Television of the Weak: "Hauntingly Effective Storytelling"

This week, Martin watched Survivor and Celebrity Apprentice, Tucker sat through 24 and hopes he spoils it for you, and Tim O'Neil showed up to explain why you should be paying attention to Grey's Anatomy. Yes.

Survivor: Heroes vs. Villains - "I'm Not a Good Villain" 
Martin Brown

Fundamental difference between reality TV and scripted TV: reality TV, by its very nature, allows for the muddiness of human intention. Scripted TV, as a habit, does not.

Take this storyline on Survivor: Heroes vs. Villains. Colby Donaldson was the golden boy of the second season of Survivor. When he came back to play in Survivor:All Stars two years later, he seemed tired and got voted out early. In preparation for Survivor:Heroes vs. Villains, Colby recognized that he hadn't brought his A-game to All Stars, and promised to come with the thunder for the new season. Straight out of the gate, though, he got literally dragged across the field by a dude on the other team that everybody thought was a joke. Then, he ended up in an alliance that found itself being systematically voted out, as his tribe lost challenge after challenge. Soon, it seemed like all he was doing around camp was laying face-first in the ocean, staring into the water. A glimmer of hope showed in his game when one of his tribemates mangled his knee, and they voted him out in order to try to keep the tribe strong. As of the end of the last episode, Colby was in a position where he had to show and prove, or go home.

On a scripted program, Colby leading the Heroes tribe to subsequent victory would have looked similar to last week's episode. He would have recognized his situation, realized it was do-or-die, and then triumphantly led his team to victory, redeeming himself and his team. But on Survivor, you get the added benefit of Colby literally picking up a woman and literally throwing her out of his way on his way to victory. There's still the whole comeback-kid story arc, but you also can't ignore the fact that the dude is totally overcompensating, not to mention a little pathetic. So do you root for him, or not? Are you supposed to, or not?

Clearly, Survivor has labeled each of the castaways on Heroes vs. Villains as a good guy or a bad guy. But, over the course of this season, they've never been beholden to those definitions. The effect, for me, has been that I've found myself rooting for people I hated in the past; I've found myself rooting against people I thought I liked; and I've found myself more emotionally engaged than I've ever been in a TV show. Yeah, it's weird to talk about being "emotionally engaged" with a TV show that's so fundamentally goofy--what with the alliances and tribal councils and slip-n-slide challenges and all--but I think that's a bi-product of watching multi-dimensional personalities cope with extreme circumstances.

The problem now is that the most dynamic personalities are the one who are being voted out. The show is beginning to be dominated by fewer and fewer people. There's no one left to really root for on the Heroes' side, and the Villains look to follow suit. The season has been virtually flawless so far, with each episode topping the one before it in surprising ways. But, as of this last episode, the two major storylines--the Heroes' implosion, and the rivalry between Rob and Russell--have each reached a kind of conclusion. Either the show's going to have to make a sharp left turn, or some personalities are going to have to show up soon, if Heroes vs. Villains wants to sustain its momentum.

The Celebrity Apprentice - "Muggles and Wizards" 
Martin Brown

Two hour episodes have always been too long for The Celebrity Apprentice, but this week's episode was stretched exceedingly thin. It spent about 30 minutes establishing Rod Blagojevich's technology deficiencies, to the point where they spent so much time making him look inept that it was suspicious. All of the evidence of Blagojevich's ineptitude--him lifting up a computer to see if there was anything underneath, mispronouncing the names of Harry Potter houses, or falling asleep on plane, say--could be recontextualized to show something completely different. And I know things have gotten tiresome when I find myself thinking about ways that Rod Blagojevich may have gotten screwed by the editors. Though, come to think of it, so far that's his whole criminal defense, too--that he comes off a lot different when you get to hear the whole tape. So maybe, in some small way, Blagojevich is getting exactly what he wanted when he signed on for The Apprentice in the first place: reasonable doubt. That's what you'd call justice.

