A Perspective on The Wire

You've probably been too busy following Lost or American Gladiators to pay much attention to The Wire, which is the best, and most disillusioning, show to ever cross the airwaves and not come into your house. I'm surprised I went seven weeks without talking about it, and I've been particularly shaken by the final season so far, walking away from three shows agape, "Holy shit..." This season's Institution of Massive, Unabashed Failure is the media, and the storylines explore what's been hinted at previously: the twisted, co-dependent relationship between the hegemony of news organizations and, the root cause of all the world's ills, you (yes, you) and your simple-minded complacency. Set a year after "A New Day in Baltimore" never materialized, the broke-ass city is still perpetually desperate for political capital but also actual, monetary capital. Carcetti sold his soul to the powerful upper-middle class white wing of the Democratic party, brushing off the governor's offer from last season and leaving the schools in the same unacknowledged decrepit, useless condition from last season. The cash crunch has reached into the Baltimore P.D.; the five percent raise Carcetti enthusiastically promised the police department is being paid out ━ or, more precisely, not paid ━ in sheets of office paper, to be redeemed on that glorious day when the city actually has a few coins in its coffers. The media, the once-venerable Baltimore Sun, not a real newspaper but "still a pretty good newspaper," is beset by similar financial privation and, suffering takeovers from the Los Angeles Times and then the Chicago Tribune, abandonment from a corporate structure with other things on its mind. The institutional mantra in Baltimore is "more with less," which is even more retarded than it sounds.

The one institution thriving in Baltimore's new day is the New Day Co-Op, and particularly Marlo, who's consolidating his power after a year-long hiatus while under scrutiny from the MCU. The MCU, which was shit-canned twice when the city did have money, is disbanded along with its investigation into the row house murders, and McNulty is shipped back to his perch, and continuing downward spiral, in homicide. This season, more explicitly than any of the others, asks how the common people, shlubs like McNulty, just trying to do their damn jobs for Christ's sake, get ━ that is, wheedle or extort ━ basic resources from The Powers That Be, y'all and your wallets, and what that makes them and their society. It would involve using you, an ATM for your own good, and examining the moral consequences later; I'm reminded of House: "I teach you to lie and cheat and steal...and as soon as my back is turned, you wait in line?" So The Wire presents three parallel scenarios: McNulty, after a lot of alcohol, tampers with crime scenes and old cases to manufacture a serial killer terrorizing Baltimore; Clay Davis finally faces exposure of the shady non-profits he's been skimming from; and a Sun reporter, Templeton, makes himself the paper's new golden boy by fabricating quotes and making up the news. How do we get what we want, what we're entitled to, or what we believe we're entitled to? We give you what that base, emotional, jumping to conclusions part of you wants ━ whatever that is, it's pretty cheap ━ and you reciprocate.

That's where the press comes in. The utopian idea is that the media is supposed to provide us with the information we the people need to run our country, it being a democracy and all, but with that in mind, I'm starting to realize how phenomenally irrelevant it is. I'm talking about the opening to the six o'clock news: a minute on someone shot in Rockaway Beach, another minute on somebody stabbed in Bayonne, then three people shot in Morrisania, all in critical condition, with some blonde reporter standing by at the hospital's ambulance bay. This, followed by, "Danger in the kitchen: which household product that you own can kill your whole family? We'll tell you, at eleven." What am I supposed to do with this "news?" More to the point, shouldn't we assume that all this, and the context it creates ━ You are not safe if you leave your home! Also, you are not safe in your home! Buy plastic sheeting and duct tape! ━ is bullshit anyway and the weather forecast is the most honest, straightforward part of the news?

So McNulty creates a "Homeless Strangler" character (that would be a guy who strangles the homeless, not a homeless guy who strangles ━ important difference), broadcasts it around, and gets nothing. I've always wondered this about the media, especially the sensationalist tabloids: in the exploitative, parasitic relationship between the papers and their readers, which comes first, the public's interest or the media's interest? The Chicago Tribune, being a business operating in a free market, would argue that they give their readership what it wants; as a (potential) reader, I note that my options are limited to what the media chooses to provide me. The serial killer story McNulty gives the press ranks somewhere in the middle of the Metro section. It seems formulaic: Alma's triple homicide story wound up in the same insignificant nether-zone. Number of victims, divided by how far on the fringes of society they were, plus salacious details equals location, with some bonus points for being white, an ex-cheerleader or pageant queen, missing in Aruba. Templeton, always the attention glutton, has to pretty much beg McNulty for some gripping detail for the story, something front-pageworthy, something the Post and Daily News could make a tasteless pun on.

