Idle TV Thoughts

My brain has latched onto this thought, and now I need to tease it out. So: after watching the Bunheads pilot, I was thinking that the vaguely-alluded-to story of Sasha's gay dad sounded like a lost verse from "At the Ballet" from A Chorus Line. (Yes, as was mentioned at the end of April - I'm still thinking about A Chorus Line and sometimes listening to the soundtrack and I really, really hope they'll go meta there and have like Priscilla Lopez come on and play a former dance colleague of Kelly Bishop's character.) And then I started wondering whether the town in the show being called Paradise is a reference to the line, "It wasn't paradise/But it was home" re: ballet class in the aforementioned song, which is not only Bishop's big number, but is also partially based on her actual life. And then I wondered whether that's too dense a reference even for Amy Sherman-Palladino. But then I remembered seeing this Gilmore Girls episode once where Carole King (singer of the show's theme song) was playing a record store owner in Stars Hollow with "Pleasant Valley Sunday" playing in the background. So who knows. (Please imagine all that being rattled off at rapid speed, ASP-style.)

OMG You Guys: Part V*

Needs more Lee Pace. And telepathic wolf communication.

*There was no post for Part IV, but I felt like it would be weird to say Part IV for the fifth movie. 

Quoted

"The Watergate that we wrote about in The Washington Post from 1972 to 1974 is not Watergate as we know it today. It was only a glimpse into something far worse. By the time he was forced to resign, Nixon had turned his White House, to a remarkable extent, into a criminal enterprise."

- Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward
"40 Years After Watergate, Nixon Was Far Worse Than We Thought" from The Washington Post

I'm trying to keep from venturing too far down the rabbit hole on Mad Men, but in the past few days I keep wondering whether the general air of foreboding and cynicism creeping into the show is pointing right towards Nixon. There's of course the first-season dealings with his first presidential campaign, and Henry's continued presence has kept Republican politics on the show's periphery in a way that could easily shift into more prominent plot points. I thought all the malaise was going to be about mirroring the decline of New York City as the seventies approach. But the events of the last two episodes suggest that there are also some questions being brought forward about what happens when your success is derived from being complicit in a corrupt enterprise. 

Quoted

Honestly, there was talk around base camp right at the start of the season, literally in the first couple of days, of something happening to somebody. I'm not sure what it was, maybe people intuited it, there was just a feeling going, that someone was man overboard. I'm not sure where that came from. For me, when I went to all the costume fittings, I saw that he hadn't been taking as good care of himself. There were stains in his shirts and his waistcoats. I would point them out, "This is dirty," and they'd go, "Yeah, that's what we're doing this season." And I'd go, "Yeah, that's not good."

- Jared Harris, Interview from HitFix

They're thinking about all this on a level that we in the audience can't even really see. That's a little mind-boggling, to be frank.

"Killing Lane is the most agonizing thing we’ve ever done, both emotionally and professionally as writers. Jared Harris has been, and indeed still is, a beloved member of our Mad Men family. He is an incomparable actor and friend. Just wrapping our heads around and committing to his suicide took months. We spent weeks in the writers’ room debating the merits and consequences, and hours in his office choreographing the deed. Every detail was meticulously mapped out—from the placement of the rope and body, to the application of the make-up, to the suicide note (we actually wrote six).

"In the end, all we can say is that the experience is not over. There is still one more episode to digest and consider. And what a brilliant one it is from Matthew Weiner. A season-finale glimpse into Lane’s (and Don’s) tortured soul awaits. We don’t think anyone will be disappointed."

- Andre and Maria Jacquemetton, from Slate

I'm a bit scared, wondering what more could possibly be coming tomorrow night.

Trailer Thoughts

Well, this looks appealingly nuts. I think there's a lot of potential for interesting stories to be told that take place in the nineteenth and acknowledge the complicated history of race therein.* And a take this extreme practically demands attention and debate. I hope there will be a rich critical discussion around this movie this coming winter.