Grey's Anatomy - "Sympathy for the Parents" 
Tim O'Neil

If you've never had the pleasure of watching Grey's Anatomy, I can explain the show's premise very simply: imagine a hospital that isn't a hospital. Imagine this hospital / not-hospital, staffed by doctors / not-doctors, knowledgeable in medicine / not-medicine, but far less interested in curing their Patients of the Week than in fucking each other, or sometimes even hitting each other. Sometimes even fucking and hitting each other at the same time (don't worry, that's actually happened). This is, in other words, the worst medical drama of all time, the kind of show that exists to make House look like a procedural documentary on Discovery Health. And yet, for all it's absolute and unequivocal incompetence, it somehow manages to remain interesting and even occasionally riveting week-in and week-out. It's not something I'm proud to admit, but admitting that you are helpless in the hands of a higher power is the first step in any twelve step recovery program. So, here I am: 

My name is Tim, and I'm addicted to Grey's Anatomy.  

(See what I mean about the hitting?)

The way Grey's works is actually pretty simple. Essentially, every character is unlikeable to a greater or lesser degree. Oh, sure, there are some characters who may be temporarily more popular or more appealing than others - but even the best of them, with almost no exceptions, are all pretty much intolerable. In a cast of about ten regular characters and half-a-dozen more peripheral presences, each one takes their turn being an asshole - or doing something otherwise despicable - at regular intervals. Don't get too attached to anyone! Characters on this show have a nasty habit of being written off between episodes and never being mentioned by anyone again, ever. The best an actor can hope for is that after they've been unceremoniously fired by the producers their character might get a few rueful references in future episodes. If you're a charter cast member, your absence might be noticed with more frequency. (And if you're Katherine Heigl, your absence will be noticed every episode as the show tries unsuccessfully to recover its equilibrium after losing its only actor with so much as a modicum of talent and charisma.) But make no mistake: if modern Grey's has any defining characteristic, it's sheer chaotic churn. If you're a young actor hired to fill a new roll on the show, you probably have a better chance of surviving on the Battle Royale island than lasting six whole episodes.  

(Paging Dr. Stevens - the show is even suckier without you!) 

Anyway, now that I've laid some groundwork for this, the Inaugural Installment of Grey's Anatomy at TFO, we shall begin. 

First, this wasn't that bad an episode, as these things go. It was a Karev-heavy episode, which is hardly a bad thing - in the post-Heigl talent vaccum, he is perhaps the show's best performer, or rather, "least worst." The problem is that since Izzie left, his plots have been pretty one-note - he's currently a long-suffering martyr, the former bad boy who was reformed by the love of the good Doctor Stevens. They hooked up for the (seemingly!) final time as she was dying of stage IV metastatic melanoma, they got married but - surprise! - she lived due to an incredibly miraculous cancer treatment. Of course, their marriage was built on death adrenaline and, honestly, they're both selfish assholes, so its no surprise the relationship fell apart as soon as he realized he was stuck with her for longer than a week and would probably never get to score any of that sweet widower pity sex. Then he started flirting with Dr. Reed Adamson and it looked like maybe they were going to hook up and she was going to be his post-Izzie fling, but - surprise! - Dr. Adamson hasn't been seen in a few episodes despite the fact that she is one of a handful of new cast members who made a big splash at the beginning of the season (because, you know, they fire so many they have to constantly replace them). Chances are we'll never see her again. (This is a recurring theme, I may have mentioned.) But now he's again a lone wolf who sort of slept with Lexie "Little" Grey earlier in this season, which was one of the factors that contributed to Lexie and Sloan breaking up. (Sloan, AKA Eric Dane, had a sex tape you may have seen.) And then his brother shows up on his doorstep, asking for a free hernia operation, and things go wild because Karev never even bothered to tell his crazy white trash family that he had even been married.

And if you're wondering why I used the pejorative phrase "white trash," it's because the producers and writers at Grey's have taken very careful steps to ensure that we do not for a second forget that Karev's family is from a lower rung on the socio-economic status, and that his having been able to lift himself out of poverty in order to become a surgeon is no less than a Herculean feat of the Will-to-Power made flesh in the Overman. Because, gosh, Karev's mother takes anti-depressants and his siblings were in and out of foster care. Isn't it great that he hasn't succumbed to the inevitable entropy of America's permanent economic underclass? Yay illusory upward mobility!  

