks down his job, and his capacity to influence the outcome. It’d be nicer to think there’s a massive audience for smart stuff with no obvious hook and some evil middleman was stopping it reaching them, but Landgraf’s elaboration is more likely to be tough truth than an easy lie. “If the answer is as simple as change Terriers to Beach Dicks and take the dog off the poster, and it’ll quadruple its audience, then I’m being dumb in not picking it up, especially since it’s such a good show. I did my best to answer that question, and unfortunately the answer was resoundingly no, that’s not likely to create a different outcome. Because for whatever reason—that’s disappointing and not entirely fathomable—people just don’t want to watch this show.” Cheers to Chris for the link. | ||
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RIP Terriers « Mana's Menagerie of Maniacal Mumblings: [...] Terriers was a cool show. It is with sadness that it has gotten axed by FX on December 8th. Here’s a great short post by Tom Francis on its death. I always thought network presidents were out of touch with reality (you know, like everyone with [...]
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