Television Of The Weak: Akiva Goldsman Could Ruin A Birthday Party That Had A Pony In Attendance

This week, it's all about some Fringe, Archer, Dollhouse, Mad Men, Dexter, House, Sons of Anarchy

Fringe: "Fracture" by Matthew J. Brady

There's a fine line between enjoyably dumb and just plain dumb, and Fringe crossed over onto the less-worthwhile side this week, with a plot about inadvertent suicide bombers and hints that the continuing subplots are pretty much a what-the-fuck mishmash of ominous portent and anything that can keep stringing weird shit along for a few more seasons. At least, that's what I take away from it; even if his name isn't too prominent in the credits, I still sense the hand of Akiva Goldsman in the works (he's a "consulting producer" now). There's an ominous sign for you.

Anyway, we get a plot involving ex-soldiers who have been taking a serum that, when triggered externally, crystallizes their bodies and then makes them explode. There's an evil former officer who is behind it all, and we've got a dumb race to stop one of them from blowing up in a Washington, D.C. Metro station (the soldier is a pretty housewife from Illinois, so you won't be surprised to learn that she survives). It's a bunch of calculated crap that's meant to make it suspenseful, but it's pretty goddamn lame, even for this show. We don't even get the usual quirks; Walter's schtick this episode is limited to a "one Mississippi, two Mississippi" countdown to the lady exploding and yelling at Peter for eating a cheeseburger in front of his pet cow. And the subplot about Olivia trying to recover from the injuries she suffered on her interdimensional jaunt quickly got tiresome as well; she was pointed to a guy who works at a bowling alley (played by veteran "that guy" actor Kevin Corrigan) for help, and he takes the Mr. Miyagi tack of training, making her do annoying stuff until she snaps and suddenly makes a breakthrough. Yawn.

Yes, it was an eye-roller of an episode, even taking a side trip to Baghdad so Olivia and Peter can hunt down one of his old contacts for some help finding an Iraqi doctor who is now ostracized after working with the Americans. This show is on Fox, isn't it? You'd think they would have him getting high-fives from Sean Hannity, not stuck working as a cook because nobody likes him. See what this show has reduced me to? Dumb political jokes? Let's not do this, Fringe. The teaser for next week seems like we might be getting back on the way to the good stupid, with a character illustrating that it's bad for universes to "come together" by smashing two snow globes into each other. Subtlety! Do it up right, fellas.

Archer: "Mole Hunt" by David Brothers

H Jon Benjamin captured the hearts and minds of our great nation as the obnoxious, disgusting, and hilarious Coach McGuirk on Home Movies. Time passed, Home Movies got cancelled, he's done a few shows since, most notably Lucy, Daughter of the Devil, and now he's back in an all-new role on FX.

Sterling Archer, code-named Duchess, is the top agent at ISIS, if only because his mother is the director of the agency. However, while he's cut from the same cloth as Bruce Wayne and James Bond, he's... a screw-up. He's rude, arrogant, insensitive, and completely, totally irresponsible.

Archer is the kind of adult cartoon that Adult Swim specialized in a few years back, full of dirty jokes and outrageous violence. There's an extended "Let me just put the tip in" sequence that's much funnier than that joke has been in several years, if only due to the variety and, ah, length of the joke.

In a way, Archer's nothing new. It's a funny spy show, a little dirty and a little sexy for the 18-24 set, and full of things that'll make your mother ashamed to have given birth to you if you laugh at it. Remember the naked John Lennon and Yoko Ono picture? Imagine that with an old lady and a hairy dog. Bam.

But the cast is killer. H Jon Benjamin's disinterested, self-centered, and yes, McGuirk-esque approach to Archer makes him equal parts endearing and frustrating. Malory, his mother, is the mother from Arrested Development playing more or less the same role, though somehow even more spiteful.

Really, it's an Adult Swim show that's just a little smarter, a little meaner, and a little more likely to bust out actual curse words instead of gimmicky bleeps. It's also laugh out loud funny, filled with easily abused archetypal characters. Archer's a douchebag, and his douchebaggery is amazingly entertaining, whether it's embezzling ISIS money, telling a quiet secretary that she's ugly when she cries, or slapping drinks out of people's hands.

