The Factual Opinion

Television of the Weak: Donald Sutherland Is Dead and Living In Austria

This week: Sean Witzke with the Mad Men bullets, Nina with the Pillars of the Earth and True Blood shells, and a pail of leavings from Tucker on Hung.

Mad Men - "Christmas Comes But Once A Year"
Sean Witzke

After last week's extra-shitty opening moment, at least this week's opening is a scene instead of a bullshit writers-room mission statement. Of course it's got the always boring Draper kids in it, so we're back to zero. Don Draper's secretary reads the kids letter to Santa. The Freddy guy from Sterling-Cooper comes back, and is in A.A. Yeah, it's that episode. Rather than work an internal premise (HEY FEMINISM, MISOGYNIST DINOSAURS), they've decided to start just pulling random things in as themes.

Don meets his neighbor across the hall, it's the girl from Brick. Freddy and Peggy work together. Peggy is nothing but a haircut and a feminist argument - zero character. "My bed is covered with work", then the guy she's with says "Thats kind of symbolic". What the fuck, Mad Men writers? Are you worried we won't get it? Quit telling us the fucking subtext for five minutes. Peggy as the only voice of feminism on this show is becoming a crutch rather than a tool. I guess there used to be more young people on this show? But right now, she's the only fully developed young character and the only woman with that mindset so she's becoming even more unlikeable than she used to be.

All the annoying kids in the office pool get moments, if you care about, here you go, caring about that. I guess? Pete Campbell having nothing to do is one of the few things I'm happy with here.

There is a pretty great character moment of Don Draper ducking his way out of a focus-group personality test. Then there's another one, of Roger Sterling getting a call from Lee Garner when hung over, accidentally getting forced into throwing a huge xmas party. And they shoot Christina Hendricks in side profile as he hits on her, making some redundant statement about "this is the office and that's life". It's nice to see Slattery, Harris, and Hendricks get a scene where they can bounce off each other, but really this is sitcom filler showing up pretty early on in the season. Who gives a shit, really? I guess this is the Roger Sterling episode, where Sterling eats shit the whole episode in order to keep his Lucky Strike contract. I like Sterling, but his character is really only great as a foil for Don, so whatever mileage you get from this is yours to keep.

Don is lonely, but really they haven't given Don anything to do. He's in a holding pattern, and we're only in episode 2. Bad start. The group dynamics lady reads Don like a book, tells him he'll be remarried within the year. I have a problem with this mostly because its another chunk of this show telling instead of showing. Then Don sleeps with his secretary, and there is an awkward moment between them which is nice, but not really substantive at all. Then Don quickly brushes her off the next day, giving her a hundred dollar Christmas bonus.

Once again, the Don and Betty show has very little Don and Betty in it. I'm beginning to sense a pattern. The best part was Don and Sterling doing nazi voices as they get into the office so they don't have to talk about the christmas party. I want to watch whatever show that scene came from.

Pillars of the Earth - "Redemption"
Nina Stone

Well, I certainly feel like I'm going to have a redundant review here. So much happened that I can't possibly talk about the plot. I just need to tell you about who's giving great performances and what my opinions are - right? The story is so large that even though it's being split up into 8 hours of a mini-series, it could probably have been longer. This particular episode felt like they wanted to squeeze so many details in, but they didn't have time, and then they just decided that they'd do it anyway. It ends up being a lot of short scenes - the kind that are all action and no words. The kind that are great when you're reading them, but feel like some sort of weird edit and jump-cut when thrown into the mix of one episode. Nevertheless, I fully enjoyed it this episode and wanted more, more, more. One thing really striking to watch is the portrayal of faith in Medieval Times. Royalty, clergy, townsfolk - all want to be on the side of God. When somebody holds up a cross, it matters, when somebody gets threatened with Hell, there's actual fear. And the belief of each of the characters as to whether God is on their side or not is what is creating the drama and the tension in the story. Of course, we are all rooting for the good Prior Philip. And although the book certainly seems to have it's audience rooting for him, I believe Matthew MacFadyen's performance is so compelling that you're not only wanting him to succeed, you want him on camera all the time. Rufus Sewell is doing a nice job as Tom Builder, but so is everybody else on the show, and I'm kind of wishing that MacFadyen was always standing somewhere on screen, even if he's just eating walnuts and looking at the other characters talk. In this episode, we get another emerging hero: Jack. The former mute. (I can't totally remember, but I do think the book made a bigger deal about his transition to speaking. The show didn't even try--one episode he didn't talk, his mom said "he can talk, but he doesn't talk that often" and then the next episode, he talked some, and now he talks all the time. They probably should have just cut the mute aspect entirely.) In addition to talking, Jack turns out to be an artist with a heart of gold who isn't very good at winning fights. And oh, good lord, how could I forget?!! This episode we witness the beheading of Donald Sutherland! Seems to be a weekend full of beheadings. (Keep reading for that to make sense.) What's more odd than that is that I seem to be so tickled by them. Ew.

True Blood - "Hitting the Ground"
Nina Stone

Ah! It was getting soooo goood there for a little bit! Last Sunday's cliffhanger had us watching Bill die a slow and painful death. Sookie finding him just in time, as Tara was finding wheels for their escape, and then - out of the shadows - Lorena appears and sinks her teeth into Sookie's neck!!! And it ended! Oh, I was sure Lorena was going to "make" Sookie - and what crazy plot twists and turns might ensue?!?! I seriously COULD NOT WAIT for this episode. And - oh oh oh - in the scenes that they show for the next episode - we see Sookie on a stretcher in a hospital! I mean, wowza! The suspense was nearly killing me!

So, what happened? Well, a bunch of back and forth shit happened. Again. I mean, it was still good, but as you can tell from my tone, I'm weary of it all. Sookie gets away from Lorena because Bill springs to "life" holds Lorena down, while Sookie stabs her with a wood? or iron? spear-like-thing, and Lorena dies the "one true death" and turns to blood and intestines, showering Bill. Rendering him near death again. Why? Not sure. Never gets addressed. So, to recap thus far Bill had proposed to Sookie, she comes back to say yes, he disappears, ends up in Mississippi in, under duress for for her protection or something, he calls her and tells her they are over. Of course, she does not take no for an answer and goes ahead chases after him. Finds him. He tries to give her the cold shoulder, but then shows his true colors and love for her. Now that they are finally together in the same room? He is sentenced to death and taken away. She is locked up in a room upstairs. Telepathically, her and Tara plot and escape - and do. She finds Bill, but now he's nearly dead. Lorena attacks Sookie - she's nearly dead. Bill wakes up, saves Sookie, she kills Lorena - now Bill is nearly dead. You still following this? Well, good, because it keeps going.... I could type the rest of it out, but it would spoil it for some of you - and make me very tired. Suffice it to say, much more drama ensues with Sookie nearly dying, us finding out that she has NO BLOOD TYPE, she has some weird dream (reality) about a lady name Claudine and people of "the light" and Claudine warns her to stay away from Bill, he will take her light. So...yeah.....ONCE AGAIN even though they can finally be together - now Sookie is going to tell Bill that they can't be.

Lotsa other gruesome stuff happens. The sex on True Blood has toned down, but the violence has not. We watch a full beheading of Zeljko Ivanek. It's kind of amazing. And it marks the beginning of utter chaos in Vampire Land. Yeah, I'll still watch it, but like I said, I'm tired of this Sookie & Bill thing. I am, though, intrigued by Claudine. And what that's all about. I'm even more inclined, though, to read the books now due to my Facebook friend's status update:

"Dear writers of True Blood, Didn't you read the books? I love your show and all, but... you should probably read the books. This isn't how things are supposed to happen. And btw, Claudine is supposed to be tall, beautiful, and fantastic."

Hung - "A Man, A Plan or Thank You, Jimmy Carter"
Tucker Stone

Hung is a comedy show that isn't very funny, a satire on getting-by-in-these-economic-times that isn't very biting, an exploitation show in the vein of HBO's look-tits standard Dream On, and if you're riding with Todd VanDerWerff, it's also a kinda/sorta fairy tale. None of those things are that interesting, and none of those things are hard to discern from watching five minutes of the show, which is why that's all I'd seen of it until a week ago. My wife liked it, so she's kept up with it, and the Factual's own Marty Brown didn't like it but wanted to keep up with it anyway. Last week, I walked by the television and caught a scene in the middle of "Mind Bullets or Bang Bang Bang Motherfucker" where Jane Adams (who plays the show's incompetent pimp) bawls out her more qualified counterpart in a parking lot. I've said it here before, and I've got no problem repeating it: if there's an actor doing something that's interesting and unique, I'll pretty much watch as much of that person as I can, regardless of what the rest of the experience entails. Jane isn't a complete unknown to me--I'm of the age where watching Happiness was a rite of undergrad passage--and she's enough of a New York presence that I've actually run into her a few times, but until that parking lot scene, I can honestly say I had no idea how talented she was. On a show like Hung, where the dialog rarely elevates itself beyond quirky and obvious, it's up to the people working those lines to find a route towards compelling. On paper, Jane's character is one that's hard to root for--she's whiny, laced with obnoxious quirks and smothered in self-loathing--but mostly, she's just stupid, a female version of the overgrown infant that's usually played by people like Will Ferrell and Adam Sandler. But in action, as played by Adams, it's a fearless, submerged in investment performance by a no-bullshit brilliant physical comedian. There's no wasted half-ass movement in the way Adams clasps her hands over her eyes when seeing something that upsets her, there's about 16 different ways she can bug out her eyes whenever she's trying to make herself heard, and the random moments on the show when she dances around in frustration are a masterpiece of controlled, lunatic clowning. This is old school Peter Brook Empty Space/Theater of Cruelty acting, the kind of stuff that television doesn't provide opportunities for anymore, and while my frothing enjoyment for Adams might be tangled up in a sorrow for its absence, that doesn't lessen the skill with which she puts it on display.

On this episode, one of the characters eats some marijuana cookies and hijinks ensue, just like they ensued when the mom character in the second Transformers ate pot brownies.

So yeah, okay. Jane's fucking great though.

-Sean Witzke, Nina & Tucker Stone, 2010

Television of the Weak: Coordinating Chimp? It's My Man Dave.

This week, it's the return of Mad Men, the death of Party Down, the birth of Pillars of the Earth, and the middle parts of True Blood, and The Thick Of It.

Mad Men - "Public Relations"
Sean Witzke

It's the Don and Betty show! Maybe this year it'll not be padding for 60% of the season! Maybe historical moments won't be used as a crutch! Better than Rubicon, I guess...

