These are not spoilery except for The Crown, in which nothing really happens.

The Crown – Churchill’s Expression

Series 1, Episode 7
Netflix

The Crown is about the current queen of England’s early reign, a role which commands tremendous fanfare and almost no power. So the series zooms in on what small things she can do: so far her most politically influential move has been to invite someone to a dinner and then cancel it.

So when she discovers that Churchill and his senior staff have been lying to her about the type and severity of his illness, her instinct is to do nothing. Her character arc in this episode is to work up the courage and authority to instead give them a stern telling-off, which is also effectively nothing.

Churchill has been portrayed thus far as well-intentioned but manipulative – this is not the first time he’s deceived people when he thinks he knows best. He shows great respect for the crown and constitution, but not much for Elizabeth herself: in their first meeting he virtually chides her for offering him a seat, when the etiquette is to stand in the monarch’s presence.

All of which makes it uncertain how he’ll react to this earful. It’s pretty serious to be caught lying to the queen, but he seemed to think little of doing it and we all know there’ll be no real consequences. For most of her reprimand, he looks at his feet. But when the queen expounds the personal aspect of the betrayal, he looks up, and we finally see his reaction.

He might be about to cry. He might be about to die. John Lithgow’s whole considerable face trembles with dismay. He made the decision as a politician strategising to keep himself in power, but in the presence of a queen actually acting like a queen, and acting hurt by him, he’s reduced to a desperately sorry child on the verge of tears. It genuinely twisted my gut.

I heard an interview with him once where said that no matter how ‘big’ a director wants him to go with his performance, he’s always itching to go bigger. So when the practical stakes of a climactic scene are virtually nil, and the emotional stakes have to be carried by a single facial expression, he’s your guy.

The Good Place – The Dog

Series 1, Episode 1
NBC

The Good Place is probably my favourite new show of 2016. I liked the concept immediately: a woman wakes up in heaven, is told only the most virtuous people get there, is congratulated on her selfless works, introduced to her soulmate, and then, when they’re alone, tells him they have the wrong person. She did none of that stuff, she just has the same name. And she’s an asshole.

There’s obviously comedy potential in a jerk having to learn how to pass herself off as a good person, and it’s a very funny comedy. But it’s also a surprisingly compelling serial: the mechanics of how this place works, and how her presence is disrupting it, are always developing. And big cornerstones of the show’s premise are regularly smashed by new developments. It’s the only comedy I can think of where at least half the reason I’m watching is to find out what happens next.

Ted Danson plays the architect of this particular neighbourhood of heaven, and here he’s trying to track down what’s causing all the glitches.

Dirk Gently – The Negotiation

Series 1, Episode 2
Netflix

This new Dirk Gently adaptation takes some getting used to, but it’s worth it. It takes no stories and only one character from the books, Dirk, and inverts almost everything about him. He can be annoyingly zany, the show can be annoyingly serious, and his accomplice Todd can be annoyingly annoyed about both.

But surprisingly, the main thing I loved about Douglas Adams’ writing is intact. It was the nature of his worlds that made me want to keep reading: in Hitchhikers, it felt like they could go anywhere in the galaxy and something bizarre, interesting and funny would happen. In Dirk Gently, it felt like he could stay exactly where he was and something bizarre, interesting and sinister would happen.

The show has that. Weird characters and inexplicable events pile on faster than it seems possible to resolve, but as they blunder through the resulting mess, bit by bit, it starts to tie together. And once you know all the non-sequitors will ultimately make sense, it’s fun to spend time in this world where something bizarre, interesting and sinister is always about to happen.

It also features easily my favourite scene of the year. This is from episode two, and while it does reference many, many plot threads, I don’t consider it a spoiler for any of them for reasons that will become obvious.

Office, day

NEEDLESSLY DICKISH BUSINESSMAN:
Your company is garbage, Desperate! Once I buy it despite hating it, I will change everything you like about it!

DESPERATE BUSINESSMAN:
Go to hell, Needlessly! The merger’s off!

NEEDLESSLY DICKISH BUSINESSMAN:
Without me your company is nothing (but I still want to acquire it)!

DESPERATE BUSINESSMAN:
That’s for me to tearfully acknowledge later and for you to shut up!

NEEDLESSLY DICKISH BUSINESSMAN:
I’m a jerk in my personal life too! (Leaves)

Office, day

REASONABLE SUBORDINATE:
Dammit Desperate, we need this merger or we’re done for!

DESPERATE BUSINESSMAN:
Shut up, closest friend with my best interests at heart! Besides, soon we won’t need Needlessly Dickish OR his money.

REASONABLE SUBORDINATE:
Dammit Desperate, don’t do anything desperate!

DESPERATE BUSINESSMAN:
I don’t have a CHOICE except the one you just mentioned!!

Car, day

JESSICA:
I’m so glad you invited me to Place Where You Live.

JESSICA’S LOVELY FRIEND:
It’s so lovely to see you Jessica! How’s your book tour going?

JESSICA:
Very well, thank you. I am a literary titan known to most of humanity and my work is to everyone’s taste.

JESSICA’S LOVELY FRIEND:
That’s great. I just hope you don’t get wrapped up in the FLASHPOINT OF LOCAL TENSIONS going on while you’re here.

JESSICA:
(Raises quizzical eyebrow)

Apartment, day

HANDSOME YOUNG MAN WHO WORKS FOR SOMEONE BUT IS OTHERWISE NOT REALLY INVOLVED:
I love you PRETTY YOUNG WOMAN WHO IS RELATED TO SOMEONE.

PRETTY YOUNG WOMAN WHO IS RELATED TO SOMEONE BUT OTHERWISE NOT REALLY INVOLVED:
Oh, but it’s no use HANDSOME YOUNG MAN WHO WORKS FOR SOMEONE! In some obtuse way this business merger makes our love impossible!

HANDSOME YOUNG MAN WHO WORKS FOR SOMEONE BUT IS OTHERWISE NOT REALLY INVOLVED:
Ugh, you’re right somehow!

Docks, night

SHADY CONTACT:
I got the stuff, where’s the money?

DESPERATE BUSINESSMAN:
I didn’t think this through.

SHADY CONTACT:
Hey, you’d BETTER have my money!

DESPERATE BUSINESSMAN:
I didn’t think this through.

SHADY CONTACT:
You messed with the wrong Shady Contact, Desperate! I will definitely and literally kill you! Not a figure of speech! If you’re murdered soon, it was me! You hear that, witnesses who heard the victim arguing with someone around this time?

Docks, day

POLICE IDIOT stands over DESPERATE BUSINESSMAN’S BODY. JESSICA arrives immediately somehow.

POLICE IDIOT:
Looks like an open-and-shut case, Mrs F. Witnesses heard Shady Contact threatening to kill him, and as a police officer I don’t like to look for further evidence or consider any other possibilities.

JESSICA:
I’m not so sure, Idiot! Can you get me his phone records?

POLICE IDIOT:
OK, for some reason it’s fine for me to share that private data. But I’m telling you Mrs F, this time you’re wrong. I know I have a 0% success rate and you solve all of the 22 murders that happen near you every year, but

Office, day

NEEDLESSLY DICKISH BUSINESSMAN:
With Desperate out of the way, this merger will definitely go through! Yes, I had a motive to kill him alright.

IRRELEVANT CHARACTER WHO LOOKS CONFUSINGLY FAMILIAR:
I reply, but say nothing of substance and never become relevant to the plot, although I look enough like someone who is that you’re no longer completely sure of what’s happening.

Lovely house, day

JESSICA’S LOVELY FRIEND:
What’s that?

JESSICA:
Hm? Oh, just Desperate’s phone records from the night he died. Do you know, he didn’t make a single call to his wife that night? Don’t you think that’s odd?

JESSICA’S LOVELY FRIEND:
I like you but no.

JESSICA:
All the same, I’m going to keep looking through these records.

JESSICA’S LOVELY FRIEND:
Well, this isn’t at all the right context for this phrase, but a rolling stone gathers no moss.

JESSICA:
Moss… that’s it!

JESSICA’S LOVELY FRIEND:
That’s what?

JESSICA:
The missing piece of the puzzle!

JESSICA’S LOVELY FRIEND:
What puzzle?

JESSICA:
The puzzle of who killed Desperate Businessman!

JESSICA’S LOVELY FRIEND:
Please just say out loud the thing you’ve realised.

JESSICA:
I have to get to the police station immediately! (leaves)

JESSICA’S LOVELY FRIEND:
For fuck’s sake, Jessica!

Docks, night

SOMEONE’S WIFE, YOU FORGET WHOSE is rummaging through a bin at the crime scene.

JESSICA:
Looking for this? (She holds up an earring)

SOMEONE’S WIFE, YOU FORGET WHOSE:
Jessica! No, I was just… I thought I heard a dog, in the bin.

JESSICA:
I’m afraid it’s over, Someone’s Wife. You killed Desperate for basically the same mundane, practical reason as one of the male suspects, but you didn’t get much screen time so it still seems like a surprise. I found your earring at the crime scene, and when I give it to the police I’m sure they’ll prove it was yours.

SOMEONE’S WIFE, YOU FORGET WHOSE:
Not if I happen to have a gun on me and draw it now, honestly planning to kill an old lady over some fairly flimsy evidence but for some reason wanting to warn her first!

POLICE IDIOT:
(Emerging from the shadows) Drop it, Someone’s Wife!

SOMEONE’S WIFE, YOU FORGET WHOSE:
Oh for God’s sake. Why do you let her do these things as a weird piece of theatre?

POLICE IDIOT:
Her chain of evidence is always hopelessly weak, so we just have to hope you’ll either kill her or confess.

JESSICA:
It’s true. I have no reason to mention this beyond simple smarm now, but I never found any earring.

SOMEONE’S WIFE, YOU FORGET WHOSE:
Then how?!

JESSICA:
Oh, it was quite simple, really. The moss. When I saw you at the funeral earlier, the camera focused weirdly on a piece of moss on your shoe. I happened to remember that this moss only grows in one place in the world, the crime scene, and it only sticks to murderers.

But I had to wait for someone to mention the word ‘moss’ in a different context before I made this trivial extra step as if it was a moment of serendipitous inspiration, which for some reason is how we want crimes to be solved.

SOMEONE’S WIFE, YOU FORGET WHOSE:
Well I’d do it again! In moss-proof shoes, and undroppable earrings!

JESSICA:
Again, I never found an earring.

Always an elevator for some reason, day

HANDSOME YOUNG MAN WHO WORKS FOR SOMEONE:
Jessica, we wanted you to be the first to know: we’ve set a date!

JESSICA:
Oh, that’s wonderful!

PRETTY YOUNG WOMAN WHO IS RELATED TO SOMEONE:
I hope you’ll come to the ceremony!

JESSICA:
Oh, I wouldn’t miss it for the world. Just so long as you don’t expect ALL of your guests to survive!

(All laugh)

JESSICA:
Hundreds of people have died around me.

(Freeze frame)

It’s such an extraordinary mix of exciting potential and staggeringly clumsy writing that I’ve had trouble stringing together a sentence about it that uses the word ‘but’ fewer than five times. So I’ll give up on a coherent overview and just list the things I like and don’t like.

Bad

All the relationships. Sorkin apparently no longer understands humans on any level. He’ll start with a tired premise (they fancy each other but won’t admit it! I just thought of this one!) and then take them directly to INSANE MONSTER MODE, where the characters devote their entire lives to ridiculously elaborate Machiavellian schemes to randomly torture people or achieve the opposite of what they want to prove to everyone they don’t want it.

It’s impossible to give a shit about anyone who behaves this way, so from the moment it starts, every further minute spent on relationships is painful. And they never go anywhere and they’re about 50% of the show.

The sexism. It’s getting hard to call it anything else. I’m losing track of the number of plotlines, minor and major, one-off and recurring, that take the form of: “stupid woman is an irrational idiot, man schools her humiliatingly whilst being a selfless manly patriot.” You can write anything. Don’t keep writing that.

The plotlines. I guess the ‘bad’ list has some fairly big stuff on it. I like the news stories they choose to feature, and I often like a lot of what happens in direct relation to them. But the show’s own stories are bizarrely inept.

