This week, Sean Witzke breaks down why Treme is a waste of time but Breaking Bad is not, and Tucker rubs his soft penis on Law & Order before mentioning the gross shit that happened on 24 and falling apart completely.
Breaking Bad - "I See You"
Treme - "Shame, Shame, Shame"
Sean Witzke
So last week Breaking Bad just completely knocked TREME out of my interest completely. Treme is an ensemble drama the way that Generation Kill was, where you were carried along by the ideas and the performances, but you were watching David Simon. The big comparison is the Wire but only in the spirit-of-a-city-equals-approach, Russian-novel-on-tv thing. The only other real comparison with the Wire is something a friend of mine said to me, that the Bunk makes a much better McNulty than McNulty ever was. It's great tv, but it's also low key tv. It's nice and the drama happens when it happens. The show is all personal interaction making points to the audience. It's an anti-drama. This week's Treme, it was pleasant and enjoyable, Steve Zahn sang, the Bunk smirked, Violin Girl looked hot, John Goodman said "Donny", the cast of Top Chef Masters showed up for some reason, and then later Steve Zahn got his white liberal ass knocked down for saying "nigger". Oh and Christopher Morse was there, which was nice. It was all just nice. There's no urgency there, which might be to the shows benefit, but it's not going to grab you by the throat and make you wait for next week's episode the way everyone else you know treats Lost and Dr. Who for some reason (I don't know either).
Breaking Bad on the other hand, is openly a manipulative melodrama. It's not realistic, it's tragedy. It's big moments and character moments. Treme may have picked up on format of the Wire but not the gripping ever-twisting character nature of it. Mad Men too, it picked up the idea of destroying drama from within and really showing us what a character based show could do by removing all the tools of the hourlong tv show and relying entirely on interpersonal interaction without becoming a soap opera. Breaking Bad picks up from the Wire too, but it picks up the stuff that made the Wire palatable for idiots like me. The Omar shit. The elements of the show that got it compared to Deadwood and the Sopranos and The Shield, which I'm not as familiar with, but Breaking Bad owes a ton to as well. All of these shows share one thing, though, and that you are watching them so you can watch a character portrait play out over years instead of hours.
In the past four or so episodes, went from reliably good to jaw-droppingly great, culminating in the Hank-vs-the-twins parking lot fight which was the closest thing that tv has come to the constant odds-changing of the action scenes in No Country For Old Men. Breaking Bad has spent 25 or so hours giving us a cast of real, usually unlikeable people, and we spent a lot of time with them. For seasons 1 and 2, the only characters worth caring about on this show were Walter White and Jesse Pinkman. It was a priority because of the way the writing was blatantly about button pushing and it was carried by Bryan Cranston's performance. The way that season 2 ended was so much smarter than it had to be, and so much more emotionally devastating that you knew the show had potential to be something so much greater than that. This season started at that level, with some ebb and flow good and bad. It wasn't appointment television, but it was always somehow better than you were expecting. And then whatever episode it was Danny Trejo popped up again, Breaking Bad became appointment television.
"I See You" is clearly made by people who have sat in hospitals waiting for loved ones to die. The disgusting small talk. The tinkering with hospital furniture. The screaming for no reason. The helpful attitude covering up feeling useless. Watching someone just lose it over something trivial. Someone had to have lived it, and they put it on tv. The kind of tension that forced tedium takes, even though it's not much of the runtime of the episode, it feels like forever.
The best scene in this episode was Walter and Hank's partner - the partner says I wish I could walk in there and kill that guy right now, Walt turns away from the camera and his jaw clenches. "Me too." In an episode with a stone cold cold-open, a guy with severed legs clawing his way across a floor to kill someone, a master manipulator double cross, and Betsy Brandt acting her heart out - it's a jaw clench and two words. Hank and Marie were characters you put up with for a while there, now they're the reason this show is worth watching - somewhere along the line, I started caring about them. Watching a character bitch about waterspots on a fork is some of the best tv I've seen all year, thats when you know this is good shit.