Certain critics, who I respect even though I wish I had their jobs, read this, McNulty's serial killer yarn, as the moral decline that really costs him his soul. His transgression: making shit up? Deceiving people? He hits rock bottom ━ which is inane hyperbole in The Wire; rock bottom is more like Bubbs accidentally poisoning Sherrod ━ after giving Larry, a crazy homeless guy, a hundred bucks to relocate to Richmond and pretend to be the Strangler's next victim. Which is wrong, but morality on The Wire isn't merely a mess of gray areas but a complete condemnation of the right-and-otherwise dichotomy Sepinwall forces on it. (Oddly enough, Sepinwall lets this quagmire slide when it comes to Dexter: he does bad things for a good reason, but he's working through it.) There are bad consequences and there are bad consequences; so in this week's episode, Kima has to tell the parents of McNulty's crazy homeless man that their son, who they could no longer care for and had to let go on the street, was probably a victim of the Strangler. And it is awkward, quoth Sepinwall:

Last week, I talked about how Jimmy's abduction of Larry was the moment where he took his scheme way too far, but Kima's interview with the parents of an earlier "victim" show that Jimmy's actions have been reprehensible from the start. Sure, the dead guys are in no condition to care about what's being done to their corpses, but Jimmy's lie is devastating the family members. Like the parents say, it's bad enough to live with the knowledge that you didn't (or couldn't) prevent your son from killing himself with drugs and alcohol, but it's far, far worse to believe that you failed to protect him from being murdered and sexually molested.

Interesting, in a season that twice called out Sepinwall's medium (he's the TV critic for New Jersey's own Star-Ledger newspaper) for showing more sympathy for white victims than black victims, and for upper-class victims than poor victims, he complains about how McNulty's lies affect a white, middle-class family with nary a word about the twenty-nine (by my count) black people that Marlo had murdered, including our friends Bodie, Prop Joe, and Butchie. The Wire gives us this amazing omniscient panaroma, where the full butterfly effect of everyone's actions become clear, and still our own parochial viewpoint takes precedence. Let's review: The MCU's budget and personnel are slashed, Marlo immediately resumes consolidating his power. Marlo consolidates his power, he represses the West Side community, pays more to shady lawyer Maury Levy, makes more "donations" to Prop Joe's fake churches and New Orleans hospitals (which are likely connected to Clay Davis, especially given the land deal Nareese brokered for that drug dealer slash strip club owner), and in particular buys more heroin from the Greek. The Greek sells more, he ships more Slavic prostitutes to America in cargo containers, not to mention whatever he does with his implied terrorist connections. Reading in the paper that your son was murdered and molested (assuming the Sun printed that, even though there's no confirmation that Crazy Larry was either) must be horrible, maybe even almost as bad as being dragged to a vacant by Chris and Snoop, or working as a sex slave in freaking America.

It's not that Sepinwall's ethical take is wrong, especially given that, as I said above, McNulty isn't extorting resources because he wants to catch Marlo but because he thinks, as a homicide police, he's entitled to some resources. But The Wire is full of characters who make ethical decisions that are, let's say, short-sighted, and the degenerate world thrives on them. This season I may admire Bunk and Kima for doing the right thing, real policework (although it seems like Bunk wouldn't have re-opened the Marlo investigation if McNulty's selfish jackassery hadn't put him in a bind), but at least McNulty isn't taking the ethical shortcut the System lays out for him and passing responsibility to somebody else.

This attitude is persistent in Baltimore, under the guise of "fairness" and "political correctness." We saw the same thing last season in the schools, with our sympathies reversed because it was children at the bottom of the shithill instead of drug pushers. I'm thinking of the scenes where Donnelly socially promotes a finally thriving and clearly unready Dukie to high school, effectively ending his education. "Did I do something wrong?" he asks. No, it's just too much trouble, from the superintendent, the media, City Hall, having him in the school and she is long past that. "Have some kids of your own," she tells Prez, who's protesting Dukie's promotion, as if helping nobody is morally superior to helping just one person. All of these institutions that are supposed to make us civilized instead leave a Hobbesian world where there's no loyalty, and no altruism, to anybody but you and yours. Then the police complain that these gangsters won't snitch.

"How Does That Make You Feel?"

