Tag Archives: television

By your jawbone, shall we know ye: The Glades

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Gators.  Caymans.  Smuggled newts.  Stolen generators. Ex-cons.  Cons.  Moonshine.  Diamonds.

This is a strange little show.  It’s another of Netflix’s recommendations, and I’m not sure why I’m so enchanted with it.

Maybe because I believe Florida is basically one dangerous, violent swamp?

Anyway, the premise is quite straightforward.   Jim Longworth, snarky Chicago homicide detective, decides to move to Florida.  He teams up with the resident Chief Medical Examiner (aka coroner), Carlos Sanchez, and, after a bit of wrangling, he also teams up with a nurse, Callie Cargill.  Callie is a single mom–her husband’s in prison for armed robbery, she has a teenaged son, and she’s paying the bills and going to medical school to become a doctor.  The team is rounded out by Daniel, a hardworking and geeky young grad student.

The episodes are a mix of ‘ripped from the headlines’ hot topics and strangely endearing, cracked out Florida-specific crimes.

Fer instance, in the pilot, they identify the victim by finding the gator (excuse me, cayman) who ate her.  The Detective shoots the cayman and hauls it into the coroner’s office.  Dr Sanchez, hilariously cranky and appalled, initially refuses to autopsy a gator.  But it’s lying there on the slab, little lizardy arms stuck out T-Rex-like, so Carlos gives in.  The grad student, Daniel, happens to be a herpetologist, and when Carlos initially pulls out only a box turtle and some trout, Daniel explains about the long digestion time.

So Carlos digs around in the innards and eventually finds the (partially digested) jawbone.

Which is how they identify the victim, and thereby, the killer.

You gotta admit, that’s kind of awesome.

It’s usually semi-plausible, in an insane kind of way, but sometimes the plots are a bit too recent news headline for me.  I skipped the episodes about kids getting guns on the black market (and yes, shooting someone by accident–too damn depressing) and I bailed out of the ‘chronic pain clinics are a drug haven’ because it was mostly just wrong.  (I have a chronic pain condition, so I know a lot about it.  Most pain clinics don’t prescribe narcotics at all, and those that do are extremely strict about it.  Yes, there is a booming black market in pain drugs, but the show got all the details wrong.  If they wanted to have a doctor in a clinic over proscribing, they could’ve tried botox injections (yes, really) instead of talking about the black market trade in fentanyl.  Fentanyl comes in patch form only, outside hospitals, and it’s nearly impossible to misuse because of it.  You can’t drink it, smoke it, or ingest it to get ‘high’, although if you do put it on and then take a hot bath you can OD and croak.  This has been yet another nitpicking brought to you by the resident cranky person.)  Ahem.  Where was I?

Oh yes.  The Florida specific episodes.  See, there’s a lot of nice worldbuilding in this series.  One episode is about a mermaid who washes up on the beach.  In Florida, there’s apparently a booming business in mermaid shows.  Attractive young women dress up in latex mermaid tails and swim around.  One of these women shows up on a beach, in a tail, dead.

The plot involves synchronized swimming practice (harder than it looks–I used to do synchronized swimming), the strange things people do for love, and the intricacies of a sibling relationship.

Another episode covers a Papa Hemingway contest/festival, complete with moonshine subplot, and a very attractive black sable German Shepherd named Bo.  (What?  You don’t see black sables very often, and they’re my favorites.)   It also involves a hipster with a degree in marketing from Tulane.

My favorite episode is the one about NASCAR.  I don’t actually follow NASCAR, but we have a track here, and it’s a highly specialized fandom with its very own rules, royalty, and fans.  I thoroughly enjoyed all the car chases and the details of how the villains did what they did and why. I’d tell you more, but it would be a spoiler.

Some of my other favorites are about the famous Florida town of psychics, the exotic bird (and newt!) smuggling ring, the town of circus freak descendents, the guy who believed in aliens, and a private island.

The characters are all well-rounded, and sometimes individual episodes focus on a particular character.  There’s a relationship between the main male lead, Jim, and the main female lead, Callie.  Unlike most shows, the two don’t tumble into bed first thing.  She’s married and while yes, her husband is in prison, she’s too moral for that.  So they wait!  Until she gets a divorce!  Weird, huh?  Weird, but cool.

There’s some complications to the love life that bored me (just leave them together and get on with the show already!) but I can put up with that.  They’ve got a habit of including implausible beach-bunny super-high heels on people who, in my experience, would not wear them, but whatever.  I’m mostly in it for the gators.  Who wouldn’t be?

 

Metal in Your Bones

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This was first published on Madeloud. It’s part of an ongoing Metal Apocalypse.
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Anti-semitism is very much frowned upon these days, so I don’t often get to see the mass media reduce me to an invidious exploitative stereotype for the amusement and titillation of my peers.

In that sense, the 2009 episode of the TV show Bones titled, “Mayhem on the Cross” was a stimulating novelty. Not that it was anti-semitic — of course not. It was anti-metalhead.

