The Life and Death of Miss Jade Goody

God and Man in Big Love

Television doesn't do terribly well in portraying people of faith. To a real degree, this is a function of television being a mass medium and mass media wanting to do their best to keep their audiences as mass as possible, even in today's age of niche markets. To some degree, this has to do with fundamentalist Christian and Mormon audiences in the U.S. being deeply suspicious of a pop culture that portrays them as buffoons more often than not. Indeed, a good number of evangelical Christians have embraced The Simpsons' Ned Flanders, satirical warts and all, simply because he's a nice guy trying to live up to his creed in a world that continually tests him ...

... I say all of that, but Big Love has pretty much just gone ahead and MADE a show about the struggles of having faith in the modern world and has done so in a largely respectful and fascinating way on the network you'd least expect to be interested in broadcasting the good, clean fun of living by a strict religious creed. Big Love's occasionally anthropological feel - the series tends to shoot the religious ceremonies of the Henricksons as though it's a National Geographic documentary - is often overwhelmed by the sheer compassion it feels for all of its characters (outside of, arguably, Roman Grant (Harry Dean Stanton), who seems to be viewed as venal and unsalvageable). There's another scene in "Come, Ye Saints," scripted by Melanie Marnich and directed by Dan Attias, that struck me silent with its beauty. Margene (Ginnifer Goodwin), reeling from the death of her mother and the revelation that Bill's oldest son Ben (Douglas Smith) is in love with her, is destroyed when she accidentally leaves the urn carrying her mother's ashes atop a car and then drives off, scattering the ashes to the wind. She finally seems to let loose some of the grief she's been carrying, and then, Bill baptizes first wife Barb (Jeanne Tripplehorn) in a hotel room hot tub as a proxy for Margene's mother, ensuring that when Margene dies, her mother will be there waiting for her on the other side.

It would be easy to play this scene for goofy laughs (it IS a pretty weird concept), but Big Love plays it for every ounce of poignancy it can muster, from the look of comfort on Goodwin's face to the cool lighting of the hotel room. "No soul is lost," says Bill, and for an instant, Big Love strikes you with the sensation of why these people are in this seemingly unsustainable setup, of why anyone would want to be a part of a religious tradition seemingly at odds with the modern world ... 

Big Love and the Art of the Soap Opera

The Two Losts

I suspect when all is said and done that the history of Lost will cleave it pretty neatly into two different shows.

... The great divide falls between the first half of the show's third season and the last half of that season (which roughly matches up with when executive producers Damon Lindelof and Carlton Cuse convinced ABC to let them set a hard end date for the series). Before season three's 13^th episode, "The Man from Tallahassee," the series was much more meandering and much more prone to fits of stupidity. But it was also a show with more time--time for things like visual poetry or narrative tangents that occasionally seemed like dead ends (fans hated season three's "Tricia Tanaka Is Dead," but it was really a fine little piece of television--it just didn't advance the master narrative in any way) ...

But after the network set a firm end date for the show, it became something ever-so-slightly different. Gone were the long, meander-y episodes where we found out why Kate liked horses (and/or killed her dad) for the most part (there was one where we found out why Desmond says "brother" to everyone, but that was the last of an old era). The show became something much more purposeful, taking great strides forward in its narrative and starting to tie seemingly disconnected elements into a larger framework. In addition, the characters started behaving more like real people, no longer forced to do things they wouldn't do in real life in a similar situation by the constraints of a plot that said they couldn't because the show might run 10 seasons, and what would you do then? Most of the series' fans are deeply agnostic that Cuse and Lindelof really had a plan for how the series would run, but the episodes since that back half of season three seem to speak well for the two at least having SOME idea of how this was all going to play out. Plus, while there have been a few clunkers since the back half of season three (most notably season four's "Something Nice Back Home"), the series by and large has reinvigorated itself as one of the best hours of action-packed TV out there, flitting easily between genres, depending on who's got the episode focus that week.

The Wire's Politics

Writing to affirm what people are saying about my faith in individuals to rebel against rigged systems and exert for dignity, while at the same time doubtful that the institutions of a capital-obsessed oligarchy will reform themselves short of outright economic depression (New Deal, the rise of collective bargaining) or systemic moral failure that actually threatens middle-class lives (Vietnam and the resulting, though brief commitment to rethinking our brutal foreign-policy footprints around the world). The Wire is dissent; it argues that our systems are no longer viable for the greater good of the most, that America is no longer operating as a utilitarian and democratic experiment. If you are not comfortable with that notion, you won't agree with some of the tonalities of the show. I would argue that people comfortable with the economic and political trends in the United States right now -- and thinking that the nation and its institutions are equipped to respond meaningfully to the problems depicted with some care and accuracy on The Wire (we reported each season fresh, we did not write solely from memory) -- well, perhaps they're playing with the tuning knobs when the back of the appliance is in flames.

... If The Wire is too pessimistic about the future of the American empire -- and I've read my Toynbee and Chomsky, so I actually think a darker vision could be credibly argued -- no one will be more pleased than me as I am, well, American. Right now, though, I'm just proud to see serious people arguing about a television drama; there's some pride in that.

Star Trek Returns

Reasons To Welcome a Liberal Era

Rewatching The Sopranos

Thomson is most penetrating when he develops and enlarges his ideas and arguments over multiple entries, and when he's neither praising nor slamming but simultaneously giving and taking away: see his ambivalent analyses of Do the Right Thing; Tinker, Tailor; the often magnificent Heaven's Gate, the photography of which is exactly "heartbreaking"; and The Sopranos--expertly done, but "The Godfather plays every year; The Sopranos in reruns will bore you."

My Good Opinion of Alec Baldwin ...