I started watching In Treatment, HBO's latest exploration of psychotherapy after the brilliance of The Sopranos and the excruciating tedium of Tell Me You Love Me. In Treatment is slow and tough to watch, or more precisely tough to sit through, set entirely in a psychiatrist's office with only two characters' (three on the Thursday episodes) back and forth, and I oddly admire it for breaking television paradigms. It's like watching a stage play, maybe one of those Greek tragedies before the concept of "action" had been invented, and the character study is hidden in the way the patients exposit their stories. But the show is having this bizarre side effect on me; I'm beginning to feel inadequate about my own therapy sessions. Do I talk enough? Are my narratives interesting, meaningful, clear? Or am I just paying two-hundred dollars a fifty-minute hour for a live audience, for the kinds of incoherent ranting write so hastily in my blog?

This is typical for me: Thanks to many, many years in therapy, I now recognize my habit of ascribing the idea of "normal" to my external observations and then using that contrivance as a standard against which I judge my own experience. With that view, I find it interesting that I only read half the show ━ the patients' role, their physical, tangible behavior, their acting ━ in the context of my own psychotherapy. The doctor, Paul ━ as if I call my therapist by his first name ━ remains a cipher, the Greek chorus in the dialectic, frequently just pulling on the patient's issue even as it's flowing smoothly out. "Tell me more." Or, "Go on." Punctuated by one of those weird therapy revelations: what you just said is interesting, illuminates differently, contrasted to this other thing that slipped out of your mouth five sessions ago, like the whole thing's scripted. I mean, obviously In Treatment is, in fact, scripted but Rodrigo Garcia does a truly sublime of job of revealing these characters, where they're blabbing on and on and on, self-assured, and then Paul does his mental calculations and turns his patients transparent before they're even aware of it.

I wasn't seeing Paul as anything more than the sounding board until the Friday episode, when Paul has a weekly appointment with his own therapist. You'll recall that on The Sopranos, Dr. Melfi also had an analyst, distilling (and, by the end of the series, adulterating) her emotional reactions, and I'm now wondering if my therapist sees a therapist. I approve of, and appreciate, and value psychotherapy and the dynamic ━ to the non-initiate, it's like paying somebody to be your friend; but, in a healthy relationship, you're paying the therapist to not be your friend. He's someone who has no emotional stake in your well-being and his relationship with you, so he can be what your friends can't: objective and critical. And that's beneficial; obviously, psychiatrists realize that benefit, and that's why I'm now working on the assumption that my therapist has his own Ivy League-educated Psy. D., and he spends fifty minutes a week on that couch, and they call each other by their first names. The idea makes me jumpy, and not just because I've never cared to conjure anything about my therapist's life outside our sessions. I'm not happy with him having issues, or if he doesn't have issues, then he has issues in that sort of self-help way people go, "Everybody has issues."

Now I have to see him as a person, and not an Eliza with intelligence, textbook education and life experience. He's a person who could find my sheepish narratives tedious, or could be frustrated with my stubborn impenetrability, or could just plain resent me. He can judge me, in the same way I'm afraid everybody else does, and I'm sure that's compartmentalized somewhere off in my brain.

But on the other hand, I've been meeting with this particular therapist for seven years, and another one for three years before that, and another one for two years before that, all of whom, I now presume, can't fit into my reductive mold as emotional processing units, the role I secretly want to foist upon everybody else. That means that despite my best efforts, I actually am succeeding at normalizing my relationships with them, objectively and in reality, as human beings. Which is why I'm in therapy in the first place. Hmmm....

Scab

Dear American Media Conglomerates:

I generally sympathize with the working man, the Americans like myself who perform the tedious, backbreaking labor necessary to keep our great nation supplied with the coal, the industrial machinery, or the non-English speaking domestic help it needs to thrive. I'm disturbed when greedy corporations stepping on these good Christian folk, and thankful for the unions supporting our working-class as they struggle to put food on their dinner tables. But with your screenwriters on strike, and broadcasters threatening to fill the airwaves with absurd new reality show mash-ups like Are You Smarter than a Singing Midget Who Loves New York? I feel like now is a good time to compromise a few principles, step across the Writers' Guild picket line, and offer up my writing talent — just to keep television running smoothly, of course.

And also because I'd fucking kill for the job these thankless little sell-out shits aren't doing. I would write for TV shows or movies gratis... I would write for the vast wasteland detritus — Zoey 101 or The Jimmy Kimmel Show or that super-sterile original programming on the ABC Family Channel — just to see my name in the credits and hear something resembling my words out of the actors' mouths. I would pay Viacom, Disney, Warner Brothers or NBC Universal to write for them. FOR CHRIST'S SAKE, ARE YOU LISTENING, STUDIOS!!!???

