Television Of The Weak: Come Back To Bed, Brain

This week, Sean Witzke examines the latest developments in the Breaking Bad franchise, while Tucker watches Hell's Kitchen again.

Breaking Bad - "Abiquiu"
Sean Witzke

Flashback to Jesse and Jane, discussing Georgia O'Keefe. Jane is still terrible.

Jesse in his happy, bitchy-but-fun flashback just shows how sociopathic Jesse post-Jane-dying, post-Hank-kicking-the-shit-out-him can be. If the two guys in a room episode last week was about Walt losing it, maybe it was as much reminding us why we love Jesse. Because this week, Jesse goes down the road to being despicable. Calling back to Jane is great, especially when Jesse starts reciting Jane's bullshit to his new girl to convince her to buy some meth from him. Jesse's idea of Jane is completely backwards from the manipulative junkie mentality we saw her exhibit, and this episode we get to see the girl Jesse loved. Jesse's idea of obsession versus her idea of obsession are completely different things, tying back into how Jesse took half an episode to figure out what Walt was doing last week.

Turns out that this girl's brother killed Combo, so... well thanks kid, I hated Combo. But yeah, circle of endless cause and effect violence on this show is starting to become a lot scarier and more filmic with every new episode. Shit that Jesse and Walt did a long, long time ago is still lingering around them, having much worse consequences than they originally thought.

Hank versus Marie, yay this show gets extra awesome once again. Hank is getting angrier and angrier, Marie is trying to fix everything before it happens. The loving moment between Hank and Marie that happened right before the shit went down, we're not going to see that any time soon.

Walt doesn't show up until 15 minutes into the episode, and even then they delay showing his face. Walt and Skyler are shot Pacino/Denio in Heat style, completely existing in opposite universes for a while, even divided in wide shot by two window frames. They don't exist with each other at all, and then suddenly they do, and Skylar is suddenly all in on being corrupted and okay with what Walt does. Later when they're in the car together, the Heat style neither of them in frame together thing happens again, this time implying that Walt is still not connecting with Skylar. He tells her the last thing he's been keeping, that he's still dealing, and Skylar barely even lets it register. Skylar is completely corrupted now, and that's going to be a thing for the rest of the season. Considering how morally compromised she's been this season, it'd be hard to imagine anyone cares.

Saul Goodman's waiting room is hell, and I love that so goddamn much. Saul Goodman is my favorite character on television, and is in high ranking of best characters on tv in a long ass time. Saul is up there with Stringer Bell, The Monarch, and Dan Dority. Saul's money-laundering speech from a little while back turns out to be something he knows by rote. Saul as a businessman is very honest about how sleazy and shitty a person he is. Basically, if you pay Saul exactly what he wants, he'll back you up forever. Saul is exactly the guy you want to know if you do some shit, and Skylar might be right in this instance, but if she's going to piss Saul off - well, she gotta go. "It adds up perfectly. Walt's a scientist, scientists love lasers." / Ice Station Zebra Associates. How can you not love this guy?

In the end, the window / two characters never interact in the same space thing comes back when Walt and Gus eat their meal together. Business/family/marriage - the lines are blurring for Walt in really uncomfortable way. The way he's acting, his life straightening out is an unexpected devlopment. Well, straightening out isn't the exact right phrase, Walt is just getting further and further invested, to the point where there's no longer a cut and run option on the table. He's in it now, and from the next ep trailer, Jesse's gonna bring it down on top of his head.

Hell's Kitchen - "Sixteen Chefs Compete"
Tucker Stone

I thought I was done with Gordon Ramsay. Having watched the original fly on the wall documetary stuff (which is great), then the F-Word (which is okay for ten minutes), then about 8,000 other shows, I broke the habit by force sometime early in the last season of this show. (Or maybe two seasons ago. I was out, brother.)

And yet, here I am again, dosing up on Hell's Kitchen one more time. What gives?