Dear Dr. Karev: You're sassy! Never change! 

So anyway, Brother Karev gets his operation, causes havoc and splits, never to be seen again. That's your token stab at social relevance because poor people don't have insurance. 

Meanwhile, please allow me introduce you to the three worst actors in the world:  

From left to right, that's Kim Raver as Teddy Altman, Sandra Oh as Cristina Yang, and Kevin McKidd as Owen Hunt. They form the show's current "hot triangle," a shape slightly complicated by Teddy's current sexual relationship with a newly domesticated Sloan (Sloan asked Teddy out soon after Lexi left him because his heretofore-unknown teenage daughter turned up pregnant in order to leech money off her plastic surgeon deadbeat dad.) Basically, all three of these people are awful. Awful, awful, awful. I can honestly say that when Hunt and Yang are on screen with each other they make me want to reconsider ever having sex again. When they are actually stimulating sex (which is OFTEN, they take their clothes off on Grey's even more often than they hit each other), the only plausible solution to the unmitigated horror on display is simply to go full-on Oedipus - there are some things which, when seen, cannot be unseen. I don't know what it is, exactly, but these two actors have the worst chemistry of any romantic couple I've ever seen on film. On their own, the characters aren't necessarily bad, but together they are just repulsive. I don't know how to explain it, even though myself and Violet have spent a great deal of time trying to piece together exactly why this is. It's like - you know how some actors have chemistry? Like, say, Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg in Breathless - two actors who you can instantaneously see belong together, who share a palpable and tangible sexual reciprocity, whose depth of passion is deep enough to communicate entire movies worth of subtext with as little as an arched eyebrow. Hunt and Yang are like that, only completely reversed: when they stand together, it's as if some kind of door has been opened into another realm of pain and terror, and things have stepped out of this door which should not exist in our universe of three-dimensional Euclidean geometry.

So, the fact that Hunt and Yang (or, if you want to be cute, "Yunt") are being delivered to the viewer as some kind of Eternal Romance for the Ages is simply, well, it makes me want to die each and every time I think about it. This is especially funny if you recall that Yang's previous Eternal Romance for the Ages was with another charter cast member who got fired because he said some stupid homophobic shit in public, and was therefore erased from memory. All you really need to know about Hunt is that the actor who plays him, Kevin McKidd, was previously featured in this. He's a Iraq War vet who suffers from PTSD of the kind that is often triggered by kissing or sharing a bed with Cristina Yang. I'm not joking! He tried to strangle her in bed once, and it was AWESOME because for a moment there I really though they'd pull the trigger on some kind of murder-suicide shit, but of course they didn't. And now even though they're still together the current storyline is all about how she is afraid of him because, like, he's going to have some sort of triggering event that drops him back into The Shit and he'll go nuts and kill everyone. Hell, you should be afraid, Cristina Yang. You should live your life in a state of profound and unreasoning terror at having to share a bed with this:  

Oh, wait! Sorry, wrong image: 

 

(Can you believe this guy was in Trainspotting? I can't!) 

Even though Hunt the addled Ginger war vet isn't what you might call "a catch," he's got two women fighting over the chance to pluck his wiry red thatch from between their teeth. The other is recent cast addition, Dr. Altman, a fellow Iraq vet pulled in to Seattle by Hunt "supposedly" so she could teach Yang all about being a cardiac surgeon (which is kind of not how I imagine hospital HR searches are conducted in the real world), but really because they share a Sacred Bond, having been part of the Band of Brothers who Fought the Good Fight and got blown up by IEDs and all that stuff. Which is well and good, I'm sure, but c'mon. Who the hell wants to wake up next to Darth Ginger? Who the hell would fight for the privilege? Crazy motherfuckers, that's who. So I say, go on, Dr. Altman. Schtupp Sloan to your heart's content. They call him McSteamy for a reason, after all. He's hot, you should totally hit that. He's got his own sex tape. Hunt? Not so much. I'd really rather he never had a sex tape. Leave him and Yang to their own precious brand of hell, eternally making love with all the eroticism of a fat man slapping together two ziplock bags of rotting meat in the Stop & Shop parking lot on a hot summers day.