*This seems like as good a place as any to observe that I'm crazy excited about Twelve Years a Slave, not only because of the increasingly awesome casting news but because it's a true story and Chiwetel Ejiofor has long deserved a meaty starring role and I love that Steve McQueen's throwing his new bigger profile behind it.

I'm interested in some of the questions Ta-Nehisi Coates raised in his reaction post regarding the trailer. (For one thing, I think the question of whether we've hashed out the Soul on Ice deal enough varies depending on whether "we" is "people engaged in academic and critical discussions about race" or "America.") While the issue of women's function in liberating themselves is a critical one to keep in mind, I don't know that we'll fully know how that's going to shake out until we see the whole movie. Certainly, if you look at the first trailer for Inglourious Basterds, I don't think you get any real sense of how much of the movie is devoted to Shoshanna rather than the titular group. And I hope (and, to some extent, expect) that the man who gave Pam Grier such a showcase in Jackie Brown isn't employing Kerry Washington as just a pretty face. 

Quoted/Screened: May 2012

"My personal hope is that he lets a hundred (or maybe a dozen) Whedons bloom. Let's hope he repays the loyalty of his fans by opening the doors of the entertainment kingdom to the kind of writers and creators who might not get a crack at the big time without his backing. Nobody's done more than Whedon to create and inspire a generation of TV writers; many of the best scribes working today got their start on Whedonverse programs and most of the rest were powerfully influenced by his shows. I hope he throws his weight behind those writers' most impassioned passion projects..., backs those writers' pitches, gets their shows on the air and brings more fine entertainment products to the Web."

- Maureen Ryan, "Avengers Fans: Thank TV for That Awesome Movie (And What Joss Should Do Next)" at Huffington Post

I thought I'd let this stand as my Screened post for May, since the bulk of my movie viewing was contained in three trips to the theater to see The Avengers. (All 2D) (The only other movie I saw was We Bought a Zoo, which was much more charming than I expected.) The best was the first showing I went to, on Saturday the fifth, where the opening-weekend crowd responded to quips and plot developments with raucous laughs and cheers. The quippy banter of the script was perfectly suited to the viewing experience - it felt joyous to be among the crowd in a way I seldom feel in a packed theater. I rewatched some of the lead-up movies in the week before I saw The Avengers; while my opinion of Iron Man 2 hasn't really changed, I can see how The Avengers benefitted from letting that movie do a lot of heavy lifting in establishing SHIELD's presence in the broader plot and defining Tony Stark's relationship with them, and I think the weaving together of the various plot strands actually elevates the first Thor and Captain America movies a bit.

I also liked this LA Times interview with Joss Whedon - I think the comparison of Bruce Banner with Oz from Buffy is a really interesting one to make among the many "how does The Avengers fit in the Whedon-verse" analyses floating around. That was the other great feeling I had watching the movie for the first time - in that much-heralded shot that tracks from hero to hero in the midst of the final battle, my cult-TV-loving self couldn't help but think, "Holy crap, he really did it."

Mood Music LXVIII

This is A) the best mash-up they've ever done on Glee and B) the only track I bought from all the performances in the third season. I might give it a couple of episodes in the fall, just because their "plan" for following half the characters into their post-graduation lives sounds like a recipe for disaster and I love some good train-wreck television. But I've already deleted the season pass off of my DVR, and I'm probably going to chase that liberating feeling right out of regular Glee viewership.

What's all this new activity all of a sudden? I'm glad you asked, mythical reader. I'm trying to clear some, if not all, of the backlog of draft posts I've accumulated as I ready myself for Dream Emmy Ballot season. Half-finished movie thoughts from the winter, your hour is nigh.

Idle TV Thoughts

I. I was totally prepared to be over True Blood, but each new shot of Michael McMillan is wearing my resistance down. I love Reverend Steve too much to just drop the show altogether. (Okay, Chris Meloni's return to HBO doesn't hurt either.) (Also, HBO's seasonal "check out this HBO-type awesomeness right here" reel is some of my very favorite marketing, going back to the old ones you can see on DVDs of their early-aughts shows.)