(Mild plot outline spoilers)

A whole episode hinges on someone accidentally inserting an asterisk into the e-mail address of someone she e-mails regularly, twice, on the same day that the company introduces a system that makes that e-mail the e-mail to everyone in the company. Another spends a freakishly long time describing the plot of the movie Rudy, so that it can be referenced in a final scene that completely misses the stated point – in Rudy, apparently, they give Rudy the thing he’s never had. In Newsroom, they give a millionaire more money.

And in another episode, to quote the Onion, “Who reads a tweet from The Rock to their girlfriend at a party?”

Are the two main characters really called Will MacAvoy and MacKensie MacHale?

Good

It’s a show about making a news programme. I don’t know why, but I can just watch these forever. They’re putting on a performance, so it’s tense and immediate, but it’s also important work, not just entertainment. That’s entertaining.

Sloan. Olivia Munn as the qualified but socially inept financial reporter turns out to be the best character. She’s one of the few whose personal dramas always take a backseat to her work, and the work/life balance of screentime is closer to what it was in the West Wing: mostly work. The one episode where her emotions affect her job, it happens out of a determination to do her job better.

The preaching. I know this comes up almost exclusively in the criticism category for others, but for what it’s worth I like most of the soapboxing. Some of the speeches are powerful, elegantly worded arguments worth making, and I don’t get to see a lot of that. It’s one of the things I liked about the West Wing. It doesn’t bother me hugely that what the character is saying is clearly what the writer believes, it’s only when the reason to say it is flimsy that it becomes a problem. There’s plenty of that too, but it’s nice to see the good rhetoric on telly again.

The closest I can get to a conclusion is that the episodes without a Maggie and Jim plotline are more entertaining than painful. I will continue watching it forever.

Newsroom, though, has been panned. The only piece I’ve read that was positive about the show ended on a bizarre and contextless account of an exchange that makes Sorkin sound like a patronising sexist prick. Particularly bizarre given his work, which typically mocks sexists, features some of the best female characters on television, and even has them competently discuss their differing takes on feminism.

Weirdest of all, Newsroom does seem sexist. It opens with the male star dressing down a female student for her dumb question about America, in which he takes pains to use “sorority girl” as a pejorative, imply she couldn’t possibly be politically engaged (despite her presence at this political debate), and claim America was the greatest country in the world back when “we acted like men”. If it’s meant to be a sexist character rather than a sexist writer, it’s awkward that a) he’s the protagonist, b) he’s so obviously acting as the writer’s mouthpiece at the time, setting up the manifesto for the show.

Most of the reasons to dislike Newsroom stem from that character, Will. His opening meltdown speech is half great (“America is not the greatest country in the world”) and half terrible (“But it used to be”), and that’s as close as we ever get to a reason to like or care about him. Some reviews object to the amount of preaching – I think the preaching itself is excellent, but when it does get old, it’s because people are having to preach at Will, to persuade him to stop being so pathetic.

Despite all that, I really like it. I’m not convinced Sorkin actually is sexist, I think he’s just misjudged how some of this stuff sounds. And I don’t think Will is going to be a problem forever: once he’s on air, we finally see his virtues.

The emerging news story and the crew’s frantic reaction to it is exciting and inspiring for exactly the reasons it seemed to be in the script, and that’s what I’m expecting more of. News is important, and live TV is tense – it has the potential to combine the virtues of his last three shows. It also has the potential to focus on the kind of emotional stubbornness that made Dana and Casey’s relationship get old in Sports Night, Matt and Harriett eternally tedious in Studio 60, and Will so hard to like in this pilot. I’m optimistic it won’t.

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.

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.

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:

• Jake the dog and Finn the human are friends, and both are good guys. This almost never happens. The fact that they’re never jerks to each other in any serious way just makes the series a fun place to be, and the characters completely likeable.
• The dialogue is genius. It’s a mix of the straightforward earnestness of a kids’ cartoon, the fun plays on language you’d normally find in something more mature, and the conspicuously modern idioms that make the heroes feel likeably ordinary in their fantasy setting.
• It’s free and easy with its visual imagination. Technically it’s all set in one place, the Kingdom of Ooo, but whichever direction they head they seem to run into a race of creatures we’ve never seen before, an awesome place unlike any of the others, or a weird new magical artefact. It has the throwaway spontaneity of a child making up a story on the spot, but it follows each one through to an inventive or funny conclusion. It just feels like every time you start a new episode, you’re going to see something completely new.

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.

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.”

Most 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.

Intricate 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.

A 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.

Comedy 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.

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.

1. The show has no main character but primarily revolves around two male professionals who are each exceptionally talented at their slightly different jobs, but slightly under-appreciated.
2. One of them is in a problematic relationship with a strongly opinionated female character whose job brings them into contact and potentially conflict.
3. Another conflict revolves around someone in a position of power imposing a different mindset or agenda on one or all of the main characters, hindering their ability to do their job the ‘right’ way.
4. The pilot features one of the main characters in some kind of exceptional personal or professional crisis, one he cannot hide from the world, and the other characters give him stronger support than he expects or feels he deserves.
5. At least once two people conduct a conversation by each elaborating on their own concerns without ever listening to the other person.
6. One of them argues strongly for the ‘right’ way against his superiors, accepts his fate, then must argue the opposite side when relaying the news to the other characters.
7. At the end of the episode, the fortunes of the character in crisis have changed and the formula for the rest of the series is established.

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.

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.

The first entry of a Minecraft diary I’m starting just went up on PC Gamer – it’s just a short one to start with, but this might turn into a long-running thing. It’s about playing with a sort of permanent death rule: if I die, I have to delete the whole world and everything in it, then start again from scratch in a new one. It’s also starting from when I first played the game, so I know virtually nothing about how it works. The next entry will go up first thing tomorrow, and it’ll probably be every other day from then on.

I’m not going to harp on any more about how good Terriers is – it actually had a bit of a dip around episode 9, getting too bogged down with its heroes’ personal problems to investigate any clever plots – but I am going to give you the full song the ridiculously catchy theme tune is taken from. It was written by the series’ composer Robert Duncan specially for it, but I like that he wrote the full song too.

My Call of Duty: Black Ops review also went up on the site this week. I reviewed both the Modern Warfares, and it sometimes felt like I might be the only one not having his mind blown by the unending B-movie combat.

Both those games had a saving grace: the first had a few really smart sections, and a level of dazzle that was new at the time; and the second’s co-op mode is still the best thing the series has ever done. Black Ops has neither, and its multiplayer is too glitchy to get much out of yet, so it’s the first time the score really reflects how much fun it is to aim-and-squeeze your way through a badly written action movie.

Amusingly, the only other review on Metacritic with a score close to mine calls it “Truly a magnificent single-player experience,” “the best single-player campaign that the series has ever had,” and “stunning”.

Povenmire and Marsh still found themselves fighting for some of their more surreal material. In several episodes, for instance, a character named Major Monogram interjects—apropos of nothing—the phrase “Ever since… the Academy.” A Disney executive quickly flagged the line, arguing (correctly) that it was utter nonsense. Povenmire assured him that it was exactly the kind of nonsense kids would parrot to one another at school. In fact, he felt so confident, he told the executive he expected to one day hear children repeat the line. The skeptical exec pledged to give Povenmire $100 for every time Povenmire heard it (unsolicited, of course).

“He now owes me $2,000,” Povenmire says. “And he said, ‘Can I give it to you in Hannah Montana merchandise?’”

The making of Phineas and Ferb, on Wired. This was the first kids’ TV I’d seen in years when I caught on telly at Kim’s, and I felt like the future of humanity was in better hands than I realised.

It all stems from the Death Note: a book found by a sociopathic hyperintelligent schoolkid that will kill someone if you write their name in it. You have to be picturing their face, and you can specify the time and circumstances of their death. He starts using it to rid the world of violent criminals, but gets into such hot water so quickly that his immediate objective is mostly self preservation.

The detective is never entirely sure if it’s really him doing it, since the flexibility of the book lets him schedule killings of people he’s never met, by natural causes, at times he has a perfect alibi for. But nor can the villain find a good way to kill his rival and get away with it: the two keep manoeuvring so that the villain could always feasibly be innocent, and the detective cannot be safely killed.

It’s a terrifying mind game of questions.
“He’s asking me what the killer would do – do I answer accurately and risk looking like the killer, or throw him off and risk playing dumber than he knows me to be?”
“If he’s telling me that openly, does that mean he knows that I know, or is he trying to find out if I know he knows that I know?”

Luckily, the complexity is kept readable by a completely frank expositional dialogue style, where people actually say things like, “If this had happened sooner, it would have been bad for me!” and “Please could you explain a little better.” You’re forever wondering how the hell the series is going to last more than a couple of episodes further, because massive developments tighten the circle around these two players in almost every one. But it keeps finding clever ways to scupper the dominant player, and luck never sides with either of them too long.

I haven’t finished the whole thing yet, but I can say the first 24 episodes are essential brain fodder. Thanks to Graham and Lisa for recommending it in the pub the necessary five times for me to get around to checking it out. If you’re in the US, PleasingFungus points out that the whole series is available on Hulu for free.

The pilot establishes a rich guy as the villain, getting away with murder, as if that’s going to be the overarching plot for the whole season. Instead it’s picked apart and inverted in a few episodes, and the jobs-of-the-week get much more inventive and entertaining as they unravel it.

Everything else I’m watching at the moment treats its series-scale plot with kid gloves, never daring to move it more than an inch in a single episode to preserve precious plot juice for the finale. Terriers goes at its own with a wrecking ball.

Basically my only complaint has been totally overturned, and unless I’m forgetting something big, this is the best new drama since Dexter Breaking Bad.

Prohibition-era Sopranos. Steve Buscemi is a corrupt county treasurer in Atlantic City in the 20s, and it’s lovely to see him play a position of power. I’ve got so used to him as a snivelling loser that it’s surprising how well his perpetual sneer works as one of superior disdain. The tone is just right, for me: Buscemi’s character is a villain, but not repulsive so far. It’s possible to enjoy the early twentieth century opulence of his life without being put off by the guy himself.

You’ll spend a few episodes trying to figure out which one of the central partnership is the dopey archetype, which one’s the womaniser, which one’s the genius, which one’s the loser. Eventually I realised none of those templates fit any of these characters any better than they do real people. Basically, the hook is that it’s written by someone who doesn’t think you’re a moron or have an insultingly reductive attitude to human nature.

They kind of had to do an episode like this – skipping over it or doing anything fun would have been a betrayal of the emotional punch of the finale. But that didn’t make it any easier to watch. The theme of discovering your humanity through a relationship just hit a little hard. That makes this an effective episode, but I can’t claim to have enjoyed it over the lump in my throat.

If you didn’t see it, Farnsworth invented a mind-swapper. He and Amy swapped bodies to enjoy youth and food respectively, but found they couldn’t switch back because their body’s immune response blocked the same switch being made again. They could still swap to other bodies, though, so Bender and the Professor (really Amy) swap minds.

Bender (really the Professor): Now then Amy, we’ll simply switch bodies, and then we’ll… no… I’d be back in my body, but then you and Bender would be switched, and the Amy and Bender bodies can’t trade minds again since they just did!

Professor (really Amy): Oh no! Is it possible to get everyone back to normal using four or more bodies?

Bender (really the Professor): I’m not sure! I’m afraid we need to use… MATH.

You can already tell the whole episode is going to be amazing at this point, but I had to pause and work it out before watching any more. You could call this an intentionally self-inflicted spoiler, but you kind of already know the main characters aren’t going to end up permanently switched, right? I just wanted to know if this was a way they could be restored, and if so how many more people they’d need.

It’s trickier than it seems as first, but not as impossible as it starts to look shortly after that. To be as clear as possible, I’ll refer to people as Person They Appear To Be (Person They Really Are). This is important because it’s the bodies that can’t switch back directly – there’s no rule about minds.

By this point in the show, here’s the story so far:

Amy and the Professor switch

Producing:
Professor (Amy)
Amy (Professor)

Amy and Bender switch

Producing:
Amy (Bender)
Bender (Professor)

Leaving:
Professor (Amy)

Bender (Professor) proposes switching with Professor (Amy) but doesn’t go through with it. It’s easier to think about if he does do that, though, because we’re back to just two wrong ‘uns to fix.