"Who is Don Draper?" is the first line of dialog in the season. I'm not sure if that's pretentious or portentious. Probably telling that the Mad Men writers are believing their own hype.

A guy with a fake leg interviews Don for a magazine. Roger Sterling says "So cheap they can't afford a whole reporter". Then we see Draper, Sterling, and Campbell sitting in with idiots trying to sell a 40's bathing suit in the bikini age. Then we see the Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce offices, set to Mancini soundalikes. The office is cramped and late 60's looking. We see Peggy, she has a new haircut but still can't arouse more than 20 seconds of interest. Her and Campbell are still awful and I don't give a shit about them. Their subplot here is that they pay two actresses to fight over a ham in public. It's some ABC bullshit. Don gets mad at them, because they fuck it up, he calls them idiots.

Don's lawyer says he's being bled in the divorce. Sterling tells Don he needs to screw his wife's friend. Don watches his commercial on tv. Don goes to dinner with a girl who says "the world is so dark right now", and Don plays it down so he can sleep with her. Don does not give a shit about the state of the world, even though his job is turning the zeitgeist to his benefit. She turns him down and tells him to wait a month.

When the interview gets published, the writers uses that as an excuse to describe Don on screen "Don is a cipher". Yeah thanks, I read blogs too, I don't need to see it on the fucking show. No one gives a fuck about your reviews. Anyway the plot, while clearly them jerking off, is that Don doesn't understand that being a public figure is part of his job.

Joan Holloway finally gets to talk 25 minutes in, with the non-bearded fat guy. She humors him, sort of. It'd be nice if one of the main reasons people watch this show - Joan Holloway - had something to do wouldn't it? Guess not.

Betty show up at 31 minutes (on the dot!) eating Thanksgiving dinner with her husband's family. The family hates her. So much so that later, Henry's (the new husband) mother tells him that Betty's kids are terrified of her. Don, on the other hand, has a whore over for thanksgiving, has her slap him around a bit. Well, that's more interesting than Don pining after the other girl. Betty is still awful with her kids. When Betty and Don finally speak to each other she dismisses that he wants to see their baby. The best moment in the episode is the "too bad" expression she has in that moment. Betty then leaves Don hanging with the kids, just to stick it in a little bit. Betty hates Don, that's this seasons second theme. The first is "who is Don Draper". I like the Betty one better, because it's a lot less hacky. Betty even tells Don "we are all here because of you, all we want to do is please you". Yeah, I get it.

Don has a low-level meltdown in the middle of a presentation for a two-piece swimsuit, tells the prudes to get out of his office, and the episode ends with Don selling the gunslinger ad-man schtick to another reporter. Its too neat, too clever, and boring. A whole episode like that 2 seconds of Betty giving a nasty look to Don would be great, but we've got to wade through this whole hour to get there. I already miss Breaking Bad, don't you? Wasn't it great?

Pillars of the Earth: "Anarchy/Master Builder"
Nina Stone

I don’t now how we found out about it, because we don’t have Starz and have never, ever contemplated subscribing to it. But we were sitting on the couch and it suddenly came to my attention that Pillars of The Earth, one of my ALL TIME FAVORITE books, was now an eight part mini-series, produced by Ridley Scott, on Starz - and the first two episodes were on On Demand. !!!!!!!!!!!!!! I was so f***ing excited! In fact, the comment was made by my significant other that he might not have ever seen me so excited about anything on television, ever.

I loved this book so much. Have you read it? Last summer I submerged myself in the long-awaited (we’re talking something like 15 to 20 years of waiting) sequel.

So, how is it as a mini-series? Well, like all good books, it might not translate as well to screen. Follet’s vocabulary choices and descriptions of cathedrals, family bonds and character observations are possibly harder to translate into film then one might think. And there’s a lot to cover, plot-wise. There are several families to follow - from Tom Builder and his clan to the aspiring family of Shiring, the manipulative and self-serving Bishop, the earnest monk, the political corruption of the government and the church, etc., etc., etc. It feels almost like trying to keep up with names in Chekhov or Doestoevsky. And in book form, each chapter was told from a character’s point-of-view, if I remember correctly. Which is not as easily done via film.

But nevertheless, it’s thrilling to see my beloved book come to live. I love this genre and it’s got a fun cast. The first episode is a set-the-stage sort of thing, with an introduction to nearly every possible character and their particular objectives. So, it’s a lot to take in and follow. By episode 2, you can start to sink your teeth into the story a bit and begin to root for a few folks. Tom Builder is played by Rufus Sewell, and he's everything he seemed to be in the book, from the physical description to the humble confidence. The Bishop, played by Ian McShane - yeah, Al Swearengen from Deadwood! -- is perfectly slimy. Okay, so he’s basically playing his Deadwood character without the swearing and the fucking. But it’s still very similar. And so far, the most compelling performance is, of course, Matthew MacFadyen. I’m beginning to think that guy could recite Twinkle Twinkle Little Star and we’d all cry and reexamine our lives afterward. He’s amazing.

So, I’m totally on board. But of course I am, because this is totally my thing. I have a thing! I’m so excited!!

Party Down.
Both seasons.
Sean Witzke.

So Party Down is the new hotness, I guess? It's the latest show that people are mad has been cancelled. Well the reason is probably because Party Down was on a network no one in the world has, Starz (which, fyi, is the studio that produces the Simpsons now so blame them). So it getting cancelled basically means people can't watch it on Netflix anymore, which makes it barely a tv show. It's a webshow, basically. A lot of people I know love it, so I did the right thing and downloaded it illegally shortly after the show was cancelled forever. The right thing, mind you.

It IS actually pretty good. A lot better than the average sitcom, clearly owing things to the Office-awkward school of modern tv comedy and the zany Arrested Development/30 Rock-school, but it's not like we're losing a game changer here. The problem is everyone would tell you different. Here's the deal with the cast - it's Ken Marino (third guy from the left in all the David Wain movies), Lizzy Caplan (the annoying girl from Cloverfield), Martin Starr (beard bet guy from Knocked Up), Jane Lynch (whose on some anti-gay propaganda show on Fox, also had cocaine for breakfast, cocaine for lunch), Megan Mullally (Ron Swanson's insane bitch of an ex wife on Parks and Rec), some dumb blonde guy I've never seen before (?), and Adam Scott (the coked-out agent on East Bound and Down). Who's who of random comedy people show up episode to episode, the best being Paul Scheer, Bubbles from the Wire, Jo Lo Truglio, Matt Walsh, and Steve Guttenberg as himself. The best episodes, just like Always Sunny In Philadelphia, are directed by Fred Savage.

For a sitcom it is alarmingly well commited to portraying the whole cast as petty assholes who hate their jobs. Marino does a pretty great job showing how desperate and pathetic that guy would be, cycling from dickish boss to whining drunken mess from episode to episode. Jane Lynch never tells anyone she had cocaine for lunch, is therefore a lot less interesting than she could have been. Lizzy Caplan just does the cute snarky girl thing without ever being as mean (read: hot) as Aubrey Plaza or as hollow deadeyed as Zooey Deschanel. Blonde guy exists as a foil for other characters, but he's not terrible at it. Megan Mullally is great when they finally give her stuff to do halfway through the second season. Adam Scott plays Paul Rudd, only a little better because he's got more sociopath in him. He's still stuck in that, dry snarky guy who is likeable thing, but he works at least. Martin Starr is the real winner here, playing a bitter hard sci-fi writing, blogging, hatefilled prick. Major asshole, spends the entire first episode saying the same line from Repo Man over and over until someone gets it and then says to the person who got it "you and I are the only people in this entire place that would get that line". Fuck, I know that guy. Shit, there are days where I am that guy. More than I'd want to admit. Him ranting about how Close Encounters is a piece of shit and we're all going to die when the aliens show up? I've said that shit. I meant it. He's an asshole who's going to get in his own way forever. So is everyone else on this show, *thats the theme*, but that guy hits home. He's got timing too. Good comedy on tv = assholes arguing over nothing, so Martin Starr vs. blonde guy actually hits that sweet spot at least once an episode. Example "You're a waiter" "I'm a waiter like Einstein was a patent clerk!" "Einstein wasn't in the army".

The rest? Well I like it, it's not Snuff Box or anything, but it's more funny each episode than it is not funny. Whenever it sticks on the sitcom stuff, like "angry dad at part gets drunk and naked" or "mistress shows up at funeral" or "farce at a theater party", it fails. Or whenever it lets the relationship humor take over (which they skirt than trip over more often than not). I like it though. I might actually buy the dvds. If only so I could show people Megan Mullally and Bubbles both high on coke and plotting a buddy cop movie called Pride and Prejudice where both Pride and Prejudice have sisters that are hookers so the story is personal.

True Blood: "Trouble"
Nina Stone

So, I keep turning this on to watch it...and then I start multi-tasking and miss a bunch of stuff. But this season they seem to have done that classic "Luke & Laura" thing. (Reference: General Hospital circa the summer of 1979. And no, I just heard about it). You know, Bill and Sookie are together and making it work and then - Bam! they've been torn apart. This time, by outside circumstances. But it seems this is going to be the season where we keep rooting for them to get back together. Bill's been taken my Vampires to Mississippi. Some sort of shit is going down around the Queen selling V and using Eric who is using Lafayette, as a pawn. The dude (King?) in Mississippi wants to expose it all and for some reason has designs on making Bill Mayor of Mississippi. Which means he will have to be apart from Sookie. For good. It's hard to tell if Bill is doing this because he doesn't think he has a choice, or if he has really thought it over and decided to let Sookie go.

Sookie is crushed but does not give up. She somehow gets hooked up with this werewolf dude to take her to Bill. Werewolves are the driving subplot this season. And see, I should be able to fill you in on all sorts of fun facts...but I just lose interest. There's werewolves, Sam is reunited with his family of origin who had his shape-shifting ass up for adoption. Tara has found herself once again the victim of a lunatic. This time a vampire who keeps her tied up, like Kathie Bates Misery-style. And I write this all simply because I want to say: she did that light thing with her hand again!! Yeah yeah yeah! Sookie! Bill saw it! It's the same thing that she did to Maryann last season! Some crazy being tried to get to close to her and she pushes them right in the face with her hand, and this crazy force field of light comes out of her hand and jolts the receiver of said jolt, back. It's the coolest looking thing. More of that please. It's like, the last thing that happened last episode - and it's all I care about.

