Joss Whedon (who is one of my own personal gods in case you didn't know) had a Q&A panel at 2013's Comic Con in which he mentioned a desire for more original content to come out of Hollywood. You can watch the entire panel here if you like, and if you don't have anything to do for the next hour. It's funny and insightful as Whedon has a tendency to be, but the focus on more original stories struck me as interesting. This is partially because I've been lamenting the various remakes and rehashes and adaptations coming out of Hollywood for the past couple of years, and it's just nice to hear someone I respect and admire so greatly admit to feeling the same way.
As we all know, Whedon's star is (finally) on the ascendent. He's gained a lot of success over the past couple years while helming the ship for Marvel's The Avengers adaptation and writing, directing, and producing his own adaptation of Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing. Anyone else sensing a pattern developing here? For a man with specific views on the need for original content, Whedon didn't seem to be putting out much original content. Indeed, even The Cabin in the Woods (brilliant film that it was) seemed to be the brain child of Drew Goddard. So where were all of these original ideas Whedon wanted to see come out of Hollywood but didn't seem ready to produce himself? Apparently sitting in one of his desk drawers for the last decade.
In Your Eyes is the most recent film to be released by Whedon. Given how busy the man is with Age of Ultron, and all of his other Marvel duties, I don't know how much he had to do with the film's actual production, but we do know that he is the sole person responsible for the script.
And what a script it is. In Your Eyes (which can be rented for only $5 here) is the story of Dylan (Michael Stahl-David) and Rebecca (Zoe Kazan), two people who couldn't be more different from one another but who find themselves inexplicably linked and drawn together. The film opens with Dylan and Rebecca as children, him in New Mexico and she living in New Hampshire, on what appears to be just a normal day for both of him. He's going to school and joking with his friends, and she's going sledding with her mother. As Rebecca's getting ready for the pulse pounding trek down the snowy hill, Dylan finds himself seeing things through her eyes, and when she crashes into a tree, the both of them feel it and are knocked unconscious. The film then jumps forward a decade or so to give us Dylan and Rebecca as adults. He's an ex-con fresh out of prison for breaking and entering and trying to get his life together, and she's married to the worst man imaginable living an unfulfilled, upper-class life. Their weird connection has continued in less invasive ways than the sledding incident, but it's kicked into full gear one day for no discernible reason. They find that they can talk to each other (out loud only) and see what one another sees, and also smell and feel what the other is smelling and feeling. What follows is a fascinating and entertaining story about how two people who've never even met find themselves falling in love.
The story works exceptionally well for a sap, like me, who loves romance and watching people fall in love. And for two people who are on screen together for less than five minutes, Michael Stahl-David and Zoe Kazan have exceptionally strong chemistry with one another. It was easy to forget during their scenes that they couldn't actually hear one another and were filming their respective parts in different locations. But deeper than the romance were themes about companionship and never being alone that I found to be really moving. But the romantic story in and of itself is great because these two people make one another better by being together. It's something I've noticed about the best of Whedon's romantic relationships: His characters don't have to change or give up anything about themselves when they get together. When that particular element is missing, the relationships tend to fall flat or not work.
The flaws in the film are nominal. None of the characters outside of the main two are developed as well. Most of them are two dimensional villain types who serve little to no purpose other than to be horrible and create tension for the couple. There are a number of scenes of the two of them talking to each other over their mysterious connection in public and getting odd glances from the people around them who think their talking to themselves. This could have easily been taken care of by each of them simply buying a Bluetooth and wearing it everywhere. Since the story takes place in a world where people seemingly walk around talking to themselves all the time, this is an odd problem for the story to have and never address. And the origin of this connection between them and whatever it is that sparked it into being is never explained in the film. There's a moment when Dylan says he's been thinking about the reasons why it might have happened when it did, and when Rebecca asks him what he thinks, he simply replies "Why not?" It's an exchange that suggests Whedon knew the question would come up eventually and either didn't want to bog down the proceedings with an explanation, or couldn't come up with one himself. As a choice, it feels a little lazy on his part, but I also recognize the potential desire to allow that element of the story to sit on the back burner while we just focus on these two characters falling in love. In that sense, whether this development is a stroke of genius or a deal breaker for the picture is something that I think is totally subjective.
Other than that, I honestly thought every aspect of the story worked. As much as I'm looking forward to Age of Ultron, and I can't stress enough how excited I am, I must say that if Joss Whedon continues to lead the charge for original content in Hollywood, then there's nothing more we could hope for. In Your Eyes blends romance and Sci-Fi in one of the best ways I've ever seen. Spend your $5 and watch it now; you won't be disappointed.
Sunday, May 4, 2014
Saturday, April 19, 2014
Character Analysis: Ian and Mickey from Shameless
I honestly wasn’t sure about watching Shamless at first. It seemed to be a fairly typical Showtime series with extremes in sex, nudity, and vulgarity, but very little in character development or sound plotting. Couple that with its seeming premise of a low income family just struggling to make it through addiction and poor parenting, and I didn’t think there’d be much in the series for me to latch onto. But a very early promo for the series seemed to imply that at least one of the characters was gay.
Immediately, my attention was piqued. I make no bones about the fact that a show with a queer storyline will grab and better keep my attention than a show without one. In a world where so many minorities are ignored or nonexistent within a number of storytelling forms, it doesn’t seem like it’s too much to ask for a little visibility. So given that early promo, it seemed we were dealing with a show that would, at least on some level, cover the issue of growing up poor in the inner city and still having to navigate the murky waters of an "alternative" sexual orientation. That, at least, was a story I could dedicate some time and interest to. But I still went into the show, which is ostensibly a comedy, with fairly low expectations on how they’d go about handling this character and his story.
So imagine my surprise when, a mere four seasons later, Shameless has proven to feature one of the best and most nuanced queer relationships TV has ever seen. From the moment when Ian and Mickey have sex for the first time in the seventh episode of the first season, it’s clear that this relationship will be anything but simple and straight forward. But its the continued manner in which the writers find to complicate things between these two boys that makes the story so fundamentally fascinating and important. Here’s a couple of the reasons I think this is one of the most important queer story lines in TV.
The Characters
Ian and Mickey are two of the most unique gay characters that I think I’ve ever seen on the small screen.
As the show opens, Ian, who is about 15 or 16, is having an affair with his adult, married-with-children, boss from the convenience store where he works. But it’s important to note that Ian isn’t a victim. He isn’t being preyed upon by Kash so that the man can get his perverse sexual needs met. If anything, Ian is the aggressor in the relationship. This is a fact that’s made even more obvious when you find out that Ian is the top in all of he and Kash’s sexual encounters. Indeed, Ian is also the top in his sexual relationship with Mickey, but more on that in awhile.
Kash is certainly a closet case who is too afraid of his wife and shamed by his muslim religion to come out properly, but what he isn’t, per se, is a pedophile (or an ephebophile to be more exact). Even though he is engaged in a sexual and even fairly romantic/emotional relationship with a teenager, the show never made it seem like Kash was attracted to Ian specifically because he was a teenager. Instead, everything about it seems to suggest an arrangement of convenience (interesting when you consider the place the two of them work). Kash sleeps with Ian because Ian is the only gay man he knows and he isn’t strong enough to go out and find someone his own age; Ian sleeps with Kash because he honestly likes the man and also because its a way for him to take control and have some level of power within his sexuality.
Ian isn’t really shown as being ashamed of his sexuality in the early goings of the show. He doesn’t live in an environment that’s very conducive to alternative sexual orientations, and his family and the support they give each other is so important to him that of course he’s worried that disclosing his sexuality might color their opinion of him. But the truth is that while it might take Ian some time to come out, when he does so it’s done rather effortlessly. This is a credit to the series as well as to the character who seems to have far less anxiety about his sexuality than most gay teen characters on TV do.
Mickey, on the other hand, carries a lot of anxiety and conflicting feelings towards his sexual orientation. It’s to the character’s credit that these fears and uncertainties manifest themselves in very interesting and entertaining ways. Instead of being almost obnoxiously self-conscious around people, trying his hardest to hide what we all know to be obviously true, Mickey has a tendency to simply live his life, lashing out from time to time.
The thing with Mickey is that his hyper-masculine personality isn’t a persona or a facade to hide his divergent sexual orientation; its who he really is. Mickey’s grown up in a world where he had to be hard and tough in order to survive. The Milkovich family is one of criminals. They’re what the Gallaghers would be without the steady, gentle hand of Fiona to guide them and keep them on track. Raised by a patriarch who is in and out of prison and is verbally, physically, and it’s suggested even sexually abusive when he is out, Mickey had to learn early on how to be tough and how to give as good as he got in order to survive.
This is one of the many ways he’s set apart from a lot of the other closeted LGBT characters on TV. Mickey has sex with women, he robs stores, he carries guns, he gets into fights, and he’s the “dirtiest white boy in America” because he honestly doesn’t know any other way to be. In the early moments of the first and second season, Mickey isn’t so much in the closet as he’s just incapable of conceiving of the possibility that he’s gay. Getting fucked by Ian is just something that’s fun and feels good. Indeed, for him bottoming isn’t about status, or the giving up of any level of power or masculinity at all. Mickey is in full control of his sexual proclivities. “Liking what I like don’t make me a bitch” he expresses to Ian once after Ian tries to shame him for being a bottom.
In fact, Mickey seems to be way more understanding about what he likes in the bedroom than a lot of gay characters tend to be. At a pivotal point in the third season when he invites Ian over while he’s got the house to himself for the weekend, he comes out of his room with a string of (fairly large) anal beads and asks Ian to use them on him. While it’s possible that he acquired the sex toy only recently, my guess has long been that Mickey learned early on that he enjoyed being penetrated, and Ian isn’t the first boy to be granted that pleasure. Conversely, Ian has no clue with the anal beads are for and has no idea how to (or why he’d even want to) go about using them. So while Ian is more in control and has a firmer understanding about his sexual orientation and is strong enough to come out, Mickey is in more control of his sexuality and sexual lifestyle. It’s a distinction that works to set this relationship apart from others like it.
But again, that element of Mickey’s stunted emotional and psychosexual development is still important. So when he tells Ian after their first sexual encounter “Kiss me and I’ll cut your fucking tongue out,” it’s important to remember that he isn’t posturing; this simply isn’t the kind of situation where kissing will be a part of the equation for him because in spite of what he might do in the bedroom, he simply isn’t gay.
