Entries in TV (33)
Caprica
Fridays at 9 p.m. on Syfy. Five episodes into the first season.
Only novels rival TV shows in terms of the depth and breadth of the worlds they can create. That’s what makes the classic luddite sneer “I don’t even own a TV” so profoundly stupid: It betrays the fact that the sneering luddites are just as blind to the medium’s potential as the TV hacks at which they direct their derision. Because sure, most TV is disposable (just as most books and music and movies are ultimately disposable), but the shows that understand the possibilities in literally hours of story time can become epics, not necessarily in style (I’m thinking of shows like Arrested Development in addition to such obvious examples as The Sopranos and Buffy the Vampire Slayer) but in scope.
Time will tell whether Caprica can ascend to that echelon—it’s still early, and it’s walking a staggeringly high tightrope—but it has the potential because it has the ambition, with an enormous cast of complex characters, intricate plotting, and truly intriguing ideas about technology and religion and terrorism and the nature of humanity and a host of other weighty themes. The tone is a bit uneven, wobbling from humor to melodrama to genuine tragedy, and then there’s the fact that as a prequel to the revamped Battlestar Galactica (which ended its four-season run last spring), it is, by definition, heading toward apocalypse: the vast majority of the characters (not to mention their entire civilization) are doomed, which is, you know, kind of depressing. And yet Caprica is too interesting and immersive to be a downer. I haven’t gotten over my fears that it’s going to collapse into an incoherent mess (always a danger when you aim high), and I don’t have much idea where it’s going with the many narrative threads, but my bewilderment isn’t a strike against it. That, in fact, is what make it so fascinating.
Mary Beth
Dollhouse — revisited
Second season and series finale aired Friday, January 29, on Fox.
Looking back at what I wrote about Dollhouse after its first few episodes, I’m stunned by how far the show came in its two brief seasons. Maybe it just took a while for creator Joss Whedon’s team of writers to figure out how to make their high concept work. Maybe the meddling Fox executives finally backed off enough to let them tell the story the way they had always wanted. Maybe it just took me a while to get past the problematic elements and appreciate how brilliantly the show was handling them. I suspect, in fact, that it might be a little of all three. But now that the show has ended with a taut, thrilling, poignant finale, it’s worth reassessing. Back then, with my first post, I considered Dollhouse worth appreciating more for its ambitions than its achievements, but now, having seen the whole thing, I think the series ended up realizing those high ambitions and even expanding upon them in ways I hadn’t expected or thought possible.
Glee
Wednesdays at 9 p.m. on Fox. Eight episodes into the first season.
Warning: Glee causes whiplash. The high school show choir dramedy will be clever and witty and sensitive and fresh, and then, a moment later, it will be stupid and unfunny and cruel and clichéd. Then it will launch into a musical number so energetic and charming that you forgive the bad stuff, and then the bad will take a truly ugly turn, and you wonder how you ever thought it was good enough to make up for that. The choir’s hyperspeed cover of Beyoncé’s “Halo” mashed against “Walking on Sunshine”—yay! The choir teacher’s deeply uncomfortable cover of Sisqo’s “Thong Song”—boo! Awesome, bizarre humor involving Jane Lynch advocating caning and prancing around in a zoot suit—yay! Stupid, bizarre humor involving the football team being coached to dance, literally dance, in the middle of a play—boo! A poignant, beautifully acted scene in which a gay teenage boy comes out to his father—yay! Yet another nasty, misogynistic scene in which an impossibly shrewish woman browbeats her impossibly saintly husband—boo!
Assessing Glee means weighing the good against the bad, and I, at least, have yet to get the scale to stay still long enough to take its measure. The show bewilders me, delights me, and disgusts me—and even when I stop hating it long enough to love it, I feel a little bit dirty about doing so. But I keep watching. It has me hooked. That has to count for something, I guess.