II. I'm like 95% sure that the two seasons of The Killing don't hold together in any sort of logical way as a story that covers less than a month in show-time, but also I think Stephen Holder is my new fake TV boyfriend?

Musical-Type Awesomeness (And Other Thoughts)

I can't stop watching Smash, even though I think it has a lot of problems, and while I was following a thought about Smash down the rabbit hole I came across this delightful clip. It's the original cast of A Chorus Line singing "What I Did For Love" on the Phil Donahue show shortly before the original run closed in 1990:



It's like, you only thought this song was poignant.

Anyway, I was thinking about Smash specifically compared with the documentary Every Little Step, which chronicles the casting process for the 2006 revival of A Chorus Line. One of that film's mini-arcs - the "inexperienced-but-talented" throughline focused on Jessica Lee Goyner - works where Smash's presentation of Karen frequently doesn't because they freight her with all this baggage of naivete and moral superiority when the "but talented" should be the going concern. Every Little Step derives all its drama from the audition process and the auditionees' perceptions of themselves as performers, rather than try to pile on any extraneous personal issues. 

Other wishes? A few weeks ago, I watched All About Eve again and thought the show could use an Addison DeWitt; specifically, someone savvy who's invested in the various goings-on of the plot and who can give some direction to the aimlessness that seems to govern characters like Karen and Ellis. Sometimes you need that character who'll actually tell people to stop behaving like simpering fools, instead of just you the audience member yelling it at the TV from your armchair. Hell, you could even have one of those characters actually sit down and watch All About Eve as Marilyn research and decide to actively seek out an Addison DeWitt figure. It would probably make about as much sense as anything else that's gone on this season.

And I wish the show would stop having characters act like Ivy's relationship with Derek somehow precludes her from also being talented. I don't think they're setting her up to function in a muse role (if anything, the recent "Karen-is-Marilyn!" hallucinations seem to be heading in that direction, which in turn is making me pull extra-hard for the Grey's Anatomy/Bones-esque brain tumor option) but it's crazy to not have at least one person mention that some of the most fruitful creative/romantic partnerships in the history of dance and musical theater have been between performers and their director-choreographers.

Quoted

"Maybe because the show is a comedy, some viewers can’t help believing the show “wants” us to sympathize with Hannah in stealing the money, but I think that couldn’t be less true. The interest of the show is in showing her as an intelligent, unformed, selfish, self-pitying young screw-up. She’s funny, and she’s irritating. She’s sometimes perceptive, and yet stunningly un-self-aware. She cares deeply for her friends, and sees her parents as ATMs. The show is not about seeing her as a good person, it’s about wanting to see her—hopefully, by taking on some responsibility, growing up and seeing beyond herself—become one."

- James Poniewozik
from "From Tony Soprano to Hannah Horvath: What Does a TV Show 'Want' You to Think of Its Characters?" at Tuned In


I've been working a lot recently trying to articulate what exactly it is I want to focus on in my studies going forward, and I think part of what I want to achieve is the kind of breadth of knowledge Poniewozik draws upon here to make his point. I particularly love the comparison of the character moments in the respective pilots of Girls and The Shield. (I'm currently in the middle of the sixth season of The Shield - knocking shows off of this list like a champion, if I may say so, and on the verge of tackling Nos. 1 and 2 in the aforementioned process of deepening my body of knowledge.) So much has been said about the pilot all over the Internet that I think I'll save judgement on Girls for a few weeks, but based on Sunday's episode I agree with this assessment of the level of self-awareness involved in presenting the show's characters.

On a Mad Men Rewatch

Good grief, but I love thinking too much about this show.