Judging The Dead, Who Can't Answer Them Back

The Wire and the Newspaper Industry

Adama-Roslin '08

Generation Kill (II)

Nancy Franklin's assessment of the whole thing, sadly, matches up with my assessment of part one:

... it’s a little surprising that Simon went for this material at all. If you watched TV during the first two weeks of the war, you’ll remember that it was covered exhaustively and enthusiastically, as if it were a hot, sandy pep rally. Troop movements, weather conditions, equipment, terminology, and geography—reporters practically got drunk on it all, egged on, presumably, by the networks, some of which sported American-flag graphics during their war coverage. However you judge the response of American news organizations during the early days of the war, they certainly made those days vivid to viewers, and they helped us understand the terrible significance of the resistance the Marines faced in southern Iraq as they made their way from Kuwait to Baghdad. Wright’s pieces, coming out so soon after the invasion, brought the same kind of reality home—even more so, since he had greater control over his narrative than the TV reporters did: they were literally blown about by the wind while they were on camera and sometimes were made almost invisible by all-encompassing sandstorms. But that unforgettable time was more than five years ago, and I don’t see anything to be gained by retracing the path from Kuwait to Baghdad. Tell us, as they say, something we don’t know.

Generation Kill

Obviously, any follow-up to The Wire was bound to suffer by comparison, but the first episode of David Simon's Iraq War miniseries, Generation Kill, was a pretty big letdown nonetheless. I'll be coming back to it next week - first episodes are always a tough thing to pull off - but so far a miniseries that promised to show us "the new face of American war" looks like a mash-up of things we've seen before: Its portrait of American man-children in the desert that will be familiar to anyone who's seen Jarhead, or Three Kings, or Stop-Loss, or even documentaries like Gunner Palace. It's competent, sure, but it isn't particularly revelatory - and with Simon and Co. involved, revelatory is what I was hoping for.

The Man and the Medium Have Met

It was only a matter of time.

That's Entertainment!

I don't subscribe to Entertainment Weekly, but I usually manage to read at least every other issue cover-to-cover (I always buy it for plane reading), which is more than I can say for an awful lot of magazines. So I guess I'm basically in the same camp as Tyler Cowen and Seth Roberts, who discuss their EW-love at length here.

Today's '80s Flashback

Via Vic Matus, George Constanza pitches the McDLT:

Tony Was Whacked?

A somewhat persuasive, extremely prolix exegesis of the Sopranos finale. (via THND)

Here's a visual aid:

More Pollack

I have a Current up expanding on my love for Tootsie. Also worth your time: David Edelstein on Pollack the actor, Jeff Goldberg on Pollack the screenwriting coach, and the comments thread (featuring the supposedly-retired Matt Zoller Seitz!) at the House Next Door.

Big Screen, Small Stars

Matt Feeney, on Forgetting Sarah Marshall:

It’s typical for these breakup movies for the guy to upgrade from the desiccated, WASPy blonde who dumped him to an earthy brunette, but the contrast in this movie is so glaring that I actually felt sorry for Kristen Bell, who plays Sarah Marshall. (This is going to sound harsh. I wouldn’t write it if I thought Kristen Bell were a TAS reader.) Her character is a sort of parody of a television actress, but the thing is that she looks like a parody of a television actress. Where Mila Kunis is a sort of Rousseauan ideal of natural beauty, all litheness and fitness and proportion, Bell has the tiny body and oversized head that actors are said to often have, so that even when her whole body is on screen, her head still looks like it’s supposed to have a television around it. A television actress herself, she was obviously cast because of how closely she resembles the thing her character is supposed to be a parody of. So, in Forgetting Sarah Marshall Kristen Bell gets to literally embody her own parody. That is not an identity that – having called attention to it in such a way – you can just climb out of for your next movie. Given the roll that Judd Apatow is currently on, Sarah Marshall must have seemed like a dream part for Bell, but, to be honest, I don’t see how her career will recover from it.

Harsh but basically true, though I would differ with his take on Kunis: While I agree that her character was vastly more physically fetching than Bell's Marshall, I thought her performance, too, had the smaller-than-life quality that usually results when a television star gets miscast in a feature film. (Though she turned in better work than Jason Segel, who had the smaller-than-life quality that you'd expect if you cast that pretty-funny guy you went to high school with in a feature film.)

Matt also wonders if by calling the movie a "something of a dud" I meant that it wasn't funny at all, to which I'd answer with a resounding no. Large swathes of the movie weren't nearly as funny as they should have been, and a few sections - particularly the running gag about the uptight newlyweds - were just painfully unfunny. But one of the leads was almost hilarious enough to almost make the whole thing worthwhile. To wit:

Lost's Why Problem

Now that I've caught up in my viewing, I'd like to associate myself with Peter Suderman's remark that the most persistently irritating thing about Lost is that "it asks 'why' but answers 'what' and 'how.'" This problem, obviously, is built into the show's architecture, since it's not knowing the "why" that keeps us coming back for more. But it was one thing to consistently withhold the why across the first two seasons, when all the characters were more or less just as in the dark about it as the audience. Now, though, the show has reached a point where certain characters know the why - or at least some of it - and others have good reasons to want to know the why; moreover, the in-the-dark characters often have the means to force the in-the-know characters to explain the why to them. Which means that to keep the audience guessing, the in-the-dark characters have to act ridiculously, implausibly satisfied when the explanations they get stop with the how and the what.

The show is still crackerjack, mind you, but only in those episodes when everybody's too busy doing things to ask questions - as at the end of last season, and the first few episodes of this one. When the pacing slows, as it inevitably must, and the characters have time to sit around and talk things out, things get really irritating really fast. This problem made the middle of last season an enormous drag, and I'm worried it's going to kill the middle of this one too.