Maybe that makes me a jerk, but the real jerk in this situation is FX, who showed a sneak preview in Fall for a show that premieres in January 2010.

Dollhouse: "Instinct" by Matthew J. Brady

The ratings for the season premiere of Dollhouse were reportedly not very good, which isn't exactly unexpected, but is still unfortunate, especially in light of episodes like this, which join Fringe on the far side of the dumbness border. The setup for this week's adventure in personality-borrowing, which sees Echo turned into the mother of an infant, is screaming for a twist that never comes, and eventually you realize that the extent of the premise was realized in the first couple minutes, when we saw her breastfeeding the kid, and it all goes as expected from there. It could have been interesting, since the father was acting all suspicious, but no, he's just an asshole who didn't want to deal with a kid, so he hired a glorified wet nurse. The real complication is supposed to be about Echo's personality discovering the unreality of her situation and going post-partum crazy with protectiveness for "her" child, but it's really all about how women have some sort of incomprehensible, quasi-mystical quality that connects them with babies and gives them feminine intuition, and the Dollhouse is doing Very Bad Things when they mess with that. For a show that's all about neat sci-fi ideas and their ramifications, well, I guess that's expected, but I don't have to like it.

The main plot is thin enough that it needs support, so other subplots show up to do shore it up here and there, including November returning for a checkup and over-explaining her motivation (really serving to make Helo uncomfortable, which is the only thing she's good for anymore) and the anti-Dollhouse senator moving forward with his crusade after getting some information from a source that will probably either never be explained or turn out to be somebody who doesn't make sense. Gotta fill in those minutes somehow. I'm still waiting for more of that glorious stupidity; next week's serial killer plot looks promising. Is it bad when the preview for next week is the best part of the show?

Mad Men - "Souvenir" by Sean Witzke

Still contender for best theme song ever, way to go RJ.

After the last round's apocalyptic run-on sentence of an episode, suddenly this show is mostly concerned with minutia. There are a lot of jump-cut time lapse portions, a lot of daily ritual. It's a strange decision that doesn't pay off until the very last scene of the episode, the kind of smart delay that leads to diffusion of expectations. The dynamic went from an elliptical, self-reflective structure to some Altman shit. It's how people behave and present themselves. It's all surface, on a show that already puts a premium on surface. It's also a Pete Campbell-focused episode, so half of it is a wash. The Don and Betty half, though, is gold. The only problem is you might not realize it until those credits snap over.

We open up to Pete Campbell reading Ebony magazine. Yeah, I'm supposed to care about Pete Campbell this episode, and I just can't do it. Ooh he took his shirt off. Sexy as a sheet of drywall. He watches tv all day, buys groceries, talks to his next door neighbor's (German?) au pair.

Don and Betty together in the kitchen, talking about catchup plot points to show that, hey, time has passed. Betty has a sequential day as well, emphasized by her primping in the mirror, almost pushing Sally out of the way and ignoring her as she does so. She has a hearing with Neidermeyer about some nonsense about water tables. Fucking topicality, the show is set in the 60s. Betty is interested in the dude from the dinner party, who is Rockefeller's assistant? Aide? Something like that? They kiss, Betty drives away, maintaining her Grace-Kelly-on-Xanax attitude towards most things. Her weird giddy shimmy and sudden deadeyed stare at hugging Don are all the more fake and forced after this. And now that she's kissed mayor's aide guy (like the guy with the ice skating rink on Futurama) she's all happy.

Joan Holloway is now a manager at Hermes, which doesn't shock Pete Campbell at all because this is probably the first time Pete Campbell has had to think about Joan Holloway for more than 10 seconds. Because ITS THE PETE CAMPBELL EPISODE, Joan is reduced to a walk-on. I call bullshit, and suddenly I miss that scientologist lady who married the guy from Thunderant.