Bender and Professor switch

Producing:
Bender (Amy)
Professor (Professor) – Fixed!

Leaving:
Amy (Bender)

Now Bender and Amy need to switch, but they can’t directly. So we use Fry as temporary storage:

Bender and Fry switch

Producing:
Fry (Amy)
Bender (Fry)

Leaving:
Amy (Bender)

But that’s not enough. We need a somewhere else to put Bender’s brain so we don’t end up using the same storage person twice for the same trade. So:

Amy and Leela switch

Producing:
Amy (Leela)
Leela (Bender)

Leaving:
Fry (Amy)
Bender (Fry)

Now we can get Amy’s brain back in her without putting Bender into Fry – we can’t re-swap that pair.

Amy and Fry switch

Producing:
Fry (Leela)
Amy (Amy) – Fixed!

Leaving:
Bender (Fry)
Leela (Bender)

Similarly, we can put Bender back to rights without stranding Fry.

Leela and Bender switch

Producing:
Leela (Fry)
Bender (Bender) – Fixed!

Leaving:
Fry (Leela)

So finally we can switch two people who both want to be switched, which is the only way you can ever finish this thing:

Fry and Leela switch

Producing:
Fry (Fry) – Fixed!
Leela (Leela) – Fixed!

That was my first attempt. Looking it over, I think there’s probably some flab there – I think I can see a way to save a move or two early on. But figuring out this much made the rest of the episode all the more fun to watch, because the switches get nuts very, very quickly.

It seems to be biting off way more storylines than it can chew, and more maths than it can resolve, but it does both beautifully. The Wash Bucket is one of those sublime minor characters we don’t see enough of lately, like the homeopathy-hating announcer bot in Crimes of the Hot. And although they seem to be glossing over the mess they’ve made by having the Globetrotters announce that any such tangle can be resolved with two extra people, that is provably correct, and they show they’re nerdy enough to do the legwork by doing a montage of all the required switches at the end.

If Futurama sometimes seems weirdly inconsistent, it’s probably because of the crazy number of writers. No two episodes this season have been written by the same person. This one was by Ken Keeler, also behind Time Keeps on Slipping, and I therefore conclude that he is awesome.

But a lot of the complaints you could level at the way Lost ended up sound superficially like things you could as easily have said about season one: it raises interesting questions but never answers them, it’s too mystical, and you’re given far too much backstory for characters that just aren’t that interesting.

But I think a definable line was crossed somewhere in the middle, between unanswered questions that seem like they could have an interesting explanation, and just making arbitrary shit up in the same lame attempt to blow your mind usually reserved for the stoned, at parties, to the completely sober.

Smoke monster, rips up trees, makes a mechanical clanking noise – I’m fascinated.
Dharma Initiative, has bases here, investigating scientific properties of the island – I’m intrigued.
The Others, mysterious, seemingly superhuman, with horrible motives – I’m kind of intrigued.
“I don’t know what’s more curious, where the rest of the statue is or why it only has four toes.” – I’m, uh, nearing a borderline here.
Ben isn’t in charge of the Others. An invisible man in a shack is. He can cure cancer but he hates flashlights. Also the shack teleports.
At this point it’s clear that there isn’t going to be any kind of interesting explanation for this, and I stop caring.

Everything after that point sounded increasingly like a 12 year-old trying to bail himself out of a ridiculous lie by layering carefully constructed but painfully over-specific falsehoods on top of it. I never really cared about whether they’d answer the questions the series raised, only that the questions should hint at interesting answers. Once it strays into random land, there’s nothing for my imagination to chew on and I get bored.

At some point during Season Five – where one timeline is itself jumping back and forth through time – I stopped watching entirely – hence the 0. I never really came back, except for finales and premieres, and I only watched the two episodes preceding the grand finale this week.

I think that let me enjoy it. It was complete hokum of the laziest, stupidest kind, but emotionally well judged and oddly satisfying. Getting a shitty answer to some of the central questions, even the really interesting ones, turned out to feel better than getting none at all. What they gained by deciding not to do anything particularly special in the whole two hours was the freedom to pace it to give each meandering, pointless story thread its own little send-off. I’m not sorry I skipped what I did – in fact I wish I’d skipped most of seasons 3 and 4 too – but I’m glad I tuned back in for the end.

The crappy, crappy end.

Is this list in order? If you care, no. If you don’t, yes.

Curb Your EnthusiasmThere are far more episodes of this than I will ever have the constitution to watch, but this last series was well worth catching for the Seinfeld reunion. The actual episode of Seinfeld produced within the show isn’t shown in full, but the real payoff is better: having Larry and Jerry in the same show. You can immediately see why Seinfeld itself turned out so well: Larry’s darker, but funnier with a more positive presence to play off. And Jerry’s funnier when he has someone to take him to more absurd and surreal places. Best of all, the verite style of Curb lets them honestly laugh at each other’s stuff, which somehow makes all of it funnier.

DollhouseIt took a long time to build enough on to its unconvincing premise – brainwashable prostitutes – to convince anyone it was worthwhile, but this second season has really picked up pace. It’s started to show a surprising commitment to progressing the plot in drastic ways with each episode, and even the one-offs have cleared up major backstory mysteries. Perhaps it was a series that knew it would die soon, or perhaps there’s a huge masterplan we’ll ever see. Either way, I don’t feel like we’re losing masses of unexplored potential by ending the series now, but I’m enjoying the impressive rate it’s burning through what it’s got left.

Man-doll Victor’s been the other treat of this season – previously stuck in some pretty dull roles, he’s since been given three or four chances to mimic other characters when ‘imprinted’ with their personality. Each time, the performance has been creepily good. When trying to tot up how many times it had happened just now, it took me a while to remember that he’d ever impersonated Topher – I just filed that whole sequence as ‘the bit with two Tophers’.

Update: just saw the latest. Whaaaaaat.

CastleI gave this a chance solely because it had Nathan Fillion – Firefly’s Captain Reynolds – in it, and happened to do so on the episode where his character dresses as Mal Reynolds for Halloween. “Didn’t you wear that like five years ago?” His daughter comments. “Don’t you think you should move on?”

It couldn’t pick a more worn-smooth formula if it consciously tried: a police procedural starring a non-cop ‘consultant’ who helps the department solve crimes by a) having some special insight into the criminal mind and b) projecting an aura that prevents ordinary cops from grasping rudimentary logic until it’s phrased to them in allegorical form. The flavour this time is that he’s a best-selling crime writer. And that it’s brilliant.

The twists are small but effective: Lady Cop’s disapproving relationship with him is complicated by the fact that she’s always been a fan of his trashy work, and there’s something almost cute about her determination to give him a harder time to compensate. Castle himself is a rockstar in the literary world, but a powerless underling in law enforcement – Fillion manages to be charming, funny and pathetic as both. And his profession gives him a boyish excitement for working with the police rather than the sneering smugness the genius character usually has.

His daughter, whose inclusion initially triggers a Pavlovian sense that this is where it’s about to jump the shark, isn’t used as a source of whiny teenage tension. Instead she’s just a bedrock for the character, convincing, likable and sweet. It’s so rare to see a father/daughter relationship on screen where they just seem to be friends, and neither of them is being an asshole – the highest compliment I can pay is that it reminds me of Veronica and Keith Mars. It’s only because all this stuff works that she serves the purpose most irritating daughter characters are trying to: she humanises a man who seems otherwise ghoulish in his enthusiasm for murder.

DexterSpeaking of men ghoulish in their enthusiasm for murder – yes! Link! – wow, Dexter was incredible last year. Seasons two and three both ultimately vindicated themselves, but each had a wholly annoying, dangerously predominant character who forever threatened to ruin it. Season four’s non-annoying equivalent is 3rd Rock From The Sun’s John Lithgow, and the wrinkly sociopath he chillingly portrays is one of the most compelling screen murderers I can remember.

Funnily enough, despite an exciting escalation from the worst Thanksgiving ever to an extraordinarily grim finale, the episode that stuck with me was an early one-off. A sleep-deprived Dexter completely loses track of where he’s stashed a body, and consistently one-ups himself by avoiding all the places even he would think to look. I think the core appeal of Dexter is that, whether or not we’ve killed anyone, we all remember how it feels to have done something bad. Even if it was as a kid, the consuming fear of getting caught is scarier than any monster or murderer, because no-one’s going to be on your side.

Flight of the ConchordsLoretta broke my heart in a letter
She told me she was leaving and her life would be better
Joan broke it off over the phone
After the tone she left me alone

Jen said she’d never ever see me again
When I saw her again, she said it again
Jan met another man
Leeza got amnesia just forgot who I am

Felicity, said there was no electricity
Emily, no chemistry
Fran ran, Bruce turned out to be a man
Flo had to go; I couldn’t go with the flow

Carol Brown just took a bus out of town
But I’m hoping that you’ll stick around

(He doesn’t cook or clean; he’s not good boyfriend material)
Ooh we can eat cereal!
(You’ll lose interest fast, his relationships never last)
Shut up girlfriends from the past
(He says he’ll do one thing and then he goes and does another thing)
Ooh, who organised all my ex girlfriends into a choir and got them to sing?
Who? Who? Mmm, shut up
Shut up girlfriends from the past

Mimi will no longer see me
Britney, Britney hit me
Paula, Persephone, Stella and Stephanie
There must be 50 ways that lovers have left me

Carol Brown just took a bus out of town

Love is a delicate thing it could just float away on the breeze
(He said the same thing to me)
How can we ever know we’ve found the right person in this world
(He means he looks at other girls)
Love is a mystery, it does not follow a rule
(This guy is a fool)
(He will always be a boy; he’s a man who never grew up)
I thought I told you to shut u-u-up?

Mona, you told me you were in a coma
Tiffany, you said that you had an epiphany
Mmm, would you like a little cereal?
Who organised this choir of my ex girlfriends?
Was it you, Carol Brown? Was it you, Carol Brown?

Carol Brown just took a bus out of town
But I’m hoping that you’ll stick around

Special Mention: State of PlayNot even remotely last year, but holy shit this was exciting. When I watch something this good, I sometimes get a completely inappropriate twinge of envy – why aren’t I this good a TV writer? Wait, I’m not a TV writer. Still, damn you Paul Abbott.

It’s the story of two murders, a mysterious death, an MP and the journalists investigating their connection. S. It gets complicated at a rate of knots, but never arbitrarily, and making sense of those complications becomes a compulsion. It’s a single six episode series, and if you can make them last more than a week you’re a stronger person than I.

I tried to watch the more recent film adaptation on a plane, but in trying to cram six hours of fast-paced developments into two, they’ve somehow managed to make it slower, less exciting and insufferably preachy. If you can watch the whole thing after seeing the series, you’re a more patient person than I.

Note: GleeI don’t know if it was in my top ten or anything, but this series about the rivalry between a glee club and a cheerleading squad – two concepts completely foreign to me – starts on E4 in the UK tomorrow. It’s sort of hypnotic: glossy and mawkish, but aware of it and happy to throw a slushie in its own smug face every now and then. It was the Journey cover they do at the end of the first episode that convinced me that songs could actually work in something like this, so catch that if you catch nothing else. It’s worth sticking with for the surprising Sue Sylvester episode, and the irritating aspects of the plot’s main conflicts do get resolved.

A regular feature in which I ask you to listen to a sound file with no idea what it’s going to be. It’s an attempt to share the strange experience of rummaging through my old download folders, listening to forgotten MP3s with uninformative filenames. All I know about them is that I must have liked them at some point.

Volume Four was the shortest I’ve ever posted, this one is the longest – don’t click play if you’re in a hurry.

It turns out that if you start talking about Mirror’s Edge in the Future offices, pretty soon a small crowd gathers to weigh in. In a group of editors and writers – one who gave it nine out of ten and another who thinks five was too high – it turns out we mostly agree. We all love to run, and we all get angry when we’re stopped by something difficult.

Most of my suggestions for the combat with cops would make it less difficult, and hopefully less awkward. But it can’t get so easy that you don’t feel threatened, and the grander issue is that it needs to be more avoidable. So this is about that.