The Thick of It - "Episode Three"
Tucker Stone

"Remember that check you signed for at the beginning? That wasn't for being mute."
-James Smith, regarding Joanna Scanlan's lack of contribution to the episode commentary

 
The idea behind the third episode was to set the story completely in one hotel room, watching as Glenn, Olly and Nicola feverishly hammered out a speech she was to give later that day. From there, the idea snowballed into Malcolm Tucker making good on his oft-repeated threats of physical violence, the casual destruction of bloggers, and a memorable guest appearance by Miles Jupp. (Jupp's appearance as the serially incompetent John Duggan forms the primary focus of James Smith's commentary. Throughout the episode, Smith ridicules Jupp's performance, cruelly pointing out every moment in which he failed to stay in character--which is actually quite a bit of the episode.)

While these thirty minutes don't do much to move the general narrative of the season forward, viewing it with the knowledge of how the overall plot of Season Three concludes, you might make an argument that Malcolm's failure to prepare for this conference, as well as the moment when he loses his temper and punches Glenn in the face, indicate his general slide towards the upcoming collapse. For the most part, this is just a funny episode that showcases the strange uselessness of Nicola Murray's job, Terri Coverly's neurotic obsession with her own importance, and Malcolm's never-gets-old brilliance at saying things like this: "I read all the blogs. Because, basically, I'm an underemployed fat fucking loser with nothing better to do with my time than sit in my bedroom, like a fat space-hub in a track suit, reading inconsequential, un-spell checked shit fabricated by other fat, farting, fucking losers."

Television Of The Weak: The Best Pick-Ups Have A Square Edged Design

Time got away from Tucker, so Martin Brown reared his head from seclusion to reveal he's been watching Last Comic Standing while Sean Witzke swallowed the entirety of the Young Ones and used Futurama to pick his teeth clean.

Last Comic Standing – Semi-Finals, Round 1"
Martin Brown

The difference between actors and comedians is that actors are symmetrical, physically, and comedians are lopsided. Thus, the semi-final rounds of Last Comic Standing are built expressly to pick the 10 most symmetrical comedians in the competition to send to the finals. If you look at the five finalists picked so far, you’ve got a nerd, an old guy, a fat Mexican, a fat old white dude, and a woman who is hot on a scale of comedian to one, but kind of lacking on a scale of one to actress. And yet, each of the finalists is totally television-worthy. You could plug any one of them into a sitcom right now and make a million a thousand dollars. They each have a decent chance of winning, probably have a solid constituency of less-TV-ready audience members in their corners, but none of them are really intriguing enough to root for. So Last Comic Standing is pretty much just a bland and inoffensive competition-based “funny” program. In other words, television.

The finalists are each, though, pretty funny. Or, at least, funny enough. And the15 or so other comedians that competed against them were pretty funny, too. Which begs the question: Would Last Comic Standing be a better show if it just ran the comics’ (edited) sets back to back to back, and got rid of the judges, the host and the competition? Of course it would. But that version of the show would never get on the air. For one thing, by the time it aired for its fourth week, it’d have to include some seriously ugly people, because I’m pretty sure that they used all of their vaguely attractive possibilities for the semi-finals, and that was, what, forty people? That, and nobody wants to watch stand-up comedians on primetime network television unless they all live together in a house and start getting real. And comedians do not get real.

They never get real, because they’re always trying to be funny, and, man, nobody wants to be around someone who’s always trying to be funny. If these guys are smart, they’re simply trying to parlay the exposure from LCS into a part on a sitcom. That’s definitely what Lil’ Rel was aiming for, since he chose to not even do stand-up comedy in his semi-final set, but instead wasted his time doing cheesy characters ripped from the Tyler Perry playbook.

Of course, none of the comedians will actually land a sitcom thanks to Last Comic Standing, and even if they did, host Craig Robinson should be a morality tale to ward them off of taking it. Dude is so bush league as the host of LCS that it’s hard to believe he ever had chops as a stand-up. It’s entirely possible that Robinson was flat-out miscast in his role, that his sense of humor—which thrives on awkwardness and silence—would never have been an appropriate anchor for a variety show. But Robinson isn’t helping himself out by overtly reading off the teleprompter while his unenthusiastic manner comments on how lame the jokes are. Plus, he spends a lot of time using funny voices and making weird faces, and every 4th grader knows, that is not the way to make friends.

Young Ones - both seasons
Sean Witzke

The Young Ones was a tv show co-created by Ben Elton, who is the guy who wrote the funny parts of Blackadder. Richard Curtis went on to make nice happy movies with ensemble casts about nice, happy people. They are awful. Elton went on to make a bunch of shit too, like The Thin Blue Line, but at least they aren't full of characters who exist in a shiny, conflctless universe full of smiles and hilarious romantic misunderstandings. Blackadder was always at its best when it took hard lefts and turned into two or three guys berating each other and devolving into chaos. And from what I understand, the best examples of this were the parts written by Elton.

Anyway, The Young Ones is Ben Elton's first show. It's where he got that style down. It's stupid and violent and idiotic, full of flat characters, no plot, ugly sets, musical numbers, puppets, and unlikeable actors. And oh my god, it's mean. There are four characters - Rick, a rich kid activist hypocrite played by Rik Mayall to be the most unlikeable human being on the planet; Vyvyan , a violent punk who destroys everything in his path; Neil, a worthless perpetually suicidal hippy you want to stab in the face every time he talks; and Mike, a wannabe ladies man cum con man who talks to camera all the time. And not a character, but the 5th cast member is Alexi Sayle playing every member of their landlord's family.

Yeah its kind of like the Monkees, it's 4 characters hanging out in a house and getting into "adventures" with musical numbers/guests poorly worked into the plot. The characters are awful. The stories don't exist, and when they do, they're quickly abandoned or undermined. It's an anti-sitcom, which I first saw when I was like 11 or 12 when it was running on Comedy Central. I couldn't have seen more than 2 or 3 episodes, because I thought Madness were just the band on the show instead of guests.

Its really stupid, but its really smart in its stupidity. In one episode, in mid-conversation, they zoom in on a can sitting on a shelf, then it grows teeth and says "don't look at me, I'm irrelevant". The show is flat because it's honest about its subject matter. Students, particularly these archetypal students, are superficial shitheads who only exist in opposition to each other. Kids are assholes, and the only reason to watch comedy television from any time period is to watch people be assholes to each other. They're stupid and violent, all their interaction with each other and the outside world shows them to be completely sheltered and incapable of doing anything but watching television and fighting with each other. Almost every episode ends with the characters being killed and their house being partially or completely destroyed. The terms "anarchic" and "surrealistic" get applied to a lot of things post-Python, but this is legitimately anarchic. Sitcoms are all this worthless and flat, with the exception of one or two, and at least the Young Ones is honest about it. It's really the precursor to Aqua Teen Hunger Force, it's 4 characters trapped in an endless conveyor belt of insults and awful, ugly sets. Around episode four of the first series (there are only 12 episodes in total), they reach the perfect balance of flippancy and anger. These guys don't know anything but they know they hate each other (except Mike and Vyvyan who appear to have a mutual respect for their disregard for the other two). Theres clearly a lot of improvisation going on, even in the editing where they'll randomly cut to other crap whenever theres a dead scene.

It's unpleasant and juvenile, uglier than you'd expect for a BBC show produced in the 80s (and thats saying something), there are episodes where they clearly run out of ideas and have Vyvyan smash the set, and Alexi Sayle completely derails every scene he's in by overkilling whatever brief moments they give him (seriously it's like dropping Brando into ep of Friends sometimes). But...

Fucking Motorhead and the Damned show up to lipsync, Hugh Laurie and Stephen Fry show up just to get killed and make stupid faces, Terry Jones drinks like a fish. And yet none of those things are as funny as Vyvyan and Rik bickering like rabid dogs, or Alexi Sayle ranting in three accents. This is probably top ten sitcoms of all time, because four idiots screaming can be a gateway to genius too.

Futurama - "Attack of the Killer App"
Sean Witzke

Oh, an iPhone/Twitter episode! You eat it, I have Young Ones on my computer, and it was a show smart enough to end before it crawled out of the grave and into its own ass.

-Sean Witzke & Martin Brown, 2010

Television Of The Weak: The Return Of Two Things That Happened Before

This week, Sean Witzke watched Futurama and Tucker used a time machine to watch The Thick Of It.

Futurama - "Rebirth"/ "In-a-gadda-da-leela"
Sean Witzke

I think I'm supposed to go "YAY! FUTURAMA'S BACK", right? The problem is that Futurama ended its 4th season with a pretty great episode. A musical where all the conventions of the show were shot down and the one subplot that mattered - Fry and Leela actually getting together - wrapped up as nicely as they could.

Then Futurama came back with 4 direct to dvd movies. The first one was funny, the other three were each progressively worse than the last. The first one, Bender's Big Score, was a kind of culmination of all the stuff Futurama did well - science fiction conceits torn to shreds, alternating tone between mean-funny and romantic-sad, a willingness to burn some of their own sacred cows. But it still had the same problem that the rest of the D2DVD films had - it had the urge to sacrifice jokes and character for the sake of continuity. Its some 90's X-Men, '10s DC comics shit - Futurama would rather tell you that this tertiary character is actually the Professor's long lost son that have Dr. Zoidberg eat garbage.

Because, you know, it's a sci-fi show. It was bound to happen eventually. Nerds ruin everything and a show by nerds for nerds (apparently the writers actually know a lot about physics) is counting down to eat itself from day one. Futurama was rare because it didn't crawl up its own ass the way sci fi always does on tv (scifi fans love this wanky shit - and when they're not served it on a silver platter and given something else, they bitch. Look up "Battlestar Galactica series finale" if you wanna see).

Heres the biggest problem with these two new Futurama episodes, which I guess are the start of the 5th or 6th season depending on how you count the movies, they are almost entirely built out of jokes or ideas from ideas from previous episodes. The first joke back is near identical to the one at the start of the first movie, and it's watered down. And more importantly the "lets murder the idiots who cancelled us" impulse that was there the first time they used it, this time its was a "HEY WE'RE ON A NEW NETWORK" joke. Fucking terrible. And thats the just the first. Stem cells, robot duplicates, a character dancing to the point of exhaustion, Leela in a coma, a doomsday device wedged inside Bender, Fry having an afro from static electricity, the Professor screaming to god "prepare for rebirth", perfectly symmetrical violence, cyclops puns, Bender singing 80s tunes as commercial bumps, Hermes taping the crew use the toilet, "Do the Bender!", etc. More than that, the cliches that these two episodes are based on aren't even particularly tweaked so much as thrown out. Yes, it was actually earth the whole time. Yes, Fry is ALSO really a robot. You can guess these things in the first five minutes of each episode.