"Two dollars, Don? That's what he makes in a week." Don and Betty arrive in Rome, Betty speaks to Conrad Hilton for a moment and there is a jumpcut to the two of them in bed, partially dressed. We're supposed to guess at whether or not they had sex (they didn't). Betty speaks fluent Italian with an almost-passable accent, gets her hair did. Don doesn't speak anything but drinking. Betty and Don pretend not to know each other at the resturant - "I'm only in Rome for one night, I won't have my heart broken." The two of them have sex. The infidelity thing, while more on Don's side than Betty's, is just becoming a component of their relationship at this point. They fool around behind each others backs, lie to each other constantly and I never get the feeling that we're waiting for the writers to spring that card on their marriage. No, Don's false identity is here for that, so weirdly the infidelity is just something that happens, it's not a stick for plothammering. When that moral superiority is taken away from the writers, the result can only be positive for the show. And they're all over each other here. They never left the hotel, as they say.

Cindy Brady beats up her brother, kisses the neighbor boy. No one cares. When Betty gets home, she singles Sally out because she's a horrible mother. Then she stares at her masturbation couch, lectures Sally on her not to go around kissing boys. Because she knows, she totally kissed the mayor's aide after he got Fry tried as a minor.

Pete kind of forces himself on the German au pair once he got a financial hold over her. Like a date rapist. The au pair's employer basically tells him he doesn't care what he does, just to not fuck with his home life. "Be smart and keep it out of the building", he says like he's been there. When Pete Campbell's wife comes home you remember that he's sympathetic only because his wife is completely unlikeable and her trying to get busy with him is fucking repulsive. It doesn't help that she's dressed like a Flintstones extra. Pete on the verge of tears, unable to look at his wife. Yeah: still don't care. I don't even feel the "fuck this guy" vibe that Pete was cultivating in earlier seasons. He's a paper doll, a non-Laurie House character. Pete and his wife talk over dinner, and he tells her he missed her. The two of them have to represent Mr. and Ms. Capitalism, because there is absolutely no passion in their lives at all.

Betty has made a decision for Don against mayor's aide, which should reverse in two episodes when the real shit goes down... but wait... Betty shows herself a lot here - the educated, intelligent woman who never wanted to be a suburban housewife comes home from Rome and realizes she hates everything about her life except for Don. Fucking finally.

Dexter: "Remains To Be Seen" by Tucker Stone

Continuing the "let's ignore things that used to be interesting", the most recent episode of Dexter includes a portion where Dex loses his temper and yells at Quinn. Now, Quinn--like most of Dexter's supporting cast--is an underwritten shitbag who fails to entertain at every turn of his perpetually scowling face, but when you compare that scene with every other time Dexter has "lost his temper", it's a pretty painful example of how much this show has abandoned (or lost) what used to be a major portion of its charm. See, up until now, Dexter never lost his temper. Ever. Because he couldn't. Dexter would play people, he'd imitate anger--the moment when he snarled "I own you" to force Doakes into a public confrontation, the moment when he pushed Jimmy Smits into an ill-thought out rage through a faked meltdown--but real temper? Not a chance. Over and over again, through voice-over, through Dexter's behavior, it was made clear that Dexter wasn't an emotional creature. Part of the twisted pleasure of the second and third season was tied up in this (and the climax of the Ice Truck Killer, even more so)--because Dexter struggled with unexpected feelings he couldn't comprehend or explain away. Was it anger? Love? He couldn't tell, because how the fuck would he know? Now, he doesn't register them at all. He gets angry, he behaves irrationally, and what was once fascinating becomes pat, confusing.

A lot of complaints with the show end up, unfortunately, in one single pile: this isn't as entertaining as it was, and it's because "they're doing it wrong." That's a boring attitude to have, and even if it's true--and it may not be, it may just be personal taste crushed against popcorn failure--it's not a tremendously intelligent way to watch a television show. Thankfully, the moments when things do work are still widely available--Dexter's compulsive frenzy to find the missing body parts (inside his own mind), the slow, methodical nature in which John Lithgow hunts his next victim--both of those sequences catch up with the general appeal of the show, which is that we want to see someone completely awful, see them do something completely awful, all so that we can more fully enjoy the moment when Michael C. Hall strips them naked, covers them in plastic wrap, taunts and torments, and finally, right at the moment when it becomes a bit too upsetting--slaughters them like an animal, smiling all the while. It's gross. It's vile.