The Pacing:
So the Ian/Mickey storyline starts out with a couple of very solid characters. But the show doesn’t stop there. The slow burn of Ian and Mickey’s relationship is one of the other elements that makes this story so worth watching. This isn’t love at first sight, and it isn’t the typical shoehorning in of intense emotional feelings where they don’t belong; it’s two fully realized characters slowly falling in love with each other and their relationship progressing from something purely physical into something a lot deeper.
Admittedly, it would be easy to say that Ian falls for Mickey quicker than Mickey seems to fall for Ian, but in a lot of ways even the show isn’t too clear on Ian’s feelings. As recently as the penultimate episode of the latest season, when asked whether or not he loves Mickey, the best Ian can come up with is that he likes the way Mickey smells.
For Mickey, however, the process of falling in love with Ian, and more importantly realizing that he’s falling in love with Ian, is slow and arduous, and wonderfully rewarding. There are a couple of ways in which the show has a tendency to show rather than tell us that Mickey is falling: the first is with really rewarding moments that harken back to, and obviously contradict earlier moments in the show.
It’s wonderful to watch the couple’s first kiss and to remember that early line about tongues getting cut out. But it’s also wonderful to have Mickey get out of juvie at the beginning of the third season, immediately find Ian for one of their sex romps, and in the midst of their special brand of pillow talk let it slip that he missed Ian while he was on the inside. He plays it off like this emotion was only due to not being able to get the kind of sexual gratification that he craves, “I have to do all the fucking in Juvie, otherwise I’d end up someone’s bitch,” but when coupled with the scene from the first season where Ian visits Mickey in jail and tells him he misses him and gets another threat for the effort, it becomes easy to see that Mickey’s on a steady path towards loving the guy he’s been having sex with for the last few seasons.
The Ian/Mickey story is crammed with these parallels. There’s the kissing of course but also small scenes where Ian begs Mickey not to do something harmful which is then mirrored in one of the more heartbreaking scenes between the two where Mickey, despite his protests that he’d do no such thing, begs Ian not to leave him and join the army. These moments show growth for the character and the depth of their relationship as a whole and they never cease to be amazing to watch.
The other cue to Mickey’s continued growth and his deepening feelings for Ian lies in his clothing and styling. It’s something my friend Stephanie first pointed out to me when we were watching one of the recent episodes together: Mickey’s gone from being the “dirtiest white boy in America” to someone clean, presentable, and all the more attractive for it. I think this is due to two reasons: 1) Mickey feels good about himself when he’s with Ian and therefore takes more care and pride in his appearance. 2) After watching Ian engaged in a relationship with Kash and then in one with Ned (both of whom are older, well groomed, and somewhat well-off gentlemen), Mickey seems to have started transforming himself into someone he thinks Ian would be more likely to find attractive. It starts with one of my favorite scenes in the third season where Mickey asks Ian what it is about this old dude that he finds attractive and then almost immediately starts to take on some of those elements himself.
Notice how the gunshots are used to punctuate each of Ian’s statements about Ned. He’s engaging Mickey in a conversation that gets at the heart of Mickey's insecurities about their relationship and it angers him and in his anger he fires the gun. The remark that Ian makes about Ned buying him things is aggravating partially because Mickey knows its bullshit and partially because he knows that’s something that he can’t give to Ian. But he doesn’t fire the gun in the wake of the oh-so-important “He isn’t afraid to kiss me” statement because he knows that that’s not bullshit and that it's something that Ian values. And in his desire to be the kind of person Ian can love, he knows that this is the sort of direction their relationships needs to take.
But I’ve often thought that more than just wanting to acquiesce to whatever it is that he thinks Ian wants from him, Mickey also feels the desire to take their relationship to that next level but he lacks a basic understanding of how a healthy romantic relationship works which would help him to know how to navigate those waters. The look on his face when Ian says what he says about the kissing is one of deepest shame. He knows that Ian’s claim that his unwillingness to kiss him is based in cowardice is accurate, and yet the way he responds to that isn’t with the bruised ego of the tough guy, but by almost immediately rectifying the situation. It’s as if he’s saying “If what it takes for me to keep you is a kiss every now and then, then by God am I willing to do that.” Likewise, I think he’s equally ready and willing to alter the way he dresses and grooms himself to those same ends. It’s one of the most subtle things the show has done, but when Mickey starts showing up in the third and fourth season with his face washed and his clothes looking oddly more conservative and almost yuppy, it’s a noticeable change.
The Roadblocks:
But all of that would be for naught if it weren’t for the show’s willingness and amazing skill at placing interesting, horrifying, but believable roadblocks in Ian and Mickey’s way. In a typical show, the romantic roadblocks tend to be about cliches such as infidelity. With these two characters, the roadblocks are more along the lines of Mickey’s homophobic and abusive father catching the two of them together, beating them both, and then hiring a hooker to come and basically try to rape the gay out of him.
Their roadblocks have a tendency to be Ian trying to confront Mickey about what he’s long known to be true in an attempt to get a real reaction from him and Mickey responding by beating the shit out of him. These scenes are never easy to watch, but there’s something to be said for the couple’s ability to work past them and to overcome their
issues in the long run. Also there’s the fact that these moments are all grounded in the show’s strong characterization. There never seems to be any question that Mickey’s beating Ian has nothing at all to do with wanting to hurt the boy, or even to assert some level of dominance over him, but has everything to do with his futile attempts to beat this thing out of himself. I don’t know that this rationalization makes the act itself any better, per se, but I do know that I watched the scene in question feeling much worse for Mickey than I did for Ian.
These roadblocks (or speed bumps, maybe?), as well as the many others, serve to make this relationship unlike any other on TV. The element of one of the boys being singularly unable to accept this crucial part of who he is is important. But if that’s where the story stayed, it could easily become just another story about a gay man in love with a closet case. The fact that the show adds unique and interesting outside forces into the mix keeps this story well ahead of the curve in a lot of ways.
The Ian/Mickey storyline is one that I follow closely in part because it perfectly encapsulates what I love about long form storytelling. It’s taken 4 seasons to get them to this point, but Mickey has finally come out of the closet and told the world that he is in fact gay. He did it in a moment where it looked as though if he didn’t, he’d lose Ian. Their entire storyline over the course of this fourth season has more or less been about how incapable Mickey is of losing Ian again, and so we’ve seen him take some drastic steps forward to ensure that that didn’t happen. The relationship will never be easy, and indeed the speed bumps the show has lined up for them in seasons to come seem to be as exciting and interesting as anything they’ve thrown their way thus far.
Shameless isn’t really an all around great TV show. There are a lot of elements to it that they haven’t quite figured out as well as they have the Ian/Mickey thing, and even more elements that simply don’t work no matter what they try to do with them. But the odd thing is that the way the show fails in so many other story lines only serves to show just how well it succeeds with this one. Through consistent characterization, strong pacing, and an ability to keep the struggles of the relationship fresh and interesting, the writers of Shameless have succeeded in creating one of the single greatest queer relationships, and maybe one of the best relationships in general, that TV has ever seen. Now if we could only get the two of them to finally say “I love you!” my life would be complete.
Immediately, my attention was piqued. I make no bones about the fact that a show with a queer storyline will grab and better keep my attention than a show without one. In a world where so many minorities are ignored or nonexistent within a number of storytelling forms, it doesn’t seem like it’s too much to ask for a little visibility. So given that early promo, it seemed we were dealing with a show that would, at least on some level, cover the issue of growing up poor in the inner city and still having to navigate the murky waters of an "alternative" sexual orientation. That, at least, was a story I could dedicate some time and interest to. But I still went into the show, which is ostensibly a comedy, with fairly low expectations on how they’d go about handling this character and his story.
So imagine my surprise when, a mere four seasons later, Shameless has proven to feature one of the best and most nuanced queer relationships TV has ever seen. From the moment when Ian and Mickey have sex for the first time in the seventh episode of the first season, it’s clear that this relationship will be anything but simple and straight forward. But its the continued manner in which the writers find to complicate things between these two boys that makes the story so fundamentally fascinating and important. Here’s a couple of the reasons I think this is one of the most important queer story lines in TV.
The Characters
Ian and Mickey are two of the most unique gay characters that I think I’ve ever seen on the small screen.
As the show opens, Ian, who is about 15 or 16, is having an affair with his adult, married-with-children, boss from the convenience store where he works. But it’s important to note that Ian isn’t a victim. He isn’t being preyed upon by Kash so that the man can get his perverse sexual needs met. If anything, Ian is the aggressor in the relationship. This is a fact that’s made even more obvious when you find out that Ian is the top in all of he and Kash’s sexual encounters. Indeed, Ian is also the top in his sexual relationship with Mickey, but more on that in awhile.
Kash is certainly a closet case who is too afraid of his wife and shamed by his muslim religion to come out properly, but what he isn’t, per se, is a pedophile (or an ephebophile to be more exact). Even though he is engaged in a sexual and even fairly romantic/emotional relationship with a teenager, the show never made it seem like Kash was attracted to Ian specifically because he was a teenager. Instead, everything about it seems to suggest an arrangement of convenience (interesting when you consider the place the two of them work). Kash sleeps with Ian because Ian is the only gay man he knows and he isn’t strong enough to go out and find someone his own age; Ian sleeps with Kash because he honestly likes the man and also because its a way for him to take control and have some level of power within his sexuality.
Ian isn’t really shown as being ashamed of his sexuality in the early goings of the show. He doesn’t live in an environment that’s very conducive to alternative sexual orientations, and his family and the support they give each other is so important to him that of course he’s worried that disclosing his sexuality might color their opinion of him. But the truth is that while it might take Ian some time to come out, when he does so it’s done rather effortlessly. This is a credit to the series as well as to the character who seems to have far less anxiety about his sexuality than most gay teen characters on TV do.
Mickey, on the other hand, carries a lot of anxiety and conflicting feelings towards his sexual orientation. It’s to the character’s credit that these fears and uncertainties manifest themselves in very interesting and entertaining ways. Instead of being almost obnoxiously self-conscious around people, trying his hardest to hide what we all know to be obviously true, Mickey has a tendency to simply live his life, lashing out from time to time.