There's one great joke in this first episode, and it's Bender convincing Fry to give him ass to mouth resusitation. The second one has a pretty good 40s serial riff laced through it, complete with villain Emperor Chop Chop and Zapp Brannigan's domination fantasties. But they're brief moments among middling crap, recycled jokes, and offensive, almost Family Guy-level reference jokes.

The thing is - I love Futurama, I'll give it more leeway than I should because its something that I've got a soft spot for. I love John DiMaggio and Billy West, and I like a lot of the people behind the show because they're some of the funnier ex-Simpsons people out there. The animation is still great looking, the characters are still likeable.

But... we need to learn to let shit go, nerds. It's good that the Arrested Development movie isn't going to happen, the Stooges should have never put out a reunion album, and we should have let Futurama stay a great show that was short-lived instead of pretending this is a good thing. Sure, maybe thats nostalgia talking, as well as the intervening years being a tv rennisance upping my expectations of fucking tv shows, but this isn't hacking it. This is worse than crap, it's nerd killing funny.

And we demanded it.

The Thick Of It Series 3 - "Episode 1"
Tucker Stone

Little background might be necessary, but I'll keep it brief. I'm a firm believer that you're about as interested in the people who do the blogging as I am in what a fleshy prostitute thinks of mouth injections of imported pork, so: there's not much on television right now, and what is on irritates me in a way that I find uninteresting, and the irritation isn't compelling enough for me to spend weeks wondering why. So, for the hell of it, I figured I'd use this little spot alongside Sean's Futurama missives to take a look at the third series of The Thick Of It, which I'd put alongside the second and fourth seasons of The Wire, the final two seasons of The Shield and a hodgepodge collection of Breaking Bad episodes as the best goddamn thing that television's had to offer in the last ten years. (Maybe throw in that part of Spooks where Adam Carter talked a terrorist into killing herself as well. Oh, and the episode where Danny died!) As the upcoming fourth season of Thick is now official, I figured revisiting it might be fun, and since I never got around to listening to the commentary tracks in the first place, maybe something of interest can come out of it for you as well.

Okay, that's enough fucking human being stuff. You want to know if I ate breakfast today too? Moving on.

"On the scrap heap at the tender age of 76? That's no life for you. Hey, do you want me to call Dignitas? I could call about In-dignitas. They'd come round and push you out a window dressed as a clown."

Although the opener is rife with Peter Calpaldi spitting his venom into every mouth that comes near him, it's Olly's reference to the famous euthanasia organization that best encapsulates what this episode is about. Confusion, fear, replacement, and shame. In one of the deleted scenes, Robyn Murdoch muses on why anyone would want the job of Secretary of Social Affairs and Citizenship in the first place. The public hates them, they make less money than "graphic designers"--all in all, it's a thankless, boring job. It's also rife with embarrassment and ridicule (showcased by watching new Secretary Nicola Murray, a bottom-rung choice elevated only out of confusion and a lack of qualified candidates willing to accept the job, as she is humiliated and berated by Malcolm Tucker and eventually forced to choose between her husband's future, her middle-school aged daughter's, or her own), and one's only support network is a bunch of craven lifers, willing to sacrifice each other and themselves for the sake of a bit of job security. (Job security totally dependent on the vagaries of elections, at that.) In a brilliantly cruel twist, Armando Iannucci and the writers admit to having kept a bit of the Series Three plot from the cast, forcing the actors into a position where their scenes were filmed while they were still in the dark as to where the season was actually going, making the moments when Olly and Glenn are packing up their desks that more raw. Rebecca Front, who joined the cast as a replacement for the entrenched-in-bizarre-controversy Chris Langham (who is brusquely acknowledged on the commentary track, with only one writer even attempting to make a joke about the actor's toxic legal troubles), is described by the crew as being more than a little bit nervous about joining a show that had, by the time season three arrived, acclaimed a massive amount of notoriety. But in a similar fashion to that which has Chris Addison and James Smith performing scenes as two men who don't quite know if they've got a job anymore while the actors themselves wonder, you know, if they've got a job anymore, Rebecca's nervous and eager-to-succeed performance as Nicola Murray only benefits from the way in which the introductory episode is written. Desperate for a friend, but surrounded by misanthropic sycophants, Front spends most of the episode trying to play nice...only to reach the final minutes of the show sullenly staring out at all of the hateful people that surround her.

It's pretty much perfect, which is why it's great that Armando decided to ditch the idea of having a story where Nicola arrives and gives everybody head lice. British comedy may be obsessed with cruelty right now, but that would have been a bit too hardcore.

Although Iannucci and his writing team knew from the beginning that Series Three's primary concerns would be the arc of Malcolm Tucker, the first episode doesn't lay down much of the specifics of that. The key portion of what will eventually form those final, perfect episodes is found only in Nicola's introduction--unlike Chris Langham's Hugh, they needed Tucker to be stuck with a relatively unblemished subordinate, somebody who had yet to truly face the humiliation of the job. (They describe Hugh's character in Series 1 as someone "who has had the shit completely kicked out of him".) It's a smart choice that circumstances forced the writers into, but even if Langham had been able to stick around, they probably would have found it necessary to replace him. For some of what occurs in those final episodes to really have impact, Malcolm's eyes have to be fixed on someone who he honestly believes may have some humanity left inside them, an individual who won't choose self-preservation over pity--and that's something that only Nicola can bring to the show. It's a genius decision to write her the way they do, because as funny as Thick is when you just watch a mash-up of Jamie's demonic tirades, Series Three is able to deliver on an even more accomplished dramatic level (without losing a bit of its humor) merely by injecting the show with a bit of wide-eyed sincerity. Murray may never get to bark out of any of the show's famous foul-mouthed tirades (another deleted scene where she insults Olly comes across as weirdly out of place), but for most of Series Three, she's the much needed Trojan Horse that conceals what the story is really about.

Asides:

-Before it devolves into making fun of Bond films, the writers describe a massive amount of stuff that was shot that never made it to air: Nicola getting Malcolm's call, a morning with her children, her trying to reach her husband and leaving for work, her leaving her previous assignment, so on. It seems clear that they chose to leave that stuff out so that the audience would see her forced into an environment that they already cared about, instead of risking an intro that might've exaggerated how "new" she was to the show.

-Although the expense scandal in British politics was breaking at the time they filmed, Malcolm's demand to Nicola that she throw away an extravagant office chair (which she had unknowingly stolen from Glenn) was just a lucky coincidence. Armando even goes so far as to say that he thought it was pretty ridiculous for people to pretend that they wouldn't try to expense things like cat food if they thought they could get away with it at their job.

-At some point, there had been a proposal made to the production staff that they consider a spin-off, an idea that Armando only thought would be interesting if it was a spin-off in the same vein as CSI Miami, with the British equivalent of David Caruso. They then talk for a while about doing Thick of It Babies, eventually settling on doing a young Malcolm/young Jamie college roommate series.

-The commentaries don't spend a lot of time dealing with anything specific about the moment-to-moment, but they do stop to mention that James Smith (Glen) thought it would be funny if his character showed up to meet the new boss wearing colorful socks, as a way to "sort of tart himself up a bit". Armando made sure to include a shot where the socks are visible.

-The final line--when Malcolm claims he's leaving to wipe his ass with pictures of Nick Robinson--resulted in an email from Nick Robinson the next day, who thanked the producers on the behalf of him and his mother. They both were watching that night.

-Sean Witzke, Tucker Stone, 2010

Television Of The Weak: You Might Want To Call Your Boss

This week, Sean Witzke watched the sun go down on the third season of Breaking Bad, while Tucker started to grasp that he probably isn't going to be able to keep up with Hell's Kitchen.

Breaking Bad - "Full Measure"
Sean Witzke

In Vince Gilligan fashion, after the nasty cliffhanger of last week we're treated to an ominous opening fakeout - empty shot of Walt's house. Of course it's a flashback and the "oh god what happened" moment is Walt and Skylar looking at the home. Walt calls it a "starter home" not realizing that the bottom is about to fall out right after his kid is born.

This series has many visual callbacks to No Country for Old Men, we get another one, of wide horizon expanding before us and SUV headlights pulling into the frame. Then we're back in their own imagery - Walt putting the Heisenberg hat on, the cracked Aztec windshield, over the shoulder shot catching the sun on Gus' glasses. It's nice that a show like this can entertain having iconography in the first place.

Mike the PI, this is his episode to shine. He's a fixer and while Walt calls Gus a pragmatist, it's really Mike that is. Mike is down for whatever, but he's not out for mayhem. He's not world-weary either. He's just tired. He's smart, scary capable, and seems to like he likes Walt a little more than he should. But last episode he made it clear that he knows where his money is made, and that he works for Gus first and everyone else last. Him looming over Saul in wide shot, flatly telling him to tell him where Jesse is, thats the banal terror of Breaking Bad right there. This is big, scary, dramatic shit, but ultimately the criminals aren't even the kind of criminals that would warrant being on the Wire. Breaking Bad is every day, people who understand they have to do this for a living. Mike, he wouldn't be the kind of gravitas-filled monster this same actor plays on other shows. He'd be Mike, who likes the people he works with but won't hesitate to shoot them in the arm for fucking up. Even the sheer badass, Omar-style assault he puts on (the balloons? so smart) is low scale and slow. Its badass because its set to Ill Communication-era Beasties funk, but also because he's just doing his job, in between cleaning up after Walt and driving his kid to school. "Saul, don't make me beat you until your legs don't work" and "I'd trust the hole in the desert I'd leave you in" is takeaway dialog like this show has always done its best to leave out of every character but Walt and Jesse's mouths.

Gus telling Gail about Walt's illness, it's actually Gus telling Gail that he's going to kill Walt as soon as Gail is sure he can replace him. He calls this a desire for "continuity". This scene is brilliant because it takes the loaded conversations Gus and Walt have been having and turn them to another purpose - when Gus talks there are layers and layers of meaning, and when Walt speaks to him its like ancient samurai having tea. Gus talking to another character without that level of conversation is such a domination, it's beyond intimidating. You don't fuck with Gus, and never has it been more clear than in this episode.

Saul's brief two scenes are great - the second one, of him telling Walt and Jesse how badly they've fucked him and themselves, in the back room of a laser tag. "That goes double for you hip hop". The scene also shows that Saul is far more loyal than anyone would guess - he threw Mike off the trail when he could have just handed him Jesse.

In the Lazer Tag Walt goes from telling Jesse he's not a murderer to this episode outright telling Jesse to murder Gail. Walt cares about Jesse, but as with his relationships with everyone else, he loves him as long as he can help him. He talks to Jesse with stipulations and rules - saying "I saved your life, are you gonna save mine?". Jesse just wants to end it, have Walt turn states evidence and run. But Walt says no, find where Gail lives and I'll do it. Walt goes out on his way to kill Gail, the silent asshole picks up Walt, because there is "a chemical leak in his lab".