But it's the one thing this show hasn't fucked up yet.

House: "The Tyrant" by Tucker Stone

Okay, let's see if we got this right: not only does Andre Braugher lose his guest spot role so that the dude from Due South/The Shield can show up and play the show's umpteenth version of House-but-not-really, but Taub barely gets acknowledged while the show devotes roughly 15% of its run-time to the soul-numbing reunion of Omar Epps with his Wyld-ing Out handbag? And now Chase is being saddled with the "impossible to ignore, forever" label of being-a-fucking-murderer?

Oh, and House apologized like four times. This is a difficult road these Fox-ters are making bitches roll.

Guest POW this week, in case you missed the numerous advertisements--which you didn't, I've been wiping my ass with freebie Darth-Vader-On-House toilet paper for three fucking weeks now--was old James Earl Jones. (He used to stutter! Did you know that? Every speech teacher in every "waste of life/money" acting program in the country whips out that old chestnut around the second or third class, which is roughly around when everybody realizes that none of the "skills" taught in speech class will ever be used, ever, anywhere, by anyone, unless one becomes a speech teacher.) Old Jones did have a nice little line about "maintaining order", but he didn't follow it up by saying "throughout the galaxy, as father and son", but hey, House is all about the missed opportunities these days. And while it was abnormally pleasant to have a patient die--Cutthroat Bitch is the only one that sticks in memory, but the last season is a blur--it was just as abnormally disappointing to find out that Chase is now saddled with future storylines where he will sit morosely in rooms while the camera frames him as if he's being lit by a flashlight. It's not that popping the guy was necessarily a bad choice, it's that It's A Fucking TV Show, one that's never mastered the art of the long-form story--making one of the main supporting castmembers into a Doctor Who Kills only works when you're planning on getting rid of the character, or when you're planning on having that one moment be the central point of the character's existence for the remainder of the show.

As per usual, House was played by Hugh Laurie and was thereby rendered immutably perfect, despite the scene where he made a simple mistake, compounded the mistake, and then did a magic trick that had a 50% chance of miserable, incarceration-causing failure. Still: pretty shitty stuff!

Sons Of Anarchy: "Smite" by Tucker Stone

Having not seen the first season of this show, due to the whole "bikers? who cares?" mindset, I'm unaware of what "the book" contains. Based off this episode, everyone on Sons of Anarchy has CancerAids, and "the book" is where they'll find the antidote. They talk about it in symbolic terms, laden with bullshit-staring contest scenes, they cradle it like a premature infant made of the thinnest glass, they cut to close-ups of the title...they never say what's in the goddamn thing that's so fucking awesome, but whatever it is: must be pretty fucking awesome. It's odd, because one wouldn't imagine that the leader of a biker gang is much of a wordsmith, considering his biker gang spends all of its time in one small, shitty town that has a population of A) the biker gang and B) 13 people who don't like the biker gang and C) a really busy hospital where some women work so that other women may cry. But hey, what do I know. I don't wear fucking chaps.