The police choppers already work well as a propulsive force for the chase sequences that doesn’t often lead to death or frustration. But I’d like to change each of the three types of ground enemies, and how they’re used.

Cops: Not allowed to fire until they’ve issued two verbal warnings (“Freeze!” – “Stop or I will shoot!”) giving you a window to take one out or escape. Obviously once you’ve attacked one, others in the area can open fire. When they do hit, damage is much more serious – two hits kill – but they’re still wildly inaccurate. It becomes more of a tactical puzzle about how not to get shot, and the way forward never depends on turning a slow valve, climbing a slow pipe or working out where to head.

SWAT: Armoured and with two-handed weapons, these guys can’t be disarmed. But they’re only ever sent after you, so you never have to get past them to progress. They can be killed with stolen cop weapons, knocked out if you drop on them, or pushed into danger by a melee attack.

Chasers: Right now these guys have tazers, which are just kind of annoying. I think they should have mace. They should be knocked back by any melee move – to their death if they’re on a ledge – but if they get right up to you, they grab you and spray a blinding teargas in your eyes, sending your vision haywire and making you scream. You can try to flee while blinded, but if you don’t get away your third macing incapacitates you, and it’s game over.

Being chased was the perfect way to escalate Mirror’s Edge, but the Pursuit Cops are just so lame in combat; dancing about, tickling you with electricity and mild punching. I want to be freaking terrified of these guys. It would help if they didn’t look like dorks.

So one set is easy to deal with, another is hard to deal with but easy to avoid, and the last is hard to deal with or avoid – so do whichever you’re best at. I found lots of fun ways to lure Chasers into positions where I could knock them off a building, but bizarre rules meant that more often than not, I was the one knocked back by the crucial blow.

I was saying the other day that no matter how often the game explicitly tells you to stop and fight, the player still tries to run right past. Replaying the early sections at lunch today, I realised there’s actually a forced pop-up message in the prologue chapter that says “Always try to get away from enemies.” It couldn’t feel more like two different games that were code-merged at the last minute.

Lost: Season one: I like everything about this show except Jack.
Season two: I like everything about this show except Jack and Kate.
Season three: I like everything about this show except Jack, Kate and Sawyer.
Season four: I like everything about this show except Jack, Kate, Sawyer and Ben.
Season five: I like everything about this show except Jack, Kate, Sawyer, Ben, Locke, Sun, Juliet, Charlotte and the plot.

Damages: Something about the style, tone and performances is still gripping, but every part of the plot this season is inferior. The main one’s a really tired cliché, Timothy Olyphant’s feels arbitrary and improbable, and the callback to the last season hinges on someone we saw shot still being alive – don’t ever, ever do that.

24: These tropes are still fun no matter how many times they’re repeated. Jack having to achieve the impossible in service of the terrorists is a classic. I notice Fake Hillary Clinton is the first president of 24-land to act in any way presidential – the others seemed to think their advisors outranked them.

The Fringe: This ought to be trashy fun, but something about it really doesn’t work. I think it’s that it takes itself so goddamn seriously, and the lead actress, while talented, is so scowlingly concerned that she sucks the joy from the surrounding nonsense.

Lie To Me: Smug but entertaining. Tim Roth as a human lie-detector. The science is both more convincing and interesting than guff like CSI, and more relevant than the hilarious nonsense of Numbers, but of course still wildly exaggerated. The decision to back up some of their claims with quick flashes of famously ashamed, guilty or angry people showing shame, anger or guilt is a great trick.

Flight of the Conchords: Caught bits of this a few times when jetlagged in the States and it never clicked, but this new series has just been sublime. The Conchords are a real band and a fictional one, and this is a mockumentary made by the real one about the fictional one, with the story of their bad, meek indie performances sometimes told via the medium of their smart, genre-hopping real songs. This is their manly answer to the Black Eyed Peas’ famously dismal My Humps:

– Female protagonist I don’t hate. Wendy Watson hereby joins the other… three.

– A character who doesn’t take half a fucking hour to get over every surprising turn of events. Writers! The stuff you’re writing didn’t really happen, so watching your characters refuse to believe it happened is not actually terribly entertaining for us!

– Conversely, disbelief at just how idiotic your plot is makes them highly entertaining.

– Max Payne references.

– Scenes where a character starts to say something about what we’re seeing, then thinks better of it.

– Ultra-mild curse words, ideally accompanied by a character who actually does swear her face off at the appropriate times. Somehow that makes the gosh-darnits seem extra mild.

– Ending an episode with a Russian Futurists song. This one was laser targeted at me.

This needs blogging about urgently, though, because it’s an online televisual event that will happen at an actual time! Tomorrow! Written by Joss Whedon and some other people, starring Nathan Fillion, Neil Patrick Harris and my close personal friend Felicia Day, it has two things in common with Firefly, and it’s about a supervillain, and it’s got Felicia Day, who is interviewed in the issue of PC Gamer on-sale in two weeks. Run, don’t walk, to your newsvendor. But run slow enough that you get there around the end of July.

It’s also a musical, and admittedly I haven’t liked one of those since Dancer In The Dark, but still. The three acts go up Tuesday, Thursday, Saturday, and stay up till Sunday, but I’m particularly keen on watching it as it comes out, because I am as mentioned in love with the idea of international premieres.

The premiere is something the internet’s sort of destroying and recreating at the same time: movies are splattered across the release schedule as people pirate them early, wait for the DVD, or wait to pirate the DVD. TV is Tivo’d and DVD sets are Netflixed bit by bit, but increasingly significant things are getting put out as webisodes. And in that, we’ve got the communal excitement of every fanatic devouring new content at the same time, world-wide instead of country-wide.

…

S’cool.

Update! Spit! This thing is the exact opposite of what I just said! It’s being broadcast via the evil Hulu, which is US-only. Way to defeat the whole spirit of the thing, jerk-wads!

Nevertheless, it is live now, and if you just grab Hotspot Shield or another sneaky proxy service of your choice, you can disguise yourself as an American and watch. Think of it as a baseball cap and a few extra pounds for your browser.

Update! It’s good! But doesn’t get very far in its 14 minutes. I now advise waiting till it’s all out on Saturday and watching then, since someone blew the whole worldwide premiere idea. Felicia suggests non-US people wait ‘a bit’, and adds a smiley face. Make of that what you will.

Update! As Iain and Graham note, the US-only restriction seems to have been removed.

Update! Act 2 is out and even better! Also, the whole thing is getting crazy popular, which is awesome. Provided they can refrain from fucking up the region thing, more of this sort of thing!

Update! It’s over! What did you think? Spoilerific comments below. I thought it went from good to great and back to good. The end seemed to be leveraging an emotional investment that I didn’t really have. I was there for the lols.

The interminable filler episodes between each premiere and finalé were doing a pretty good job of killing my enthusiasm for Lost. And towards the end of season three, the silliness was just getting silly. There’s a character called Taller Ghost Walt. Jack’s dead dad got better. Ben isn’t really in charge, he takes orders from an invisible man who can cure cancer and lives in a teleporting shack but hates technology.

But then I enjoyed the very end of that season, in an I-don’t-really-care way. And now I’m enjoying the start of the new season, in an oh-wait-actually-I-do way.

Starting on a Hurley episode was a quick way to my heart. I could have done with less teleporting shack action, particularly since it now apparently has Jack’s simultaneously dead, undead and never-died dad in it, but even that is sort of entertaining from Hurley’s perspective.

Glad that the factions finally split, glad that Jack’s was so unpopular, and glad that, after he made his choice, it became woefully clear that The Other Others weren’t here to rescue them. Daniel, the nervous physicist with a gun, does such a dismal job of reassuring them that his every scene is comedy.

The Other Others, unlike most of The Others and The Tailenders, are mostly welcome additions to the cast – Daniel’s loveably neurotic, the pilot’s likeable, Miles The Angry Semi-Evil Techno-Exorcist is likeably dislikeable, and the woman will hopefully die soon.

I couldn’t tell you why the wilfull absurdity of Miles’ profession doesn’t grate with me the way the invisible cancer-curing teleporting luddite did. I think because it’s brief, and no big deal is made of it. That understatement also does wonders for the scene with Daniel’s bizarre experiment – it doesn’t overplay what happened there, but it’s fascinating if you got it.

Hello, dude from The Wire! Explain chess to us in Baltimore gang terms.

But the main thing I love about Lost at the moment is the darkness implied by what we’ve seen of the future. I’m really pleased they stuck with the great idea of switching to flash-forwards instead of flash-backs, leaving the island in the past and making it feel like the plot’s finally progressed. And I’m even more pleased about what they’ve shown.

Kate hates someone so much she can’t even be civil about his funeral (my bet is Michael, by the way). Jack hates his life so much he spends it trying to get back to the island. Hurley’s so haunted that he jumps at the chance to spend the rest of his life in an institution. And Sayid – Sayid is a hitman for Ben?

That’s the worst – and hence best – of it. They’ve escaped the island and they still haven’t escaped Ben. The weasely mass-murderer who seems to spend most of his life at their mercy, yet always end up back in charge. Hopefully the reasons for this won’t be as feebly contrived as Abram’s scoffable methods for keeping Ron Rifkin’s character ahead in Alias.

Graham points out that Lostpedia (from which these stills are stolen) is overflowing with absurd theories. My favourites are that a change in photo frames during the Miles flashback indicates an entirely new timeline, that the island is keeping Jack’s father alive so he can pay Sawyer back for a drink, and the entire Theories section on the nature and causes of Jack’s beard in the final episode of last season:

Jack’s beard

• Jack grows a beard because he’s become an alcoholic addicted to pain killers who doesn’t take care of himself because he is depressed.
• Jack’s stubble appears Grey on the island, but his beard is not in the flash forward.
  • He could have just dyed his beard.
    • Jack has become “an alcoholic addicted to pain killers who doesn’t take care of himself because he is depressed” but cares enough about his appearance to dye his beard to not look old.

Seeing the Lost game recently, which Damon Lindelof describes as “RIDICULOUSLY AWESOME!”, had made me forget that anyone involved with Lost was ever talented. I’m glad the fourth season started to remind me.

But I’m tinkering with a redesign for this site that will likely go live in the next week. I like what I’ve got so far, but every time I look at it I half-glimpse something much, much better, and I’m trying to work out what to change to make it into that. In the meantime, and in the spirit of preparing for a New Year’s reboot, I’m posting things I’ve been meaning to post for ages. From the TV show Carpoolers:

I’m actually not wild about it as a sitcom, but there’s something brilliantly infectious about the radio singalong scenes. See also the ad.

Futurama: Bender’s Big Score: if you’ve seen Score and felt that it’s a little heavy on the fan-service – hi. I’m one of those fans it was servicing, and it did it very well. I didn’t need that much Leeloo, and the songs were needless and clumsy, but other than that it was joyous.

I’m the sort of fan who gets an enormous kick out of the new theme tune, the triumph of bureaucracy, the explanation for how Gore lost the election, the obsessive retconning of the pilot episode’s pivotal moment, the cyclic timeline mathematics and the titular payoff at the very end. Speaking of the theme tune, have you heard the 1967 original? It’s surprisingly awesome.

“Are you free?”
“You have no idea.”

Dexter Season Finale: the only thing wrong with this season of Dexter (apart from the unaccountable soap-opera interlude that was Rita’s mother) is a certain character lapsing into a hideous crazy-stalker stereotype. But the finale got so much mileage out of the mess this created that I can almost forgive it. The scene with three people and a large black bag was almost unbearable to watch. More spoilerific discussion should probably go in the original comments thread.

But yes, fantastic. The leadup to this over the last handful of episodes is the best Dexter has ever been, and Dexter is itself near-perfect television.

“Let’s see if the best bed in Kaer Morhen can hold us!”

The Witcher: broken sexist porno that’s coming up in a lot of game-of-the-year lists, and got huge review scores everywhere but with us. You play a badly scarred grey-haired old man in leather trousers, to whom a procession of identically-shaped redheads surrender themselves sexually after three lines of astonishingly bad dialogue. Post-deed, you are awarded an achievement souvenir card showing the girl naked, just in case you didn’t already feel like a pathetic mysognist.