Mike says to Walt, "as soon as you figure out what this is, the sooner we can all go home", clearly not talking about a chemical leak. Walt loses it, starts pleading for his life, offering to cook for free (!?!), and eventually offering up Jesse. It was a neck-snapper of a twist, something I never thought I'd see Walt do. Even though it does keep in with the series theme of humbling its protagonists by their own actions - Walt is one of the most proud characters on television. He doesn't believe in charity, he took everything to accept help from anyone for two straight seasons. Walt flipping on Jesse was something that couldn't happen, but here it was and in character. Of course it was another fakeout and the final moments are of Walt telling Jesse that if he kills Gail, they get to live, buying himself time and putting Mike in the worst possible situation. Walt doesn't think that maybe he's getting Jesse killed along with Gail, or that this plan only benefits him, or that Jesse has so much blood on his hands he's not going to be able to take another body at this point. Walt only cares about Walt, and while the series is likely going to give Walt exactly what he wants - which is to win. The Hat coming back on, even briefly, thats signifiying bad news, thats the worst possible thing that could happen. Walt got in too deep and then pissed off the wrong people, and even when he gets out of this situation, probably exactly the way he planned, its only going to put his family and Jesse in a worse position than they were when he was out. The opening flashback sends one thing home - that Walt's expectations never match the outcome, and that he's clearly not prepared for the awful things that could happen. He's willing to deal with them, he's willing to go hard when he has to, but Walt doesn't understand the consequences of his actions and thinks he does. Thats never going to be a benefit, and the hints at him losing control all throughout the season are only going to make him a danger to everything and everyone he touches.

No Skylar, no Hank, no Marie, no Walt Jr. This is an episode about Walt and Jesse, and the people they work with - Mike, Saul, Gail, and Gus.

This season - this was a stunning 13 episodes, wasn't it? A good show transitioning to a great show, possibly seeing the failures of Mad Men's 3rd season and crafting a show that consistently surprised and never pulled its punches. Always stepping up from the previous episode, always propelling forward without getting bogged down in continuity-laden garbage, all the subplots actually mattered and weren't just filler, no day player bullshit, no overt messages while the show had real thematic heft. It was just good at being a character based show, and never plateaued the way most shows do. After the the previous season finale's choice to go with something internally violent rather than cathartically violent, this season they managed to do both. There isn't more to say than this is a show that can manage that, and thats why it's worth caring about.

Hell's Kitchen - "13 Chefs Compete"
Tucker Stone

 By the time you get to the last quarter of a Hell's Kitchen season, you're supposed to have picked one of the competitors as a favorite. The choice isn't really up to you. It's determined by how well the editors have done their job, and in the case of Hell's Kitchen, that job is to present the other contestants in a way that makes them completely unlikeable. There's a lot of different ways that they can do this, almost all of which are shared amongst the hundreds of shows that utilize this format. This particular episode was one that did the trick where your attention is focused on the failings of two people--Jason from the men's team, Fran from the women's--while frantically cutting to the two of them making indignant excuses for their failures. It's pretty standard stuff: you show the person screwing things up repeatedly, and then you show them complaining about being called on it. If it's done properly, the audience reaches the end of the episode disliking the contestant, to the point where they are consistently repelled by any argument for the contestants competence.

In Fran's case, this method neatly dovetailed with another standard trick. Earlier in the episode, Fran accidently scalded her hand after oversalting the water, but she then concealed this from the team. As the show progressed, she began to screw up her specific task, which was to cook the meat. After running out of excuses for her failings--none of which were related to her hand--she began to complain about the burn incessently. Easily manipulating a team member into notifying Ramsay, Fran was able to flip her personal screw-up into a personal quality. She was a fuck-up, okay, but she was a determined one, a supertough fuck-up--hell, did you see that hand? It's kind of red! That's some inner strength that lady is packing! Of course, the entire sequence was one that showcased her various deceptions, portraying them in a way that implies that the viewer is seeing things that the other contestants aren't privy to--but that's the trick. You're supposed to reach the end of the episode and be completely disgusted with Fran's craven attempt to manipulate the people around her, and you're supposed to be angry that nobody-else-is-calling-her-on-it, because that makes the conclusion of the episode--where Fran is saved from ejection--totally unsatisfying. Seeing Fran caught out for her manipulation and technical incompetence then becomes the motivating force for watching the next episode. And if the trick is pulled off again, and it will be, an entire season turns out like this: each week, one gets a little satisfaction as irritating people are put in their place, until one reaches the end, where the most non-irritating people become, by default, the hero. (Does that mean Fran will go home next week? No. But you can be guaranteed that, if Fran doesn't step up to the plate, the next episode will produce more footage of another contestant behaving in an irritating fashion. And then, as they did this week when they chose to eject Jamie, the producers will get rid of whichever cast member is proving useless in the production of irritation/entertainment fodder.)

Martin can correct me if I'm wrong, but this is pretty much how all these competition shows work. Sometimes a show will luck out with a couple of "bad guys" who are actually good enough at the menial "tasks" that they can force the show to keep them until the end, but for the most part, these shows are geared around a weekly installment of irritation/vindication. The show starts, you don't know anybody, it introduces some people for you to dislike, and then it spends the next 13 or so weeks punishing those people for you, and then, at the very end of the season, it asks you to pretend to care about the two people that are left behind. Hell's Kitchen has the occasional blips where this format doesn't work, where a specific contestant has such unusual personal circumstances that they don't properly fit as "assholes" and thereby force the producers to institute some kind of special resolution (twice before, two honestly likable amateurs were hired by Gordon Ramsay after their mid-season ejection--they weren't qualified enough to believably win, but they weren't the sort of people the audience would happily watch lose).

That's pretty much it, I think. I was going to conclude this boring fucking recap by making some kind of proclamation why I'm not going to keep writing about this show, and I was thinking I could tie that into another thing about how I think, sometimes, you do have to just fucking stop being a politically correct bitch and just admit that you really are better than certain things, like shitty boring predictable reality shows on the Fox network, but I don't really feel like it anymore. It's tempting to pretend that I'm not going to watch Hell's Kitchen because I'm going to do something better with my time, like get in heated debates with strangers about the oil spill, or write extensively about the time I picked up an ugly middle aged woman in a Waffle House and gave her a foot massage, but I'm probably just going to try to get into video games again. Maybe I'll eat some pussy for a couple more hours a night. Hell's Kitchen can suck my dick.

-Sean Witzke, Tucker Stone, 2010

Television of the Weak: Look At All This Paint Everywhere, oh wait that's brain matter

This week, Matthew Brady forced himself upon True Beauty, Sean Witzke watched something called Breaking Bad that seems to good to really exist, while Tucker continued to pursue that which wanes in popularity.

True Beauty: "The Stealing Challenge"
Matthew J. Brady

Summer seems to be the time to subject oneself to trashy reality TV, since there's little else on (how about that Lost-esque miniseries NBC has been promoting the hell out of? Or whatever crappy sitcoms TBS keeps vomiting onto the air?), but if I'm going to try to watch and possibly write about any of these, it might as well be the most schadenfreude-laden one I can find, right? After a decade of this shit being plastered all over the airwaves, the main "pleasure" to be obtained from any non-"heartwarming" (fix up the poor people's houses, help fat people stave off bloated death, etc.) iterations of the genre comes from seeing people make asses of themselves. That's the only explanation I can find for Tucker being fascinated with The Bad Girls' Club anyway. So, with this series, which is apparently spearheaded by dual-headed Banks/Kutcher monster Tyrash (although it's not indicated in the show itself, except perhaps in the credits), the premise is ostensibly to gather the typical all-surface reality-show mavens and then mock them for being pretty on the outside and a black hole of human decency within. Or so goes the claim, although the show seems just as interested in lusting after the beautiful people as any other. The group of ten young models/actors/obnoxious assholes are gathered in Las Vegas, told they are competing to be the "Face of Vegas", and all packed off to live in a hotel suite, while the ostensible hosts (the gratingly flamboyant, fish-lipped, dead-eyed Carson from Queer Eye for the Straight Guy and some model who looks like a slightly older, and thus hideous and decrepit but also wise with age, version of all the female contestants) watch their antics in a "spy center" that consists of a bank of monitors displaying the views from a bunch of hidden cameras, along with the "real" host, another aging model who, in an apparent bit of reverse casting psychology due to her resemblance to Vanessa Williams, is apparently supposed to be an authority on morality or something.

But! While the vapid morons think they'll be competing in the typical reality show challenges, they'll secretly be tested in moral matters, always in the most obvious ways. The task this week is to create a "Vegas alter ego" for themselves, with $200 to spend on a costume. The morality comes into play when the "stylist" who helps each of them pick their outfit encourages them to steal an item that they couldn't afford. Predictably, some of them complied, and others didn't; after the first "will they or won't they?" moment, the whole thing got pretty boring, with the interest coming more from trying to discern why the actress playing the stylist pushed some harder than others to commit the crime, or the relative values of the potentially stolen items, which ranged from a hair clip to an entire spangled outfit.

The contestants then got all dressed up in their cliched personas (Elvis impersonator, slutty bride, Marilyn Monroe, pimp, etc.), which didn't seem all that different from their usual personalities, especially the ones who just wore something skin-exposing, and displayed themselves in plexiglass enclosures on a sidewalk, with pedestrians encouraged to "vote" for them by inserting novelty casino chips into the slot of their favorite zoo creature. This entire bit was cringe-inducing, as the morons begged for attention, the women bending over to display cleavage to leering men and the guys thrusting their crotches at any drunk middle-aged casino-goers, everyone whining all the while about not getting enough chips, somebody stealing one of their poses, or whatever other idiocy the editors can pass off as interpersonal intrigue. It seems to me that anyone with real "inner beauty" would refuse to participate in such a degrading activity, but obviously none of these assholes have a self-regulating bone in their bodies.