- In his recent interview with the New York Times, Matthew Weiner said of his tentative seven-season plan, "My plan always, and it’s how I pitched the show to AMC, is, let me show the difference between these people at the beginning of the ’60s and the end of the ’60s. You see how adult they are when it starts. But I guarantee you when we look back after the finale, you will  say, ‘Look how young they were.’ And you will look back with nostalgia." I think that's already true - at least, I was surprised by how young the actors looked to me now rewatching Season One. I particularly think that the flashbacks in "Waldorf Stories" give a different sense of where Don is at the beginning of the series - it feels more like we come in on him still shaping the myth of Don Draper.

- I liked the third season less upon rewatch than I expected.  It still contains some of my favorite episodes - "Shut the Door, Have a Seat," "Guy Walks Into an Advertising Agency," and "The Grown-Ups" (a personal favorite for its take on television spectatorship) - and some moments I really love. (Nothing will match the feeling of recognizing the opening strains of "Bye Bye Birdie" - a longtime favorite of mine - at the beginning of "Love Among the Ruins" when I first watched it.) But the season's got two major issues in Suzanne Farrell - easily the worst of any of Don's conquests thus far - and Conrad Hilton. I found that knowing both will be gone by the end of the season really drains away whatever patience I was willing to employ when I watched the season live. Additionally, I think in retrospect that the third season's conceptual departures - like "The Fog" or "Seven Twenty Three" - don't work as well as episodes like "The Jet Set" or "The Summer Man." (Though now I'm convinced that somewhere within me there's an essay about deconstructing the awkward intersections of "The Fog," The Help, Medgar Evers and White Lady Problems.) The last quibble is one that may very well still be addressed - the departures of Sal and Paul Kinsey felt so abrupt, and still do with no updates on where they might have ended up during the fourth season. I wouldn't put it past Weiner to suddenly bring one of them back - he did it with Freddy Rumsen - so maybe that's a point of contention to store away for whenever the show concludes.

- One thing that feels sort of surprising looking back - we've never gone home with Ken Cosgrove. Even the subplot in "The Gold Violin" is more about Sal than Ken. Hopefully, the casting of Larisa Oleynik and Ray Wise as his fiancee and father-in-law-to-be, respectively, in "Chinese Wall" is an indicator of the show laying groundwork to finally delve deeper into its most unassuming accounts man.

- Another realization - we don't really have any sense of Joan's relationship with her mother. Could that change if we come back in on her with a baby?

- I forgot how much of the fourth season's back half is devoted to the firm's financial woes. I'm curious to see if they pick some of the seeds of potential business back up - especially the conclusion of the Honda plot in "The Chrysanthemum and the Sword" and mentions of Dow Chemical in "Tomorrowland." I'm especially intrigued by the latter. After a season and a half of mostly oblique references to Vietnam, outside of Greg Harris' plot, would Weiner now put SCDP that close to the war machine?

- It's still surprising sometimes to recall how funny the show is - to take a few moments from "The Beautiful Girls," for example, Harry's indignant reaction to finding his afghan being used to help shepherd Miss Blankenship outside the range of the clients' eyes or Don finding that Sally doused his French toast with rum instead of syrup and just rolling with it.

- Speaking of "The Beautiful Girls," like much of the fourth season it replays well. But I still don't really understand Joyce's "men are like soup" metaphor.

- Naturi Naughton's appearance in "Hands and Knees" feels super-weird post-The Playboy Club.

- A potentially big plot point I wonder about for the future is whether Don will ever get that last bit of information he's missing about Peggy's pregnancy - they go right up to the edge of it in "The Suitcase," and I think the tension around Pete being one of the only people in SCDP with an inkling of Don's background (especially with the North American Aviation debacle in "Hands and Knees") suggests that there could be interesting  dramatic fallout. There's a cautious equilibrium among the three of them that's reminiscent of the dynamic that Peggy overturned in "Meditations on an Emergency."