David Simon Is Still Talking, Dammit

I was going to say something about David Simon's latest attempt to prove that he doesn't care what the critics thought about the final season of The Wire, not at all, not one little bit, but just for the record he's smarter than all of the self-interested, can't see the forest for the trees, would never have made it back in the old days when true newsmen roamed the earth journalists who got all caught up in boring stuff like "plot" and "characterization" and "dialogue" and just didn't have enough perspective on their business to get how frickin' brilliant his critique of the modern newsroom really was. But Vulture beat me to it.

While I'm on the culture beat, I'd also like to associate myself with Vulture's remarks about the wonderful Judy Greer.

More Chatter on The Wire

The valedictory conversation continues. Here's part 2:

You can watch parts 3 and 4 here.

Exit Simon

The Wire's creator has his say, at length.

(Also, he'll be on NPR's Talk of the Nation, along with Ed Burns, at 3 PM today, if you feel like calling in and grilling him.)

Untangling The Wire

Just before the finale aired, we taped a conversation about the show with Mark Bowden and Jeffrey Goldberg, both of whom have written extensively about The Wire recently. I was the (none-too-smooth) moderator; you can watch part one here:

If you're looking for post-finale commentary, you can find the Goldberg take over at Slate; for a jaundiced view, try the Sun's David Zurawik; for a critical but somewhat more favorable assessment, head over to the House Next Door.

Notes on The Wire

Overall, I incline toward the Slate dialoguers’ take (and Matt's) on this season of The Wire, rather than the more favorable view that you’ll find at the House Next Door. Not that the season isn’t riveting television; not that I’m not desperately anticipating for the finale; not that David Simon and Co. are guilty of anything except failing to live up to the ridiculously high standard that they’ve set for themselves. But it remains the case that they just haven’t quite lived up to it. The newspaper plot would be an entertaining morality play in a different, lesser show, but compared to what The Wire has done with other institutions and their inhabitants it’s weak stuff indeed: A succession of one-note characters acting out a story that’s at best tangential to the state of newspapers, circa 2008. (If only Pulitzer-hungry editors and scumbag fabulists were the biggest problems facing papers like the Sun!) The season as a whole has been at once more melodramatic and more didactic than the ones that have come before, and while I’ve come to terms with the lurch toward soap opera – fake serial killers! kidnapped homeless men! – in the police-procedural plotline, there have been too many moments when Simon's declinist worldview (and his view of himself as Jeremiah crying unheeded in the wilderness) has felt like an artistic weakness rather than the strength it's always been.

I wrote a post a while back arguing that it can be a good thing when great television shows either set early end-dates on their own or get saddled with them, and that many of the high points of recent television from The X-Files to The Sopranos would have benefited artistically if their creators had wound them up earlier than they actually did. I certainly wouldn't go so far as to suggest that The Wire has overstayed its welcome; even with all its weaknesses, this season is still vastly stronger than the some of the more middling stretches of The Sopranos. But having just re-watched the whole of Simon's creation, for start to (almost) finish, I do think that if you compare the show to literature, as so many of its admirers do, the first three seasons feel like an organic whole, a single masterpiece - whereas seasons four and (especially) five are interesting and imperfect sequels to the original Great American Novel.

I know this is a minority opinion, and many people think the fourth season, with its child's-eye view of the inner city, is easily The Wire's best. But while I agree that the depiction of the four kids is one of the finest stand-alone sections in the show's entire run, it's embedded in a larger narrative that feels more inconsistent, and less compelling, than the long duel between the Bell-Barksdale gang and the special crimes unit that dominated seasons one through three. I don't regret any of the extra time we've spent watching Marlo and Carcetti, Bubbles and the Bunk (though I've had just about enough of Jimmy McNulty), but it's still the case, I think, that the canvas has grown overbroad at times, and somewhat scattershot as a result. The Wire's greatest story was the rise and fall of Stringer Bell, and nothing's matched it since.

The Three Davids

The House Next Door convenes a roundtable to debate the question of the hour: Who's the greatest of the small-screen auteurs - Milch of Deadwood, Chase of The Sopranos and Simon of The Wire?

Compressing Lost

I think Peter Suderman's exactly right about this:

A compressed season may not have been a good thing for The Wire (although, hey, it's still not bad), but I think it stands a good chance of improving the prospects for Lost. One of The Wire's strengths has always been its expert pacing, balancing the various needs for character moments, plot development, and plain old suspense. The true scope and complexity of each arc usually took five or six episodes to develop and another five or six to unravel before the last two episodes provided closure.

Lost, on the other hand, has had the opposite problem; it's been positively spastic with its pacing, usually too slow, and always too heavy on laying the groundwork for intrigue without providing nearly enough follow up. The creators are experts—perhaps the best on TV—at sucking viewers in. But they don't know exactly what to do with you once you're on the hook. A slightly compressed schedule could potentially force its writers to focus on what's truly integral to their story rather than on what's merely tantalizing.

Now whether Peter's right about this ... well, your call.

Now That's More Like It

I knew Don Adams. And you, Steve Carell, are no Don Adams. (hat tip: Jonah)

The Simon Worldview

In the comments section of Matt's post (and Reihan's, too), none other than David Simon himself joins the conversation:

Writing to affirm what people are saying about my faith in individuals to rebel against rigged systems and exert for dignity, while at the same time doubtful that the institutions of a capital-obsessed oligarchy will reform themselves short of outright economic depression (New Deal, the rise of collective bargaining) or systemic moral failure that actually threatens middle-class lives (Vietnam and the resulting, though brief commitment to rethinking our brutal foreign-policy footprints around the world). The Wire is dissent; it argues that our systems are no longer viable for the greater good of the most, that America is no longer operating as a utilitarian and democratic experiment. If you are not comfortable with that notion, you won't agree with some of the tonalities of the show. I would argue that people comfortable with the economic and political trends in the United States right now -- and thinking that the nation and its institutions are equipped to respond meaningfully to the problems depicted with some care and accuracy on The Wire (we reported each season fresh, we did not write solely from memory) -- well, perhaps they're playing with the tuning knobs when the back of the appliance is in flames.