The winner ended up being the bitchy Liz, who is already shaping up to be the show's villain; her victory was attributed to the expensive outfit she stole. The two lowest-earning competitors, both guys who chose lame costumes (drag queen and lackadaisical Elvis) went on to be judged for elimination. This brings up the obvious question: for a show about "inner beauty", why are the people to be eliminated chosen via a contest consisting solely of a judgment of outer beauty? The judges try to justify it by saying that "true beauty" is a combination of the inside and the outside, so the winner has to be the "total package", which is a bunch of bullshit. They also get hung up on whether one of the two dorks "really wanted to be there", since he seemed to lose energy after a few minutes of a really bad Elvis impression; obviously, for them, drive to compete is a definite sign of upstanding character. The choice between the two should be simple, since of the douchebags stole something and the other didn't, but they still can't decide, so the host unveils another, secret challenge: as people were entering the boutique, an actress blocked the door pretending to be struggling with her dog's leash, which was tangled up in a sidewalk sign. One of the assholes took two seconds to help her out, while the other blew her off. So the question was, which was more morally reprehensible: theft, or refusal to aid a moron who can't walk down the street without assistance from strangers? The judges decided to send the thief home, but probably just because he was the slightly lamer of the two, an over-friendly (in a really forced, awkward way) idiot who chose to dress up as a drag queen for some reason. Hilariously, when the real host revealed herself to him, he seemed to have the same reaction as I did, having no idea who she was; Chris Hansen this lady ain't. And then, when they explained that he was really eliminated for being a criminal, he protested, saying that he really thought he should have been the Face of Vegas. This idiot didn't just lack inner beauty, he apparently lacked anything going on inside his cranium at all.

So, what the fuck is up with this show; is it worth spending any more time on? Obviously not, but I'll probably end up plopping myself down in front of the next episode, if only out of a sense of astonishment at the things these horrible, horrible people do with full knowledge that they are being observed at every moment, and a sense of amusement at the simplicity of the "morality" that the show pretends to promote while mostly ignoring it in favor of the usual vapid Hollywood emphasis on surface. It's loathing all around, for the contestants, producers (Tyraaaash!), and myself, for wasting time and mental energy on such nonsense. That's life in 21st-century America for you; see you next week.

Breaking Bad - "Half Measures"
Sean Witzke

Endgame time. Spoilers like a crazy thing.

Walt doesn't understand - "Plausible deniability" is something that Skyler doesn't understand. The shit she's pulling right off? It is almost impossible to like this character (or maybe its the actress?).

Jesse Pinkman moralizing about how these drug dealers use kids? Maybe not intentionally, but it recalls Wire season 5. Jesse and Walt discussing murder is what this series was made for. Walt talking down to Jesse when he tries to treat him as an equal, Jesse struggling to do the right thing. Jesse's season arc has been the extreme of what Walt is doing - slowly becoming the bad guy. The difference is that Jesse made a decision to do so he's down for selling drugs, being a murderer, stealing from his partner. Whatever he needs to do, he'll do it.

Saul and Walt plotting to fuck with Jesse's future - it's exactly the kind of thing that Walt would think is a good idea. Walt is all about delaying problems, putting them out of sight and out of mind. He's also about teaching lessons. The PI with the beard, him showing up and talking to Walt the way that no one has talked to him since Saul told him to put a dollar in his pocket. His lesson - no one learns anything, no one gets scared. He tells Walt to quit fucking around.

He also refers to Gus as "his boss, our boss". Which is unnerving, because now we know exactly where this guy's loyalties lie. When he and the quiet asshole from the factory in "Fly" show up and grab Jesse, and how slowly Jesse is marched toward Gus' trailer is awful. What happens next is Walt and Jesse both in the middle of a situation they have no control over. The PI sits enforcer-style, Walt sits alongside Gus, the two drug dealers along the side - Jesse is trapped. Jesse's "no more children" compromise feels like he got screwed, even after Gus tells him that Walt is the only reason he's not paste. This season is about Walt, Jesse, Hank, Saul, Gus being infantalized by the people around them and seeing how they react. Jesse being told to shake hands and play nice was maybe the worst of these scenes.

Marie giving Hank the hospital special from Crash in order to get him to leave? They play that so smart - him being emasculated and not at the same time. It's also an interesting dodge to see Hank's story move along without something emotionally or physically violent.

The thing that gets Jesse to backslide on his sobriety turns out to be the same thing that would cause anyone to - accidentally killing someone else by not acting. Jesse says he'll play nice and it gets the kid killed. Jesse's role in this show, especially towards the end of seasons - it's to get someone else killed. No wonder he's so far gone, this kind of shit happening twice would push someone to get high and go kill some competing drug dealers.

The last minute of the show is something that made me scream at my television in shock. It's the opposite of what happened last season, with Walt acting to save Jesse instead of letting something awful happen to him. With Walt shitting where he eats because he can't help but do it, and because the partnership between him and Jesse is quickly becoming the most important part of his life. Walt stops a Jesse/rival dealers gunfight by plowing his fucking Pontiac Aztec over the two of them and then shooting them both in the head at point blank. Walt is ready to fuck with Gus - who knows his family better than anything - in order to keep Jesse alive. The byline that sold the series - Mr. Chips turns into Scarface, and Vince Gilligan's assertion that the show will run 4 or 5 seasons - it's starting to be clear how that's going to happen. 

It starts when Walt tells Jesse: "Run".

Hell's Kitchen - "15 Chefs Compete"
Tucker Stone

Nothing interesting happened on the episode. Well, that's not totally accurate. Two people left, and one of them was the crazy ass farmer-who-kills-his-own. He walked out after Gordon looked him in the eye and said "You're a fucking joke." That's a pretty big loss, as it leaves behind the exact same bunch of Type A shitheads that you've seen a billion times before, even if you've only watched five minutes of a reality competition show through cheesecloth while listening to the Yellow Swans. That farmer was special. He was aggressively full stop weird, a gnarly combination of clean cut Americana redneck with an upper class no contractions kind of serial killer sociopathy. You could see him coming back and spree-killing anybody wearing green shoes just as easily as you could see him asking a diner "for this dance" even though there's no music playing. He'll be missed.

The other guy that got sent home didn't have the same kind of special, although Lord knows he tried, like he's been trying all his life. Packing the sort of oblique abdominal that advertise regular gym trips, coated in a sea of tattoos (including a regretfully chosen Hell's Kitchen television show logo) and crowned with one of those Mohawks that just screams I'm Trying Really Hard To Appear As If Non-Conformity Comes Naturally To Me, "Mikey" was a genuinely nice guy, mostly because television producers still think its an expectation-bucker when they cast tattooed wanna-be punks who are, in an ironic twist of fate!, actually polite non-alcoholic nerds with superb personal hygiene. He was a shitty cook in some ways, and he'll always remain in our hearts, because he tattooed the logo for a reality show on his body. Enjoy freaking out all the squares, buddy. You'll go un-missed.

The only other thing that seemed noteworthy about the episode was the opening credits, which I missed last week out of not knowing the show had a new season. In the credits, our poor farmer gets stabbed in the right buttocks by a tiny chef flying by way of batwings, the Italian guy does something so stereotypically Italian with his hands and face (whassamatter? i don't-not-know-a!) that you wonder if they'd make an Asian contestant whiteboard up a math equation, and then Autumn (the girl who last week proudly said "I'm the bitch!") is depicted with a devil on her shoulder...but no angel, you get it? Because she's a BITCH. She's going to FUCK EVERYBODY OVER. Which she seems to be doing, yes, but it would be a lot more fun if the producers weren't so blatantly in it.

-Matthew J. Brady, Sean Witzke, Tucker Stone, 2010

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

Television Of The Weak: It's Like A Graveyard

The end! The end of Fringe, with Matthew J. Brady! The end of Lost of Zeb L. West! The end of Grey's Anatomy, with Tim O'Neil! The end of 24, with Tucker! And a regular episode of Breaking Bad. With Sean Witzke!

Lost – “The End”
Zeb L. West

Well, here we are. At the end of all things. Just you…me…the cast…and 13.5 million viewers all tuned in for the answer to… something! Some vague and indescribable rationalization that will satiate six long seasons of explanatory deprivation!

I polled my most trusted, die-hard, Lost-watching friends, and they were literally unanimous in their lack of a single unified question that needed answering!

Some were DYING to know: “What, in the fuck, was the polar bear? And why do I have the vague sense that they already explained it to me?”

Others could not live another moment without knowing: “Why did that statue have four toes?! And why, in God’s holy name, am I convinced that it is significant?”

And still more were chomping at the bit to know: “Why do they call Hugo ‘Hurley’? What kind of inaccurate nickname is that? It’s like the Richard/Dick paradigm! Might as well call a Becky ‘Deb’! There MUST be a connection to the numbers…”

I can still remember my third grade teacher, Mrs. Boyle teaching us that it’s a total cop-out to end a story with ‘…and I realized it was all a dream!’ But somehow Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse believe they’re smarter than Mrs. Boyle… as if somehow that third grade rule did not apply to their clever ‘flash-sideways’ plot device!

If the entire flash-sideways plot was only a pre-death flash in Jack’s mind, then why the hell were we watching all of those other characters? Just because they planted a clue to it with his re-occurring neck-bleeding doesn’t justify the fact that we had to sit through whole episodes of other characters being visited by little-blue-fairy Desmond!

I mean, what were we watching that for if it was all happening in Jack’s mind? Was he having some kind of third-person omniscient dream about what all of his friends would have done if they hadn’t been to the island and their lives were slightly different? How they would all be leading happy but empty lives where they never met their soul-mates (except for the few who remained single at the end? Locke? Boone? Vincent?) And what was that thin little antagonism between Desmond and Eloise Hawking about? Where she wants to stop him from waking up figments of Jack’s imagination? Like, what does this hypothetical have to do with ANYTHING?! All the writers have been saying in interviews lately is that they only feel obligated to answer what the flash-sidewayses were all about, and sadly, that’s all they (barely) accomplished. Or worse, since the whole six-season story ends within Jack’s little pre-death fantasy dream, we’re left confused about what happened in the ‘real’ story.

Okay sure, maybe Christian Shepherd (the irony of whose name is not Lost on flash-sideways Kate har-dee-har-harr /barf) alludes to the fact that they’re all somehow participating in this belabored alternate reality as a way of spiritually reaching out to one another from beyond the death that some of them haven’t yet experienced! …But that still doesn’t mean that it matters! What does it mean that Ben and Locke have a heart-to-heart outside the church if it’s all inside of Jack’s mind? Who cares about Boone at this point? Or worse, Sayid and Shannon! (The mere thought makes me genuflect in horror) And why in God’s name should Boone and Hurley be buddy-buddy at this point? Hell, Sun’s flashback to an ultrasound (while receiving an ultrasound) serves about as much narrative value as a sentimental recap episode of Three’s Company where Jack (Tripper) remembers Chrissy/Cindy/Terri doing something stupid.