The Prisoner
Sole season on DVD. (At present, all seventeen episodes are also streaming for free on AMCtv.com.)
I love watching TV shows on DVD, partly because of the lack of commercials but mainly because I’ve never been good with delayed gratification, and on DVD, I can watch episode after episode without having to wait a week or more in between.* When it came to The Prisoner, however, one episode at a time was all I could take, not because it’s a bad show—to the contrary, it’s brilliant—but because it’s so weird and trippy, such a relentless mind-fuck, that I always wanted to stew over an episode before jumping directly into the next.
Simply put, The Prisoner is like nothing else I’ve ever seen before. Sure, you can recognize the classic show’s influence—particularly on labyrinthine, long-arced series such as The X-Files and Twin Peaks and Lost—but the audacity and surreality of the 1967–68 original are hard to match. Furthermore, The Prisoner demonstrates a strong singular vision that TV shows, a relatively collaborative medium, rarely possess. It was championed, cocreated, and produced by one man, actor Patrick McGoohan—who also wrote and directed many of the episodes (some under pseudonyms) and, of course, starred as Number 6—and that matters, I think. The Prisoner feels authored, for lack of a better term. It’s as unfiltered and distinct as a good novel, and as challenging as one, too.
Castle
Select episodes from first season available online at ABC.com (and soon, I hope, on Hulu). Season two debuts Monday, September 21, on ABC.
I recently read an interview with a short story author who said she enjoys writing short works because she feels more freedom there to explore extremely dark, bleak places—places she would be reluctant to visit, as either a writer or a reader, for the length of a novel. The idea rang true to me (partly because I’m presently in the midst of a provocative but depressing, emotionally draining novel that I wish were a bit shorter), and although I think the notion could easily be taken too far (perhaps it would be better to say that that overwhelmingly dark subject matter is more challenging in a novel than in a story), I find it fun to extrapolate from that notion to other media.
For example, musical devices that might be tiresome in a longer work—gimmicky orchestration; the incessant drill of a single rhythmic pattern; light accompaniment of a guileless melody—can be charming in a short piece (see: Sabre Dance). A movie can use simple, archetypal characters that would become flat and tiresome in an ongoing work like a TV show (see: Pan’s Labyrinth). And a TV show with a charismatic lead character often can get away lackluster storytelling because spending time with the character is the whole point of watching the show.
Such an encapsulation would be a little harsh for Castle, ABC’s one-year-old mystery drama, but not by much. The premise is gimmicky, the policework is standard, and the mysteries vary in quality (to be fair, that’s typical of crime shows), but none of that really matters because Nathan Fillion is the star: Castle is fun and compelling to the extent to that Fillion is fun and compelling, which makes it quite fun and compelling indeed.
Little Dorrit
Masterpiece Classic miniseries, March 29–April 26.
With Charles Dickens, you expect an innocent saint of a hero, broadly drawn yet charmingly idiosyncratic characters, sensational setbacks and reversals, and, of course, some populist agitation, and Little Dorrit does not disappoint on those fronts: check, check, check, and check. What surprised me, though, is how timely that populist agitation is. We’re inured to the deprivations of “A Christmas Carol,” and Bleak House focuses on arcane nineteenth-century British legalties, but the targets of Little Dorrit come straight from today’s newspapers: ruinous Ponzi schemes, predatory lenders and landlords, a financial system that rewards those who shuffle money about rather than those who actually produce goods. As melodramatic as Little Dorrit is (very), the rage at its core about capitalism gone awry is still all too relevant, and it still burns.
Dollhouse
Fridays at 9 p.m. on Fox. Seven episodes into the first season.
The premise of Dollhouse gets creepier and creepier, verging on distasteful, the longer you thing about it. A shadowy company manages a collection of “Dolls”: people whose memories and personalities have been erased, to be replaced with the personas and skill sets demanded by the company’s clients. Want a temporary bodyguard who looks like Eliza Dushku? A master thief who looks like Eliza Dushku? A date guaranteed to put out (i.e., a glorified whore) who looks like Eliza Dushku? Done and done and done. And deeply creepy.