Admittedly, I’m not a pure metalhead — I don’t attend concerts very often, and I listen to lots of non-metallish music, from Mariah Carey to Donovan. Still, I identify sufficiently to have found the Bones episode alternately hysterical and irritating.

Let’s cut to the tape:
The opening Norwegian black metal band doesn’t sound remotely like Scandinavian black metal — the vocals are crappy Eddie Vedder via nu-metal, not black metal’s demonic screech, and the music is lumberingly catchy rather than atmospheric. There’s even a stadium rock adrenaline chorus, for pity’s sake. One of the performers is shown using a chainsaw…an amateurish, anything-goes move that could certainly occur at a punk show, but which just is not black metal at all. The band who played the song is in real life named “Tondra Soul” — and, yeah, black metal bands don’t use “soul” to mean “soulful” and if they want a made-up-language word for “thunder”, they take it from Tolkein, not from fucking Esperanto.

Psychiatrist Lance Sweets more or less correctly characterizes the difference between death and black metal when he explains that, “Death metal is about brutal technical proficiency while black metal is about emotion.” So points for that. But then Sweets goes on to insist that both death and black metal “exploit adolescent feelings of alienation, depression… “ The problem here being that extreme metal isn’t especially aimed at adolescents — at least not by pop music standards. You go to a metal show, you see folks in their twenties and thirties and older — and that’s in the audience, not just on the stage. You want to see young people’s emotions being exploited, you need to go see Beyonce or Lil’ Wayne or Vampire Weekend live. While there are no doubt some teens who love the head-banging, for the most part the alienation and depression in metal are aimed at the adult and the comfortably middle-aged.

One of the characters declares, as if she’s reading from an encyclopedia: “Death metal enthusiasts prefer morbid horror-centric venues for performance.” What? Since when? They’re not theatrical troupes! They’re not combining metal and performance art! They book shows in clubs, for crying out loud!

Expanding on the point above — death metal bands? They don’t wear make-up. That’s black metal bands. Get it straight, people.

Of course, the main point of confusion here is the idea that metal is overall a dangerous, violent subculture. Certainly, Scandinavian metal in the ’90s did involve murder and assault and church burning — but to the best I can tell, that’s largely over. Some performers are still interested in Satanism, but that just makes them irritating blowhards, not a menace to society. As for American extreme metal — I doubt the guys in Cannibal Corpse even trash their hotel rooms, y’know?

But if it knew what it was talking about, it wouldn’t be television. I do wish they’d done enough research to have actual metal on the soundtrack, though. “Tondra Soul” — yeesh.

British Comfort Food

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Downton Abbey is a television series set on a fictional English estate of the same name. It chronicles the lives of the patrician Crawley family and their servants at the beginning of the twentieth century.

According to Wikipedia, Downton Abbey is a “period drama,” a term used by people who are embarrassed to admit that they are watching a soap opera with corsets. There’s no point in pretending otherwise, as Downton Abbey has all the familiar, soapy elements: betrayal, sex, dead bodies, catty women, unrequited love, etc., etc. This observation isn’t meant to be dismissive. Soap operas aren’t inherently better or worse than any other genre. And by the standards of the genre, Downton Abbey is pretty good. It has decent acting, high production values, and lead writer Julian Fellowes hits just the right notes of the soap genre. I particularly enjoy the mutually destructive, pathological rivalry of the elder Crawley sisters. And no one can deliver a cutting one-liner like Maggie Smith.

After watching the first season, I was reminded of why soap operas are the ultimate achievement of serialized television. The great challenge in serial storytelling is maintaining the interest of the audience for not just hours (as in a film), but for months and even years. Plots must be sustainable over multiple episodes so they can capture viewers for the long-term. The most common technique is to focus on interpersonal – and especially romantic – relationships that viewers can easily connect with. These relationship-centered stories lend themselves to deliberate pacing and slow development over many episodes. There’s the meet-cute moment, like when Matthew Crawley first encounters the lovely Mary, the gradual build-up of the relationship spread out over several episodes, the unrequited sexual tension, and finally the big, romantic kiss during sweeps. But romance is only part of the appeal, and the most successful soaps mix romantic plots with storylines involving betrayal, revenge, or other conflicts. It’s also helpful to have various sub-plots to ensure that the audience does not become bored with any one storyline. Like most soaps, Downton Abbey has a large ensemble cast, so when viewers become bored with Matthew and Mary they can enjoy the scheming Thomas or the rivalry between the Dowager Countess and Matthew’s mother.

The soap opera formula is so effective that even series that are not technically soaps will often adopt soapy sub-plots. More often than not, this means an unrequited romance between two of the main characters (as an example, see X-Files, or Bones, or House, or any drama from the last twenty years). And as entertainment conglomerates have shifted from standalone stories to long-term franchises, the soap opera formula has spread to other media. Every new story has a huge cast and a plot extended across multiple novels, movies, comics, or video games. The soap opera is so mainstream its basic features are taken for granted.