The thing with Mickey is that his hyper-masculine personality isn’t a persona or a facade to hide his divergent sexual orientation; its who he really is. Mickey’s grown up in a world where he had to be hard and tough in order to survive. The Milkovich family is one of criminals. They’re what the Gallaghers would be without the steady, gentle hand of Fiona to guide them and keep them on track. Raised by a patriarch who is in and out of prison and is verbally, physically, and it’s suggested even sexually abusive when he is out, Mickey had to learn early on how to be tough and how to give as good as he got in order to survive.
This is one of the many ways he’s set apart from a lot of the other closeted LGBT characters on TV. Mickey has sex with women, he robs stores, he carries guns, he gets into fights, and he’s the “dirtiest white boy in America” because he honestly doesn’t know any other way to be. In the early moments of the first and second season, Mickey isn’t so much in the closet as he’s just incapable of conceiving of the possibility that he’s gay. Getting fucked by Ian is just something that’s fun and feels good. Indeed, for him bottoming isn’t about status, or the giving up of any level of power or masculinity at all. Mickey is in full control of his sexual proclivities. “Liking what I like don’t make me a bitch” he expresses to Ian once after Ian tries to shame him for being a bottom.
In fact, Mickey seems to be way more understanding about what he likes in the bedroom than a lot of gay characters tend to be. At a pivotal point in the third season when he invites Ian over while he’s got the house to himself for the weekend, he comes out of his room with a string of (fairly large) anal beads and asks Ian to use them on him. While it’s possible that he acquired the sex toy only recently, my guess has long been that Mickey learned early on that he enjoyed being penetrated, and Ian isn’t the first boy to be granted that pleasure. Conversely, Ian has no clue with the anal beads are for and has no idea how to (or why he’d even want to) go about using them. So while Ian is more in control and has a firmer understanding about his sexual orientation and is strong enough to come out, Mickey is in more control of his sexuality and sexual lifestyle. It’s a distinction that works to set this relationship apart from others like it. But again, that element of Mickey’s stunted emotional and psychosexual development is still important. So when he tells Ian after their first sexual encounter “Kiss me and I’ll cut your fucking tongue out,” it’s important to remember that he isn’t posturing; this simply isn’t the kind of situation where kissing will be a part of the equation for him because in spite of what he might do in the bedroom, he simply isn’t gay.
The Pacing:
So the Ian/Mickey storyline starts out with a couple of very solid characters. But the show doesn’t stop there. The slow burn of Ian and Mickey’s relationship is one of the other elements that makes this story so worth watching. This isn’t love at first sight, and it isn’t the typical shoehorning in of intense emotional feelings where they don’t belong; it’s two fully realized characters slowly falling in love with each other and their relationship progressing from something purely physical into something a lot deeper.
Admittedly, it would be easy to say that Ian falls for Mickey quicker than Mickey seems to fall for Ian, but in a lot of ways even the show isn’t too clear on Ian’s feelings. As recently as the penultimate episode of the latest season, when asked whether or not he loves Mickey, the best Ian can come up with is that he likes the way Mickey smells.
For Mickey, however, the process of falling in love with Ian, and more importantly realizing that he’s falling in love with Ian, is slow and arduous, and wonderfully rewarding. There are a couple of ways in which the show has a tendency to show rather than tell us that Mickey is falling: the first is with really rewarding moments that harken back to, and obviously contradict earlier moments in the show.
It’s wonderful to watch the couple’s first kiss and to remember that early line about tongues getting cut out. But it’s also wonderful to have Mickey get out of juvie at the beginning of the third season, immediately find Ian for one of their sex romps, and in the midst of their special brand of pillow talk let it slip that he missed Ian while he was on the inside. He plays it off like this emotion was only due to not being able to get the kind of sexual gratification that he craves, “I have to do all the fucking in Juvie, otherwise I’d end up someone’s bitch,” but when coupled with the scene from the first season where Ian visits Mickey in jail and tells him he misses him and gets another threat for the effort, it becomes easy to see that Mickey’s on a steady path towards loving the guy he’s been having sex with for the last few seasons.
The Ian/Mickey story is crammed with these parallels. There’s the kissing of course but also small scenes where Ian begs Mickey not to do something harmful which is then mirrored in one of the more heartbreaking scenes between the two where Mickey, despite his protests that he’d do no such thing, begs Ian not to leave him and join the army. These moments show growth for the character and the depth of their relationship as a whole and they never cease to be amazing to watch. The other cue to Mickey’s continued growth and his deepening feelings for Ian lies in his clothing and styling. It’s something my friend Stephanie first pointed out to me when we were watching one of the recent episodes together: Mickey’s gone from being the “dirtiest white boy in America” to someone clean, presentable, and all the more attractive for it. I think this is due to two reasons: 1) Mickey feels good about himself when he’s with Ian and therefore takes more care and pride in his appearance. 2) After watching Ian engaged in a relationship with Kash and then in one with Ned (both of whom are older, well groomed, and somewhat well-off gentlemen), Mickey seems to have started transforming himself into someone he thinks Ian would be more likely to find attractive. It starts with one of my favorite scenes in the third season where Mickey asks Ian what it is about this old dude that he finds attractive and then almost immediately starts to take on some of those elements himself.
Notice how the gunshots are used to punctuate each of Ian’s statements about Ned. He’s engaging Mickey in a conversation that gets at the heart of Mickey's insecurities about their relationship and it angers him and in his anger he fires the gun. The remark that Ian makes about Ned buying him things is aggravating partially because Mickey knows its bullshit and partially because he knows that’s something that he can’t give to Ian. But he doesn’t fire the gun in the wake of the oh-so-important “He isn’t afraid to kiss me” statement because he knows that that’s not bullshit and that it's something that Ian values. And in his desire to be the kind of person Ian can love, he knows that this is the sort of direction their relationships needs to take.
But I’ve often thought that more than just wanting to acquiesce to whatever it is that he thinks Ian wants from him, Mickey also feels the desire to take their relationship to that next level but he lacks a basic understanding of how a healthy romantic relationship works which would help him to know how to navigate those waters. The look on his face when Ian says what he says about the kissing is one of deepest shame. He knows that Ian’s claim that his unwillingness to kiss him is based in cowardice is accurate, and yet the way he responds to that isn’t with the bruised ego of the tough guy, but by almost immediately rectifying the situation. It’s as if he’s saying “If what it takes for me to keep you is a kiss every now and then, then by God am I willing to do that.” Likewise, I think he’s equally ready and willing to alter the way he dresses and grooms himself to those same ends. It’s one of the most subtle things the show has done, but when Mickey starts showing up in the third and fourth season with his face washed and his clothes looking oddly more conservative and almost yuppy, it’s a noticeable change.
The Roadblocks:
But all of that would be for naught if it weren’t for the show’s willingness and amazing skill at placing interesting, horrifying, but believable roadblocks in Ian and Mickey’s way. In a typical show, the romantic roadblocks tend to be about cliches such as infidelity. With these two characters, the roadblocks are more along the lines of Mickey’s homophobic and abusive father catching the two of them together, beating them both, and then hiring a hooker to come and basically try to rape the gay out of him.
issues in the long run. Also there’s the fact that these moments are all grounded in the show’s strong characterization. There never seems to be any question that Mickey’s beating Ian has nothing at all to do with wanting to hurt the boy, or even to assert some level of dominance over him, but has everything to do with his futile attempts to beat this thing out of himself. I don’t know that this rationalization makes the act itself any better, per se, but I do know that I watched the scene in question feeling much worse for Mickey than I did for Ian. These roadblocks (or speed bumps, maybe?), as well as the many others, serve to make this relationship unlike any other on TV. The element of one of the boys being singularly unable to accept this crucial part of who he is is important. But if that’s where the story stayed, it could easily become just another story about a gay man in love with a closet case. The fact that the show adds unique and interesting outside forces into the mix keeps this story well ahead of the curve in a lot of ways.
The Ian/Mickey storyline is one that I follow closely in part because it perfectly encapsulates what I love about long form storytelling. It’s taken 4 seasons to get them to this point, but Mickey has finally come out of the closet and told the world that he is in fact gay. He did it in a moment where it looked as though if he didn’t, he’d lose Ian. Their entire storyline over the course of this fourth season has more or less been about how incapable Mickey is of losing Ian again, and so we’ve seen him take some drastic steps forward to ensure that that didn’t happen. The relationship will never be easy, and indeed the speed bumps the show has lined up for them in seasons to come seem to be as exciting and interesting as anything they’ve thrown their way thus far.
Shameless isn’t really an all around great TV show. There are a lot of elements to it that they haven’t quite figured out as well as they have the Ian/Mickey thing, and even more elements that simply don’t work no matter what they try to do with them. But the odd thing is that the way the show fails in so many other story lines only serves to show just how well it succeeds with this one. Through consistent characterization, strong pacing, and an ability to keep the struggles of the relationship fresh and interesting, the writers of Shameless have succeeded in creating one of the single greatest queer relationships, and maybe one of the best relationships in general, that TV has ever seen. Now if we could only get the two of them to finally say “I love you!” my life would be complete.
Tuesday, February 18, 2014
TV Review: Looking (Season 1 Episodes 1-5)
Looking was one of my most anticipated shows of the year. I’ve been waiting for a contemporary version of Queer as Folk for awhile now. And while I’ve found a lot within the first 5 episodes of the show to be enjoyable and entertaining, I’m not at all ready to consider it to be within the same league as its Showtime predecessor.
In a lot of ways, I don’t think this is a bad thing. Setting itself apart from other queer shows that came before it could well be what rises Looking above the pack. It seems to have the frankness and sexual boundary pushing abilities of QAF coupled with some of (but certainly not all) the comedic timing of Will & Grace. Where I find the show to be lacking thus far is in nuanced and exceptional writing.
Looking is the story of Patrick (Jonathan Groff) and a few of his closest friends as they try to make their way through life in current day San Francisco. The cast of characters features no real surprises: Patrick’s best friend, Agustin (Frankie Alvarez) is in a committed long term relationship that’s in the early days of being opened to outside play, Dom (Murray Bartlett) is the aging man who uses his sex life to feel young and in charge of something, and Patrick is the romantic making his way through a string of dates to find the perfect boyfriend. The collection of characters is a bit hackneyed, but no less interesting and entertaining.
It’s hard to pin down exactly where Looking succeeds. The first two episodes were slow building and seemed far more interested in shock value than adding actual depth to the world and the characters. There’s an extended conversation within the second installment where the characters have an in depth and graphic conversation about sex. The conversation itself doesn’t ring false (indeed I’ve had some version of the same conversation multiple times over), but it’s placement within the episode, and the series as a whole feels forced, as if the writers were trying their hardest to slap viewers in the face with the fact of what kind of show this would be.