Law & Order - "The Taxman Cometh"
Tucker Stone
The mystery on here wasn't the initial mystery, but it wasn't much of a mystery either way. It was just a chance to watch this one over-the-top lookatmyexpressions woman goon her way around the table, licking her lips and mooning like a zombie Marcel Marceau, who she also sort of resembles. There was a nice bit of stunt casting, with Clea Duvall doing the heavy lifting that playing off drug addicted space cadets requires. Except for that, and a chance to see what Balki's cousin looks like now that time has had its way with his hair, it was the same generic milk of mushy magnesia that populates this season of Law & Order. The best part of this season was when Sepatha the Mercenary told Jeremy Sisto that he should shave and wear clean clothes, and that was mostly because she called him a bunch of names when she did it. (And he did look like shit, and she was right, but him looking like shit now seems like it might have been an actual character trait, as boring as he's become.) The second best part of this season was in this episode, when Sam Waterston did an imitation of Faye Dunaway in Chinatown, saying "She's my daughter. She's my sister. She's my daughter. She's my sister." He also made the slap noise when he did it! That would've been the best part of the season, but right after he did it, what's her name hot chick said "Chinatown! Good one, Jack."
Which, yeah, duh, Chinatown, and I guess it's there because some crybaby producer was worried people wouldn't get the reference, but c'mon--just saying "Chinatown!" isn't going to help those people. They're just going to be confused, "Chinatown" is just going to be a second non sequitur that they don't understand. Also, who cares about people who haven't seen Chinatown? Fuck those people.
24 - "12:00PM - 1:00PM"
Tucker Stone
They said torture was a-coming, and here it was. In stark opposition to some of the other time they've used torture (but not really), Jack brutalized some guy just to be horrible and make him suffer, not because he was trying to accomplish anything, and they let the scene go on for three minutes. (Which they also advertised as being "the most intense three minutes in 24 history", which is a lie, because none of the torture scenes were ever that intense.) It was pretty graphic--not as graphic as Nip/Tuck, but still, Jack beat the guys face into powder, slashed gigantic cuts into his chest, poured some kind of fluid on the cuts, burnt the guys cuts with a blowtorch, apparently cut a hole in his belly button?, and then, since none of that gave him a hard-on, he disemboweled him and fucked the guy's stomach with his hand until his body was pregnant with a SIM card. That's when the guy died, and this is how Jack will have more names to put on his death list, because the show has run out of things for Jack to "prevent" or "rescue", and since he no longer "cares", he's just an angel of revenge. And while the way that story usually plays out involves the revenge-r stopping before he "crosses the line", Jack has now, in the most recent episodes, executed a woman in cold blood at point blank range, killed an entire team of spec ops Russian agents in a hit attempt he set up himself, and finally, tortured and murdered a man with his bare hands. He's run out of lines, which is why he's wearing a spandex outfit (with mask) next week while attacking Secret Service agents with a machine gun.
And you know what? Who fucking cares. I don't. I don't care about anything. I can't have a baby because my sperm doesn't work, they're trying to fix a massive oil leak by throwing human hair into it, Arizona is going to start stringing up Mexicans because Americans are too pussy to grow their own fucking weed, Greece is a non-stop parade of rioting lunacy, Chinese men can't stop killing small children, and it's totally legal for this guy to be a fucking human being and not a dead person. Fuck optimism. I'm an Arsenio man for life. There's no reason to believe in a better future for your children, for you, for anybody. We're going to leave this place worse than it was when we found it, and we deserve everything that we've got coming to us, and I hope you don't even get half of what we deserve brother, because what we deserve is so horrible I can barely imagine what it might be, but whatever it could be, it can't be any worse than what 24 is doing to me, because 24 is making me believe that there's a chance that things could turn around in the end if I just tried a little bit harder, but no, it can't, and it never will.
But hey, a potato chip company thinks that I should upload pictures of my happiness on flickr, so maybe I'm just a whiny cunt with sand in my panties and I should smile more often.
-Sean Witzke, Tucker Stone, 2010
And how is that outburst supposed to help me decide if I should make a budgetary allowance for the season box set? Huh? Thanks a bunch for nothing.
Posted by: AComment | 2010.05.13 at 05:50
Even though it wasn't entirely necessary, I liked the flashback to Danny Trejo earlier this season.
Also this episode got me really interested in Gus the chicken man.
Posted by: Nathan | 2010.05.13 at 17:28
Jesus! The horror 24 has become is just ...wow
Posted by: DK | 2010.05.14 at 22:29
Jesus Tucker you can be dark when you really want to
Posted by: Nathan | 2010.05.17 at 12:06