Does that mean The Wire is without humanist affection for its characters? Or that it doesn't admire characters who act in a selfless or benign fashion? Camus rightly argues that to commit to a just cause against overwhelming odds is absurd. He further argues that not to commit is equally absurd. Only one choice, however, offers the slightest chance for dignity. And dignity matters.

... If The Wire is too pessimistic about the future of the American empire -- and I've read my Toynbee and Chomsky, so I actually think a darker vision could be credibly argued -- no one will be more pleased than me as I am, well, American. Right now, though, I'm just proud to see serious people arguing about a television drama; there's some pride in that. Thanks.

I think this jibes pretty well with what's been said in and around the Bowden essay. If you think that American society no longer works "for the greater good" of most of its inhabitants, and that our existing institutions are incapable of addressing the challenges we face, then The Wire will strike you as a masterpiece of true-to-life social realism. If you think, like me, that this assessment is too bleak by half, then The Wire will still strike you as a masterpiece - but one whose political message, as is often the case with great works of art, warrants being taken with a grain of salt.

The Wire

If you watch The Wire, you should read Mark Bowden’s essay on the show in the latest Atlantic. If you don’t watch the show, you should run – don’t walk! – out to buy the DVDs, watch the first four seasons, and then read Mark Bowden’s essay. Like most of what’s been written about The Wire by its myriad admirers, it’s a valentine to the show’s greatness; unlike most of what’s been written, though, it gets at the show's limits as a work of sociology, and the extent to which its much-lauded "realism" is undergirded by David Simon's ultimately unrealistic sense of near-despair over the state of American life - whether in the ghetto or in City Hall, in blue-collar neighborhoods or (this season) in the offices of your local daily newspaper.

Responding to the essay, Reihan and Matt both concur with this assessment, to varying degrees, but both make the point (which Bowden makes as well) that the show’s unrelenting - and therefore unrealistic - emphasis on tragic scenarios and the impossibility of self-help is a crucial part of its success as a work of art. "It’s by no means clear to me that a more accurate show would be a better show," Reihan comments; expanding on the same point, Matt writes:

... part of what gives The Wire such great power is its creator's conviction, wrong though it is, that his tragic vision constitutes telling it like it is. While departing from both reality and realism in any number of ways, The Wire is resolutely committed to verisimilitude in a way that almost no other show is. The result is the creation of a world -- Simon's Baltimore -- that feels eminently real, but is imbued with all the artifice of Greek tragedy.

In political terms it's a dark vision that, like Dostoevsky's, veers wildly between radical and reactionary and that exists, fundamentally, outside the lines of “normal” arguments about policy. Simon believes that we are doomed, and political progress requires us to believe that we are not. But aesthetically it's an extremely powerful conceit.

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that he believes we’re “doomed,” exactly; Simon’s vision lies outside the normal lines of politics, no doubt, and I take Reihan’s point that it’s effectively “an elaborate, moving brief for despair and (ultimately) indifference.” But I’m sure Simon himself considers it a brief for radical action of some sort. He isn’t a no-hoper; he just doesn’t place any hope in the meliorist progressivism that most contemporary liberals support (or, needless to say, in Reihan’s applied neoconservatism).

Continue reading "The Wire" »

You Can't Fight YouTube Politics

Two weeks ago, Richelieu wrote:

Ol' Huck deserves credit for getting this far, but success brings much higher stakes. The Goober act will have to go back to Mayberry. If Mike Huckabee is serious about winning, he must begin running a serious-minded campaign. He should lose the stupid Chuck Norris cartoons and start acting like a president. Or at least a vice president.

Two days ago, after the whole debate over the YouTube debate, Peter Suderman wrote:

I have to say, this seemed the most lively debate of the last few months, as, after the first few, they’ve all tended to blur together. But some of that, I think, is that, as an event, it was just… bizarre. American politics has always been something of a wacky traveling circus. But this was just a full-blown freakshow.

That’s not, however, to say that Republicans should resist it. Politics is becoming more of a sport, an entertainment event, and to resist that, I think, inevitable trend, will only hurt more in the end. Like it not, the GOP’s just going to have to learn to play along.

Reluctantly, I think I'm with Peter. Huckabee should keep the Chuck Norris ads, and the GOP should keep doing YouTube debates. Immediately after watching the, ah, freakshow I briefly felt as if the people who'd insisted that the GOP candidates absolutely had to do it (myself included) might have been wrong, and the people who worried about debasing the Presidency and all the rest of it had been right. But that feeling passed, and I came back to Peter's position. I think the bulk of the conservative response to the debate has thus been exactly right: The thing to do isn't to withdraw from the arena, but to make sure that 1) you know how to play the game (as Huckabee clearly does) and 2) the people managing the arena are playing fair, and inflicting the same "gotcha moments" on both sides. On this latter subject, Peggy Noonan's column seems to me to be the last word.

Sesame Street, Adults Only

Virginia Heffernan reports:

Sunny days! The earliest episodes of “Sesame Street” are available on digital video! Break out some Keebler products, fire up the DVD player and prepare for the exquisite pleasure-pain of top-shelf nostalgia.

Just don’t bring the children. According to an earnest warning on Volumes 1 and 2, “Sesame Street: Old School” is adults-only: “These early ‘Sesame Street’ episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child.”

Heffernan has some fun with what the warning might be referring to - "Cookie Monster was on a fast track to diabetes. Oscar’s depression was untreated. Prozacky Elmo didn’t exist" - but it turns out that her jokes are pretty close to the truth:

I asked Carol-Lynn Parente, the executive producer of “Sesame Street,” how exactly the first episodes were unsuitable for toddlers in 2007. She told me about Alistair Cookie and the parody “Monsterpiece Theater.” Alistair Cookie, played by Cookie Monster, used to appear with a pipe, which he later gobbled. According to Parente, “That modeled the wrong behavior” — smoking, eating pipes — “so we reshot those scenes without the pipe, and then we dropped the parody altogether.”