But because the soap opera is so ubiquitous, it’s hard to do anything particularly innovative with the formula. Downton Abbey distinguishes itself from the pack in two ways: setting and social commentary. A pre-WWI English estate is a relatively unusual setting (especially for American audiences), and the series is overflowing with nostalgia for a bygone era of fox hunts and Victorian fashion. The social commentary, on the other hand, focuses on class relations and the role of women in a pre-feminist society. At least in the first season, the treatment of these issues is rather cursory and superficial. The writers want to show the gradual transformation of British society, so there are sub-plots where the youngest Crawley daughter flirts with women’s suffrage and helps a maid find a more respectable job as a secretary. But the series never addresses the roots of social inequality, because to do so the writers would have to acknowledge that the Crawleys are spoiled oafs who’ve coasted through life thanks to their undeserved wealth. So the appeal of the setting – and its adoration of noble privilege – clashes with the attempt to say something meaningful about social change in the twentieth century. At least the social commentary provides a veneer of seriousness that most soaps lack (it’s not just a TV series but a “Masterpiece Classic,” according to PBS).

If Downton Abbey never quite rises above passably entertaining, the blame is mostly due to the lackluster writing rather than the conventions of the soap opera. The soap opera formula is simplistic, but that very simplicity means it can be easily merged with other genres and adapted to the interests of the writer. As an example, The Sopranos possessed many of the typical features of the soap opera (extended plots and sub-plots, large ensemble, an emphasis on relationships), and it successfully combined these features with intelligent social/psychological commentary. If I were to arbitrarily rank Downton Abbey, I’d place it below the best of HBO, but well above the cookie-cutter soaps on network TV. It’s probably on par with Mad Men, another series where nostalgia and social commentary collide.

Who knew cottage gardens were such dangerous places? Midsomer Murders

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So I’ve spent most of January and February plagued with some kind of….plague.  It’s horrible, but it does mean I get to catch up on all the TV I’ve missed in the past couple decades.  I blew through New Tricks earlier, then I watched Murder in Suburbia (not bad, really, and I liked Ash, though I usually guessed who dunnit in the first ten minutes) and then, for reasons known only to itself, Netflix suggested I might like a garden gnome musical and I had to have a soothing lie down*.

When I came back, I was armed with another friend’s suggestion: Midsomer Murders.  Supposed to be the best acting evah.  Which actually it really kind of is.  John Nettles, who plays the lead detective, can do more with his eyebrow than most actors can do when chewing the scenery and screaming.

The basic premise of the show is this: DCI Tom Barnaby is a police detective in Midsomer, a pretend county in England that’s filled with picturesque but extremely violent villages.  Barnaby always has a sergeant or factotum.  In the early series, it’s Sergeant Troy, a handsome young man with even fewer brains than Barnaby.  I quite like Troy, even if he is rather homophobic and kind of a jerk at times, he’s very kind and has a good heart.  Troy eventually grows up to be his own detective and after five or so years, we get another sergeant, Dan Scott, who is a city-slicker lower-class modern-thinking twatwaffle.  Er.  Not that I dislike him or anything.  Fortunately, Scott is eventually replaced by a much nicer, quite brilliant extremely kind, canny, and earnest Ben Jones, who started as a beat cop and got drafted by Barnaby.

So a crime will happen and then Barnaby will show up with his assistant and begin detecting.  In between detecting (and sometimes during), we’ll occasionally get glimpses of Barnaby’s wife, Joyce, and adult daughter, Cully.  Joyce is a gourmand who can’t cook and has a passionate love of acting and art.  She’s got a kind heart and often is volunteering in various causes to save the world.  Cully is an actress, but she has a bit more of her dad’s practical streak.

The charm of this show is in the setting and characters, the absurd cottage cozy murder plots, and in the fine wordplay.  This is not a show to watch if you’re looking for realism in your motivations and villainy.  It’s not about that.  It’s also not about accurate police procedures–during most shows, Barnaby shows up to talk to important witnesses, who nearly always are:

  • Conveniently called away on the phone, by a visitor or relative, or realize they’re late for an appointment.  If I was the copper, I’d say, “Look, this is murder.  You can be late to the annual orchid grower society meeting.  Answer my questions fully or I’ll haul you to the nick.”  Barnaby nearly always lets them go, and they’re often killed before their next appointment with him.
  • Extremely shifty, to even the most oblivious eye.  “What were you doing on Tuesday the thirteenth at 7 pm?” Suspect’s eyes dart around the room, “At home.  Alone.  Watching telly.”  Does Barnaby ever ask what they were watching, to see if he can catch them in a lie?  No, he does not.
  • Basically barking mad.  (Practically everyone on the show is.)  “I couldn’t have been murdering anyone!  I was preparing for the annual bell-ringing competition and nothing can get in the way of that!”
  • Standing in their living rooms, in pub common rooms, or in the center of a church aisle, surrounded by other interested listeners.  It’s not unusual for him to question several people, in a group, at the same time.  “What were you doing on Tuesday the thirteenth at 7 pm?” he’ll ask the husband.  “We were watching telly together.  We had a quiet night in, didn’t we, dear?” says the wife.   And her husband will nod.  Even though the wife was out shagging the vicar and the husband was practicing skeet shooting.  Or murdering someone.  Only at the end of the show does Barnaby ever notice that this might not be the Best Interrogation Technique Evah. And since he asks the questions in public places, there’s always convenient eavesdroppers who can tattle to the village gossip or the local murderous fiend.  Or who are the local murderous fiend.