And that right there is the trick of Lost’s final episode! The transition was not from action to exposition, but from exposition to sentimentality! Many folks shed a good tear for the passage of their tv character friends, but that’s not to be confused with the catharsis of a well-told story. It’s hard to say good-bye to characters you’ve spent six years with! It’s hard to say good-bye to a weekly tv-watching ritual! Or the precious water-cooler hypotheorizing that follows! Hard to say good-bye to EVERY SINGLE love story we’ve invested in! Not a single one survived, unless you suspect (as I do) that Miles and Lapidus were MADE for one another.

So did I enjoy watching the whole enchilada? Fuck yes I did! And writing these rants about the last two seasons has really improved my engagement in the story and its many plot failings!

Did I start writing these columns to drain all of the enjoyment out of the series for anyone who genuinely liked it? Fuck no I didn’t! And if you’re still diggin it and want to call me a dipshit in the comments, I say speed the plow! We’ll always have season 1, which was truly awesome television!

And in case you think me callous, here’s what I CAN give them credit for: maintaining a shred of ambiguity! At least they preserved some of the mystery they worked so hard to cultivate. As much as they started to blitzkrieg us with late-game exposition, even going so far as to BREAK THEIR OWN STORYTELLING CONVENTION (the flash sideways) to give us more flashbacks (which, by the way, don’t really explain ANYTHING if they are not the actual origin story – guess we need an origin story for Jacob’s mother now too! And an origin story for the island-protector before her!) Boiling it all down to some frustratingly concrete explanation would have cheapened the whole experience. Because, as I wrote before, this has always been about mystery, not puzzle! (http://www.factualopinion.com/the_factual_opinion/2010/03/television-of-the-weak-a-freak-show-from-sunup-to-sundown.html). When I heard they were adding an extra half-hour to the already two-hour finale, I figured it was because their epic explanation had bloated so large, it couldn’t be contained within 120 minutes! (Did I give them credit for anything in there? I hope I did..)

In conclusion:

1. The smoke monster deserved better.
2. A friend said it was much better than the random-ass ending of Battlestar Galactica, and I must agree.
3. Another friend said that the seasons after J.J. Abrams had clearly left the show (2-6) were a lot like the West Wing seasons after Sorkin left the show.

4. Afterlife in a church? Why? What was the Dharma initiative?
5. Bunch of vaguebooking at the end about ‘letting go’ and ‘moving on’ and ‘let’s go find out’ and ‘well, there is no “now”, here’!? New Age balderdash I say!
6. It was pretty progressive to have us grow attached to a torturer from the Iraqi Republican Guard! (And have him fall in love with a girl who belonged on the O.C.!)
7. Can’t believe they killed off Tina Fey’s character so fast!
8. I woulda been happy to see Walt, even if he’s grown to be a linebacker over the years.
9. Goodbye psychotic/psychedelic Dharma map that appeared once we stopped punching in the numbers and the blast door came down! (I heard there was a puzzle you could buy that had a picture of it – God bless you hardcores who bought that puzzle and lovingly put together every senseless piece!)
10. Goodbye John Locke’s knife!
11. Goodbye Richard Alpert’s guy-liner!
12. Goodbye ‘Freckles’ (even though I feel like I never saw em!)
13. Goodbye Jacob, you extreme plot device which to this day confounds me!
14. How the fuck did Jack end up back out of the leprechaun hole? I don’t know! Were we taken back to the beginning of the season after Juliet rock-tapped the H-bomb? I don’t really know! Jack looked like he was in the same spot as the beginning of the season, but he still had the gut wound that killed him, so who the funkenstein knows?!
15. I’m glad Hurley was our savior, because he was the only one who was pure at heart J

And last, but not least! I’m happy to announce the winner of the contest is TIM O’NEIL with the following prediction:

“Years from now the Lost season sets are gonna be in the 2/$15 bin at Target and anyone who picks them up is going to consider taking the plunge before remembering their friend from work told them once that the show sort of petered out in the end and wasn't worth the trouble.”

Tim, please shoot an email with your address to the ‘email me’ link right above Bert eating the baby! And I will send you your very own set of Dharma Station pins which I bought off of etsy!

Farewell my fellow Lost fans! It’s been a pleasure J

Fringe - "Over There, Part Two"
Matthew J. Brady

Does this second half of the Fringe season finale even need discussion (for that matter, does any episode of the damn show)? Probably not, but I soldier on nonetheless, determined, for some reason, to try to wrangle some enjoyment out of this show. This one is okay, although most all the interesting alternate universe stuff made it into the first part, aside from an Olivia-on-Olivia fight scene and the much-ballyhooed-around-the-comics-internet alternate DC comics covers (http://dcu.blog.dccomics.com/2010/05/21/geoff-johns-and-hank-kanalz-on-last-night’s-fringe-alternate-universe-covers/) (which are barely noticeable in the background as Peter muses that the differences between universes are subtle; he's obviously not a comics fan or he would be busting a nut over the amazing sight before him). There's also a pretty obvious ending twist/cliffhanger, especially since it calls back to the "evil replacement" plot of the beginning of the season, but it's not a bad way to end the season. No, the annoying thing here is a plot that was a bit too thin to be stretched out over two episodes, leaving us with annoying bickering between Walter and a barely able to enunciate Leonard Nimoy, who does little more than act as a deus ex machina to keep the show from ending. Thanks to his selflessness, I'm sure we'll be back to the same old plots about people with exploding skin or something before we know it, barely remembering that there's a reality-threatening evil high-tech army a vibrational barrier away. Yay?

Breaking Bad - "Fly"
Sean Witzke

This episode was directed by Rian Johnson, who's artistic voice has largely been tainted by the fact that every idea he has had is overshadowed by the voices of other people. Brick owes a whole lot to Hammet, Chandler, and Polanski; Brothers Bloom is a decent little con man movie buried under every tic that he could steal from better directors Paul Thomas Anderson and Wes Anderson. Its fitting that the opening of his recalls both the first scene of Terry Gilliam's Brazil and the lingering flies-as-symbol-for-mental-corruption device David Cronenberg used in The Fly. The fly buzzes around, Walt goes overboard trying to kill it, putting Jesse in danger, delaying production, falling about a story and braining himself. In both filmic instances, the fly was a much larger symbol than just an annoyance to the characters. The Fly is a good metaphor for the series, how Walt's obsession eventually becomes Jesse's - that his willingness to become completely amoral pays off on Jesse's head a thousand fold. The only way I see Jesse's life ending is violently, and in the very near future, probably getting thrown in a refrigerator truck with a whole mess of Gus' chicken.

This is a holding pattern episode, the kind that come right before the real shit goes down on tv seasons like this - the last 2 episodes of shows like these are usually bloodbaths. Or at the very least, they are massive game changers like Mad Men's s3 finale was. Breaking Bad seems to be following that formula, even though the Hank vs. the Twins episode would have been a season-ending-cliffhanger on any other tv show. This episode is a two-man show, Walt and Jesse talking to each other as they make meth, recalling "4 Days Out" from last season. Walt is losing it, over his family again, and expressing it with his perfectionist tendencies without realizing. Last time it was the dry rot in his house representing his fear of his cancer surgery, this time its a fly representing his collapsing relationship wth Skylar.

Walt wishes he'd died, he wishes he hadn't let Jane die. The real drama of the episode is two monologues - one where Walt comes very close to admitting he watched Jane die, and ends up telling Jesse that he spoke to Jane's father the night she died. It's tense, but it's also heartbreaking. Walt think he's "missed his moment" and now he's just stuck here. In remission, doing reprehensible things with no noble purpose anymore. He's stuck in the now, where he realizes he can't get to be a hero from where he's found himself standing.

Jesse betrays how much he cares about Walt too - or at least worries about him. He talks about the discovery channel a lot, first in pretty direct metaphors about how he feels they're getting screwed for money by Gus (talking about how the head Hyena forces the other to kiss his ass, literally). Then ebola. Then possums, and then how one got into his Aunt's how when he was kid. Then about how his aunt went insane, still thinking it was in there, and how her going crazy was cancer metastizing in her brain.

It's an emotional workout between Walt and Jesse, going through them fighting each other, patronizing each other, confessing, and eventually treating each other with more love than they want to admit they have for one another. Walt tells Jesse he's been to his oncologist and he's still in remission (to him, thats the problem), but that creates a bigger problem, one thats been coming up more and more this season - Walt is losing it, with a suicide attempt last week and now this, it's only going to get worse.

24 "2:00PM - 4:00PM"
Tucker Stone

There was one priceless moment of ridiculous nonsense before the lights went off, a scene where Jack pressed a gun to the head of Reed Diamond before ordering the soon-to-die sucker to suture up an abdominal knife wound, but otherwise, this was the worst season finale the show has ever had. (Even the James Cromwell season included the destruction of an oil rig and the blinding of Rickey Schroeder.) This one consisted of Jack losing a fight, crying, and failing to kill anybody, multiple scenes where President 42nd Street changed her mind (again!) and lots and lots of Freddie Prinze Jr grunting. Sure, there was the expected moment when Charles Logan put a bullet through his skull after testing the gun on Reed Diamond's face, and yes, that part was absolutely wonderful, but otherwise, these two hours were the exact opposite of whatever note anyone wanted the show to go out on. (And no Aaron Pierce to boot!)

That's partly to be expected. 24 is on its way to a feature film incarnation, the show had run out of characters to kill off that would have resonated in any measurable way, it wasn't like Jack was going to bite it, and the crew were at least halfway through production on this dumb season when they found out they wouldn't be returning for more. Last week's episode was a rare gift, a callback to the days when a normal conversation in an office building could be interrupted by a surprise gunship attack, or Aaron Pierce could shot the fuel tanks on a flamethrower and blow up three lanes of a Los Angeles highway. There wasn't enough gas left in the show, this season's plot, the only choice was to exit through the back.

That's what they did, in their own silly fashion. Freddie, Chloe & Arlo, staring at a floor-to-ceiling drone image of Jack. He looks up in the sky and said goodbye.

He can't hear you, but say it anyway:

Good riddance.

Grey's Anatomy - "Sanctuary" and "Death and All His Friends"

Tim O'Neil

I must apologize for being dead wrong. You see, I thought I had it all figured out. Shows like Grey's aren't exactly rocket science, after all. It's a prime-time soap with occasional pretensions towards medical drama, although the latter definitely only exists to support and reflect the narrative priorities of the former. So if you watch enough of the show, enough to get a pretty good feel for what exactly is going on and how it unfolds, you feel like you can predict it with some accuracy.