Not that I'm looking to screw anybody, but it's like watching professional beer tasters or racecar drivers complain about their jobs, but even more oblivious to the irony. I'd just love to watch some NBC exec march up to Tina Fey and throw her 30 Rock words back in her face, "You got into this business because you're funny, and you're weird, and you're socially retarded. And you also got into it because it pays well," and yes, I'd miss 30 Rock but the idea of Tina Fey working some shitty normal job like the rest of us suckers, like Tina Fey as a claims adjuster or Jon Stewart painting dotted lines down the freeway, is just so comically absurd — somebody ought to write it into a Saturday Night Live sketch, if the writers were actually working.

So I'll be stopping by Rockefeller Center and Viacom's headquarters in Times Square tomorrow, pushing aside the picket lines and that giant inflatable rat (I'll stick a few nails in the damn thing if that makes my proposal any more appealing), and pitching my ideas about a new comedy where a fireman and a pyromaniac share an apartment and date women who are way out of their league. Oh, oh, and I've got this one about obscenely rich, spoiled teenagers in Montana who wear skimpy clothes and have sex with each other. And one about four professional women who run their own shipbuilding yard....

Looking forward to scabbing for you!

Thanks,

Jay Harris

Finally Improving Fall '07 TV Watch: Aliens In America and (yay!) Pushing Daisies

Sometime around the third season of Sex and the City, someone out in TV Land decided that sitcoms no longer needed to be funny. Humor in comedies died as the once ubiquitous laugh-track faded out, which in itself was one of those great steps in television evolution I was totally in favor of: "The Powers That Be finally realized that we, the viewers, were smart enough to figure out where the jokes were without being told." Turns out, TV viewers aren't all that smart, and left to wander the comedy landscape without a guide, they seem to think anything not involving an actor in an Emmy-winning crying scene is funny. Hence, Desperate Housewives, which is mediocre satire and about as funny as having Dane Cook perform at your parent's funeral.

Not that the unfunny comedy can't be good; I can count Weeds, The Knights of Prosperity, Everybody Hates Chris, and probably others if I thought about it, as shows that aren't absurd enough to really pull off the humor that they're going for, but are certainly watchable just to empathize with the well-crafted, multidimensional characters. Complaining that Weeds isn't funny is a lot like complaining that Mad Men isn't funny: who said it had to be? You still get a way better TV bargain than you would watching Two and a Half Men.

That's pretty much the case with Aliens in America, the CW's token dork show, about an unpopular high schooler whose image-conscious Midwestern family takes in a Pakistani exchange student. The premise sounds like a recipe for stock "comedy," and there's plenty of mismatched housemates dialogue that's obligatory but not that funny, like den mother Franny telling Raja, the exchange student, to go to bed at 6:30 so the rest of the family can discuss how to "return" him. (It's a theme that's sort of harped on in the pilot.) The family's shallowness and ignorance is the joke here, but it comes off as mean-spirited plotting. I had the same issue with the bit about Justin finding himself on the seniors' "Hottest Girls" list or the reveal with Claire's boyfriend at the end of the episode.

But the show is really good when it's spontaneous — the scene out of nowhere with the bullies fighting over which one of them would sleep with their sister was hilarious, and (maybe I'm naive here but) I wasn't expecting Raja's class to unanimously blame him, personally, for 9/11, especially when the whole dialogue opened so innocently. I can see the show moving in that direction — the writers had to manipulate the story for Justin and Franny to eventually have changes of heart, but the rest of the characters can grow organically since they don't have to, a never will, accept Raja. The dynamic softened in just the right way, pitting a now-likable family I can empathize with against an unlikable world I also empathize with. I'm not prepared to laugh, but I'm prepared to care.

Not that I'd lodge any complaints if the networks would create more shows like 30 Rock or Arrested Development. You know, stuff that you actually do laugh at.

So, last night...