In fact, if I have one problem with Looking (and I have a number of them), it’s the dialogue. It hardly ever feels organic and natural, and the way a lot of the characters talk has left them feeling more like caricatures than actual people. The effect is such that it feels like the writers know what they want the characters to say but not why they need to be saying it, or perhaps it’s the actors who don’t understand why their characters are saying the things they say; the overall effect is the same.
But if I had to pinpoint a moment when the show started to win me over, it was towards the end of the second episode. Patrick has met a nice Hispanic guy (Richie played by Raul Castillo) who seems to also be into him; the two of them go home together and after having spent the entire episode giving in to his baser tendencies and some of his own racial notions, Patrick is surprised to find out that Richie is circumcised. The tentative foreplay they’re engaging in is peppered with a number of subtly racist (or at least stereotypical) statements being made by Patrick and we can see Richie becoming more and more uncomfortable by them. The outcome of Patrick’s shock over Richie’s lack of a foreskin is that Richie decides to leave, claiming that the two of them aren’t a match. Subsequently, Patrick makes a bowl of comfort food and has a phone conversation with his best friend that features him acknowledging that he might be a racist. This development in and of itself was remarkable, no queer themed show that I’ve watched in the past has seemed interested in tackling the issues of racism within the gay community in such a straight forward manner, but it wasn’t the statement that interested me so much as the effect it had an episode or two later when Patrick and Richie bumped into each other again and Patrick actually apologized and Richie actually forgave him beginning what should be Patrick’s first serious relationship of the series. While I was worried the show would make the statement and then have no follow through, what they’re actually doing is embarking on a story within which they’ll start to parse out some of the complexities and the rewards of interracial dating.
One of my longstanding annoyances with Queer as Folk was always that the cast was so whitewashed. Every main character and every one of their major love interests was white. While Looking still isn’t as diverse as I’d like it to be just yet (there are no African American characters and the one Asian American character is as minor as a character can be on a show. It’s the latter I have a bigger problem with as the show takes place in San Francisco, a city with a fairly large Asian American community), the fact that they’re at least striving to include Hispanic characters and looking at the effects of dating outside one’s race is interesting and promising.
The side plots of the show are interesting, but not a huge draw. The "will they, won’t they" element of Patrick’s relationship with his boss Kevin (longtime favorite of mine, Russell Tovey) is cute, but of course something we’ve seen before, the stories surrounding Dom (his relationship with Scott Bakula’s Lynn and his attempts to start a new business) are endearing but less than memorable, and the just about anytime Agustin is on screen I want to change the channel. But at this point in the show’s exceptionally young run, the writers at least seem to know what they’re doing with the lead character, so there’s that.
Right now, Looking is good. I enjoy watching it every week and I’m curious to see where it goes. If it finds itself capable of telling new stories, or at least telling old stories in new and interesting ways, and possibly even making grander points about being gay in America in the 21st century, then I think it might find itself capable of being truly great.
In a lot of ways, I don’t think this is a bad thing. Setting itself apart from other queer shows that came before it could well be what rises Looking above the pack. It seems to have the frankness and sexual boundary pushing abilities of QAF coupled with some of (but certainly not all) the comedic timing of Will & Grace. Where I find the show to be lacking thus far is in nuanced and exceptional writing.
Looking is the story of Patrick (Jonathan Groff) and a few of his closest friends as they try to make their way through life in current day San Francisco. The cast of characters features no real surprises: Patrick’s best friend, Agustin (Frankie Alvarez) is in a committed long term relationship that’s in the early days of being opened to outside play, Dom (Murray Bartlett) is the aging man who uses his sex life to feel young and in charge of something, and Patrick is the romantic making his way through a string of dates to find the perfect boyfriend. The collection of characters is a bit hackneyed, but no less interesting and entertaining.
It’s hard to pin down exactly where Looking succeeds. The first two episodes were slow building and seemed far more interested in shock value than adding actual depth to the world and the characters. There’s an extended conversation within the second installment where the characters have an in depth and graphic conversation about sex. The conversation itself doesn’t ring false (indeed I’ve had some version of the same conversation multiple times over), but it’s placement within the episode, and the series as a whole feels forced, as if the writers were trying their hardest to slap viewers in the face with the fact of what kind of show this would be.
In fact, if I have one problem with Looking (and I have a number of them), it’s the dialogue. It hardly ever feels organic and natural, and the way a lot of the characters talk has left them feeling more like caricatures than actual people. The effect is such that it feels like the writers know what they want the characters to say but not why they need to be saying it, or perhaps it’s the actors who don’t understand why their characters are saying the things they say; the overall effect is the same.
But if I had to pinpoint a moment when the show started to win me over, it was towards the end of the second episode. Patrick has met a nice Hispanic guy (Richie played by Raul Castillo) who seems to also be into him; the two of them go home together and after having spent the entire episode giving in to his baser tendencies and some of his own racial notions, Patrick is surprised to find out that Richie is circumcised. The tentative foreplay they’re engaging in is peppered with a number of subtly racist (or at least stereotypical) statements being made by Patrick and we can see Richie becoming more and more uncomfortable by them. The outcome of Patrick’s shock over Richie’s lack of a foreskin is that Richie decides to leave, claiming that the two of them aren’t a match. Subsequently, Patrick makes a bowl of comfort food and has a phone conversation with his best friend that features him acknowledging that he might be a racist. This development in and of itself was remarkable, no queer themed show that I’ve watched in the past has seemed interested in tackling the issues of racism within the gay community in such a straight forward manner, but it wasn’t the statement that interested me so much as the effect it had an episode or two later when Patrick and Richie bumped into each other again and Patrick actually apologized and Richie actually forgave him beginning what should be Patrick’s first serious relationship of the series. While I was worried the show would make the statement and then have no follow through, what they’re actually doing is embarking on a story within which they’ll start to parse out some of the complexities and the rewards of interracial dating.
One of my longstanding annoyances with Queer as Folk was always that the cast was so whitewashed. Every main character and every one of their major love interests was white. While Looking still isn’t as diverse as I’d like it to be just yet (there are no African American characters and the one Asian American character is as minor as a character can be on a show. It’s the latter I have a bigger problem with as the show takes place in San Francisco, a city with a fairly large Asian American community), the fact that they’re at least striving to include Hispanic characters and looking at the effects of dating outside one’s race is interesting and promising.
The side plots of the show are interesting, but not a huge draw. The "will they, won’t they" element of Patrick’s relationship with his boss Kevin (longtime favorite of mine, Russell Tovey) is cute, but of course something we’ve seen before, the stories surrounding Dom (his relationship with Scott Bakula’s Lynn and his attempts to start a new business) are endearing but less than memorable, and the just about anytime Agustin is on screen I want to change the channel. But at this point in the show’s exceptionally young run, the writers at least seem to know what they’re doing with the lead character, so there’s that.
Right now, Looking is good. I enjoy watching it every week and I’m curious to see where it goes. If it finds itself capable of telling new stories, or at least telling old stories in new and interesting ways, and possibly even making grander points about being gay in America in the 21st century, then I think it might find itself capable of being truly great.
Wednesday, January 15, 2014
2013 TV Year in Review: The Bad
As much as I enjoyed the year's TV lineup, I don't want it to seem like it was all good on the small screen. Per usual, there were a number of shows that simply didn't make the cut. So let's talk about them.
The Newbies:
I don't think anything proved to be a bigger waste of time on a weekly basis than Fox's The Following. I'd be shocked if any new series in 2013 had a bigger PR push leading up to the pilot. It seemed to have everything going for it. From Kevin Bacon making his debut as a TV leading man, to James Purefoy being fun and menacing, to the always preferable 13 episode season. And yet so much was missing or just lacking. The love story was pathetic and unbelievable, the multiple disciples Carroll had, all in exactly the place he needed them to be, strained credulity so much it was
laughable, the show never really deigned to show us exactly what it was about Carroll that made him so appealing and charismatic to these people in the first place, and so many things happened on a weekly basis simply because the plot required them to. Generally, when a story has plot elements that seem to come out of no where and have no basis in reality, it's because the writers haven't thought out their characters well enough for their decisions and failings or successes to seem organic. After the 6 episodes I watched (and 6/13 hours is more than enough to gauge a series in my opinion), the writers' sheer lack of clarity on who these characters were was obvious.
But just as bad as all that was The Following's pointless and egregious use of violence. As premium and even just cable shows continue to get more and more popular and more and more critical acclaim, basic cable has found itself in a position to ask what it is that sets these series apart from their own. As opposed to looking at the confidence and crispness of these shows' storytelling, it looks like Fox has decided it's just about the lax Standards and Practices these channels are allowed to employ on their programming. So the writers of The Following decided to cram in a lot of pointless and gratuitous violence and never understood that the presence of violence alone is meaningless without some kind of stakes behind it.
In the end, The Following is a show of almost-but-not-quite. The Poe foundation could have been nice if the series actually seemed to know anything at all about Edgar Allan Poe beyond what has been made sensationalized over the years. The love triangle between the two not-so-gay guys and the cute androgynous psychopath would have been nice if the show actually understood the complexities of human sexuality instead of wanting to deal with it like a child who thinks kissing adults are funny and mysterious. And I say all of this acknowledging that enough people seemed to continue watching The Following to warrant Fox giving it a second season which starts soon, so maybe I'm the minority here (I actually know I'm not), but everything about this show reeked of bad storytelling tropes.
The other big deal new comer that fell horribly flat was Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. I've already detailed my feelings about the first 7 episodes here, so there's not much more to say on the subject;
my thoughts haven't changed as the series has rounded out the 11th hour. But more importantly, after almost a full season by certain standards, AOS hasn't gotten any better and I've finally lost all desire to watch.
Possibly the most disappointing, if not outright offensive, thing the show has done thus far was to come out of hiatus with a huge campaign about finally giving answers on the Coulson mystery only to not deliver with the episode in question. Some light was shed on the issue, the story took a miniscule step forward, but the question of what actually happened to Agent Coulson still hasn't been answered. And the scant, pseudo-answer the episode provided did nothing to inspire me to even want to find out what the real answer is. So with all of the promise in the world, with the same team that was behind Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog leading the way, and with all of the might of Marvel's cinematic universe behind it, AOS turns out to be a bust. C'est la vie.