24 - "6:00AM - 8:00AM"
Tucker Stone

That doesn't even kind of look real.

1) Here's a back-and-forth sequence:

Jack: There's a mole in CTU.

Renee: How is that possible?

Well, shit, how is that possible? There's been a mole every single season, and in a couple of seasons, there was more than one mole. Considering one of the seasons only had a functioning CTU division for a couple of Janeane Garofuuuuking hours, the concept that anybody--even a semi-functioning human being conjured from liposuction waste--could express surprise at the idea of a mole in the sieve of capability that is 24's Counter Terrorism Unit can only have been included as a big help help we're so fucking tired of working on this show moment from the writers. When the show finally gets around to tearing down the sets and unlocks the writer's cave, you're probably going to discover a bunch of emaciated crazies hovering over the half-eaten body of the one Nader supporter the show had. (Don't cry any tears for that softie, because he was surely responsible for that clown-y human rights lawyer from season four.)

2) If you're in any extended length acting program that isn't designed solely to play Glenda to the fantasies of the shallow, emotionally damaged shitbags that make up the majority of the attendees, there's a point where the teachers--the female teachers who have actual screen credit to point at--will take the female students aside and explain to them that they have to learn how to master two specific scenes if they harbor any hope of ever paying the rent with television or film parts.

• Explosive crying, with actual tears, leading to the admission that you've been raped.
• Explosive crying, with actual tears, after another actor tells you that a family member (usually a child) has died in some manner of horrible fashion.

Because it's acting school, there will be extensive, lengthy discussions regarding the hideous sexism inherent in the popularity of these two scenes, and because it's acting school, these discussions will always include multiple instances where various members of the class will point out that "we could just do theater", to which everyone will nod while murmuring, before going back to silently obsessing about how to get the work they want to get, which is the work that they think will pay them lots and lots of money despite the fact that they aren't actually attractive enough to find success as a character actor on the PAX network.

It's a shitty system, there's never a point where anybody disagrees with that. But it's the system, and nobody in acting school has any interest in changing it. They paid the tuition because they want to get a seat.

The women who play the wife and daughter of the Elvis Costello looking-dude who plays the President of the IRK, which is a made-up Middle Eastern country of (one is led to assume) Muslim lunatics that Elvis has a tenuous control over, have spent every hour up until this one being, at best, completely intolerable. That's not their fault! Nobody on 24 ever wins any prizes for their performance, because 24 has terrible writing and depends on the constancy of the accelerating format to create tension, which hopefully give birth to drama. And yet, because they paid attention in drama school, or because they understand and accept the way this kind of television show is supposed to function, they played the scene where they found out that Mr. President had been captured extremely well, and that was just a prelude to the really amazing job of crying and clothes rending that they delivered when they found out that he had his throat slashed wide open on "the internet" for the world to see. The lines themselves weren't much--a lot of "no, no, NO NO NO" and "NO NO NO" and "NO NO WHERE IS JON BEEF NO HE IS DEAD"--but when coupled with some hitching sobs and and guttural rage bombs, they took it to the next level. (The next level after "completely intolerable" is "tolerable".)

3) And yes, they did kill the guy, and he got a silent count, just like the fat guy from Suicide Kings, who didn't deserve one either. Actually, nobody deserves a silent count anymore, because that was a relic from when there were characters on the show besides Jack & Chloe that the audience had a real connection with. As of this stage of 24, you could sneak onto the set and light Cherry Jones on fire and still have a hard time convincing yourself that this would change the plot in any noticeable fashion. None of these people matter anymore, they're just wet cogs getting moved around an Ikea warehouse with bad lighting. Kill them or don't, but quit throwing out three fingers and screaming West Side everytime you do something that roughly approximates something you did before.