It doesn’t do great things for Barnaby’s detecting, but it does up the body count, which is part of the fun.

Most of these shows have a pile of corpses at the end.  A murderer will thwap someone to death with a shovel over a thousand year blood feud and then have to kill six other people to cover it up.  Nobody’s ever a serial killer, although there are occasionally people who suffer fits of hereditary madness which drives them to various Foul Deeds.

So I’ve burbled on about how silly the detecting is, but let me give a glimpse of the charm of the show (because honestly, it does have plenty of charm!).

So as not to spoil lots and lots of episodes, we’ll start with the pilot, which should give everyone a decent feel of the show.  It begins with two aged spinsters who compete to see who can find a Super Special Sekrit Orchid (I told you-flowers are dangerous!) in the local woods.  Whichever one of them discovers the orchid proves it by marking it with a stake and then taking a photograph.  Spinster One, whose name I have already forgotten, bicycles out to the woods with her basket and camera and special stakes.  While out there, she finds the orchid, and while photographing it, discovers something shocking.

She races home, slams the door, makes two short phonecalls, and then dies.  Suspiciously.  Her friend and neighbor, Spinster Two, tells DCI Barnaby that it couldn’t have been an accident and that it was murder.  Dun, dun, dun.

So Barnaby heads off to investigate.

There’s a local landowner who’s marrying his ward, a batty sister-in-law, the ward’s troubled artist brother, and the undertaker and his mother.  The undertaker is My Very Favorite.  He dresses like a Victorian gentleman, right down to a coat with tails and a little black ribbon in his hair, and he serves deeply troubling tea cakes on a very fancy cart.  He’s gay as a spring morning and he and his mother have been blackmailing the entire village.

Of course, this eventually gets them brutally slaughtered, but since they show up looking exactly the same in another village ten seasons later, I’ve decided that they were sneaky enough to fake their own deaths and escape.  According to the show, it’s just that they’re cousins or something, but I know Deep In My Heart that they survive.

Ahem.

So anyway.

There’s quite a few different suspects.  The sister-in-law of the local lord, who thinks she shot her own sister with a rifle during some kind of pidgeon slaughtering party.  The local ineffectual country doctor whose wife is having an affair with the local lord’s estate manager (and he’s very pretty–I can see why she strayed).  The straying wife, who is worried about being caught.  The daughter of the doctor who is having a fling with the mad artist (who always wears a truly tragic pair of denim overalls and chews the scenery like he got a degree in emo artist.)  The waif like ward.  The waif like ward’s artist brother.  And some other people, who I forget.

While Barnaby wanders around interviewing people, you get to see lots of gorgeous scenery and cottage gardens and English shooting parties and quiet country lanes.  Barnaby does have a very thoughtful mien and a quiet way about him.  I suspect that dogs would curl up happily at his feet–good stillness.  Troy, the current sergeant, is like a young overexhuberant bull, brashing his way through undergrowth and making rash assumptions about whodunnit and generally being kind of a homophobic jerk.

Much of the mystery, as many of the mysteries in this show are, is concerned with who was having naughty fun times in the woods on a blanket with whom.

As soon as I’d figured out that this was the big mystery, I suggested to my mom that obviously it was the brother and sister, because the whole show had a Greek/Shakespearean tragedy feel to it, and what better tragedy than random incest?

And so it proved.

Barnaby eventually figures it all out by contacting the now-adult childrens’ nanny and things are revealed and the wedding gets called off and the two young lovers commit suicide in the wood via shotgun. You know, as people do.

There’s some clever clues, phone calls, obscure words, etc. in the grand tradition of cozies everywhere.  I’ve lost track of the number of times people get shot to death with arrows in Midsomer county, but it’s a lot.  There’s psychics and witchcraft, the second sight, new age weirdos, writers’ societies, art fraud, retellings of Hamlet, shoutouts to Dorothy Sayers, poisoning by mushroom, hemlock, and various other dodgy substances, as well as a couple of deaths via pitchfork.  Not to mention those being driven to suicide, mistaken identities, Meaningful Messages With Flowers on corpses, and so on.  There’s a great episode where the local theater troup puts on Amadeus and the plot of the play and the retelling of the mystery weave together–it includes a truly horrible guy committing accidental suicide via razor on stage during the dress rehearsal.

Tiny intense hobbies take up peoples’ worlds, as they do in real life, and those often form the basis of the plot.  Villains are just as likely to kill over who was prouder of their rose bushes as they are to get an inheritance.  Small town dances, choir rehearsal, bell ringing, book groups, local history library photo retrospectives, fly fishing, magic tricks, Masonic societies (including the silly aprons), and more.