The Favorites?:
Forever proving that a series doesn't have to be new out of the gate to be a disappointment, last year saw a couple shows that simply couldn't get their shit together long enough to prove to be worth watching any longer.
Dexter had the unenviable job of trying to wrap up a series that had long outlived its usefulness in a lot of ways. This is a point upon which I certainly think I am in the minority, but while Dexter hadn't been great in many years, I don't think it reached a point of being fully unwatchable until it's final
season. Nothing the show has done since it's fourth season (which was a solid four years ago mind you) has been "good," but I don't think anything they did forced viewers to give up on the show en masse. And then there was Hannah McKay.
If there was one mistake Dexter made over the years, (and trust me there were many) it was in not understanding who their main character really was and trying to force more traditional TV storylines onto him. Dexter isn't the type of person to need or even really want a relationship. His whole thing with Rita was invented out of necessity and convenience, but somewhere along the line the show forgot that important fact and decided they wanted Dex to be a normal guy who just sometimes kills people. As a result we get characters like Hannah who have no purpose beyond being a love interest for a character who shouldn't have any more love interests. The character never really functions or gets off the ground in any serious fashion and as such she never really works.
On top of that, the show never really figured out what it wanted to do with the presence of Dexter's son, Harrison, so they invent an excuse to pawn him off on a number of equally useless nannies and baby sitters to justify daddy going off all night to murder people. Again it's an example of the show forcing events to fit the plot instead of developing organically. And with the opportunity to make Harrison into Dexter 2.0 given his experience with Rita's death, it's impossible to look at the route the show ended up choosing as being anything other than disappointing.
I haven't officially finished watching the last season yet, I gave up on it with about 3 or 4 episodes to go, but from what I've heard the ending did nothing at all to improve the show's overall standing, so I won't be rushing to finish up. But ultimately I think Dexter is just an example of how 8 years with a series is about 3 or 4 years too many.
The other show I said goodbye to in 2013 was Glee. The last time I gave up on a series in the middle of its run after years of dedicated, though declining, loyalty was the beginning of the fourth season of Heroes. At the time, no one realized that that season would the show's last, but after three years of diminishing returns, I finally had to say I'd had enough of the series. The same can be said of Glee, though I gave up on that series seemingly a couple years before it will officially reach its end.
The sad part about this is that I don't know that I can say Glee officially hit its rock bottom in 2013. Certainly the end of its fourth season left a lot to be desired, and featured the constantly offensive and deplorable Shooting Star which honestly should be brought up on charges for criminal negligence, but its return for its fifth season wasn't horrible. The two Beatles tribute episodes to kick things off weren't the worst installments the show had ever seen, and the Finn Hudson / Cory Monteith tribute was affecting no matter what logistical complaints I had about it. But where those first three episodes failed was in giving me a reason to continue watching. None of the storylines set forth in those early weeks seemed to be worthy of the screen time they'd wind up with (with the exception of the Santana / Demi Lovato love story that I actually am sorry to be missing), and the whole Kurt / Blane getting married thing was an active turn off for me. The best episode of the fourth season was The Breakup, and Kurt and Blane getting back together and then getting engaged on top of it totally undermined a lot of the brilliance of that particular hour.
But other than that, the problem with Glee in 2013 really just boiled down to More-of-the-Same-itis and I couldn't take it any longer. I couldn't handle more of Kurt and Blane drama, more of the show's misuse of characters like Tina Chang, more of the drastic shifts in characterization, or more of the ridiculous leaps inlack of logic that the show made on a regular basis. To an extent, I think that the fact that Glee stopped making any kind of sense years ago would be fine if it had at least continued to be funny. But that wasn't the case, and as such it lost pretty much all of its appeal over the years. The sad thing about the two most recent seasons of the show is that the New York based storylines have actually been enjoyable if not good while everything back in Lima has fallen into being unwatchable / offensive. If they'd just changed the series at its fourth season to be exclusively the story of the graduating seniors trying to make it in the world, I think it might have been a better choice. But I say that acknowledging that very few high school shows have ever successfully made the transition into college, and I don't trust Ryan Murphy with anything. But if we judge based on simple comparison, the New York stuff was way better and didn't constitute enough screen time to keep me watching the whole series, so I had to say goodbye.
Honorable Mentions:
1) Some of the best news to come out of the end of 2013 had to be the cancellation of True Blood on HBO. Much like Dexter, True Blood reached a point where it should have ended many moons ago, but there's a part of me that thinks this last season was the worst one yet. I don't know if it was the ultimately pointless Billith storyline, the continued insistence on keeping the peripheral characters at the forefront of the story (who honestly cared about Andy's kids?), or the show's complete unwillingness to allow Sookie to simply be single and ok, but whatever it was, this season never once found itself capable of being enjoyable. As opposed to previous seasons that saw brief flashes of entertaining storylines before the entire thing went down the toilet, this year it was just hard to get behind any aspect of the series. I will say that a lot of what they did with Jessica as a character was interesting, but I won't be sad to see the last of this show.
2) Ray Donovan was another series that started with a lot of fanfare, as Showtime shows tend to be, and very little payoff. I watched roughly the first 6 episodes and the different elements of the series never came together for me in a manner that would justify continued watching. Ray seemed like the kind of show with glimpses of good shows locked inside of it, but its inability to decide once and for all which show it wanted to be, which storyline it wanted to give the most weight, was a detriment. I think when a show, or any kind of story for that matter, tries to be everything, it succeeds in being nothing. But the glimpses nestled within it suggests the possibility that the show could be better in the future, or for all I know the last 6 episodes were much better than the first 6, but I doubt I'll be granted that information.
So there you have it, two posts about the highs and the lows of 2013's TV landscape. Stay tuned for my thoughts, hopes, desires, and excitements for 2014's TV season.
The Newbies:
I don't think anything proved to be a bigger waste of time on a weekly basis than Fox's The Following. I'd be shocked if any new series in 2013 had a bigger PR push leading up to the pilot. It seemed to have everything going for it. From Kevin Bacon making his debut as a TV leading man, to James Purefoy being fun and menacing, to the always preferable 13 episode season. And yet so much was missing or just lacking. The love story was pathetic and unbelievable, the multiple disciples Carroll had, all in exactly the place he needed them to be, strained credulity so much it was laughable, the show never really deigned to show us exactly what it was about Carroll that made him so appealing and charismatic to these people in the first place, and so many things happened on a weekly basis simply because the plot required them to. Generally, when a story has plot elements that seem to come out of no where and have no basis in reality, it's because the writers haven't thought out their characters well enough for their decisions and failings or successes to seem organic. After the 6 episodes I watched (and 6/13 hours is more than enough to gauge a series in my opinion), the writers' sheer lack of clarity on who these characters were was obvious.
But just as bad as all that was The Following's pointless and egregious use of violence. As premium and even just cable shows continue to get more and more popular and more and more critical acclaim, basic cable has found itself in a position to ask what it is that sets these series apart from their own. As opposed to looking at the confidence and crispness of these shows' storytelling, it looks like Fox has decided it's just about the lax Standards and Practices these channels are allowed to employ on their programming. So the writers of The Following decided to cram in a lot of pointless and gratuitous violence and never understood that the presence of violence alone is meaningless without some kind of stakes behind it.
In the end, The Following is a show of almost-but-not-quite. The Poe foundation could have been nice if the series actually seemed to know anything at all about Edgar Allan Poe beyond what has been made sensationalized over the years. The love triangle between the two not-so-gay guys and the cute androgynous psychopath would have been nice if the show actually understood the complexities of human sexuality instead of wanting to deal with it like a child who thinks kissing adults are funny and mysterious. And I say all of this acknowledging that enough people seemed to continue watching The Following to warrant Fox giving it a second season which starts soon, so maybe I'm the minority here (I actually know I'm not), but everything about this show reeked of bad storytelling tropes.
The other big deal new comer that fell horribly flat was Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. I've already detailed my feelings about the first 7 episodes here, so there's not much more to say on the subject;
Possibly the most disappointing, if not outright offensive, thing the show has done thus far was to come out of hiatus with a huge campaign about finally giving answers on the Coulson mystery only to not deliver with the episode in question. Some light was shed on the issue, the story took a miniscule step forward, but the question of what actually happened to Agent Coulson still hasn't been answered. And the scant, pseudo-answer the episode provided did nothing to inspire me to even want to find out what the real answer is. So with all of the promise in the world, with the same team that was behind Dr. Horrible's Sing Along Blog leading the way, and with all of the might of Marvel's cinematic universe behind it, AOS turns out to be a bust. C'est la vie.
The Favorites?:
Forever proving that a series doesn't have to be new out of the gate to be a disappointment, last year saw a couple shows that simply couldn't get their shit together long enough to prove to be worth watching any longer.
Dexter had the unenviable job of trying to wrap up a series that had long outlived its usefulness in a lot of ways. This is a point upon which I certainly think I am in the minority, but while Dexter hadn't been great in many years, I don't think it reached a point of being fully unwatchable until it's final
If there was one mistake Dexter made over the years, (and trust me there were many) it was in not understanding who their main character really was and trying to force more traditional TV storylines onto him. Dexter isn't the type of person to need or even really want a relationship. His whole thing with Rita was invented out of necessity and convenience, but somewhere along the line the show forgot that important fact and decided they wanted Dex to be a normal guy who just sometimes kills people. As a result we get characters like Hannah who have no purpose beyond being a love interest for a character who shouldn't have any more love interests. The character never really functions or gets off the ground in any serious fashion and as such she never really works.
On top of that, the show never really figured out what it wanted to do with the presence of Dexter's son, Harrison, so they invent an excuse to pawn him off on a number of equally useless nannies and baby sitters to justify daddy going off all night to murder people. Again it's an example of the show forcing events to fit the plot instead of developing organically. And with the opportunity to make Harrison into Dexter 2.0 given his experience with Rita's death, it's impossible to look at the route the show ended up choosing as being anything other than disappointing.
I haven't officially finished watching the last season yet, I gave up on it with about 3 or 4 episodes to go, but from what I've heard the ending did nothing at all to improve the show's overall standing, so I won't be rushing to finish up. But ultimately I think Dexter is just an example of how 8 years with a series is about 3 or 4 years too many.