Which brought Parente to a feature of “Sesame Street” that had not been reconstructed: the chronically mood-disordered Oscar the Grouch. On the first episode, Oscar seems irredeemably miserable — hypersensitive, sarcastic, misanthropic. (Bert, too, is described as grouchy; none of the characters, in fact, is especially sunshiney except maybe Ernie, who also seems slow.) “We might not be able to create a character like Oscar now,” she said.

Read the whole thing, and prepare to be depressed. (But also informed: I had no idea that Sesame Street was designed specifically for the “4-year-old inner-city black youngster," or that "in East Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant in 1978, 95 percent of households with kids ages 2 to 5 watched “Sesame Street.”)

The Shock of Recognition

Gail Collins:

I would love to give you all the arguments about the virtues of the Law of the Sea Treaty, but it seems like a cruel thing to do to readers on a Saturday. One problem with the debate is that the earnestness of the proponents is equaled only by their lack of pizazz. (The opponents call the treaty “LOST,” causing many innocent journalists to open their e-mails in hopes of getting new information on what really killed Mr. Eko in Season Three. The advocates call it “The Law of the Sea Convention.”)

A sub-Maureen Dowd pop-culture reference, you say. And I'd agree ... except that the LOST/Lost confusion has actually happened to me several times in the past month.

Meanwhile, defying Collins' claim that opponents of LOST can't "come up with any rational arguments," against it, Tyler Cowen offers a few here. Opponents of Lost, on the other hand, are probably beyond his help.

The Medium is the Message

The whole "Prominent Beltway Figure Isn't All He's Cracked Up to Be" genre is often a tired one, but I have to say I enjoyed Paul Waldman's Tim Russert takedown. Still, I'm inclined to agree with Michael Brendan Dougherty:

My only problem with Waldman's piece is that it assumes "broadcast journalists" could (or once did) serve an important function as journalists. I can't think of any major broadcast figure who was lauded for his reporting. Instead they are all hailed from on high for possessing a quality. Jennings was dignified. Williams is warm. Murrow was authoritative. Brokaw was chewing on taffy. We should admit to ourselves that the Sunday Talk Shows are less entertaining versions of Conan O'Brien for people convinced that television can edify them, or educate them about current events.

I can think of some exceptions to this rule, but basically, the point holds: TV is a spectacularly bad medium for serious exchanges about politics. It's a very good medium, on the other hand, for political theater, which is why people like Russert - who's skillful at creating the "gotcha" moment, and great at playing the "guy from Buffalo who makes the powerful people nervous" - succeed in it. And complaining about the unwarranted respect he gets somewhat misses the point: Russert isn't a successful television personality because Reader's Digest and Howie Kurtz fawn all over him; they fawn all over him because he's a successful television personality, and his mix of superficial depth and deep superficiality is crucial to his appeal.

(The same goes for Jon Stewart, not incidentally, whose famous anti-Crossfire rant was itself just part of a schtick that runs as much toward superficiality - albeit of a liberal rather than bipartisan variety - as the show he was railing against.)

Reihan: Rethinking Trade?

As someone who thinks the Republican party should move to the center on issues ranging from healthcare to inequality to taxes, I often point to the marked divergence between mass and elite Republican opinion on these and other issues. Consider this, from the latest Wall Street Journal-NBC News Poll:

While 60% of respondents said they want the next president and Congress to continue cutting taxes, 32% said it's time for some tax increases on the wealthiest Americans to reduce the budget deficit and pay for health care.

This comes as no surprise to me, and I think this reflects an admirable appreciation of reality on the part of 60% of respondents. But the bad news is very bad:

Six in 10 Republicans in the poll agreed with a statement that free trade has been bad for the U.S. and said they would agree with a Republican candidate who favored tougher regulations to limit foreign imports.

Again, this shouldn't be surprising. As Brink Lindsey has argued, Republicans and Democrats alike tend to sell free trade exactly the wrong way, in crude mercantilist terms. Trade barriers

are a tax on American economic health for the benefit of narrow interests that cannot possibly justify their special immunity from market discipline. The fact that other countries have similar policies or worse is no reason for us to cling to our own folly.

Unfortunately, the current US trade agenda is increasingly more about imposing our (insane) intellectual property rules on the rest of the world and less about lowering our own trade barriers.

I tend to think we need is a trade and development agenda organized around building a global middle class and encouraging environmentally sustainable growth. I realize that this will sound very fishy to ardent free traders. Let me state for the record that I think we should unilaterally zero out all tariffs, and that any environmental rules should be settled upon by a multilateral process that is sensitive to the dangers of protectionism.

Gossip Girl vs. The O.C.

Here's one take, from the smartest teen soap opera fanatic I know.

Also worth a look: This mini-interview, in which Josh Schwartz dissects the mistakes he made with The O.C.

Ridicule

I started out a big Sarah Silverman fan, but I don't know ... I think it's enough already. The obligatory New Yorker profile called her brilliantly-conceived comic persona "quiet depravity", but I think "naive depravity" describes it better. At her best, Silverman plays the nice Jewish girl from a nice bourgeois family who remains blissfully unaware that she's a terrible, terrible person. It's hard to describe why this persona works so well; better to just quote it in bulk, as the New Yorker's Dana Goodyear wisely did:

“I’m just sensitive,” she says onstage. “My skin is paper thin. People don’t realize it, because I’m sassy and I’m brassy, but I just— I see these care commercials with these little kids with the giant bellies and the flies, and these are one- and two-year-old babies, nine months pregnant, and it breaks my heart in two.”