If you’re tired of watching ultra-realistic grim urban crime about the destruction of society that reminds you too much of yesterday, give this a try.  My favorite so far is probably the revenge plot where the villain stakes a guy in a croquet circle and then catapaults the oenophile to death with vintage wines using a small siege engine (Season 8, Episode 6).

These are currently streaming on Netflix or Amazon Prime.

 

* Someone here suggested I continue What The Hell Did I Just Watch into a regular feature.  Maybe Netflix thought so, too.  If you all feel the need for a garden gnome musical review, I’ll take it under advisement, but I may also need suitable bribes.  Liquor.  Brownies.  Exotic drawing ink.  A large wall against which to thwap my head until the images leave it.  You know.  The usual.

The Horrors of Broadcast Television

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This is a continuation of my post on “found footage” horror.

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The River is a fascinating show. Not fascinating in the sense of being well-written, or suspenseful, or really any good at all. Rather, it’s fascinating because of how thoroughly shitty it is. Despite high production values and experienced producers, The River sucks at everything. It’s a rare accomplishment, even by the low standards of broadcast television.

Created by Oren Peli (Paranormal Activity), The River is a horror series about Lincoln Cole (Joe Anderson) and his mother, Tess (Leslie Hope), who are searching for Lincoln’s long-lost father, the famed explorer Dr. Emmett Cole (Bruce Greenwood). Emmett disappeared several years ago in the Amazon rainforest. The expedition is funded by TV producer Clark Quitely (Paul Blackthorne), who offers to provide a boat and a crew, but only if he gets to film everything that happens. So Lincoln and Tess become the stars of a reality TV series, along with a tidy group of stock characters. There’s the cute love interest for Lincoln, the ethnic engineer and his daughter, the evil mercenary, the sassy black cameraman, and the nerdy, Jewish cameraman. After leaving the Amazon River to float down an uncharted tributary, the group is soon beset by ghosts, magic, and sundry evil things.

What sets The River apart from other horror series is the found footage concept. Every shot comes from either the (in-story) cameramen or the stationary cameras mounted around the boat. Presumably, the footage somehow made it back to the U.S., where the suits at ABC broke it down into hour long chunks (with commercial breaks!) before airing it. It’s a silly premise, but no sillier than any haunted house or slasher movie. It’s a decent enough idea for delivering cheap thrills each week. But a decent idea doesn’t amount to much when the execution is garbage.

The first problem is the cast, or really the lack thereof. As any slasher fan knows, horror stories need big casts to kill off. And a horror TV series needs either a very large cast or plenty of guest stars to bump off, otherwise the story cannot generate any suspense. The audience instinctively knows that the core characters are not going to die early in the series, because if they died the story couldn’t go on. But The River has barely half-a-dozen characters, and with such a small cast it must conserve every character like they’re water in the desert. So only one person has died after three episodes (the Jewish cameraman of course, as he was just too Woody Allen-ish to survive in the jungle).

The horror is further undermined by the hokey family drama that passes for a sub-plot. Did Tess leave Emmett or did Emmett leave Tess? Was Tess having an affair with the sleazy TV producer? Will Lincoln ever forgive his dad? Does anyone care about this shit? Of course not! I don’t care about these characters and I don’t want to care about these characters. This is supposed to be terror in the Amazon, not Days of Our General Hospital.

At least with the producer of Paranormal Activity at the helm, The River should be a technically flawless example of found footage horror. I say “should,” because it’s actually a terrible example of the genre. As I discussed in the previous post, found footage copies the shaky camerawork, the crappy angles, and bad lighting of amateur video, which makes it easier for the audience to suspend disbelief and buy into the lie that the footage is real. The River occasionally uses these techniques, but then it ruins everything when it switches to perfect angles and soft lighting for those oh-so-dramatic moments. And the actors, despite being in the rainforest, always look clean and pretty. My disbelief is not suspended, because the show is too slick for its own good.

And then there’s the censorship. I understand that this is broadcast television, which is regulated by the FCC. I understand that a good portion of the American public is deeply offended by the female nipple and the word “fuck.” And I understand that it must be frustrating at times to work for a lousy network like ABC. But there’s something far more pathetic than a show where no one ever curses. It’s a show where characters regularly curse but the profanity is carefully bleeped out (even the mouths are shaded, just in a case an easily offended lip-reader is watching). Excuse my French, but what the fuck are they trying to prove? Presumably, they want the audience to believe that the characters are real and speak just like normal, foul-mouthed Americans. But the censorship wrecks the found footage conceit. The whole point of found footage is that it’s supposed to look like someone found a camcorder lying in a gutter. The content is raw and uncensored, creating the illusion of reality. As for The River, the only plausible assumption is that ABC “discovered” the video recordings of an expedition that encountered real magic, ghosts and other crazy shit. And naturally the suits at ABC bleeped out the profanity before sharing this earth-shattering footage with the public, because they’re insane.