Heading into the season finale, I was dead sure that a few things were going to happen: first, that Callie was going to get together with Mark, since both of their ticking-biological-clock storylines seemed to be converging nicely; second, Lexie would finally formalize her relationship with Karev (they had been coasting along as informal "friends with benefits" for too long); third, and this was the clincher, Derek Shepherd (McDreamy) was going to "cheat" on his "wife," the show's namesake Meredith Grey. Now that last one requires a bit of explanation: although Meredith and McDreamy have been married since last season's finale, they were never actually married - in the general chaos of O'Malley's death and Izzie's near death, they didn't make it to the chapel, but instead opted for a cutesy fake marriage ceremony in the hospital locker room, writing their vows on a Post-It note and acting as if they were married in fact.

Now, you don't have to be Charles Dickens to know that this kind of twist, while "cute" and romantic, is essentially a dramatic IOU: Post-It marriages aren't real marriages, and somewhere down the line you knew full well that the writers were going to exploit this discrepancy. It's worth pointing out that it's in McDreamy's character to be periodically unfaithful: the show's first major storyline hinged on him cheating on his then-wife Addison Montgomery with Meredith Grey - they divorced, Addison got her own spin-off, Private Practice, and the execrable phrase Mer-Der entered the cultural lexicon. The show had used Shepherd's tendency towards infidelity as a cornerstone of the drama in the earliest seasons. As this current season drew to a close, the writers even established two possible lust objects for his temptation: a spunky hospital lawyer who appeared a few episodes back in order to council Shepherd through a difficult deposition (more on that later), and a useless new resident - April - whose mooning infatuation with Shepherd has been a running joke for the previous handful of episodes. All of the pieces were in place for a dynamite finale. Shepherd's new position as Chief of Surgery was stressful, and the demands of his job were putting increasing strain on his relationship with Meredith - something had to give, and the revelation of infidelity would send shockwaves throughout the entire hospital.

Except - that's not what happened at all. This is what happened:

Shit got serious real damn fast.

Remember that deposition I mentioned a few sentences back? Well, the deposition involved a man whose wife had died while being treated at Seattle Grace. She suffered a massive hemorrhage and subsequently lost all brain functions, and she had previously signed a DNR which the doctors followed with due diligence. The problem is that the woman's husband wasn't particularly happy about this, and refused to accept that the doctors had done everything necessary to resuscitate his wife. So first he tried to sue. When that didn't work so well, he came to the hospital with a gun.

His first step was to straight-up execute the hapless Dr. Reed Adamson, the fetching pixie-cut brunette who we see laying in a pool of her own blood above. Moments later Karev wanders into the room and gets a shot to the chest. He's still alive, however, and he somehow manages to crawl into a nearby elevator, where he is later discovered like this:

In case you couldn't already guess, this weren't your father's Grey's Anatomy. Meanwhile, the rest of the hospital is still blissfully unaware of the shooting rampage. It is revealed that Meredith Grey is actually pregnant. This is a horrific idea for a number of reasons. Let's begin with the understanding that Meredith Grey, as played by noted conservative activist Ellen Pompeo, is actually part-human, part cat. Please note the family resemblance:

So even as the audience is reeling from the thought of seeing Ellen Pompeo's eight wrinkled teats swollen in anticipation of her hideous brood of Dr. Moreau cat-children, we are brought back to episode's actual plot, which involves bullets and gunfire. A few people who aren't actually important cast members get stone murdered and the whole hospital gets placed on lockdown. Meredith and Yang are ignorant of what's going on for what seems like a simply absurd interval of time, before running into Shepherd who is really quite surprised that they totally ignored all the pages telling everyone that the hospital was under lockdown because there was a psycho shooter on the loose.

The thing I most enjoyed about this episode, if I can be perfectly honest, is the way it forces these main characters to confront just how self-centered and selfish they really are. The juxtaposition of the rest of the hospital cowering in abject terror of the shooter while Meredith and Yang continue their absolutely banal conversation is quite rich, most likely intentional, and a good illustration of exactly why Seattle Grace would be the worst hospital on the face of the planet in which you'd ever want to end up.

Of course the police are absolute incompetents. Even after the hospital is locked down and the hallways are clear, they somehow neglect to send the SWAT team in, which of course gives the shooter the opportunity to wander all throughout the building and have close encounters with every character and plotline. They don't actually get around to taking a shot until he's been walking around unencumbered for at least a half-hour, real time, and even though the guy gets up and walks around for another half-hour or so, they don't catch up to him until the end of the second hour. By then, he's already dead by his own hand.

The shooter's primary target is, you guessed it, Shepherd, who he believes to be personally responsible for his wife's death. When he catches up to Shepherd he almost hesitates, but then finally his balls drop and he gets down to business:

Usually on a show like this you have favorite characters whom you root for and hope to see succeed; but on Grey's, I have found that I have characters whom I root against and hope to see die. I think that Meredith and Shepherd are two of the most insufferable narcissists in the history of television, so I was really hoping they'd both get their tickets punched. I mean, come on, look at where Shepherd got shot: do you get up and walk away from a hit like that? Under any conceivable circumstances?

But he doesn't die, even though it's later established that he has a bullet lodged in his aorta. They succeed in getting him to an OR where they just happen to have a full coterie of staff ready to put him under for open-heart surgery. And of course the only surgeon who can possibly perform this miracle operation is Yang, who is still after six years just a resident. But she scrubs up and goes in . . .

And then the shooter wanders back onto the scene, apparently pissed that he didn't actually have the wherewithal to finish the job he set out to do in the first place. He holds the operating room hostage, insisting he'll shoot anyone who tries to save Shepherd's life. But just then, who should find his way to the OR but our man from Iraq, Owen Hunt!

Now, of all the people in Seattle Grace, the one person who should actually know what to do in the event of a shooting war, it's Mr. Warzone himself. And indeed, from the moment he walks into that OR, the viewer is aware of a sensation of keen anticipation. We're waiting for the inevitable moment when Operation Ginger Storm bursts free from the shackles of civilian restraint and is mentally transported back to The Shit, Deer Hunter-style, so as to deliver a merciless beating to the killer.

Or, he could just get shot in the shoulder like a punk, which is what actually happens.

Anyway, even as Shepherd is bleeding out on the table, Meredith drags Hunt to an adjoining room to remove the bullet lodged in his shoulder. And then, as if the Grand Guignol wasn't grand enough, we are treated to the spectacle of Meredith Grey suffering a miscarriage onscreen:
That is apparently the face you make when your body spontaneously aborts a fetus and the blood trickles out of your uterus and down your leg. And yes, the bit about the blood trickling down her leg really is in the episode. How could I make this shit up?

Meanwhile, in another plotline, Karev (who you might remember from almost dying in the elevator) is bleeding out on the table while lLoan labors to save his life alongside Lil' Lexie. A couple episodes back Sloan realized that all of his odd behavior this season was a result of the fact that he never got over Lexie. But she was with Karev now, and as Karev lay dying on the table Karev and Lexie reaffirmed their love. Sloan, of course, remains stoic, ultimately saving the life of the man who has stolen his one true love. Which is how these things usually work on this show.

Meanwhile meanwhile, Dr. Bailey is forced to deal with another shot cast member, Dr. Charles Percy, shot in the gut but holding on to dear life with the aid of this week's bit of stunt-casting, Dr. Mandy Moore (Demi Lovato showed up a week or so back as well - best not to ask). Of course, all the elevators have been turned off and the hospital is locked down, so it's impossible to get Percy to an OR and save him, so he dies with his head in Bailey's lap, like so:

And then the show lingers on his last words:

Percy: Can you do something for me? Can you find Reed? When this is over, Can you find her? I always...I always had a crush on her. I don't think she knows.
Mary: She knows. Girls always know.
Percy: Yeah?
Mary: Yeah.
Percy: Can you tell her anyway? Can you find her and tell her I loved her. I loved her so much.
Bailey: Ok.
Percy: Can you tell her, you tell her I was a catch. You tell her I was a hot hot catch and she missed out on a great guy.

We already know that Reed is dead, but they don't. That's what's called" dramatic irony," and let's be frank, folks: I'm not made of stone. There was . . . something in my eye, that's all. It must be raining, but there's not a cloud in the sky.

Eventually the shooting has to stop. And the only man who can stop the slaughter is Richard Webber, the formerly-disgraced ex-chief of surgery, brought low by alcoholism and removed from his position but who is - we are conveniently informed at the beginning of the episode - six months sober. He is caught outside the hospital at the time of the shooting but somehow manages to slip the totally effective police cordon and enter the hospital, determined to track down the shooter and get to the bottom of the massacre.

Now, I'm sure Tucker is going to talk about the finale of 24 and all the brutal, gruesome shit Jack Bauer does in the course of wreaking his bloody vengeance; I'm sure there's been some cold-ass shit on that show. But honestly? I've never seen anything on network TV quite as cold as this shit right here. You might have been justified in expecting that Webber would talk the shooter down, convince him to see the error of his ways and turn himself in with some kind of illuminating moral parable. But what happens in actuality is that Webber confronts the gunman and convinces him to shoot himself.
That is apparently the face you make when you're talking a mentally deranged shooter into swallowing the barrel of his own gun:

I've lived. I've really really lived. I've failed. I've been devastated. I've been broken. I've gone to hell and back. And I've also known joy. And passion. And I've had a great love. See death for me is not justice. It's a ... end of a beautiful journey. And I'm not afraid to die. The question is, are you? A life in prison or an afterlife ... with your wife. Me or you? Your choice.

And then of course the SWAT team finally arrives, but it's too late: Richard Webber has successfully talked a man into taking his own life. I don't care where you grew up, that's pretty much the living definition of hardcore.

I see more than a little similarity between this season finale and one of the massive crossovers us comic fans have grown used to with numbing regularity. They're both intended to do the same thing: goose up interest in flagging franchises by the injection of shocks and suspense, as well as a simply massive amount of blood and guts. Are these episodes of Grey's any different from, say, the bit in Siege where the Sentry totally tears Ares in half? Not really. The only real difference is that whereas this type of audience-goosing gimmick has really worn out its welcome and ceased to be at all effective in superhero comics, it's significantly more rare to come across something as genuinely shocking as this on a TV show like Grey's Anatomy. Maybe if I paid attention to fan sites or whatever I would have had some idea going in as to just what this episode was all about, but as it is I went in completely cold and was pretty damn amazed . Grey's

is still a patently absurd medical soap opera, but for all that the folks behind it do know how to turn some very basic and predictable ingredients into something that keeps pulling me back in despite the fact that I damn well should know better. For all the inconsistency and stupidity and coincidence and straight=up sexual abuse of the suspension of disbelief on display for these two hours, it was never less than riveting.