As the audience reacts, she presses on. “It breaks my heart in half. And I don’t give money, because”—out of the side of her mouth—“I don’t want them to spend it on drugs, but I give. You know I give. I, this past summer, sent fifteen really fun cowl-neck sweaters to this village in Africa, in really fun colors—expecting nothing, by the way—and they culled their money together, whatever they call it, and bought a stamp and sent me a postcard thanking me, and it said thank you and that they had enough sweaters for every single member of the village to get one and that they were delicious.”

...In another of her bits, she invokes the events of September 11th: “They were devastating. They were beyond devastating. I don’t want to say especially for these people, or especially for these people, but especially for me, because it happened to be the same exact day that I found out that the soy chai latte was, like, nine hundred calories. I had been drinking them every day. You hear soy, you think healthy. And it’s a lie.”

Now obviously this sort of act doesn't translate all that well to the kind of things that really successful comics are asked to do - like, say, host award shows. But I still think it's instructive, and a little depressing, to contrast the Silverman routine quoted above with her now-famous takedowns of Paris Hilton (at the '06 VMAs) and Britney Spears (at this year's edition).

Continue reading "Ridicule" »

Entourage

I had more or less given up on the show after the mediocrity of last season, but I was pleasantly surprised with the run of episodes that just ended. My only complaint, in fact - apart from a faint disappointment that Anna Faris isn't as good at playing herself as she is at playing Cameron Diaz and Christina Aguilera - has to do with the lack of verisimilitude on two fronts: The movies-within-the-show, and the paparazzi (or lack thereof). Obviously, Entourage is a fantasyland version of Hollywood, not the real thing, and a certain degree of implausibility is par for the course. But the show is supposed to be a mix of realism and satire, not a straightforward send-up, and it seems to me that the creators could have put a little more effort into, say, the clips from Medellin, this season's big project, which is supposed to be a flawed movie from a talented director, not a Zucker brothers version of Scarface. And the next film Vincent Chase has lined up - Silo, "a futuristic thriller set on a farm circa 2075" - sounds like something from Mad Magazine.

But that's a quibble (and movies-within-movies are always laughable - it's a Hollywood tradition in its own right). The curious absence of the paparazzi, though, is more annoying, both because it's deeply implausible that the defining feature of celebrity life circa 2007 wouldn't ever touch this fast-living band of brothers, and (more importantly) because it's a lost dramatic opportunity. I understand that you can't have Vincent Chase and his pals constantly trailed by paparazzi, because that would cut the heart out of the male fantasy the show is selling, but the role of photographers and gossip-mongers in modern Hollywood seems like awfully fertile ground for a show that occasionally seems to be running short of ideas.

Here's a snippet from Medellin:

The Politics of Mad Men

I still haven't watched more Mad Men - I will, I promise! - but the fact that it inspires articles like this one isn't exactly encouraging. Writing for The Nation, Anna McCarthy makes the show sound like The Sopranos meets Pleasantville - a glossy, tedious exercise in ex post facto liberal condescension. Mad Men, she writes, is "concerned with demonstrating the progress we've made in gender relations since the alienated years before the women's movement," and with dramatizing "the disaffection of midcentury suburbia's 'lonely crowd' and the oppressive expectations of the feminine mystique," not to mention "the hatefulness of conformist WASP culture." (Such dramatic conceits are hackneyed enough at this point that even a Nation writer like McCarthy can recognize that they "are not terribly original," and gently suggest that may be "more revealing as a window onto the present, exposing what 'cutting-edge' popular entertainment considers the cultural gains and losses of the past fifty years.")

Then she whips out this hum-dinger of a conclusion:

Maybe, and perhaps wholly unconsciously, Mad Men signals a desire to return to a time when advertising, and the consumer culture it helped sustain, represented the vitality of Western democracy and the deeper moral meanings of capitalism. The perception that consumption is patriotic is still around, part of the arsenal of ideas used to gain support for the "war on terror," but it's becoming increasingly hard to stomach, especially as bankruptcy and foreclosure rates rise. Automobile ownership, planned obsolescence and the pure plastic perfection of Tupperware were once part of a battle against totalitarianism, American weapons of containment in the cold war. Nowadays, they are part of a global image problem, one that all the President's admen may be powerless to fix.

Dana Stevens, call your office.

The Past Is Another Country

I've heard enough people I trust rave about Mad Men to give it at least four or five episodes (I just watched the premiere two nights ago) to grow on me, and I'm happy to accept Matt's judgment that Sacha Zimmerman's review is a bit on the harsh side. But at least in episode one, this particular Zimmerman complaint rings true:

Throughout "Mad Men," corny references to the show's moment in time come thudding down on the viewer, alive with self-consciousness. The head secretary practically winks at the audience before telling the "new girl" not to be intimidated by the "technology" as she reveals a boxy, avocado-green electric typewriter. Draper chastises a subordinate for stealing a report from his trash, which he knows must have been the case because it's not like there's "some magic copying machine" around the office. And after being shown a mock-up of a space-themed advertisement, he riffs on how ridiculous it is to think that we would ever go to space. Then there are so many references to how none of the characters--even pregnant women--seriously believe cigarettes are bad for them (insert annoying "we know better now" coughing fit here), it's maddening. I get it: It's 1960! Now move on.

But I'll keep watching ...

Headquarters

If you're curious where Yuval Levin, Glenn Beck and I get our marching orders, well ...

Note the presence of (ahem) Rainier Wolfcastle.

Mendozzzzzzza!!!!!!!!

I'm obviously looking forward to seeing The Simpsons Movie and all, but I'm a little baffled to hear that the plot involves "Arnold Schwarzenegger, who has been elected president of the United States." In The Simpsons alterna-verse, shouldn't that be President Rainier Wolfcastle?