The other show I said goodbye to in 2013 was Glee. The last time I gave up on a series in the middle of its run after years of dedicated, though declining, loyalty was the beginning of the fourth season of Heroes. At the time, no one realized that that season would the show's last, but after three years of diminishing returns, I finally had to say I'd had enough of the series. The same can be said of Glee, though I gave up on that series seemingly a couple years before it will officially reach its end.The sad part about this is that I don't know that I can say Glee officially hit its rock bottom in 2013. Certainly the end of its fourth season left a lot to be desired, and featured the constantly offensive and deplorable Shooting Star which honestly should be brought up on charges for criminal negligence, but its return for its fifth season wasn't horrible. The two Beatles tribute episodes to kick things off weren't the worst installments the show had ever seen, and the Finn Hudson / Cory Monteith tribute was affecting no matter what logistical complaints I had about it. But where those first three episodes failed was in giving me a reason to continue watching. None of the storylines set forth in those early weeks seemed to be worthy of the screen time they'd wind up with (with the exception of the Santana / Demi Lovato love story that I actually am sorry to be missing), and the whole Kurt / Blane getting married thing was an active turn off for me. The best episode of the fourth season was The Breakup, and Kurt and Blane getting back together and then getting engaged on top of it totally undermined a lot of the brilliance of that particular hour.
But other than that, the problem with Glee in 2013 really just boiled down to More-of-the-Same-itis and I couldn't take it any longer. I couldn't handle more of Kurt and Blane drama, more of the show's misuse of characters like Tina Chang, more of the drastic shifts in characterization, or more of the ridiculous leaps in
Honorable Mentions:
1) Some of the best news to come out of the end of 2013 had to be the cancellation of True Blood on HBO. Much like Dexter, True Blood reached a point where it should have ended many moons ago, but there's a part of me that thinks this last season was the worst one yet. I don't know if it was the ultimately pointless Billith storyline, the continued insistence on keeping the peripheral characters at the forefront of the story (who honestly cared about Andy's kids?), or the show's complete unwillingness to allow Sookie to simply be single and ok, but whatever it was, this season never once found itself capable of being enjoyable. As opposed to previous seasons that saw brief flashes of entertaining storylines before the entire thing went down the toilet, this year it was just hard to get behind any aspect of the series. I will say that a lot of what they did with Jessica as a character was interesting, but I won't be sad to see the last of this show.
2) Ray Donovan was another series that started with a lot of fanfare, as Showtime shows tend to be, and very little payoff. I watched roughly the first 6 episodes and the different elements of the series never came together for me in a manner that would justify continued watching. Ray seemed like the kind of show with glimpses of good shows locked inside of it, but its inability to decide once and for all which show it wanted to be, which storyline it wanted to give the most weight, was a detriment. I think when a show, or any kind of story for that matter, tries to be everything, it succeeds in being nothing. But the glimpses nestled within it suggests the possibility that the show could be better in the future, or for all I know the last 6 episodes were much better than the first 6, but I doubt I'll be granted that information.
So there you have it, two posts about the highs and the lows of 2013's TV landscape. Stay tuned for my thoughts, hopes, desires, and excitements for 2014's TV season.
Wednesday, January 8, 2014
2013 TV Year in Review: The Good
I was having a conversation with a friend of mine a couple days ago and I told her that the fact that someone in Hollywood looked at the cinema landscape and honestly thought "You know what we need? A Robocop remake!" truly horrifies me. She asked me what I thought it meant about the state of Film today and this seeming nostalgia Hollywood has for almost all things 80's, and I told her I simply think it means that Film is frightened to try anything new while TV is bursting at the seams with innovation and boundary pushing. After watching the sheer amount of TV I did over 2013, and I'm honestly almost ashamed to admit to how much TV I do watch, I must say I stand behind that outlook. A lot of people have been saying for years now that we're in the middle of a TV renaissance, and I don't think it's ever been more obviously true than it was last year.
The Newbies:
Two of my favorite things about 2013 were Orphan Black and Orange is the New Black. I came across an ad for Orphan online a couple days before the series began and was just in time to catch the pilot airing on BBC America, and I was blown away. Initially, it was due to the show's willingness to have its protagonist be kind of hate-able from the get go, but as time went on, I fell in love with pretty much every aspect of the show. But of course I couldn't love anything about it more than I do Tatiana Maslany, who honestly has to the be biggest success of the year hands down. Watching Tatiana create each of her characters from the ground up was the most fun anyone could have had each week, but the rest of the show didn't disappoint either. Orphan Black told its story with a confidence I don't
think you generally get to see in TV outside of the upper echelon of series (more of them to come). It didn't waste any time getting around to the heart of the mystery of the show and had no interest in drawing out the reveal that the characters were clones. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D should take note on this point.
But maybe even more important than all that was the huge stride forward Orphan Black took by placing its story in the hands of a relatively unknown *female* lead!!!! Finally a show (a genre show no less) with theballs confidence to see that a woman can indeed carry a series! With any luck under God the rest of the copy cats in tinsel town will take note and we can finally start to get some more gender equality on the small screen!
And leading that charge is the other breakout new series of the year: Orange is the New Black. If Orphan Black was pushing boundaries by placing one female in the lead (playing almost every main character herself no less), then Orange was clearly out to throw grenades at the boundaries by placing multiple women of multiple races and ages at the forefront of its story. The outcome is a ridiculously funny, entertaining, heartfelt, thought-provoking 13 episodes that left everyone who watched them chomping at the bit for more.
If 2013 becomes the year that all doubts or questions about Netflix's viability as a source for original programming were put to rest, then I venture to say that Orange is the New Black is the reason why. It's a series grounded in great acting and directing that just so happens to be equally entertaining on a binge watch as it is when taken in small doses, and it's the only series Netflix has put out thus far that I feel totally comfortable saying that about.
The Favorites:
Not to be outdone by the newbies, a few of the perennial favorites also had (expected) great years, or at least great episodes as was the case for AMC's The Walking Dead. When it aired back on March 3rd, I was very quick to hail the episode Clear as the best episode of TV that 2013 was likely to see barring entries from TV's top dogs Breaking Bad, Mad Men, and Game of Thrones which hadn't started their seasons yet.
Clear turned out to be the quietest most well contained, and overall best, episode the show had seen since its first season. Indeed, the core of the story harkened back to storylines from that first season. The Walking Dead is a show that works best with a bit of forward momentum. So long as the characters are moving forward and driving towards something, it tends to be enjoyable and worth watching, but once they become stagnant, the show lacks much of what makes it special. This was the problem with all of the second and a lot of the third season. And just when I (and a lot of others) was starting to think that the show was going to lose all coherence and watchability, the (then) future showrunner, Scott M. Gimple, penned an episode so good that all of my faith was renewed. I didn't know TWD was capable of being as good, enjoyable, and introspective as Clear turned out to be, and I'm so happy to find out that it could. The beginnings of season 4 that aired last fall were equally good, proving that Gimple is exactly the man for the job, but nothing really surpassed Clear if for no other reason than because it was just so much better from start to finish than I thought the series was capable of being any longer.
While The Walking Dead revived its storytelling ability, Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones merely solidified their constant places at the top of the TV pyramid. Game of Thrones has long been a favorite of mine, but I think it truly set itself apart by taking something that a lot of people knew was coming and still succeeding in making it completely affecting and seriously entertaining. The Rains of Castamere is great. From start to finish it's just great, and there's not much more anyone can say about it. But I'm going to try anyway. I think there are three main points to be made about the episode's greatness:
1) It teaches you how to watch the show.
In the event that there was anyone uncertain that they needed to be watching the ninth episode of each season ready for something epic to happen, The Rains of Castamere put that doubt to rest. I hadn't read the books when I watched through the first season, so if I had a knock against the show, it was that its pacing didn't make sense. To hit the penultimate episode and kill off your protagonist only to follow it up with the boringest episode the season had seen was ridiculous to me. Now that I understand the rhythms of the series, I don't feel that way anymore. I know exactly what to expect from a season of GoT. I know the first 2 episodes will play catch up with all of our characters, I know that the 9th episode will be the most epic thing we'll ever see, and the finale will just be a bit a place-setting for the next season. This should have been clear to most people after the second season, but two points make a line and not a pattern, per se, so the ability for the third season to reiterate these things was important and enjoyable. And the fact that they did it was a set piece as amazing as the Red Wedding was sheer brilliance.
2) The title!
It would have been so pathetically easy to call this episode The Red Wedding and be done with it. Everyone who'd read the books (and even just those of us who were only on tumblr) knew what was to come. The Red Wedding is one of the most iconographic moments of the series, and maybe all of Fantasy as a whole. But instead what the showrunners did was take this song which has its own sense of mystique and put it at the forefront. One of the smartest adaptation moves D.B. Weiss and David Benioff have made has been to have The Rains of Castamere orchestrated (at least I hope that was their decision) and to make sure they've had it playing on the show's score during some of the most important and shocking moments. In that sense, the song has just as much meaning to the viewers as it does to the people of Westeros. This way, when the song starts playing at the wedding, we don't even need Catelyn's reaction shot to tell us shit is about to go down. The title of the episode and the song carry all the weight and some subtlety to anyone still a bit too slow to get it.
3) The Stark-centric nature of the entire episode.
After focusing 2012's Blackwater fully on King's Landing with Sansa being the onlyTully Stark on screen, it was nice to toss King's Landing aside and focus only on the stories surrounding the other Stark children. While I think the show and the series have been making it a point to ensure the cast of characters share top billing in a lot of ways, I don't think we've ever really left behind the notion that this is primarily the Stark's story. Dany and Tyrion factor in greatly to everything that's happened and will happen, but I think we're all left with the general feeling that the overall fate of Westeros is in the hands of the remaining Starks, so focusing on them as they lose 2 more members was a great way to heighten the episode. Again I say Sheer Brilliance.
Rounding out the best of the best of 2013 TV are the two best installments the medium has ever seen, or might ever see in future: Breaking Bad's Ozymandias and Felina. I swear I don't think it's even remotely possible to say anything about these episodes that hasn't already been said, and said far more eloquently than I could ever imagine. While the greatness of an episode of The Walking Dead could be found in the series reaching heights it didn't seem to possess any longer, and the greatness of Game of Thrones could be seen as a relatively young show simply continuing to solidify itself at the top, the genius of these two episodes of Breaking Bad is all about the final and inevitable death of a king finding a way to go out on top. BB doesn't simply end its run on a note that continues its stance as a great show, it burns the house down behind it and challenges everyone to even try and achieve what it's achieved in its six years on air.