Some leftover thoughts on "Tomorrowland" that I never got around to posting when the episode actually aired:

- It's a little thing, but I loved that Glen asked if Sally was "decent" when he knocked on her door. One, because it subtly put the lie to Betty's manic anti-Glen stance, but also because it struck me as so dad-like. (That is, to someone whose parents are roughly the same age as Sally.)

- Some interesting pop culture references in this episode. I don't think I can unpack Don's (slightly creepy) reference to The Sound of Music better than The Film Experience, (Poor Faye. No one wants to be the Baroness in that scenario.) but I think the choice of "I've Got You Babe" as the episode-closer is interesting, too: another couple with an older man and a younger woman, where the woman ultimately eclipsed him career-wise. Ten years after the song came out, they were divorced. It's always anyone's guess how much something like that is supposed to foreshadow, but given Megan's seeming ambition in the field of advertising, it seems worth keeping in mind.

- And, a note to add to that upon rewatching the episode: I wonder if that career ambition is destined to act at odds with the fact that Don clearly latches on to Megan because he wants her as a mother figure for his children.

I could say more (Suddenly noticing suitcase references in Season Two! Recalling the smarmy delight of Kevin Rahm as Ted Chaough! I can't decide whether I have things to say about the Slate pieces on the show's handling of race!) but I need to cut myself off. So, it remains to be seen what's in store for us tonight. I think the central appeal of the premieres is learning when we're rejoining the action and what's happened to everyone in the offscreen time - none of them, not even the pilot, is among my favorite episodes. I'm curious to see whether the two-hour format makes the episode more compelling overall. The weekly TV posts seem destined to start up again - between Mad Men and Game of Thrones, I'll simply have too much to over-analyze.

Idle TV Marketing Thoughts

I'm not crazy, right? They're totally having Pete's hairline start to recede? That's so excellent.

(From this slideshow of Season Five promo pictures - as always, very stylish and generally information-free but: the hippest clothes I've seen on Elisabeth Moss as Peggy; Kiernan Shipka is starting to grow into her teen face; where's Megan and are Jay Ferguson and Christopher Stanley regular cast members now?)

On Downton Abbey Season Two

I always seem to have finale posts that linger for months after their respective shows aired, and I wanted to actually post this before the next cable cycle revs up.

- I ultimately liked the second series, but can't say I disagree with some of the criticisms that labeled it too soapy.  I think the notable difference between the first and second series is that in the second the seams felt more visible in Fellowes' pastiche.  The dramatic plot machinations sometimes felt overheated or specifically designed to postpone plot resolution until the latest possible moment rather than to drive the story organically.  While the first series was great, I don't think it bought Fellowes the kind of goodwill that prompts people to give a free pass to similar plot developments in nineteenth-century classics of the genre.  Nor does he seem terribly interested in trying to subvert some of those well-worn tropes instead of playing them straightforwardly.  The highs were still high enough to carry the rest of the material, but hopefully the criticisms of the season will prompt a more measured take in the third go-round.

- The one development that really deserved the "soap opera" qualifier, though not necessarily with the negative connotations intended? Matthew's paralysis. Paralysis (and blindness) is like the Chekov's gun of soap operas; if a guy gets paralyzed in the first act, he's not still going to be in that wheelchair when you've reached the story's conclusion. They skipped a fairly standard step, in which the person (usually a man, I'm sure gender theorists could speculate as to why that is) who is paralyzed/blind realizes that they can walk/see again but keeps it a secret because they don't want to lose the relationships they've mended/created during the time of their injury. Then you get the emergency situation where they're suddenly forced to reveal that they have regained the ability to walk/see. It seemed like they were going to go there with Matthew, but I guess the suggestion of it got lost in all the characters' relief over his junk working again. (The other day, I happened to catch a few minutes of The Young and the Restless, where Jack Abbott is currently in a wheelchair and the day's story revolved around people discovering that formerly blind Adam Newman was responsible for the situation leading to said paralysis. At some point, someone said "Jack will never walk again!" and I think I said, "Oh, PLEASE." aloud to the television. Soaps are magical and wonderful, is basically the moral of that story.) In a set of episodes awash in classic melodrama, I think this was my favorite "oldie-but-a-goodie."