That leads us to 4)

Which is the Starbuck versus Freddie Prinze, Jr. remix homage of a key scene from the first season's conclusion, when Jack Bauer pulled Nina Myers out of her car mid-escape, pressed a gun against her head, and threatened to kill her before being talked down by George Mason. That scene was a rare moment for 24, a decent contradiction to the rule mentioned above. See, here's the other thing about the acting on 24: Kiefer isn't really very good. He wasn't very good when he found out his wife died (within hours of finding out she was pregnant with his second child), and he isn't any better the rest of the time. He's serviceable, he always has been. In that scene, he was just doing the umpteenth variation on a tight-jawed anger mumble, which is that thing he does where he holds his breath (you can hear him choke it out at the end of a line) and head shake where he seems to be knocking his eyes back into functionality, which he invariably follows by blinking and looking quickly to the left and right. It's a dumb trick, a habit, but it's part of the whole creation that is his Jack performance, a way of saying "see, the Jack who kills and the Jack who doesn't are like two different programs that can't run on the mainframe at the same time". (I guess that would make them operating systems?)

Xander Berkeley--who was probably the best actor the show ever had, if you're ignoring that professional race car driver and a cameo by former Presidential candidate John McCain--played George Mason back then, and he was, no doubt about it, incredible. (Xander's done about a million things, and besides being the original Waingro, he showed up in Heat as the guy who fucked Al Pacino's wife. "But you cannot, watch, my motherfuckingtv", said Al Pacino.) In that first season scene, Kiefer is choking out Nina, he's clearly going to shot her, there's no question, he's gonna shot the shit out of her and dig the bullets out with a spoon and refashion new bullets out of the shells and his anger so that he can shoot her again, and how does Xander play it?

He just smirks, and he sighs, and he says "aw, c'mon Jack. This is no good." And then he says "hey, let's go inside. Hey Jack! let's go inside!" He shrugs his shoulders, he underplays, he fucking sidles over like he's picking up a girl too young for him at a bar he's too overdressed to be at, and he talks like he's asking for extra napkins. It's even more genius than this moment, and this was probably one of the best moments the show had that didn't involve violence:

Back in the beginning, the show knew to have somebody like Xander Berkeley on their payroll, because the only way to fully get into Jack's ridiculousness was to have somebody in the room who knew that Jack was fucking ridiculous. He was an incredibly useful tool, a tool that was coin-operated as long as you could get the President on the phone to tell him in which direction he should aim his weapons-of-mass-destruction body, but that didn't mean you took him seriously, because...well, look at the guy. 

He's a fucking moron.

-Martin Brown, Tim O'Neil, Tucker Stone, 2010

Comments

[Matthew J. Brady]

It's good to have Tim here; he's awesome. Damn, that actually makes Gray's Anatomy sound somewhat tolerable. Even my wife, a diehard fan of the show, quit watching a season or two ago, but now I kinda want to get her to show it to me and explain all this stuff like you do, if only to see some Kevin McKidd action. I love that guy; he was a fucking badass on Rome, and that show where he jumped around in time was pretty good too, whatever it was called.

[John Pontoon]

Heh. "[...]wiry red thatch[...]" You're funny, man.

[LurkerWithout]

I think McKidd's time-travel show was called "Journeyman"...

[Matthew J. Brady]

That's the one!

[Ed]

So did the "Lost" reviews just stop because they revealed that the alternate timeline wasn't isolated & irrelevant, and that dipshit West is too much of a fucking twelve-year-old to back down on anything he's been ranting so stridently about?

[mateo]

Yeah, so my father-in-law is an ER doctor, and he thinks House is a barrel of shit. He thinks it reinforces the hoodoo medicine that is "totally unrealistic" (suprise!) and has no relation to real doctoring. Grey's Anatomy, however, he thinks is great, the "hi-jinks" of residency artfully reflected.

So as far as your accuracy comparison, at least one doc disagreed.

All this is per a totally unprompted conversation of about a year ago, in which he decided to share which shows he thought were the most and least accurate. Thought i would share...