Fortunately, creator Joss Whedon is reflective enough to keep his latest garrulous, genre-bending show from becoming the vacuously salacious T&A extravaganza that the Fox advertising geniuses clearly wish they were selling. If you’re going to play around with themes of selfhood and human trafficking and, frankly, rape, you can’t be superficial about it. You have to take the characters and their predicament seriously, and to his credit, Whedon does, even amid the banter and stunts and all that. Dollhouse still has weird flaws and shortcomings, but seven episodes in, it’s beginning to find its way and develop an intriguing, thought-provoking mythology. I’m interested to see where it goes.
30 Rock
Thursdays at 9:30 p.m. on HBO. Seven episodes into the third season.
As much as I love Arrested Development, I understand why it never found much of an audience. With long, complicated story arcs and dark, pointed humor—not to mention nine principal characters and more than a dozen frequently recurring characters, many of whom aren’t, technically, all that likeable—the daring sitcom is difficult for casual, uninitiated viewers to “get” immediately. But why is 30 Rock heir to the critically-adored-but-low-rated comedy crown? Why aren’t enough people watching it?
30 Rock is so easy to enjoy. The “plots” are generally a bit beside the point (if you miss an episode, no harm done), the humor is less caustic and more zany, and the small ensemble features riotously funny Alec Baldwin embracing his reincarnation as a comedic character actor as well as the show’s creator, beloved comedy goddess Tina Fey. I know not everyone is as enamored with the neurotic, geeky brunette archetype as, say, Sean is (to my very good fortune—I love you, baby!), but even so, other than Sarah Palin enthusiasts, who doesn’t love Tina Fey?
True Blood
Sundays at 9 p.m. on HBO. Five episodes into the first season.
When it rained on Sunday night a couple of weeks ago, our satellite reception went staticky and I wasn’t able to watch the new episode of True Blood. (Why the hell is cable not available on our street? We live in New York, a huge metropolitan area, the media capital of the nation! Arrgh.) I sighed and scheduled the DVR to record a rerun of the episode later in the week. It rained that night, too, so I found another middle-of-the-night reshowing and, on the third attempt, finally got a complete recording. Yay!
But through this whole satellite fiasco, with all my cursing at DirecTV, I was sort of embarrassed for myself. This was a lot of effort to watch a TV show that I know in my heart to be pretty mediocre. The stereotyping of the small-town South is inappropriate. The allegorical treatment of vampirism manages to be both heavy-handed and wildly inconsistent. Much of the “drama” is laughable and way too reminiscent of late-night softcore fare, which it already kind of resembles in other ways (ahem). And yet, and yet, and yet … I kind of like it.
Life
Season one on DVD and Hulu. Season two debuts Monday, September 29, on NBC.
The concept of Life is darkly high-concept (a cop framed for murder and exonerated and freed after twelve years rejoins the police force, despite the fact that he won a huge financial settlement against the city), but it rarely feels as pat and over-constructed as its premise suggests. Similarly, a rough sketch of the cop (he loves fruit! he’s into Zen! he speaks in a weird, elliptical manner that drives his partner crazy!) belies the complexity of the character and the way those oh-so-quirky details begin to feel organic rather than contrived.
So what looks like an unpromising drama—yet another cop show trying way too hard to separate itself from the pack—somehow coalesces into something genuinely compelling, at times even moving. I’m not sure who to credit—creator Rand Ravich for doing far more with his hook than I would guessed or actors Damian Lewis and Sarah Shahi for making everything come alive in prickly but spirited fashion—but in its strike-abbreviated first season, Life captured my attention. It has real potential, which makes its coming banishment to the wasteland of Friday nights a real shame. (Not that I ever watch TV shows when they actually air, but still.)