Can anyone name a decent horror series on the broadcast networks? I loved The X-Files when I was a kid, but that was a long time ago, and many of the episodes have not aged well. Perhaps broadcast television – with its censorship and commercial breaks – is simply not a suitable medium for the content and storytelling techniques of the horror genre.

What the hell did I just watch: Birds of Pretty I mean Birds of Prey

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I knew I’d seen the actress who played Oracle (and who I blame for sucking me into watching this damn travesty of a television show, curse it) before, so I checked Wikipedia, because that slightly off nose and those cheekbones were familiar.  Ayup.  Bats.  (Look, I went with a friend who adored cheesy horror and it had Lou Diamond Phillips–don’t judge, OK?  Also, it wasn’t that bad.  Now you can judge.)  Also, the Mentalist, where she was killed off.

So, as astute readers might know, I’ve got a bad leg, so I’m not the spry, handstand performing Vom of ages past (and yes, actually, my usual workouts did involve handstands, no joke).  Nowadays, I walk with a limp and sometimes use a cane, so a superhero who is stuck in a wheelchair appealed to me, especially if she was brilliant, lead a double-life, had a Greek inspired name, and kicked butt.  We all have our ids.

Now, I’d heard this show was pretty bad.  But lots of people hate comics TV on general principal and it garnered a lot of viewers before being inexplicably wiped off the air.  So I thought maybe it was just the usual insular bitching and moaning about continuity or whatever.

Ahahahaha.  No.

This show is truly, deeply, wretchedly bad. Which is a shame, because it had so much potential.

I’ll admit upfront that I only made it through the pilot.  Maybe things get drastically better, but I doubt it.

So, we begin with Alfred narrating a tale of Gotham and talking about Batman and Joker, which kind of annoyed me, because I am not watching this show to find out about Batman.  But anyway.  So Alfred says that Le Bat put away the Joker, but first, the Joker took his revenge by cruelly killing or maiming the ones Batman loved.  We watch Catwoman get stabbed while her daughter watches on (secret lovechild of the Bat and the Cat!) and then Batgirl get shot after a weirdly gratuitous shower scene (I don’t know, because this show was supposed to be for women, I thought) and then we see that a little blonde girl gets visions of all of this.

And OK, none of that sounds bad, actually.  It sounds like a comic made into TV, sure, but not bad.  It gets bad when we watch the young girl, now a teenager, meet a guy on the bus as she goes to Gotham city to make her fortune.  That’s when the cliches start–because he asks her if she’s running from or to and she ends up taking his number and I just rolled my eyes.  I don’t know who the hell writes this shit, but every girl I know is wary of strange guys on buses who sit down next to them and start chatting, cute or not.  I mean, lol whut.  It’s eventually revealed that the guy isn’t so nice afterall.  What a surprise.  I never saw that coming.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.  So, the girl on the bus is the teenaged Dinah, and she’s looking for two women she’s seen in her mind but never met.

Meanwhile, we get to see Helena, Huntress, swank around in the most absurd outfit for crime fighting I have ever seen.  It’s like a bizarre combination of floaty fairy-wing and dominatrix, and it just does not work for me.  There’s a weird wide-neck nearly-disco collar but the fabric is gossamer and there’s pleather or something and just….

Huntress is beautiful and cranky and athletic and she’s kicking and fighting and beating up bad guys in dark alleys and yet somehow instead of being enthralled, I’m thinking, gosh, I bet that’s really uncomfortable to workout in.  I hope she’s wearing proper support.

….This is probably not the emotion that the producers were hoping for.

I know it’s cool and all, but my goodness, that would get jabby into uncomfortable places and how could she bend properly to do roundhouses? I kind of want to hand her a Title9 catalog and recommend she look into something made from breathable fabrics and maybe some better cushioned shoes.  Nikes, perhaps, or with all that leaping, maybe some Rykas.

If you think I’m overthinking things in an action show, it’s probably because the editing in this fiasco sucks.  There are long pauses between words.  There’s time for people to strike ridiculous poses and then just….stand there.  It’s kind of weird and sad and I wanted it to stop, because at the heart, there’s some interesting possibilities for storytelling.

The three women eventually come together in a loft with nifty gadgetry (although the head scanner looked a lot like a McGuyver’d cuisinart container, which made me giggle).  Anyway.  Three women, all from rough pasts, making a little family and happiness and fighting crime.

Which would be awesome, except there were all these plot holes.  The docks at Gotham city have been bought up and haven’t been used.  No one’s been there for years.  Dun dun dun.  Really?  No one’s been at the docks in a river-based city?  Really?

Huntress goes to visit a businessman wearing her dominatrix “work” getup.  She looks like a very weird, expensive hooker, but this is what she wears when fighting crime, I guess.  They’ve got goggles that mockup vision miles away but nobody’s thought of undercover business casual, I guess.

It’s just very puzzling.

The villain in the pilot is painfully obvious, and the way the three women battle him is just as obvious.  There’s a moment that should be touching and emotional, when in her mind, Batgirl/Oracle has legs in the villainous dreamworld and then gets crushed down to her new body with no working legs, but it just came off as flat and kind of embarrassing.