Weariness has something to do with it, that's for sure. The last few years of television have been a bit of a personal golden age with The Wire, The Shield, those first two seasons of Deadwood, The Thick of It, Tim & Eric Awesome Show and Spooks all working together to give me a newly born respect for the quality that television can achieve. With a few notable exceptions--Breaking Bad & Generation Kill--I've found myself plenty bored with everything else, and I'm only willing to let some of the blame for that rest on my general tendency to dislike things just because socially retarded babymen enjoy them. But the last few months--i'd date it as being around the conclusion of Thick of It--television started tounging my inner thigh, no matter how many times I mumbled "the balls, you dipshit." Lost? I saw enough of that to know that it was printed on sheets called "not for me", and watching the last nine minutes cemented the general feeling that it was goobedlygook fantasy bullshit, the equivalent of cold oatmeal strained through steel wool. Treme is even less intriguing than the original previews warned it would be, a show that looks and behaves like Keenan Ivory Wayans should be popping out of a baby carriage screaming "message" every time Steve Zahn raps out another of his "c'mon..." sentences. Shows like 24 and the Bad Girls Club fumbled around on emergency room tables, pleading for death while their producers called for prosthetic limbs.

But then, of course, there's reality television. It was never supposed to be good, it's always been direct and open about its compulsions towards rewarding the viewer while pumping up advertising dollars. I'm the worst kind of viewer for these sorts of shows, in that I'm the exact stereotype that Charlie Brooker warned us about, the sarcastic shithead who spits out a nonstop froth of excrement and cruelty for the enjoyment of myself, cursing and ridiculing the wanna-be pseudo celebrities who populate the casts of these things because I'm too lazy to effect any substantive change in my own life, but smart enough to know that "being creative instead" is as navel-gazingly useless as consistent religious belief . My main interest in watching these shows is finding out whatever personal tragedy the "castmates" have experienced, so that I can later blame said tragedy on their inability to accomplish simple tasks. (You burned the risotto again? Maybe its because you couldn't keep your father from succumbing to rectal cancer, you semen-encrusted fuckmagnet.)

This latest season of Hell's Kitchen looks to be a pleasant offering of the exact same thing it always delivers. There's been some cosmetic changes to the dorms, the elderly bat-faced woman who used to help has been replaced by a mute blond with the body of a Jewish 1920's movie producer, but the show itself is the same as ever. People have egos, Gordon Ramsay has power over them, all of them are consistent in their ability to make "I'm shocked" faces whenever he calls them horrible, bleeped-out names, and the dining room is packed to the brim with the sourpuss sneers of failed models and mp3 rappers. The food is the same as ever--scallops! that beef thing in the bread that nobody can make correctly! risotto!--and so is the drama, with the teeming cast overpowering any chances of interesting human interaction. There's a guy with a funny accent, a lemon-faced woman who is probably going to pull out the religious persecution card if people keep ignoring the experience she gained by working in kitchens at the age of 14, a pretty black girl who has already happily claimed she is "proud to be called a bitch", and, in a Hell's Kitchen first, a psychopathic farmer obsessed with butchering animals who hopes to use the prize money to purchase two walk-in coolers. You know, for the carcasses of dead animals. His dead animals.

I'll be on board for now, sure. At least until they get closer to the end, when the show will turn into a non-stop whinefest where all of the single mom contestants cry into the camera about how they deserve to win so that they can prove to the world...something, nobody has ever explained that lesson in a way I could understand, but decades of these shows must have taught us whatever it was by now, if, in fact, it ever was going to. MESSAGE!

-Sean Witzke, Tucker Stone, 2010

Comments

[Kenny Cather]

I've never even heard of The Thick of It, and I wasn't really captivated by Deadwood like everyone else was, but everything else you mentioned was top flight television. I'd add the Boondocks to that list, too.

I like Kitchen Nightmares better than Hell's Kitchen because it's fun to root for or against a restaurant making it rather than opening my own restaurant and having a horse in the race.

[Matthew J. Brady]

I was considering covering that awful-looking True Beauty show, just to subject myself to some apparently stupid reality TV and see if I could write anything interesting about it, but I guess I missed it on Monday. Eh, maybe next week.

[Tucker Stone]

True Beauty--is that the Tyra show?

Kenny-you should watch The Thick of It. That show was (is?) incredibly good.

[Marty]

MJB - If you cover True Beauty, you have to promise to refer to its Tyra/Ashton Kutcher producing team as Tyrash.

[Matthew J. Brady]

Damn, I think you guys sold me. I actually watched it on Hulu (for some reason), and there's plenty to write about, for at least one installment. How to express the revulsion and bewilderment I'm feeling?