The Fanboy As Critic

Do you know what I really dislike? Extremely long critical essays that describe their subject, often in painstaking and florid detail, without bothering to interpret it. Like, for instance, this NYRB essay on The Sopranos: In more than 5,000 words, Geoffrey O'Brien manages to tell us almost nothing about the show that a reasonably literate viewer doesn't already know. This is the essay for you if you never noticed that on The Sopranos, "bad or misconstrued information bounced around in a world defined by random breaks, mostly unlucky," or that "any throwaway line could encapsulate a scarily decentered world," or that "a single episode could juxtapose a certain number of disparate elements, and the high pleasure was in the jarring elegance of the juxtaposition." Or if it interests you to learn that "Coppola's Godfather films and Scorsese's Goodfellas [were] crucial reference points for The Sopranos." Or if you need a critic to explain that "Chase's neatest trick was to make a show about the mob—a show that laid out in gratifying detail the workings of scams and hits, political connections and techniques of intimidation, internecine maneuverings and FBI infiltrations—that constantly suggested that the mob was not what the show was really about." The whole piece is a fan's letter, not a critic's analysis, thick with plot summary, favorite scenes and bits of dialogue, written in the pantingly verbose style of an overeducated version of Harry Knowles: "These Soprano women made iridescent the masculine monochrome of the gangster genre ... the mere sight of [Tony] padding yet again in white bathrobe toward the refrigerator evoked a disheveled Wotan worthy of a show whose capacity to extend and savor its transitions could seem Wagnerian." Gag me with a spoon.

Contrast O'Brien's vaporings, if you will, with Emily Nussbaum's justly-praised post-finale reading of the show. Nussbaum takes up some of the same concerns that O'Brien does, particularly the audience's complicated relationship with Chase's characters, but then actually advances an argument about that topic, in an essay that's a model of clarity and economy - two-thirds the length of O'Brien's, and eight times as interesting.

Jon Lovitz, Andy Dick, and Phil Hartman

As celebrity altercations go, this one - and the backstory - is pretty remarkable.

Hef's Women

As a frequent, albeit unwilling, viewer of The Girls Next Door, I found Daphne Merkin's meditation on the show for Elle at once maddening (since I found myself disagreeing with her about seventy percent of the time) and fascinating (since she's wicked smart). It makes an interesting companion piece to Jon Zobenica's great Atlantic essay on Playboy, which of course, being a subscriber and all, you've already read.

Made in America

"I'm not saying there's nothing out there," Tony tells Paulie near the end of the Sopranos finale, after the superstitious capo describes catching a glimpse of the Virgin Mary in the Bada Bing. "But you gotta live your life."

Continue reading "Made in America" »

How The Sopranos Ends III

Believe it or not, I still don't know - some blogger I am! - thanks to a confluence of events that will prevent me from seeing the final episode until this evening. So apologies for the lack of insta-analysis, and if blogging is light today, it's because I'm limiting my consumption of media to places that won't give anything away - which in our spoiler-obsessed age is precious few.

(And I won't read the comments on this post till tonight either, so no need to self-censor.)

How The Sopranos Ends II

It doesn't comport with my own theory about the show, but Matt's prediction would make for a pretty neat (and plausible) twist ending.

Also, is this Robert Iler quote suggestive, or am I just overanalyzing?:

Did he think Tony was ultimately a good father? “Yeah,” Mr. Iler said, but he added, “I think sometimes he loved his son, but he hated him a lot more of the time.”

Was a good father? As in, past tense? As in, one or both of them dies in the finale?

Okay, it was probably just the way the writer asked the question. I'll calm down now.

How The Sopranos Ends

Here's the TNR prediction thread. Here's New York Magazine's staff predictions. And here's David Edelstein:

I don't believe that Tony will die because I think David Chase will want to visit him again sometime in the future. He has too much stature to kill off just yet. Chase is too canny to make the mistake made by, say, John Updike: Having failed to channel a young would-be terrorist very convincingly, Updike is probably pacing his room at this very moment and moaning, "Why why why did I have to kill Rabbit?" ...

Tony will lose the foundation of his life. He will lose at least one member of his immediate family, although which one is difficult to guess. Anthony Jr. has become paralyzed by self-doubt and conscience, so he is already effectively out of the picture. That leaves Meadow and Carmela. I'm guessing Meadow because it would be harder to live with her death than Carmela's — and of course it would mean the end of his marriage in any case.

I, too, have come around to the view that Tony won't die - not because I think Chase wants to revisit him, but because I think the show is about the hell that wicked people make for themselves here on Earth, and killing Tony, in a way, feels like letting him off too easily. The Sopranos happily kills off its quasi-innocents (Adriana, Bobby Bacala), its unreflective sociopaths (Richie Aprile, Ralphie, and now Sil), its screwups (Vito, Christopher) and its rats (Big Pussy and a host of others), but Tony and Carmela are the only characters smart enough to understand on some level that they've damned themselves, and I think Chase will leave them alive with that knowledge. (Unless he wants to end it with Tony headed for the light - or the Finnerty family reunion - and finding his mother waiting for him.)

And I'm with Jeffrey Goldberg: Killing Meadow off is way too much of a Godfather III rip-off, and killing A.J. off just feels like a waste of time at this point. So I'm going to join Goldberg in suggesting that the finale will end with the Soprano nuclear family still intact and even with Tony back on top, in some limited sense at least; if any mob boss gets capped in the final hour, I'm betting that it will be Phil Leotardo. The show isn't about the life and death of Tony Soprano, in the end; it's about his soul, and the audience's (increasingly-vain) hope that a criminal they liked might be able to escape his pathologies and find redemption. The end of Tony's therapy, which closed off this possibility once and for all - with Melfi closing the door on him, in a scene that echoed the closing door at the end of the original Godfather - is the only ending that story needs. Killing him would be superfluous.

You Like To Watch

You know, for someone who thinks Lost jumped the shark way back in 2005 and isn't shy about saying so, John Podhoretz is an awfully faithful viewer.