If the main question surrounding the pending end of the most addictive show on television was whether or not it would be able to live up to the series' storied run, Ozymandias and Felina put all those questions to rest. Two hours of amazing storytelling, great visuals, pulse pounding action, wrapped up lose threads, and questions finally answered. Vince Gilligan and company finally took a firm stance on the long-standing question of Walter White's sympathy or morality and told all Walter White apologist to STFU once and for all with the series' most riveting moment: "I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it. And I was really....I was alive." It's all of a minute long, and it's some of the best acting and one of the most jaw dropping moments in all of TV history in my not so humble opinion.
But that's to say nothing about the other great moments of those two outstanding episodes. Everything from Hank's death, to Skylar standing up to Walter (and if the way the camera holds on the shot of the knife and the phone while she makes her decision isn't just the most amazing thing you've ever seen, then I don't know what), to the final fracture and eventual heal (band-aid at least?) of the Walter--Jesse relationship was handled with the utmost skill, respect, and appreciation. I think that there will always be people who refuse to watch Breaking Bad for one reason or another, but in the end, the reason all of us and all of your friends have been harping on you about this show is simple: It's the best thing that the small screen has seen in many many decades. It's a show that pushed the medium forward and definitively showed what long-form storytelling was truly capable of, and I just don't know that anything will surpass it.
Honorable Mentions:
1) Scandal is a show that it can be tough to admit to loving, and recommending to others, but when a season premier features a scene like this one, how can you not throw yourself behind it? Very few shows have as many "Oh Shit!" moments as Scandal does on a weekly basis, and the third season opened with one that perfectly encapsulated a lot of what the show is about, what it stands for, and what the rest of the season was really going to be. It also might be the single most perfect foundation laying scene ever as we're finally introduced to Eli Pope not as just the strong shadowy figure getting shit done, but as Olivia's father. It was great!
2) Hannibal was an early surprise for the 2013 season because I didn't think anything on NBC would be capable of being that enjoyable, but I honestly should have known better than to bet against a genius like Bryan Fuller. Great performances from Hugh Dancy and Mads Mikkelsen center this show, a great balance between being serialized and episodic elevate it, and a visual beauty that's unprecedented on network TV truly marked it as one of the greats of 2013. Small audience numbers will probably doom it and the other NBC break out Dracula to being cancelled before their time, but I'd strongly suggest enjoying them while they last.
3) On the Comedy tip, I think attention has to be paid to Fox's Brooklyn Nine-Nine. I honestly don't watch very much comedy (when you've got Archer, I don't think you really need much more), but Brooklyn turned out to not only be effortlessly funny, it's also astonishingly diverse. It's characters are fully realized and unique, and its comedy is derived from those characters being placed in great situations not the typical racist, sexist, homophobic humor that got old back in the early 2000s. With any luck this could be the future of network comedy, but so long as Seth MacFarlane is being contacted to make TV, I wouldn't bet on it.
4) The Americans had a very quiet opening season, and while I don't know that it'll be one of the shows 2013 is truly known for, I do think it was a great start to what will hopefully be a long run. It perfectly integrated its marital troubles story into its spy craft in a way that I didn't expect heading in. It was interesting each week, and there were always funny wigs, so there's that.
So I know I droned on for awhile, but this is something I'm passionate about and I felt I needed to make up for a month's worth of not posting. I'm going to spend the next couple days working on a post focused on The Bad aspects of 2013 TV, and maybe a separate post dedicated to where I hope TV is and isn't going in the future based on these findings, so keep an eye out for that. And here's to the year to come in Storytelling!
The Newbies:
Two of my favorite things about 2013 were Orphan Black and Orange is the New Black. I came across an ad for Orphan online a couple days before the series began and was just in time to catch the pilot airing on BBC America, and I was blown away. Initially, it was due to the show's willingness to have its protagonist be kind of hate-able from the get go, but as time went on, I fell in love with pretty much every aspect of the show. But of course I couldn't love anything about it more than I do Tatiana Maslany, who honestly has to the be biggest success of the year hands down. Watching Tatiana create each of her characters from the ground up was the most fun anyone could have had each week, but the rest of the show didn't disappoint either. Orphan Black told its story with a confidence I don'tthink you generally get to see in TV outside of the upper echelon of series (more of them to come). It didn't waste any time getting around to the heart of the mystery of the show and had no interest in drawing out the reveal that the characters were clones. Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D should take note on this point.
But maybe even more important than all that was the huge stride forward Orphan Black took by placing its story in the hands of a relatively unknown *female* lead!!!! Finally a show (a genre show no less) with the
And leading that charge is the other breakout new series of the year: Orange is the New Black. If Orphan Black was pushing boundaries by placing one female in the lead (playing almost every main character herself no less), then Orange was clearly out to throw grenades at the boundaries by placing multiple women of multiple races and ages at the forefront of its story. The outcome is a ridiculously funny, entertaining, heartfelt, thought-provoking 13 episodes that left everyone who watched them chomping at the bit for more.If 2013 becomes the year that all doubts or questions about Netflix's viability as a source for original programming were put to rest, then I venture to say that Orange is the New Black is the reason why. It's a series grounded in great acting and directing that just so happens to be equally entertaining on a binge watch as it is when taken in small doses, and it's the only series Netflix has put out thus far that I feel totally comfortable saying that about.
The Favorites:
Not to be outdone by the newbies, a few of the perennial favorites also had (expected) great years, or at least great episodes as was the case for AMC's The Walking Dead. When it aired back on March 3rd, I was very quick to hail the episode Clear as the best episode of TV that 2013 was likely to see barring entries from TV's top dogs Breaking Bad, Mad Men, and Game of Thrones which hadn't started their seasons yet.Clear turned out to be the quietest most well contained, and overall best, episode the show had seen since its first season. Indeed, the core of the story harkened back to storylines from that first season. The Walking Dead is a show that works best with a bit of forward momentum. So long as the characters are moving forward and driving towards something, it tends to be enjoyable and worth watching, but once they become stagnant, the show lacks much of what makes it special. This was the problem with all of the second and a lot of the third season. And just when I (and a lot of others) was starting to think that the show was going to lose all coherence and watchability, the (then) future showrunner, Scott M. Gimple, penned an episode so good that all of my faith was renewed. I didn't know TWD was capable of being as good, enjoyable, and introspective as Clear turned out to be, and I'm so happy to find out that it could. The beginnings of season 4 that aired last fall were equally good, proving that Gimple is exactly the man for the job, but nothing really surpassed Clear if for no other reason than because it was just so much better from start to finish than I thought the series was capable of being any longer.
While The Walking Dead revived its storytelling ability, Breaking Bad and Game of Thrones merely solidified their constant places at the top of the TV pyramid. Game of Thrones has long been a favorite of mine, but I think it truly set itself apart by taking something that a lot of people knew was coming and still succeeding in making it completely affecting and seriously entertaining. The Rains of Castamere is great. From start to finish it's just great, and there's not much more anyone can say about it. But I'm going to try anyway. I think there are three main points to be made about the episode's greatness:
1) It teaches you how to watch the show.
In the event that there was anyone uncertain that they needed to be watching the ninth episode of each season ready for something epic to happen, The Rains of Castamere put that doubt to rest. I hadn't read the books when I watched through the first season, so if I had a knock against the show, it was that its pacing didn't make sense. To hit the penultimate episode and kill off your protagonist only to follow it up with the boringest episode the season had seen was ridiculous to me. Now that I understand the rhythms of the series, I don't feel that way anymore. I know exactly what to expect from a season of GoT. I know the first 2 episodes will play catch up with all of our characters, I know that the 9th episode will be the most epic thing we'll ever see, and the finale will just be a bit a place-setting for the next season. This should have been clear to most people after the second season, but two points make a line and not a pattern, per se, so the ability for the third season to reiterate these things was important and enjoyable. And the fact that they did it was a set piece as amazing as the Red Wedding was sheer brilliance.
2) The title!
It would have been so pathetically easy to call this episode The Red Wedding and be done with it. Everyone who'd read the books (and even just those of us who were only on tumblr) knew what was to come. The Red Wedding is one of the most iconographic moments of the series, and maybe all of Fantasy as a whole. But instead what the showrunners did was take this song which has its own sense of mystique and put it at the forefront. One of the smartest adaptation moves D.B. Weiss and David Benioff have made has been to have The Rains of Castamere orchestrated (at least I hope that was their decision) and to make sure they've had it playing on the show's score during some of the most important and shocking moments. In that sense, the song has just as much meaning to the viewers as it does to the people of Westeros. This way, when the song starts playing at the wedding, we don't even need Catelyn's reaction shot to tell us shit is about to go down. The title of the episode and the song carry all the weight and some subtlety to anyone still a bit too slow to get it.
3) The Stark-centric nature of the entire episode.
After focusing 2012's Blackwater fully on King's Landing with Sansa being the only
Rounding out the best of the best of 2013 TV are the two best installments the medium has ever seen, or might ever see in future: Breaking Bad's Ozymandias and Felina. I swear I don't think it's even remotely possible to say anything about these episodes that hasn't already been said, and said far more eloquently than I could ever imagine. While the greatness of an episode of The Walking Dead could be found in the series reaching heights it didn't seem to possess any longer, and the greatness of Game of Thrones could be seen as a relatively young show simply continuing to solidify itself at the top, the genius of these two episodes of Breaking Bad is all about the final and inevitable death of a king finding a way to go out on top. BB doesn't simply end its run on a note that continues its stance as a great show, it burns the house down behind it and challenges everyone to even try and achieve what it's achieved in its six years on air.
If the main question surrounding the pending end of the most addictive show on television was whether or not it would be able to live up to the series' storied run, Ozymandias and Felina put all those questions to rest. Two hours of amazing storytelling, great visuals, pulse pounding action, wrapped up lose threads, and questions finally answered. Vince Gilligan and company finally took a firm stance on the long-standing question of Walter White's sympathy or morality and told all Walter White apologist to STFU once and for all with the series' most riveting moment: "I did it for me. I liked it. I was good at it. And I was really....I was alive." It's all of a minute long, and it's some of the best acting and one of the most jaw dropping moments in all of TV history in my not so humble opinion.But that's to say nothing about the other great moments of those two outstanding episodes. Everything from Hank's death, to Skylar standing up to Walter (and if the way the camera holds on the shot of the knife and the phone while she makes her decision isn't just the most amazing thing you've ever seen, then I don't know what), to the final fracture and eventual heal (band-aid at least?) of the Walter--Jesse relationship was handled with the utmost skill, respect, and appreciation. I think that there will always be people who refuse to watch Breaking Bad for one reason or another, but in the end, the reason all of us and all of your friends have been harping on you about this show is simple: It's the best thing that the small screen has seen in many many decades. It's a show that pushed the medium forward and definitively showed what long-form storytelling was truly capable of, and I just don't know that anything will surpass it.