And in the bat-leather costume, Batgirl just looked kind of weird.  Not confident and awesome, but, dare I say it, silly.

Which is really the whole problem with this show.  In Star Trek, costume silliness is everywhere.  It’s as if 100% lycra was the perfectly normal and valid lifestyle choice of the future. Only a few people get into funny looking threads and those few are aliens.  The bland Star Trek sets are kind of like community theater.  You’re not supposed to notice them.

In Birds of Prey, the whole set-up is backwards.  Most people, extras and Dinah and Oracle at her dayjob, are all picture-perfect and real as real.  The ones who aren’t real are Huntress, Batgirl, and any villain we’re supposed to take seriously, like the Joker.  And I’m sorry, but it just doesn’t work.  Joker doesn’t look scary.  He looks like my neighbor kid got into the cheap Halloween greasepaint again.  It’s comical, and not in the echoes the fine world of graphic novels sort of way.

Much like any TV, good storytelling would have carried the show through bad costume, silly sets, and ridiculous special effects.  I’m sorry to say that it’s just not here.  So much potential, so many cool characters, and….we get cliches and some heavy-handed acting.

The Truth Is Out There

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Considering they’re both serial TV dramas, Twin Peaks and the Wire couldn’t have much less in common. Twin Peaks explores the quirky surrealism of a small town; the Wire looks at the intricate realism of a city. Creator David Lynch uses the improvisational rhythm of dreams; creator David Simon relies on the layered narrative of investigative reporting. And where the Wire is one of the most multi-racial shows ever to appear on television, Twin Peaks is, insistently, not.

Yet, on closer inspection, the two shows had in common. In particular, both Twin Peaks and the Wire are obsessed with the real.

In part, this obsession is a function of genre. For all their differences, both shows are at heart police shows, and both are built around investigations and the ferreting out of secrets. In both, the techniques and expertise of the protagonists are leant to the viewer, who is enabled to approach nearer and nearer to a provocatively concealed heart of corruption. The famous scene in the Wire, where McNulty and Bunk deduce how a murder was committed while communicating solely by using the word “fuck” is analogous, in its flamboyant hermeticism, to the scene in Twin Peaks where Dale Cooper identifies likely suspects by referencing Tibet and throwing stones at bottles.

Whether through a triumph of earthy procedure or through semi-mystical intuition, the results are the same — the knowing expert shines light into the heart of darkness.

“Heart of darkness” has racial connotations of course — and that’s apropos for both shows. The connection between race and reality is most obvious in the Wire, a show immersed in the vibrancy, and despair of Baltimore’s African-American community. Omar’s transcendent cool, Kima’s understated integrity, D’angelo’s tragedy, and Snoop’s brutality are all manifestations of intertwined authenticity and blackness. The white characters, too, draw their grit in large part from the show’s integration. Thus Entertainment Weekly praises McNulty for his funk, which it links to his “easy rapport with his African-American work partners.”

Race at first appears to be almost entirely absent from Twin Peaks…but the absence speaks loudly. The show is set in the perfect American small town, with people who are all friendly, all decent, all blessed with movie star good looks, and, oh yes, (with the exception of a stereotypically untrustworthy Asian woman and a stereotypically spiritual Native American) virtually all white.

That whiteness — the trusting small town, the blonde homecoming queen cheerleader — is part and parcel of the perfection. And as the town’s secrets are revealed, it is not just the perfection, but the whiteness, which is shown to be a facade above a swirling pit of jealousy, greed, and deformation. Laura Palmer, that blonde homecoming queen, is addicted to cocaine just like all those black junkies on the Wire. Her father, Leland, is, in the depths of his twisted soul, not white at all, but rather the demonic spirit BOB played by Native American actor Frank Silva.

Moreover, the whiteness in Twin Peaks is undercut and doubled by its own queerness. The show is an extended meditation on the campiness of whiteness; the perfect exterior concealing melodrama and lust. When Laura’s best friend Donna wears her friend’s sunglasses, she turns into a teen femme fatale, exterior transforming interior. More pointedly, after Laura’s death, her murderer/rapist father, Leland, begins to compulsively dance to show tunes, his dark sexual secret finding expression through his response to stereotypically gay cultural responsiveness.

The truth in Twin Peaks is ultimately Freudian; the revelation of the ogre father and the primal scene. In the prequel, Fire Walk With Me, we learn that Leland has been raping her daughter since she was 12; in the series itself, another father almost sleeps with his daughter. In The Wire, on the other hand, the revelations are less psychological and more pragmatic, focusing on the overwhelming, crushing, and corrupting power of institutions.