Like last week, this is an episode that treads back and forth between whether or not Jax and...shit, I don't even know his name, the Ron Perlman character...okay, whether or not they'll...wait. Make friends? Love each other? Something something biker gang? Bros? It definitely has something in it about bros. Anyway, you can watch those parts and pay attention if you want, but the only thing that makes it worthwhile is seeing the bikers sit around a table while Ron bangs a gavel. (Lightly? Why does he bang it so lightly? Hell, if I had a goddamn gavel and a reason to bang it, I'd bang that shit like a Fiji drummer.) The show also has some scenes where Peggy Bundy tries to run after the blond woman who kidnapped her and passed her off for the whole gang rape thing, and that's tough enough, made even worse when her doctor apologizes for how much all that running must have hurt due to the fact that Peggy's vagina is all dry from the gang raping. (Dude, that last sentence isn't some gross thing being written to be gross, that's the actual fucking shit that happens. The doctor even gives her a prescription for estrogen, since her vagina is dry, and the estrogen will fix that, and maybe later she can go running after the people who raped her and it won't hurt as bad.) So yeah, you can pay attention to that as well, if you want, but if you do--fuck man, don't tell me that shit. Way my memory works, i'll forget it soon enough, don't want to know there's people out there flicking lighters for that particular piece of Yuck da Fuck.

Opie has a couple of good scenes. He sits around not giving a fuck, terrifying the hell out of people, gets flirted with by a junkie porno star (in front of her kid), looks at her like she's from another planet, and the whole time he continues to look as if he actually dresses and behaves like the character he's playing, as opposed to nearly everybody else on this show, all of whom look like they took off a paisley dress shirt and threw on some leather jackets the costume department stole from The Warriors.

Oh, and Henry Rollins is still a really terrible actor. I think he was worried that people might have gotten used to him being on the show, so he made sure to remind the viewer this week of that basic fact. Still, the next week might have guns going off, and the only cool action this show has yet had has been based around Opie walking directly into gunfire and blowing people's faces off. Something to look forward to!

-David Brothers, Matthew J. Brady, Sean Witzke & Tucker Stone, 2009

Comments

[Bill Reed]

I dunno. Dr. Greene totally killed a guy on ER one time and they never really bothered about it ever again.

I wouldn't say it's the crazy motherly hormonal stuff that made Echo go nuts-- that's just Ballard's excuse to throw the others off the trail. Echo's clearly turning into another Alpha-- but! because she's a Strong Joss Whedon Woman, she will turn the composite event into a positive force, as seen in Omega.

November showing up wasn't too useful, but I did like the contrast between her-- the "real" person unable to mourn the loss of her child-- and Echo, the "fake" person who can mourn when she loses a kid that's not even really hers.

[Bill Reed]

Now that I think about it, Kovac totally killed a guy on ER, too. Like, totally.

I watch a lot of ER.

[Matthew J. Brady]

Hmm, maybe Bill Reed should be writing these things...

[Tim O'Neil]

My girlfriend likes Dexter but it looks stupid to me. I asked her once, how does Dexter kill people? She said he covers a room in plastic and stabs them until they die. So I asked - what else? What kind of sexual mutilation does he perform? Is there cannibalism? Is there rape before or after the murder? What kind of torture does he practice? How long does he like to watch his victims die? She shrugged and said no to all the above. I asked, who does he kill? Small children? Single women? She said "bad people", crooks, mostly. I laughed. That's not a serial killer, that's a vigilante. What the hell is interesting about a vigilante with a secret identity? It's like the Punisher if he remarried and his killing crooks thing were turned into some Three's Company-esque secret.

Now, I've had an idea for a show in my back pocket for some time - sort of like "The Fugitive" or "Hulk" or "The Pretender", in that it's a show following a dude as he travels across the country, going to a new town and a new situation ever week. Only this man is a serial killer. Every week we watch him ingratiate himself into his environment, pick a victim, and single-mindedly hunt, torture and kill them. Part of the fun is tuning in to see who he kills on any given week. Is it the perky co-ed? Is it the sweet Downs-syndrome man living with his elderly grandmother? Is it the grandmother whose death will emotionally destroy the Downs-syndrome man? Is it a smiling three-year old? Is it an asshole gas station owner? The possibilities are endless. The only rules are that the killer has to do it differently every week, so no one figures out there is any connection to the random string of killings being left across the country.

It would be real Must See TV!

[LurkerWithout]

I think Mr. O'Neil might want to think about upping his meds...

[Tucker Stone]

Tim, I really, really like the idea that your girlfriend uses the word "crooks".

[ben stone]

Sheen and I have seen all the sons episodes