Somehow it’s even more wretched than the despicable Leisure Suit Larry games – the last of which revolved around date rape. The fact that Larry’s love interests even needed to be date-raped before they’d sleep with the idiot hero automatically makes them stronger characters than the Witcher’s.

It’s not that I can’t imagine what people see in the Witcher – I haven’t played it through, maybe it gets amazing after four hours of insufferable dross. I’m just appalled at what they can ignore. The huge script cutbacks before release have been achieved by simply deleting swathes of lines, so conversations are riddled with bizarre, glaring holes that not just make for abysmal fiction, but in many cases render events truly incomprehensible.

“Laurent ran guns for the resistance.”
“Which resistance?”
“He won’t say – apparently they didn’t win.”

Ratatouille: I hate to be down on such a sweet film, but I’m so tired of that nervous kid cliché and the angry boss who’s supposed to be funny because he’s short. Brad Bird has uncharacteristically little to add to those grating, ancient stereotypes, and the central conceit is just surreal.

The premise is a rat who can cook, and a kitchen boy who cannot, but the film has no workable idea for how the two can collaborate. It ends up inventing a physiological mechanic so utterly nonsensical that it’s downright creepy to watch.

The rat and dough physics modelling is fantastic, and it made me laugh perhaps twice, but it’s so far from the spark of The Incredibles.

Duke Nukem Forever Trailer: after ten years of development, the first movie of the incarnation that’s actually likely to be released has come out. It features no dialogue until, at the end, protagonist Nukem stands up and says, essentially, “I want to shit on you.”

I am at a loss.

The Incredibles came out around the same time as Half-Life 2, and I remember feeling relieved – amongst much else – to see that there are people in other media cramming as much genius, expertise and love into every square inch of their work. If anything The Orange Box’s diversity makes its brilliance a more dazzling achievement than Half-Life 2, and Pushing Daisies is right here to give off that same reassuring glow: it’s okay, people outside of Valve can be this clever too.

The second episode really does cement it as a masterpiece of that order. I absorb high-bandwidth, info-dense, fast-talking stuff like The West Wing with relish, but the hurtling pace and sheer concentration of brilliant ideas, stylistic flourishes and exquisite jokes in Daisies leaves me reeling. It truly is just joyous, and insane, and sickly and dark all at once.

Dexter: The new season is excruciatingly tense. It’s partly the suspense over how he can continue to get away with it when everyone seems to be closing in on him, but for me it’s also the maddening worry that they’re going soft, trying to humanise and redeem Dexter. In the end it’s a better show for continually threatening to do that without ever making good. I’ve never been so relieved to see a knife sunk into a helpless human torso.

Pushing Daisies: A light-hearted supernatural murder mystery about a pie-maker who can resurrect the dead – for one minute. The premise is gloriously fiddly: his touch brings the dead to life, but he has to kill the resurrectee with a second touch within a minute, or a random bystander will die in their place. The obvious application is asking people who murdered them, but they’re not always much help. The dialogue is sparklingly lyrical, the pace is refreshingly swift and the stars winningly chipper and likeable. And it has narration that doesn’t suck.

Damages: Has somehow stayed miraculously on the rails after a seemingly unfollowable pilot. A legal drama with a symmetrical cast of characters on either side, but where the divide between good and evil is ignored by all – especially the writers. Ted Danson makes such a compellingly sympathetic villain, and Glenn Close such a frighteningly ornery hero, that you end up riveted by the duel but unable to root for either side. The web of bizarre, volatile relationships between characters has the plot spasming wildly, untenably with episode. It seems to become more impossible to resolve with every step the two timelines take towards each other, but never cops out or undoes its awful machinations.

Sark!

Alias became terrible after – perhaps during – season two, but it was so much fun until then. Heroes has already borrowed one of its best actors, and shown that he was responsible for most of his character’s likeability. Now it’s got the other. I only hope he’s smarmily yet competently evil, and crops up unexpectedly in almost every storyline – it’d be just like old times.

Sark!

The rest is just depressing. Sylar’s still in it. I don’t even trust them with the guts to keep the Petrelli’s out. Last season’s finale was riddled with so many tedious tropes that I have no faith left in their ability to excite me. Entertain, probably.

I’m blaming British Airways, this time, for sitting me next to a door. a) Why would you put an Expensive Class seat somewhere too cold for human survival even under a blanket with the heating on maximum, and b) shouldn’t the doors on a plane be, like, airtight? Might my freezing be a symptom of a rather more serious problem at umpteen thousand feet? The two things BA can’t seem to get right are sending your baggage to the same hemisphere as you and an in-flight entertainment system that actually works. If they’re also failing to maintain hull integrity, I’m not sure they even qualify as an airline anymore. ‘Airborne torture wagon’ might be closer.

Are flights in one direction faster than in the other direction because you’re so high up that the air you’re flying through isn’t quite rotating on the Earth’s axis as fast as the ground? Because that’s kind of awesome if it’s true.

Anyway, since actual remedies aren’t working and pretty much everything causes an equal amount of pain now, I’m coiling up with chorizo cheese on toast, a flagon of coffee and a Damages triple-bill. I’m slightly gay for Tate Donovan.

Lost: quite good
I seem to be alone in this, but I rather liked the end to this series. The complaints I’ve heard are all things I’ve long since come to expect from every episode of Lost – we all know it’s no longer Good, right? Given that, and pretty low expectations from everyone telling me how much it sucked, I thought this was one of the only really fun episodes in season three.

It was even semi-clever: episodes always begin and end with the present-day bits, and dip into the flashbacks in between. This one does too: it’s just that the series has essentially moved several years into the future, and is tying up the existing plotlines in flashbacks to the island. I think this may actually be the format from now on, which would mean a long-overdue end to the flashback stories that tell you nothing and make you like the characters even less.

Resolution: pretty good
Finding out for sure that they get rescued is a pretty big deal, even if the moment itself hasn’t featured. Recent hints at some of the more supernatural theories like hell, ghosts, and near-death hallucinations are all out: they’re just on an island, it exists, they get off it. Future Jack’s sifting of maps suggests that they escape the island themselves rather than being found by helicopters or boats, since it implies that the island’s location is still a mystery. More importantly, Charlie died. Ha!

Plot holes: moderate
Plenty of minor “Why?”s, but the only really irritating one was future Jack’s reference to his father as alive. It was obvious from the start of the first episode that it was a flash-forward and not a flashback, and this was a pretty pathetic ploy to try to throw idiots off the trail by flat-out lying to them. It’s an indictment of how predictable and cheap the writing has become that I thought it more likely they were lying to me than that I was mistaken about the twist the flashback was leading up to.

Excitement: none
It didn’t bother me, but yeah, no tension or intensity at all. War with the others? Don’t care. Mikhail gone? Don’t care. Dynamite detonators killed? Don’t care. iPhone girl evil? Don’t care. The excitement of Lost was always the bizarre mysteries, the polar bears and four-toed statues. The politics of The Others and the capture of major characters is mundane and tired. If there had been any exciting scenes, they would have been diffused by the endless cutbacks to the tedious Jack plotline, the only payoff for which was wasted by being too obvious too far ahead of time.

Irritations: moderate
Interminable Jack screentime accounting for almost all of that. Didn’t mind about Mikhail coming back to life, because I didn’t really care whether he lived or died, and we already knew Charlie would, so it only achieved the inevitable. Ben facing the survivors alone was dumb, and Jack not killing him was dumb, but again, don’t care enough to care.

Highlights: about six?
Survivors commit mass murder! Brilliant! Hurley runs some dudes over! Brilliant! Charlie drowns! Brilliant! Hurley brags about saving everyone! Brilliant! Evil new high-tech faction maybe! Brilliant! Jack is pathetic and doesn’t end up with Kate! Brilliant!

Cliffhanger: er
I watched it last night, and honestly couldn’t tell you how it ended. We didn’t find out who was in that coffin in the future (I thought Juliet, but Graham says it’s referred to as a ‘he’), but ‘someone dies in future’ is not exactly a revelation we’ll all be holding our breath for. What happens about the iPhone is about the only thing I’m waiting to find out, but I could die happy not knowing.

Heroes: fun but frustrating
The climax couldn’t help but be enjoyable, but the series really lost its nerve, heart and brain at the critical moment. I feel about this almost exactly the way people seem to feel about the Lost finale – I enjoyed it at the time, but the more I think about it the more angry it makes me. It was an utterly gutless and nonsensical finalé, and they’d spent so long building to a smart and spectacular one. At least Lost only ever promised a gutless and nonsensical one.

Resolution: fucking none!
What the hell have I been doing for these twenty hours of my life? At the end of it, both people who can cause the explosion are still alive. Nothing happened.

Plot holes: numerous, enormous
DL gets shot! Why didn’t he use his power? Sylar gets run through by a slow, screaming Japanese businessman. Why didn’t he use his powers? Peter needs to be airlifted into the sky by his non-invincible brother, even though Claire had a better solution. Why didn’t he use his powers? Sylar lies down after one stab, everyone walks away. Did they forget he had powers? Guys, if you’re going to make a show about superpowers, you should occasionally remember that your characters have them.

Excitement: high
But that’s a testament to the build up rather than the finalé itself. We knew, or thought we knew, exactly what would get resolved here, and we’d been waiting for it for a long time. Then it didn’t get resolved.

Irritations: vast
All others pale in comparison to how pathetically gutless, tiresome and moronic it is to have the main villain not really be dead after all the heroes assume he is. I literally couldn’t believe they were doing it. If I didn’t have a little faith that they’ll try to move onto a new plotline for the second series, I would have stopped watching for good then and there.

It’s not just that it makes the characters stupid, it balances a huge plot twist on the absurdly precarious notion that the characters within this world have no concept of how it works. You don’t just get frustrated with them for being so stupid, you cease to understand them as characters. Their actions are inconceivable. There’s no longer any way to comprehend this universe.

Highlights: three tiny ones
It sad to say, but the biggest revelation and best moment in the finalé of an extraordinary 23-episode series was finding out Mr Bennet’s first name.

Cliffhanger: kind of
The chapter two teaser was a pleasantly clean break, but I’m not sure what it was trying to tell us. Do they have to stop an eclipse in this one?

24: good
This season a nuclear bomb went off in California in the fourth episode, so it’s been a bit of a low-key second-half by comparison. They’re trying to avoid a diplomatic faux-pas with Russia by preventing their defense secrets being handed over to the Chinese. Even that’s resolved very near the start of this finale, and the rest of the episode is about trying to rescue a single, rather unpleasant person from becoming collateral damage in the military resolution of the larger issue. But it was more about the people you like doing unexpected and pleasing things, and for that it was probably the most enjoyable of these three.

Resolution: near-total, as ever
It even ties up a plotline started three seasons ago, in which one of Jack’s many screw-the-rules operations actually has enormously grave consequences.

Plot holes: just the one
So the Russians, whose insistence on absolute proof of the destruction of The Component has been the driving force for this entire plotline, are delighted with the Vice President’s proposed plan of just bombing the oil rig it might be on and assuming it’s destroyed? Even if you can believe that, it’s impossible to believe that the VP would even have suggested it, so far is it from the result they’ve been pressuring him for all along. I don’t mind them doing the whole “You can’t call in an airstrike, X is still in there!” plotline again, but contorting the logic of the premise so horrifically to support it is sad.

Excitement: dangerously low
I think most of us are hoping Josh, Jack’s 16 year-old nephew with the awful fringe, will die. But even then we don’t really care either way. Those are the only stakes here, and 24 is supposed to be all about stakes. After a nuke on American soil the writers didn’t seem to know how to keep upping the ante, and ended up doing the opposite. It’s become steadily more downbeat and less intense as the series has gone on. It’s not a fatal flaw, but it’s a shame; the reason I fell in love with the series in the first place was the relentlessly escalating horror of what they were prepared to inflict on the country and their potagonist.

Irritations: none
24 established its flaws very early on in its life, so everyone still watching them has long come to terms with every silly thing it can do. I actually enjoy waiting for Jack to go rogue again (as he does three separate times in this episode alone). The only irritating recurring theme was his family being repeatedly kidnapped, and they’ve mostly learned to avoid that one these days. Technically Josh is family, but he wasn’t kidnapped to get at Jack – the villain’s entire plan revolved around him, the grand kidnapping failed, and in the end the government simply handed him over.