Honorable Mentions:
1) Scandal is a show that it can be tough to admit to loving, and recommending to others, but when a season premier features a scene like this one, how can you not throw yourself behind it? Very few shows have as many "Oh Shit!" moments as Scandal does on a weekly basis, and the third season opened with one that perfectly encapsulated a lot of what the show is about, what it stands for, and what the rest of the season was really going to be. It also might be the single most perfect foundation laying scene ever as we're finally introduced to Eli Pope not as just the strong shadowy figure getting shit done, but as Olivia's father. It was great!
2) Hannibal was an early surprise for the 2013 season because I didn't think anything on NBC would be capable of being that enjoyable, but I honestly should have known better than to bet against a genius like Bryan Fuller. Great performances from Hugh Dancy and Mads Mikkelsen center this show, a great balance between being serialized and episodic elevate it, and a visual beauty that's unprecedented on network TV truly marked it as one of the greats of 2013. Small audience numbers will probably doom it and the other NBC break out Dracula to being cancelled before their time, but I'd strongly suggest enjoying them while they last.
3) On the Comedy tip, I think attention has to be paid to Fox's Brooklyn Nine-Nine. I honestly don't watch very much comedy (when you've got Archer, I don't think you really need much more), but Brooklyn turned out to not only be effortlessly funny, it's also astonishingly diverse. It's characters are fully realized and unique, and its comedy is derived from those characters being placed in great situations not the typical racist, sexist, homophobic humor that got old back in the early 2000s. With any luck this could be the future of network comedy, but so long as Seth MacFarlane is being contacted to make TV, I wouldn't bet on it.
4) The Americans had a very quiet opening season, and while I don't know that it'll be one of the shows 2013 is truly known for, I do think it was a great start to what will hopefully be a long run. It perfectly integrated its marital troubles story into its spy craft in a way that I didn't expect heading in. It was interesting each week, and there were always funny wigs, so there's that.
So I know I droned on for awhile, but this is something I'm passionate about and I felt I needed to make up for a month's worth of not posting. I'm going to spend the next couple days working on a post focused on The Bad aspects of 2013 TV, and maybe a separate post dedicated to where I hope TV is and isn't going in the future based on these findings, so keep an eye out for that. And here's to the year to come in Storytelling!
Sunday, December 1, 2013
TV Review: Dracula (Season 1 Episodes 1-5)
It's not that Dracula is as good as Firefly or anything, it really isn't even in the same league, but it's surprisingly entertaining and enjoyable and delivers a lot of good things to look for in a series. And for it to be on NBC makes it even more surprising, but that fact also seems to spell its doom. Add to that its Friday night time slot (also known as the kiss of death), and its falling ratings and it seems like the show is doomed. Which is too bad because for the first time in a number of years NBC finds itself poised to deliver some real quality programming if they'd only sit back and allow the story to take hold and find its audience. Granted the show hasn't been cancelled yet, and after giving Hannibal a second season, some of the signs seem to point towards NBC finally learning it's important to be patient in the current TV market, but I won't rest easy until the show is officially picked up for a second season and we see what it and Hannibal are capable of doing with a little word of mouth press and some time under their belts.
There are two facts potentially coloring my view of Dracula: 1) I had very low expectations going in. And those expectations were only barely surpassed by what was ultimately a weak Pilot. 2) I binge watched episodes 2-5 in one morning. So it's possible that the show is only as good as I think it is when its being consumed all at once, but in the day of the DVR and Netflix and such, I don't think that this is a bad thing.
But enough about the fact that I think the show is good, here's why I think it's good (spoilers to follow):
1) Character, character, character!
I can't stress enough how important clearly defined characters with clearly defined goals and motivations are to just about every story. Dracula seems to understand who its characters are and what drives them to do the things they do. Everything from Van Helsing (Thomas Kretschmann) helping Dracula (with no pleasure from the action for either of them), to the complications in Mina (Jessica De Gouw) and Harker's (Oliver Jackson-Cohen) relationship make perfect sense. The show has yet to make a character decision that doesn't feel understandable and organic, and the few main characters we don't know as well yet (Lady Jayne Wetherby comes to mind) we know well enough to understand the decisions being made in the moment and I have faith that they'll get origin type episodes like Renfield got most recently.
2) The story is simple and interesting.
Dracula (the constantly sexy Jonathan Rhys Meyers but I mean really really sexy) is resurrected by Van Helsing so the two of them can embark on a quest for revenge against the shadowy cabal that ruined both of their lives. Everything Dracula does from taking on the persona of an American entrepreneur (bad accent and all) to getting involved in a Victorian race for renewable energy is dedicated to eliminating his enemies. Along the way he meets Mina Murray who happens to be the spitting image of his murdered wife and romantic wackiness ensues. The story is never convoluted or difficult to follow, but the focus on intrigue and the traffic of information leaves the series with the ability not to rely too highly on big action set pieces to keep your interest. This lack of reliance on pulse-pounding action was one of the first things I noticed when watching Game of Thrones, actually, and the same sensibility is found here.
3) A dedication to diversity.
This might not be a big deal to some people, but I think the way that this genre show is showing a dedication to presenting a story with queer characters and characters of color when it really doesn't have to is brilliant. The story is set in Victorian London, so it could easily get away with the idea that blacks and gays just weren't all that prolific. Instead they've made it a point to introduce important queer characters (yes plural!) and people of color into their early episodes. Compare that to another genre show, Marvel's Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., and you've got a study in opposites. And worse, AOS has no excuses since it takes place in a contemporary world. But I digress, the point is that I don't doubt that each viewer will be able to see his/herself in this show by the time the first season is over, and the stories they're telling about race relations, gender equality, and queer visibility in their world are fun, interesting, and entertaining.
In the end, we're simply left with a good and enjoyable show. Now if only I could do something to ensure NBC would be smart for once and let it take its time to find an audience.
Sunday, November 24, 2013
Film Review: The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
In the interest of full disclosure, I hated the second Hunger Games book. I also wasn't a huge fan of the first film because I thought they tried to stay too true to the book (book purests who, incorrectly, think the books are always automatically better are hating me right now) instead of focusing on making a good adaptation of the source material. But I didn't hate the first film, and I didn't hate the first book either, so those are the caveats I feel obligated to make before starting this review. I guess logic dictates that my next statement be that I hated The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, but I really really didn't.Here's the major mistake that I think Collins makes that the films, by necessity, rectify: The First Person, present tense narration. Even though the films (the first more than the second) pull almost all of their dialogue from the book, they were smart enough to avoid the too easy trap of including some kind of voice-over narration from Katniss. I don't know if this is because the film makers know how horrible voice-over generally is, or because, like me, they found the narration of the books to be the weakest element. Being stuck in Katniss' head while she repeatedly and willfully makes the worst deductions and most illogical leaps about the things in front of her face is one of the most torturous experiences I've ever had. Per usual, the films take place in third person, and the difference it makes to Collins' story is tremendous.
The story of the film shouldn't be surprising to anyone at the this point. Katniss (played by the most glorious human being ever, and someone I totally wish was my best friend, Jennifer Lawrence) and Peeta (Josh Hutcherson) have returned home from their defiant triumph in last year's Hunger Games. Now they're in a position to play up their false love (false from Katniss' point at least) for the cameras in an attempt to quell the burgeoning rebellion of the districts that their actions in the games have started. This is complicated by Peeta's (understandable) lack of interest in allowing his very real emotions to be placated by Katniss' farce, Gale (Liam Hiemsworth or, I mean, sorry, maybe this one is better?) starting to make his long standing feelings for Katniss known, and the continued threats from President Snow (Donald Sutherland in a continuously fun and evil performance) that if things in the districts don't get any better, he'll take his frustrations out on Katniss' loved ones. So in an attempt to do his part to eliminate Katniss' status as a symbol of hope, President Snow uses the upcoming Quarter Quell (a special version of the Games that takes place every 25 years) to enact a rule that this year's Hunger Games Reaping will take place from the previous winners of each district. So of course Katniss and Peeta (after he volunteers to take Haymitch's place) find themselves heading back into the games.
(Spoilers follow) As an adaptation, Catching Fire is pretty much everything I look for. The core story elements are there and pretty much unadulterated, some of the things that are a little more implicit in the book are made perfectly explicit in the film (the relationship between Katniss and Gale is one of the things that I feel is being firmly taken out of speculation and the subtext and placed firmly on the screen, and the scene in which Katniss saves Gale from being publicly flogged is one of the more powerful in the film), and the things that are being left out are more or less inconsequential, while the scenes that are added do a lot to add color and context to the story and the characters we don't get to spend as much time with in the books (the scenes between Snow and Plutarch Heavensbee [the constantly amazing Phillip Seymour Hoffman] come to mind).
There are a couple moments in the book that don't make the cut which could be argued as being important, but I'm not sure the storytelling experience is truly lessened by their absence. As for Peeta's amputated leg, while I agree that leaving this out was an oversight, I also think it's a flaw to be held against the first film and not this one, which couldn't have fixed this issue without a hugely problematic retcon. As a result, what you get is not only an intelligent and highly entertaining film, but a rare adaptation that truly surpasses the experience created by its source material.
If I have one complaint about the film, it's that the pacing still feels to be a bit off. Where I think Collins had a tendency to allow the pre-games scenes to take their time and build character and suspense, and for the pace to be picked up during the life and death games, I feel like the films have tended towards the opposite with the earlier scenes flying by while the games lack a more pulse pounding tempo. That isn't to say that the scenes in the Arena aren't exciting, tense, and suspenseful, because they often are, but the general feeling of death coming and passing the characters by in a blink is lesser here than I felt it was in the book.
But in the end, I'm left with one simple fact: The Hunger Games: Catching Fire was an exceptionally entertaining way to spend two hours and twenty-six minutes. I left the theater very excited for the next two films, which is way way more than I can say for how I felt putting the book down.
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