There are many other cop shows built around investigation, of course. But where something like Bones or the Mentalist lets the knowing detective tie up the truth in a pretty bow at the end of (at least most) episodes, the Wire and Twin Peaks treat truth as an overwhelming excess, which expertise can provisionally master but not contain. The resulting tragedy is is in many ways the guarantor of the reality. The real does not have a happy ending. The Wire concludes by establishing that life in Baltimore will go on as before; while some individual characters may escape to provisionally bright futures, the city as a whole is no closer to escaping its pathologies than it was at the beginning of the series. Twin Peaks effectively ends with the death of Leland and the escape of BOB. The culprit is dead, but his spirit lives on…and to the extent that the series abandoned that grim insight in its later part, it became virtually unwatchable (or, at least, I couldn’t watch it.)

I love both Twin Peaks and The Wire. I think they both deserve their reputations as the greatest television show ever. I do wonder though how much that reputation is about their mutual obsessions with the real. Television has often been seen as uniquely irrelevant bone-headed escapism. The Wire and Twin Peaks both, in quite different ways, present themselves as windows onto unpleasant truths. They’re serious because they show us what is, and provide no escape. Laura’s ascent to heaven in Fire Walk With Me seems more a dream to emphasize the tragedy than an actual cause for optimism, while McNulty’s final attainment of peace seems like an instance of accepting what he can’t change rather than a broader assertion of hope. Evil is fixed; experts know but can’t save us, or even themselves. It’s a grim vision so critically embraced that one starts to wonder if it could be, at times, self-fulfilling.
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Coincidentally, I just watched Tarkovsky’s film Stalker, which has a very different take on the real. Stalker is ostensibly a science fiction tale set in the Zone, a mysterious, dangerous realm where your deepest wish may be granted. Tarkovsky, though, makes no use of special effects of any kind, and so the Zone appears as simply any other piece of countryside. The three men wandering through it, casting nervous glances this way and that, seem like children playing a not-very-convincing game of make-believe — a sensation only emphasized by Tarkovsky’s long takes and excruciatingly slow pacing. The camera frames a long shot of a field, the men in the distance move across it…and still move across it…and still move across it…giving your attention a chance to wander to the trees, and the sky, and then back and yep, the men are still crossing the field…and you’ve got plenty of time to think about how silly the actors must have felt, and wonder whether they were thinking about their motivation, or how silly the script is, or just about whether they were ever going to get to stop walking across the field and go to the bathroom, for the love of God.

Eventually the guide (Stalker) leads his two followers (Writer and Professor) to the wish-granting center of the Zone, called the Room. But at the last minute both of the followers, perhaps fed up with the transparently ersatz nature of the whole endeavor, refuse to participate in the silliness anymore and balk at going in. One of the film’s last scenes shows Stalker back in his beautifully grungy hovel, lying down into his bed as if reclining in an Old Master painting, bewailing the intelligentia’s lack of faith. “Can people like that believe in anything!” he moans. “And nobody believes! Not just those two. Nobody!” After comforting him, his long-suffering wife breaks the fourth wall and directly addresses the camera, insisting that despite all her troubles, she has never regretted her life with the Stalker. “It’s better to have a bitter happiness” she says, “than a gray, dull life.”

On the one hand, Stalker is like the Wire; it fetishizes grit. The first part of the film, before the protagonists make it into The Zone, is set in an urban landscape which is run down even by the standards of the Wire’s Baltimore. On the other hand, Stalker shares characteristics with Twin Peaks. Both fetishize a secret, dangerous realm just out of sight.

But where the Wire and Twin Peaks figure the physical and spiritual as truths for genre to reveal, in Stalker both function more as consciously framed tropes. The Stalker’s hovel is so ravishingly shot and carefully composed that it becomes a quotation about grit rather than a direct apprehension of it. The intimations of otherworldliness in the Zone are so stubbornly unrealized that they become quotations about surrealism rather than an actual apprehension of subterranean dangers.

Stalker loves these genre references, but not because they show reality. Rather, it loves them as genre — as the imaginary. And if there’s a real in Stalker, it’s not in these pulp gestures, but in the process of film itself; the shots of grassland or a wall or a face held so long that narrative drains away, and you’re left looking at grassland or a wall or a face. The real is not the end result of a process of meaning, but the beginning of a process in which meaning must be added. The wall can be poverty; the grassland can be an ominous psychological truth; but the viewer must make it so. Art does not strip away to an essence, but adds to a blank. The Wire is worthwhile not because it is true to Simon’s Baltimore experience, but because of the energy of its narrative entanglements; the energetic metaphoricity of D’Angelo at the chess board or the profaner-than-life dreamed-of universal signification of “fuck”. Twin Peaks is profound not because it shows the real corruption of small town America, but because of its hollow flamboyance, haunted by specters of irony and dread. The shows are great not because they’re real, but because they’re imagined.

The very last scene of Tarkovsky’s film shows the Stalker’s crippled child sitting at a table, staring at glasses, and apparently moving them (slowwwwly) with her mind. After she stops, we hear a train pass, and the glasses shake. The telekinesis is, of course, just a special effect…and it emphasizes the fact that the train shaking the house is probably a special effect too. Tarkovsky seems to be almost taunting us, daring us to accept the shaking but not the telekinesis — or rather, to accept both. For Stalker, film is not about gaining expertise and seeking truth. It’s a way to practice faith.