Guns on the Wall

I agree with John Podhoretz's complaint about this week's Sopranos (beware of spoilers if you click through), but I don't think the implausibility he points out significantly marred what he rightly calls a great episode. I do, however, want to associate myself with Alan Sepinwall's comments this week, which get at something that worries me as well:

... I really do hope something is coming of all this. Since this final season began, I've been warning everyone that Chase and company may not be going for an earth-shattering conclusion, but more of a life-goes-on finish. But the writers have spent so much time over the last five episodes hinting that some apocalypse is coming - whether it's Phil making war with New Jersey, Tony taking out Chris or vice versa, the FBI completing their RICO case, Muhammed and Ahmed up to no good - that if none of that comes to pass, every bit of anger from the fans is going to be justified.

There comes a point when the storytelling stops being daring and unconventional and starts being sloppy and cruel.

Obviously, part of the genius of The Sopranos lies in how it confounds expectations (though if I read one more piece that references the missing Russian from the "Pine Barrens" episode as an example of this tendency, I swear ...). Over the years, Chase and company have taken Chekhov's dictum about the gun on the wall in the first act that needs to be fired by the third and said, well, maybe it does and maybe it doesn't, and it's more dramatic if the audience doesn't know which it is. But as Sepinwall suggests, if the final season of your show has about a dozen guns on the wall, all of them obviously cocked and loaded, you more or less have to pull the trigger. If you don't, you'll have sacrificed the very sense of realism that The Sopranos has labored so hard to build - and as Jonah says, you'll leave the audience with the suspicion that you never had any idea what you were doing to begin with.

Going Out On Top

Why is it good news that one of my favorite shows has announced that it's going off the air? Because it isn't going off the air till 2010, there will be three more (16-episode) seasons and they'll run re-run free, and if there was ever a show whose creators needed an end-date to shoot for, it's Lost. But there's a larger lesson here, and one that I wish some other great TV shows had taken to heart: Imagine how much better The Sopranos would be if David Chase had been kept to four or five seasons, or The X-Files if Chris Carter had stopped churning out episodes in 1998 or so. I know Deadwood fans were sorry to see David Milch's revisionist Western cut off after three seasons, but maybe they should consider themselves lucky that there will never be a season four, or seven, or twelve (Al Swearengen faces off against William Jennings Bryan for control of the Populist Party! Hijinks ensue!). The same goes for The Wire, which seems poised to leave on a high note after this year's final season with its "best show on TV" halo still untarnished.

As a general rule of thumb, I think the better the show, the more it needs a cut-off date. Three's Company could have run forever; Seinfeld should have ended a season or two earlier than it did. Ditto the long-running Beverly Hills 90210 versus its far superior heir, The O.C., which could have left on a George Costanza-style high note by calling it quits after its near-perfect first season. Similarly, I'd think more fondly of HBO's Rome if it had only been a mini-series, without the mediocre second season, and I'm worried there's a similar sophomore drop-off awaiting Big Love. Leaving too soon makes a show immortal, while leaving too late ... well, would My So-Called Life be remembered as fondly as it is if we'd had to watch Angela Davis and Jordan Catalano get together, break up, get back together, break up - and then, worst of all, go off to the same college?

Just When I Thought I Was Out ... They Pull Me Back In

Can we please retire the phrase "jump the shark"? It started as a specific term for a specific moment in the life cycle of a television show - the point of no return, the moment when a show is lost to its downhill slide - and has gradually turned into a general term thrown out to describe any episode, or series of episodes, that isn't up to snuff. So this season of Lost, which has been generally mediocre and went through a stretch of truly terrible episodes, first sparked debates about whether the show had gone shark-jumping, and then - once things got a little better - about whether it was possible to "un-jump the shark", which is like debating whether you can return from the, um, point of no return.

This is all by way of saying that last night's episode of Lost was really good, as were several episodes before it, and if you've given up on the show you might consider giving it another chance. Basically, it's clear that the creators had an overall arc in mind for this season, but didn't have enough good material within the arc to fill out the full twenty-four episodes, and found themselves spinning their wheels for long stretches. (Andrew Dignan discussed this problem here, pointing out that the shorter seasons on HBO often make those shows feel tighter and less bloated.) This required pointless flashbacks and enormously frustrating sequences where characters deliberately avoided pursuing leads and asking questions that any normal human beings in their situation would jump all over. It was bad, bad, bad. But it wasn't irreversibly bad, and for the last few episodes it's been at least partially reversed, and the series is interesting again. I hope it stays that way, but if it starts going downhill again - which is perfectly likely - I hope that we can stop talking about whether Lost has jumped, un-jumped, re-jumped or de-jumped, and just talk about where it went wrong and whether it can get better again.

Gambling With The Sopranos

One of the great advantages of doing a TV show for HBO - particularly a long-running, critically-acclaimed, genre-busting TV show - is that you don't have to fall back on the crutches of lesser television programs. For instance, when you need a dramatic device to signal a major character's downward spiral, you can afford to set it up multiple episodes or seasons in advance, and you definitely don't need to pluck a movie-of-the-week problem - like, say, a gambling addiction that's never manifested itself before - out of thin air. And while it's perfectly plausible that a random New Jersey mob boss would have a crippling gambling problem; it's much less plausible that the Tony Soprano we know and love would suddenly go all Marge Simpson and start blowing hundreds of thousands of dollars on "sure thing" football games, after six seasons in which his gambling has been confined, so far as I can remember, to poker games at the Bing and the occasional junket at Foxwoods.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that I thought last night's Sopranos was weak stuff, and particularly disappointing given that the first three episodes of this final mini-season seemed to have shaken free of last year's wheel-spinning mediocrity.

In the close-knit but violent world of Sopranos blogging, Jeffrey Goldberg agrees with me about the episode, as does Chris Orr; Matt Zoller Seitz is more forgiving.

Update: And Peter Suderman joins the apologists.