Highlights: several, but one in particular
This was the second episode of the season to feature some really brilliant writing. The first being an exchange early on between ex-president Logan and his much-maligned ex-wife, long since mad.

“Martha, the last thing I wanted to do was hurt you.”
“You always managed to get to that last thing, though, didn’t you?”

Here it was the fantastic clash between Jack and Defence Secretary Heller, whose life he’s saved around four hundred times at this point. (And who we saw die, I seem to recall, but whatever.) Heller’s forbidding Jack to see his mentally ill daughter, his long-term girlfriend, on the quite reasonable basis that everyone Jack knows dies. Jack, also quite reasonably but incredibly uncharacteristically, flips out.

“How dare you? How dare you? All I did, all I have ever done, is what you and people like you told me to.”

All the best moments in 24 are when Jack’s had enough. He takes more than anyone reasonably could, but the writers just keep throwing the trauma and tragedy at him until he snaps. He goes the entire series expressing nothing but grim determination, so when he finally does flare up it’s spectacular and genuinely emotional.

In season three this also came in the finale: after hacking his own partner’s hand off with a fire axe, on top of everything else, he excuses himself to his car for a moment and just sobs. In season four it came earlier on, when he was forced to threaten a doctor at gunpoint to abandon critical surgery on his girlfriend’s ex-husband, shortly after said ex-husband had saved his life, and does so with a look of utter panic.

Here it’s that line, when he can no longer take the callousness with which he’s discarded by his superiors when his task is complete. For the most part they can be civil about it, and cite official guidelines about plausible deniability that explain why they have to fire him, credit his success to someone else, arrest him, sacrifice him to terrorists or hand him over to the Chinese.

But this time it’s literally personal: he’s lost so much to them and the job that he can’t be allowed near the only personal life he has left, as broken as it is. And he ends up saying more or less what I said about him the last time I wrote about 24: that he’s barely a person, just a grimly logical tool who methodically achieves the objectives set for him. Ironically, it’s his most human moment yet.

Cliffhanger: none

That’s it, Intro Guy. You are now so bad that you entirely counter-act the greatness of the programme that follows your intolerable gloat. I actually regret watching this episode, the intro was that bad.

It’s not just that an intro is unnecessary, it’s this intro in particular. It’s an intro made by people who don’t just look down on their audience, they actually hate them. It’s the kind of intro I’d produce for I’m A Celebrity And The Suffocating Numbness Of My Life Has Driven Me To New Lows Get Me Out Of Here. It’s openly an advert for the very thing it is a part of. It doesn’t stop at explicitly summarising the themes and symbolism of the preceding season, it actually explains in bullet-point form what’s going to happen in the following episode, and shows clips of it. At first you think it’s going to insult your intelligence, but it quickly becomes clear that the disdain, the spite its authors hold for you far exceeds their restraint, and the insult is merely an appetiser for the flurry of gashing, wrenching, deep and bloody wounds they plan to inflict. And the salt in your mutiliations is a voice-over whose patronising sickly smarm is so drippingly viscious you could choke on it.

There’s no mistaking the venemous cynicism behind this – I spend most of my days feeling it – but attached to something as great as Heroes it becomes an even darker spectre. This is disdain for one of the few remaining wonderful things on television, and only the blackest of burnt, drowned, dead, dead souls could feel it with this level of vacant dispassion. I don’t know who writes these, but I can tell you that they have no irises – their obsidian pupils fill the entirety of their lidless and unblinking eyes.

I didn’t like 24 at first – it was exciting for a few episodes, but after three hours of excitement you start to lose interest a bit. There’s also something rather comic about the this guy having ordeals that last precisely 24 hours every few years, so I watched a bit of series five last time I was in the States to laugh at it. The show has a formula that’s easy to mock, because there are only a certain number of things that can happen within its parameters, and over one-hundred hours of programming they tend to happen quite a few times each. There’s a mole inside CTU! The boss of CTU is being a dick! Jack’s gone rogue! There’s a mole in the government! That terrorist plot was just a cover for a much larger one, involving nukes! The least interesting character’s been kidnapped! Oh no, a bomb!

But there’s a fairly smooth gradient from mocking something to enjoying its silliness without laughing, and from there to just enjoying it. And by that time, something truly extraordinary has usually happened. Every series of 24 has a handful of moments that make you take your tongue out of your cheek and just gape. They come from the fact that terrorist thrillers generally revolve around forcing the good guys to make impossible decisions, and in Jack Bauer they’ve lumped themselves with a good guy so unflinchingly logical and ruthlessly dedicated that such decisions are trivial. So to create the pivotal moments, the writers have to put him in absurdly difficult situations, in which he has to do everything short of shooting his own daughter for just the slimmest hope of stopping a terrorist plot that could kill thousands more.

Jack’s now so used to sacrificing himself or innocent lives for the greater good that he usually saves people the bother of asking him to do it by jumping in there and volunteering. At one point a terrorist leader calls an Amnesty lawyer to protect an accomplice CTU have in custody from the torturous methods they need to use to get the information they need from him in time to stop a warhead headed towards- I forget, probably Los Angeles. Jack’s solution is to release the prisoner, immediately resign, then break his fingers in the parking lot as a private citizen in order to protect CTU from liability. This has been read as advocacy of torture as an interrogation method in general, of course, but that’s over-simplifying. The reason not to legalise these methods is that you can never be certain that their use will save lives in any given circumstance. Jack is always certain, to an extent that doesn’t exist in the real world.

The truly horrible calls don’t come up too often, but that’s part of what makes them so much fun to watch. You’ve been watching Jack be almost effortlessly ruthless about so many tough decisions that seeing something make him hesitate – even if only for a few seconds – is incredibly powerful. There’s a moment at the very end of season three, which involves some of the nastiest thing’s Jack’s had to do (including one with a fire-axe and a close friend) when he’s sitting alone in his car, with no urgent mission for the first time in twenty-four hours, and just sobs.

This new series is off to a good start: he’s already had to do something that made him both throw up and cry, and- well, the thing that happens while he’s doing that, for those who’ve seen it. The aforementioned silliness of one man getting caught up in this many twenty-four-hour ordeals probably puts people off, but I’m hoping they’ll keep going for another five seasons. As it progresses it gets both darker and more absurd, making it more entertaining in diametrically opposing ways. Jack gets more interesting as he loses more of his humanity and his family feature less, and I have a feeling Kim’s going to cop it this series. The plots get more intricate as they try to avoid repetition and simultaneously up the stakes – though neither very hard; this is American primetime after all.

Season six also has one of my favourite actors: Siddig El Tahir El Fadil El Siddig Abderahman Mohammed Ahmed Abdel Karim El Mahdi – whom they somehow thought would be able to play a middle-Eastern character convincingly – normally speaks English with a perfect Received Pronounciation accent, so it’s always rather weird watching him pretend to wrestle with the language in his Arab roles. But he’s the main reason I like Star Trek – his Dr Bashir was the first truly likeable character I’d seen in any sci-fi, and the reason I gave it a chance. Here his role isn’t a terribly likeable one – he just has to look angry all the time – but I still find him endlessly watchable. If he turns out to be the series arch-villain I’ll be especially happy.

It’s over. Did sir care for it? Would sir grace us with his comments? Then might I direct sir to the spoilerific discussion following the original post? Very well.

 

Yes!

Hopefully a facial expression can’t be considered a spoiler, but if you’re not keeping up with Dexter this ought to tell you enough to realise that you should be. If you are, you’ll recognise it as one of the best reaction shots in the history of man.

Plenty of awesome things starting on US TV at the moment, and plenty of awesome things returning, so I missed that an intriguing show I read about in the paper months back had started – until Graham supplied the pilot. Played by best-thing-about Six Feet Under Michael Hall, Dexter’s a sociopathic compulsive serial killer with a day job as a forensic analyst for the Miami police, specialising in blood-splatters. And killing murderers. It’s not about him taking out the guys the police can’t prove their case against, it’s about him desperately needing to sate his bloodlust and deciding to at least restrict himself to the more deserving victims. And it is, of course, superb.

Dexter fakes normal, happy life with aplomb, making the atmosphere absurdly sunny and upbeat. His boss fancies him, his sister depends on him, and he has a doting rape-victim girlfriend he dates because neither of them are interested in sex. Forensic science is a world in which everyone has to be ghoulishly indifferent to murder just to get through the day, joking about corpses over donuts, so Dexter’s bona fide ghoulishness blends in seamlessly. Only one cop thinks Dexter’s a sick freak barely attempting to hide it, and loathes him violently and openly. Dexter is relentlessly nice in response, and inwardly slightly saddened that only one person seems to have noticed.

The joke, of course, is that Dexter has a superb insight into the workings of a serial killer’s mind, and has to actively try not to catch them in his official capacity in order to keep himself in potential victims. In the pilot, he comes across an ongoing case in which all victims are found neatly dismembered and entirely drained of blood, a style Dexter admires so breathlessly that he has trouble maintaining a professional veneer when he first sees the body – “Why didn’t I think of that?”. His usual distaste for the killers he kills is completely eclipsed by his awe at this man’s style, and the two of them are starting to become fixated with one another – the killer stalking Dexter in the most chilling way, which Dexter takes as a friendly hello.

Really the remarkable thing about him is not that he’s a serial killer, it’s that he’s a well-written sociopath. Like Highsmith’s Ripley he fakes his civilised persona so well that even you are won over by it, and like Ellroy’s Terror his compulsion is so compellingly depicted that you empathise with it almost as much as Monk’s OCD. It proves that a protagonist can be sympathetic irrespective of his crimes if his personality is appealing enough, and you couldn’t ask for a more delicious twist on the traditional ace-detective archetype.

The comments hereafter may be spoilerific for anyone not up to date with the latest episode aired in the States.

I’m not feeling too bad about the thunderous noise because Rich is out and the guys in the flat below are playing bland reggae loudly anyway. Rich has dubbed them Jonnie Potsmoker and Smokey McPot, and having watched Dude Where’s My Car on a whim the other day, I now get the reference. We’re not going to miss these guys. Although now I’ve tried this cinema-volume music thing, I may miss that. The better half of Predatory Wasp Of The Palisades Is Out To Get Us sound amazing like this.

I’m hearing a pretty muted or negative reaction to Graham Linehan’s (Father Ted, Black Books) new sitcom The IT Crowd from, like, the three people whose opinions I’ve heard. This is wrong! It’s fantastic. The second episode more than the first, perhaps – some of the actors seemed to ham it up a bit in the first, Chris Morris included, but I was still won over by it.

It’s not really a satire of an IT department, any more than Black Books was about a book shop or Father Ted was about being a priest. Like them, it’s an elaborately orchestrated farce of secrecy, politeness and bureaucracy with a twist of the surreal. What distinguishes it from inferior comedies like The Green Wing is its reluctance to write any of its characters off: none of them are dehumanised charicatures, all of them are at least somewhat likeable, and for me sympathy is essential for humour. I can’t laugh at people I entirely hate.

What made me use the word ‘fantastic’ instead of great, apart from a reluctance to resort to the absurdly over-used sentence “It’s great,” is that I keep suddenly thinking of a particular scene and cracking up – the only real litmus test for a sitcom. It’s the fire scene, but not specifically the:

Moss: (writing an e-mail in front of a fire) ‘Fire exclaimation mark. Fire exclaimation mark’

That they picked out for the preview clip – it’s the line before.

Moss: ‘Dear sir or madam. I am writing to inform you of a fire.’ (backspacing) No, no, that’s too formal.

I’m skirting the real subject of this post, mostly because I’m pretty sure I’m not allowed to talk about it. But it’s happening soon, it’s both figuaratively and literally a dream come true, and I’ll tell you all about it as soon as I’m no longer under contractual obligation to shut the hell up.

In other news, I have this week off, then next week I’m going to Moscow. Having masses of free time seemed like a good chance to try Black And White 2 (as did getting Black And White 2) and so far it is surprising me. I thought it would be pleasant but insubstantial, but in fact it’s got more substance than Colombia. But it’s extremely irritating. I thought it would again be an aimless playground from which no satisfying game could be sculpted, but in fact it’s alarmingly close to a truly brilliant RTS. It’s just definitely not one in its current state.