- So...babies and in-law drama for the third series? I could get behind that. (Plus, I guess, springing Bates from jail? That storyline kind of lost steam for me there towards the end.) Even with Matthew and Mary together, I think that the show's established enough about the characters that I feel semi-confident predicting that A) certain of the ensemble won't feel truly at ease until she's had at least two boys and B) Mary's the kind of person who will not take kindly at all to the feeling that her womb is being monitored. I also hope they use the Bransons to introduce some of the Irish conflict into the story - for whatever reason, I like the idea of DA and Boardwalk Empire having a bit of overlap in historical fictive space. It seems like the growth of new family lives for the young Ladies Crawley should be enough to propel the story organically. *fingers crossed*

- Apparently, they're moving the show (as they should) from Miniseries/Movie to Drama for this year's Emmys. This Hitfix piece from Dan Fienberg does a good job of dissecting some of the issues at play in the Drama field, specifically why "Can Downton Abbey derail Mad Men?" is the wrong question to ask. (The Drama field is so dense this year, and we haven't even seen Mad Men or Game of Thrones yet! Emmy prognosticating is so much denser and more fun than trying to predict the Oscars!) Hopefully, the move will be accompanied by at least Michelle Dockery's name being put on the nomination ballot. (I ended up not posting my "Unsubmitted" list for last year's Dream Ballot, but she was at the very top of it.)

Quoted

 "A period transplant would change the historical details, pop-culture references, and mores, but not the characters, tone, or themes. Mad Men would still be Mad Men because the show isn’t about history. It’s about mystery — specifically the mystery of personality. Weiner practices sawdust-and-footlights dramaturgy. Scenes go on longer than TV’s norm and let significant action play out in wide shots that turn the edges of the screen into a proscenium. For all its snappy dialogue, the show’s most piercing moments are silent: Don, AWOL from his daughter’s birthday party, parked at a railroad crossing while a train rumbles past; ex-lovers Peggy and Pete regarding each other through a glass partition; Don and Peggy curled on Don’s office couch like shipwreck survivors on a raft."

- Matt Zoller Seitz "What Makes Mad Men Great" from Vulture

I agree with a lot of what he says, particularly about the show's true appeal being its function as a character study. However, I don't know that all the characters could translate as easily to other time periods as he claims. Namely, I think that a lot of what shapes Joan and Betty as characters is rooted in cultural expectations of women at the time and how they shape their lives around those expectations. (After recently watching "The Mountain King" again, I also think that this plays a part in why Anna decides to let Don get away with his identity fraud. But that's sort of a half-thought-out tangent.) They're both educated women who ultimately see their paths leading to the domestic sphere whether that best serves their personalities or talents or not, seemingly because it's what they're "supposed" to do. I'm not saying that this type of woman is exclusively tethered to the sixties, though The Feminine Mystique made her a sort of archetype of the era. I guess my question is what different experiences might result in a Joan or a Betty in, say, 1980?

Random Movie Love

It's probably an indicator that I'm a bigger nerd than I should publicly admit to being that I even have a favorite studio logo, but: it's Universal, and they've revamped for their centennial!



I think Universal is my favorite because, to me, it works in all its different variations. (As opposed to, say, MGM, which I also love but I'm not wild about some of those lions. Like I said, super-nerd.) I love the old logo with the little plane so much - I flipped out the first time I saw it play before a movie. (I think it was the 1936 Show Boat, but I'm not positive.) It's interesting to feel while watching that retrospective that there are specific works I associate with different iterations of the logo, I guess based on what I watched most in the past. For me, the 80s logo goes with The Breakfast Club, the 90s with Beethoven (I know), the last before this new one with Battlestar Galactica (for whatever reason, it plays before every episode on the DVDs, as opposed to one play per disc).