I have uncensorified my Serenity thoughts now that the film’s out. I may go and see it again in the middle of the day at some point this week – I used to love being able to do that at university; it’s just you and a few old ladies, and you emerge blinking to discover that the day is still in progress. But if you’ll excuse me, I must get back to CSI: Mathematics.

My contribution to this one was the Long Play on Darwinia, in which I essentially beg people to buy it. The weird thing is, it seems to be working. I still play Darwinia regularly and it remains my favourite strategy game of all time, and it genuinely hurt to find out hardly anyone bought it. I’m happy to discover that plenty of them just needed a bit of friendly cajoling from someone with strong feelings on the matter. It also feels surreal and wonderful to have an effect – it’s not good to get used to the idea of having your words in print, and realising that people actually read them and pay attention jars you out of that nicely.

I’ve had a chance to play the new Darwinia demo they’re working on – a level not seen in the game – and it’s incredible stuff. Doesn’t just blow the last demo out of the water, it’s actually one of my favourite levels ever. I’ll link it as soon as it’s finished and up properly.

3rd: Tim’s Birthday

This one’s in the past now, and it was great. I discovered Chicken Tikka Taka Tak, sang Dandy Warhols in some kind of demonic kareoke console game (I believe the game scathingly classified me as a ‘hopeful’. Jon Hicks, however, said only my “Woo ooh ooh”s needed work – my baritone lounge crooning was fine. Damn straight) , dehatted a Nintendog and swung another around the room on the end of a rope. It seems there may have been other people present too.

8th: The OC

Yeah, everyone is straight out of an advert for one thing or another, but Seth is wittier than some of the best Whedon characters, and the constant sunshine is oddly addictive. It’s melodrama, it’s trash, but it’s frequently very funny and prominently features astoundingly good music. I am genuinely looking forward to its return.

9th: Discs Finished

Sweet, sweet release. The monthly deadline gives this job a kind of rhythm that builds to a kind of wild panic right up until the envelope containing the masters leaves my hands. Then I suddenly lose thirty kilograms and go and have a Carrot Cake Milkshake. I’m actually going to miss that when I stop being a Disc Editor. The pains of being wholly responsible for a big, important thing do pay off when it’s finally over.

12th: City Of Villains Beta

Some months back now, I accumulated so much experience debt from repeatedly dying on my way through a high-level area between me and my mission that I realised it would be quicker to start a new character than continue with this one. Experience debt is a huge, hideous, gaping wound in the otherwise unbroken awesomeness of City Of Heroes, and I felt pretty okay about giving it up until someone told me they’ve halved it now. Issue Five just went live, and now I’m longing to get back in and see what else has changed. Unfortunately my account has expired, so I’m not sure if I should re-register so soon before getting to play what is in effect the sequel.

Anyway, the point is, I’m pretty excited about City Of Villains now. I’m not expecting it to be massively different to CoH, I’m just expecting it to work.

Sometime: Fahrenheit

I can’t imagine I’m going to like this as much as its reviewers have so far, but there’s no doubting its perfectly pitched atmosphere and tactile control tricks. I intend to enjoy it as pulp – a sort of scienceless CSI.

21st: Lost

Will we find out a damn thing about anything? Craig says he heard we will, but it seems almost too much to ask. My main hope from the new series is that The Others will regain the sinisterness they had when all we knew of them was the super-human, super-unsettling Ethan. The last glimpse we had of them was too ordinary – we need to find out something namelessly horrifying about them to make them scary again.

I’m also hoping for more on the response to Boone’s call for help just before he tumbled off that cliff. If you haven’t listened to it carefully yet, do so now. It is interesting stuff.

23rd: Winter Assault

Dawn Of War was great. This will have new stuff. It will be great. END PREVIEW.

23rd: Fable

People keep telling me I’ll find this interesting, so I will play it. The voice-acting seriously risks ruining it for me, though – I found it unbearable in Black And White, and from what I’ve heard it’s the same mockingly insincere stuff here. In other respects, too, it looks a bit like a child’s drawing of an RPG rather than one made by RPG lovers. I don’t mind some streamlining, but it looks like it’s lost all the character of an RPG, leaving everything generic and placeholderish. I haven’t played it for even a second, so this is just scepticism.

Various Times: Other Birthdays

Mark, Ross and Beast all have birthdays (apparently on the same day) this month, as do at least two friends from outside of work and my gran. Literally fifty percent of everyone I know was born in September.

28th: My Birthday

I might like to go up in a balloon. Seems like a birthdayish thing to do. I also like the idea of silent flight. Engine noises ruin travel for me.

30th: Kieron‘s Birthday

I am quietly hoping to just do whatever other people are doing for this, instead of doing something sociable with lovely Gamer people for my birthday (short of working with them, if I go to work). You’re kind of responsible for people’s enjoyment if they’re out because of you, and that’s the kind of pressure for which mere Disc Editing cannot prepare you. I’d feel better if I wasn’t the main event, more of a niche side-show.

30th: Serenity

The spectacular finalé to what is sure to be the best September ever. If you haven’t seen Firefly, see this. If you have, you’re already going to see this. If you’ve already seen it through ‘connections’, I hate your face.

To celebrate I have worked out how to make Firefox realise I have an RSS feed, so that little orange broadcast icon should appear down the bottom. You can add it at as a Live Bookmark, or cram this link into a feed reader. You can even feed that feed to your personal Google page.

I am excited. We are about to get hit by a tsunami of amazingness, and I don’t see it stopping before the end of the year. Next month sees the return of Lost and The OC – the two most addictive programmes ever – and finishes off with the release of Serenity, the film of the third-best series ever, and a pretty much guaranteed entry into my elitist top films list. October is FEAR month, and given that I’ve now played the bizarrely early demo through about thirty-six times, I see myself getting lost in that pretty hard. Somewhere in that interim Hitman: Blood Money and Call Of Duty 2 are both due, but take that with a pinch of salt until you hear it from someone who knows anything. Contracts left a bitter taste in my mouth, so excitement over Blood Money is running low, and Call Of Duty 2’s promise is basically that it’ll put you through living hell, but both are bound to be an experience. I feel like I am owed Dreamfall fairly soon, but I don’t know where that’s coming from.

Let’s hope all that happens before mid-November, because in all probability subsequent events will be rendered irrelevant. I will not be playing other games for a few months. For the purposes of that claim, ‘reality’ counts as a game. I am waiting, of course, longing for sweet, sweet Oblivion. Which has Wonder Woman in it.

It’s incredibly rare, even among these great programmes, for the main character to be my favourite, but Fry definitely is. He doesn’t fit easily into any established stereotype – he’s an idiot but not to the extent of Homer, he’s a loser but not everything goes wrong, he’s hopeless with women but dated Amy, and he’s inept at everything except computer games. To me, he’s a modern-day hero: vain and stupid whilst nerdy and unpopular.

He’s a pizza-delivery boy who falls into a cryo chamber on the turn of the millenium and is defrosted a thousand years later. He befriends a heartless alcoholic bending robot called Bender (it takes a few episodes to get used to the fact that one of the characters is called Bender) and a renegade career-implant officer, the one-eyed Leela. They find work as the illegally underpaid delivery company owned by Fry’s descendant, the senile mad scientist Professor Farnsworth. Also in the company are Zoidberg, an incompetent lobster-alien doctor; Amy, a rich and clueless intern the Professor keeps on because she has the same blood type as him; and Hermes, a Jamaican bureaucrat.

The other main component of Futurama’s appeal is that it’s set in the future – the world is richly imagined and exciting, which takes it to a completely different level to The Simpsons. Cleverly, the satire of The Simpsons isn’t lost in the transition to the year 3000 either – roughly half of everything in the future is a comment on something in the present – and the humour itself is somewhere further in the senseless and crazy directions than The Simpsons. In one shot of a storage cupboard, two folders on a shelf are labelled ‘P’ and ‘NP’ – implying that by 3000AD a mathematical conundrum over the computability of a certain class of algorithms has been resolved. Matt Groening is kind of a nerd himself, but here he’s teamed with David X Cohen, and the team nerdiness level is at such dangerous heights that one DVD commentary mentions they regularly play D&D in their lunchbreaks.

Lastly, the sideline characters that crop up in just a few episodes are among the greatest ever devised: most notably Clamps, Flexo, Morbo, the Robot Devil, the generic fat mechanic guy, Santa Claus, Horrible Gelatinous Blob, the Harlem Globetrotters, That Guy and Elzar. I think quotes do more good conveying the appeal of Futurama, and luckily I have thousands of them.

Series Notes: the first three series are interchangeably great, then the fourth starts with a run of mind-blowingly good episodes, the premiere being probably my favourite ever, and so epic and exciting that it leaves me feeling like I’ve seen Futurama: The Film. It doesn’t stay that good, though, and then series five has two, maybe even three episodes that are basically worthless. The others are as great as the old stuff, but those few anomalies don’t even have a single joke in them that makes me feel bad about writing them off like this.

Quotes:

Soldier: This is the worst part: the calm before the battle.
Fry: And then the battle isn’t so bad?
Soldier: Oh, right. I forgot about the battle.

(a crustacean confiscates Bender’s cigar)
Bender: Wait, I need that to smoke!

(Bender is caught having stolen the priceless atomic tiara)
Bender: Wait, I can explain! It’s very valuable!

Bender: (to a turtle) Maybe you’d feel better if I had a drink.

Bender: (to a turtle) At least we’ll die on our backs, helpless.

Al Gore: And next up we have Professor-
Professor Farnsworth: I demand the floor!
Al Gore: Well, yes, it’s your turn to speak.
Professor Farnsworth: Well nuts to me! I’m taking the stage.

Fry: Hey, you have no right to criticize the 20th century! We gave the world the light bulb, the steam boat and the cotton gin.
Leela: Those things are all from the 19th century.
Fry: Yeah, well, they probably just copied us.

Fry: It’s just like the story of the grasshopper and the octopus. All year long, the grasshopper kept burying acorns for the winter, while the octopus mooched off his girlfriend and watched TV. But then the winter came, and the grasshopper died, and the octopus ate all his acorns. And also he got a racecar. Is any of this getting through to you?

Leela: We’re going to deliver this crate like professionals.
Fry: Aw. Can’t we just dump it in the sewer and say we delivered it?
Bender: Too much work! I say we burn it, then say we dumped it in the sewer!

Leela: That’s Zapp Brannigan’s ship!
Fry: The Zapp Brannigan?
Fry: (confused) Who’s the Zapp Brannigan?

Leela: Stop it, Bender, we don’t need to beg.
Fry: So what do you suggest? A daring daylight robbery of Fort Knox on elephant-back? That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard.

Leela: Where’s Fry?
Bender: I didn’t kill him. Professor?
Professor Farnsworth: No, I’ve been busy.

(Fry has Bender dig up his brother’s grave to take back a lucky clover he stole)
Bender: Paydirt! I got the clover, and his wedding ring. Sorry ladies, I’m taken! Hey Fry, you want me to smack the corpse up a little?

Bender: (carrying pillows) These aren’t very heavy, but you don’t hear me not complaining.

Bender: (locking Leela in the laundry room as part of a mutiny) Don’t worry Leela, soon we’ll be able to look back on all this and laugh. Ahahahahahaa!

Bender: (the ship is going down with Leela, Bender and Fry still aboard) Leela, save me! And yourself I guess! And my banjo! … And Fry!

Zapp Brannigan: (explaining his military plan) If we can hit that bullseye the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards. Checkmate!

(Fry is styling his hair in the exhaust of the ship’s engines)
Leela: Fry, do you have any idea how long it takes to reconfigure those engines?
Fry: When you look this good, you don’t need to know anything.

(Leela is proposing staying at her artificially reduced age rather than returning to her normal one)
Professor Farnsworth: (horrified) But you’ll have no way to return to your normal age except growing up, as God intended!

(Leela and Bender confront the Professor)
Leela: We’ve got to talk to you about Fry.
Bender: Yeah! We want some money! Wait, what’s this about Fry?

(Fry is staying with Bender)
Fry: Where’s the bathroom?
Bender: Bathwhat?
Fry: Bathroom.
Bender: Whatroom?
Fry: Bathroom!
Bender: Whatwhat?

Bender: Of all the friends I’ve had, you’re the first.

(Fry is preparing to revive his fossilised dog)
Bender: A dog, eh? Interesting… no wait, what’s that other one? Tedious…

(Bender and the others are ascending the side of a hotel, Bender looking in on the guests)
Bender: Get a room, you two!
Man: We’re in a room.
Bender: Then lose some weight!

Clips: native.avi (12MB) rock.mpg (3MB)

Despite being utterly unlike anything else I like in theme or type (it’s a White House drama (you might think that’s obvious from the title, but if so you’re probably American – I’ve still never heard of the West Wing outside of this series)), it’s absolutely brilliant. One thing about it goes some way to explaining the anomaly, though – it’s a fantasy. I imagine people who keep up with politics could have a nasty experience trying to swallow its picture of a government in which a near-perfect tension between pure democracy and educated liberalism decides policy, and the people in power are all heartbreakingly good-willed and astonishingly talented. To call it arrogant for that is like accusing Star Trek of exaggerating our space-travel capabilities. Not a documentary! Fiction is where they tell you a story and, while knowing the story isn’t true, you follow the plot and maybe enjoy it. Where did we get this idea that art’s supposed to just record what things are like? That’s a talentless, menial task (says a journalist); art should be fantasy, it should use imagination to show how things could be and get people excited at the idea. Beyond entertainment, that’s its only task, and it’s a much loftier and more important calling than commenting on how things really are.

The thing that sticks with me from The West Wing is the culture of highly qualified people working incredibly hard out of dedication to what they do – not why they’re doing it. Sam and Toby are relentlessly perfectionist about their own and each other’s writing because they love writing and couldn’t bear to see bad writing used, not because of a sense of duty to their country. Writer Aaron Sorkin clearly models them on himself, and the fact that he works in entertainment while they run the country implies no difference in their passion and determination. He wrote virtually every episode of the show himself, right up to the end of series four (when it mysteriously lost all its wit and heart), and – let’s be honest here – frequently took drugs to do it. I’m not the same at all, of course, but occasionally I catch myself thinking like this – using my spare time to rework something sub-par even though I’m sure it would have been accepted. The profound thing about the West Wing is that it paints a fantasy so admirable it actually inspires you to improve yourself. It ingrains you with the idea that a thing is worth doing well at virtually any cost.

The characters talk as fast as air-traffic controllers, only the jargon is not so much jargon as a mix of brilliantly argued moral points and hilarious stupidity. The political situations are eerily like recent real ones, and the action taken is a compelling compromise between liberal and what people actually believe in: the Democrats are in power, and president Bartlett (played by Martin Sheen, incidentally) is a particularly left wing (and underlyingly geeky) one. Every issue is discussed with a thoroughness and fairness (not to mention articulacy and, an unavoidably recurring word, intelligence) that impresses even me, a sceptic philosopher derisive of the attempts of any other discipline to even argue coherently, let alone exhibit any kind of rational intelligence. The arguments for the ‘other side’ are alarmingly persuasive, and a couple of times it’s genuinely changed my stance on things.

But the issues are very much secondary to the characters, for me – there are perhaps five who aren’t fantastic and compelling and vividly human, so to do the others full justice, I will list ten of them by first name in descending order of greatness: Toby, Josh, Will, Sam, Donna, Margaret, Leo, CJ, Charlie. Detailing what I like so much about each of them would be a mammoth (though strangely tempting) task, so I’ll just skip over some highlights: Toby is just fantastic all the time – grouchy, brilliant, and absurdly restrained when he’s happy; Josh and Donna’s relationship is a horribly touching combination of superficial spite masking genuine affection; Margaret’s perfect deadpan conversations with her perpetually frowning boss Leo.

Series Notes: the first two series are relentlessly brilliant, with several of the best ever episodes in the second; but then the third starts off with three or four… not bad episodes as such, just a bit grim. It’s all struggle and hostility, whereas no other episodes before that had ever lost their good humour and multi-facetedness. Shortly into the series, though, it gets great again, and stays at the old stellar standard. Then the fourth series… wow. It’s like The West Wing Plus: everything about it is even better, and the energy and pace of it is completely exhilerating. As for the finalés, the first series’ was fantastic, the next two weren’t really cliff-hangers or even very interesting, but the fourth is another explosive one, taking four long-running plot-lines to breaking point and leaving them there, and also featuring two remarkable firsts: one of the characters running (it’s not usually a very athletic programme); and a white ending screen (every other episode has a black one).

Or, it would be if that was actually the last episode. I later discovered that the fourth series, inexplicably, has a twenty-third episode, which utterly breaks the cliffhanger and leaves the series at a boring stalemate, and doesn’t have the fade to white. After that, Sorkin no longer writes the show, and while it seems superficially similar, the heart is gone from it. Series five, as far as I could muster the interest to watch, focused on dramatic global events, turning it into a political thriller rather than a personal drama set within the political arena. I haven’t watched much of series six, again because I dislike what little I have: my problem with that one stemming from the characters. They were delicate things as Sorkin crafted them, more human and believable than we’re used to on TV, and in other writers’ comparitively clumsy hands they break. Their subtle internal logic has gone, and their actions become inconsistent – just slightly, way less than on any other show, but it ruins the illusion nonetheless.

Series seven really perks up. Nothing like as good as a Sorkin series, but because it’s mostly new characters, and in a new environment, starting something new rather than trying to continue what was started in Sorkin’s episodes, it feels like a different show with a few familiar faces, and the mere-mortal writing is easier to swallow. It never got terribly exciting, and there were only a few touching or funny moments, but it was a nice way to go out.

Quotes:

(Donna is pressing Leo for official word on the news that the president crashed his* bicycle)
Leo: He was swerving to avoid a tree.
Donna: And what happened?
Leo: He was unsuccessful.**

* Actually it was Leo’s bike, but I’m not usually a trivia person. So I won’t tell you how much it cost or what metal it was made of.

** I tell this to some people and they don’t laugh. It’s not possible that they might have a higher standard of humour than me, so maybe they just don’t get it: the usual form of an explanation of an accident starting with ‘he swerved to avoid an x’ would finish ‘and hit a y’ (where x is a fast-moving object somewhere where it shouldn’t have been, and y is the kind of thing you would normally be able to easily avoid, like a tree), but in this case the president, being a dork, just cycled straight into a tree, under no unusual circumstance. The humour lies in the way Leo starts the explanation in a way that sounds acceptable, Donna notices that he’s used the tree as the ‘x’, which is what she knows the president hit, so presses him to see how he’s going to get out of naming a ‘y’ without contradicting the fact that it was a tree he hit, and his answer is funny. Yes, part of my explanation of why it’s funny is “It’s funny.”

Christian Right: Mr President – if our children can buy pornography on any street corner for five dollars, isn’t that too high a price to pay for free speech?
Jed: No.
Christian Right: Really?
Jed: I do think five dollars is too high a price to pay for pornography, though.

(Leo and Jed are approaching a plane whose engine is roaring loudly. Leo has just finished a phone conversation with Bruno and Hess)
Leo: I just got off with Bruno and Hess.
Jed: I’m sorry?
Leo: I said I just got off with Bruno and Hess.
Jed: You didn’t say ‘Michigan sucks’?
Leo: No sir.
Jed: I thought you said ‘Michigan sucks’.
Leo: I’m standing very close to the engine, so it may have sounded like I said ‘Notre Dame is going to get the ass-kicking they so richly deserve’.

(Donna has finally found Josh a flight that doesn’t involve a change at Atlanta and booked him on it)
Josh: Cancel it.
Donna: Why?
Josh: I need a layover in Atlanta. I need to get there around an hour before an eight o’clock flight would take off.
Donna: That would be around seven.
Josh: Well, I haven’t done the math.

CJ: Duchamp was the father of Dadaism.
Toby: I know.
CJ: The dadda of Dada!
Toby: It’s like there’s nothing you can do about a joke like that – you see it coming, and you just have to stand there.

Leo: I think your wife’s not going to like it.
Toby: My ex-wife. No, she’s not. Why do you call her my wife?
Leo: It bothers you.
Toby: Everything bothers me; you pick that?

Josh: Leo, ask me how long a Martian day is.
Leo: No, I don’t think I will.

Sam: I need you to tell me everything you can about the superconducting supercollider.
Physicist: How much time do you have?
Sam: About ten minutes.
Physicist: If you pay close attention and stay very, very quiet I can teach you how to spell it.

(Some women protested against Abbey Bartlet by turning up to one of her speeches in aprons and with rolling pins)
Sam: Why were there rolling pins?
CJ: Brenda Swetland: At this moment you’re not licensed to practise medicine, correct? A. Bartlet: At this moment I’m just a wife and mother.
Sam: I don’t see it.
CJ: You’ve got to want it.
Sam: Oh. I see it.
CJ: Yeah.
Sam: What’re we doing?
CJ: Well, I wanted my office to issue a statement saying “You’re annoying, shut up,” but Bruno said to wave at it, and he’s right.

Jed: Toby, why are you smiling?
Toby: Happiness is my default state, sir.

(Toby is reading what Sam’s typing)
Toby: That’s good… good… okay… Sam, you’re going to come to a verb soon, right?
Sam: Okay, you know what this is called?
Toby: Bad writing?
Sam: Imagery.

Toby: I’m not coming in the car?
Jed: No, you know why? Because you made fun of the guacamole.
Toby: I didn’t!
Jed: I could tell you were thinking it.
Toby: Fair enough.

(Toby is trying to come up with a statement for the press secretary to give in defence of their nomination for attorney general)
Toby: He’s tough on crime, fair on justice, say that. On no account say that. What is that? He’s tough on crime, fair on justice, wears a moustache, sings a song? What’s happening to me?

Josh: Was it a good game?
Sam: You know what I’d do if- no, it wasn’t a good game. You know what I’d do if I had a hockey team?
Josh: What?
Sam: I’d hire a sumo wrestler. I’d give him a uniform, transportation, five-hundred bucks a week to sit in the goal, eat a ham sandwich and enjoy the game. My team’d never get scored on.
Josh: Your team would get scored on constantly.
Sam: Yeah, but we’d sell a few tickets.
Josh: Yeah, because sumo wrestling always sells out in hockey towns.
Sam: My idea’s totally inviable?
Josh: Well, you’re a democrat.

Donna: (talking about a Chinese satelite) It was in what’s called a degrading orbital path, and it’s now dropped off their radar, suggesting it’s started a rapid descent towards Earth’s atmosphere.
Charlie: Cool.
Donna: It’s not! What’s the matter with you people?
Charlie: What did I do?
Donna: A thing the size of a garbage truck is going to be in a two-thousand mile-an-hour freefall and no-one knows where it’s going to hit!
Charlie: I’m rooting for Zurich. I’ve had it up to here with the Swiss.

Toby: I need you to back up Albie Duncan.
Andy: Is he crazy?
Toby: No. No, no. No. A little bit.
Andy: Toby?
Toby: He’s Albie Duncan, he was in the Eisenhower State Department, he’s brilliant, he’s respected; if he’s crazy, I don’t want to be sane.
Andy: You’re not.
Toby: Excellent.

Josh: I’m getting subpoena’d again.
Delores: Oh I’m sorry dear. D’you want a cookie?
Josh: Thanks.

Senator At Alcoholics Anonymous Meeting: Okay, I haven’t chaired in a while; what do we do next?
Agency Director At Alcoholics Anonymous Meeting: Now’s when we usually start drinking.
Other Senator At Alcoholics Anonymous Meeting: Actually there is one thing I’d like to talk about before we start.
Senator At Alcoholics Anonymous Meeting: If you’re going to try and get me to fund that idiot-ass airplane that can’t fly…
Other Senator At Alcoholics Anonymous Meeting: It can fly.
Senator At Alcoholics Anonymous Meeting: Yeah, it can fly, it just can’t land.
Federal Judge At Alcoholics Anonymous Meeting: That’s a small price to pay for being able to fly.

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