I've been waiting sooooo long for Pushing Daisies, since I'm a huge Wonderfalls fan, and the "Pie-lette" did not disappoint, other than in its coy yet surprisingly appropriate title. Bryan Fuller, who created Dead Like Me and the aforementioned Wonderfalls, and wrote the Heroes turning point episode "Company Man," specializes in charming tales of alienated misfits and pulls them off with a lot more honesty than, say, Josh Schwartz (Chuck) or Tara Butters and Michele Fazekas (Reaper). Of the three shows Fuller created, Pushing Daisies is by far the most cloying and even more saccharine than its color palette, but the material — within the first five minutes, a nine-year-old boy kills his mother and his best friend's father — tempers and even somehow justifies the sweetness, like in those pre-Disney fairy tales where the princess marries Prince Charming and the evil witch has her brains picked out by a colony of rabid bats.

Fuller brilliantly exploits his fairy tale narrative model to get what has to be the most complicated exposition ever on television out of the way in a hurry: "Once upon a time... magical powers... here's the rules... we're not gonna bother questioning them cause that's not what the show is about." Little Ned has a crush on the little girl next door, and the amazing ability to raise the dead with a single touch. The caveat is if he touches them again, they die for good, and if he doesn't, someone else dies in their place... although that's a moral dilemma that's pretty easily worked around when Ned's childhood crush is murdered and he brings her back to life.

The look and tone of the show are heavily influenced by the French fantasy director Jean-Pierre Jeunet, where the quirks grow out of characters fascinated by the trivial, like the mechanical hand on a stick Ned uses to pet his once-deceased dog. It's not even close to actually petting your dog, but it's important because it's all he has. The central conceit — Ned and his childhood crush, Chuck, are infatuated with each other, but can never touch — is similar, with the disparity between what's genuine and what's settled for magnified a hundredfold. The kissing monkeys as surrogates for Ned and Chuck, is actually pretty touching and special, as basically the peak of their relationship, and representing what they'll never achieve. Sad stuff, but it made the part of me that owns ten Chicken Soup For The Soul books smile inside.

I also need to say a little about Chuck who, in a show with zero gender politics, somehow manages to be the most daring and dynamic new female character of the season. So, writers of Bionic Woman, let's see how this works, so maybe your show won't suck so much. (Actually, I read that the second episode wasn't nearly as bad as the pilot, but it doesn't matter to me, since I was watching an episode of Mythbusters I've already seen seven-hundred times.) Chuck has two things your bionic heroine desperately needs implanted: something to strive for, and something to lose. Pushing Daisies and its bizarre presentation is satisfying on the same visceral level that Bionic Woman reaches, but Fuller hits a nerve of universal experience that most shows this season don't dig anywhere near dip enough for.

More Fall TV '07 Watch: Reaper and Life (plus more on Chuck, with spoilers)

I am so happy I found Reaper on the CW, the first indisputably good new show of the season, and also the first show since Flight of the Conchords that made me laugh out loud. It's the underachieving slacker complement to overachieving nerd comedy Chuck, although Reaper is smarter, funnier, and better overall. Don't feel bad, Josh; as an assembly-line show producer pandering to teens with disposable income, at least you're no Kevin Williamson. Plus Reaper will be canceled first.

Reaper's success as a coming-of-age comedy is the same as Chuck's failure: the supporting cast. The basic plots are "puerile dude gets in situations over his head and grows up," but Sam, our hero in Reaper, is doing it without a net. The Devil pretty much conscripts Sam into chasing down on Earth souls that escaped from hell, but as the show's grown-up teacher figure, Satan seems to be a lot less helpful than the Casey plus Sarah combination on Chuck. Casey and Sarah do the tough stuff for Chuck, especially the "What do we do with this guy?" decision-making, as if (also because) he's not an adult capable of running his own life, and they essentially run out of denigrating options by the time he saves the day: first, let's lock him in a secret government facility... that won't work, so Sarah tells him to wait in the hotel lobby... but that doesn't work, so they push him aside when they're (not) defusing the bomb... and even when Chuck is actually doing the job neither of them can, Casey still has to give him shit because Chuck is supposed to be worthless as a human being in this situation.

The supporting cast of Reaper is just as clueless and unreliable — maybe more — as Sam is, and Satan is hilariously unhelpful. Sam's first capture is a guy who can turn himself into fire, and the Devil not only gives Sam a Dirt Devil — not a Hoover or an Oreck — to do the job, but he doesn't even bother to fully charge it. Sam's partner is the anti-Casey — a fat, lazy slob named "Sock" — who's so unhelpful, one of the weapons he brings to the final confrontation is a battery-powered touch lamp. Their struggle is greater, so their success is greater.

That's why I want to see more of Chuck and less of Casey (but Sarah's fine), and that's why I wish ABC would make an all-Marshall Alias spin-off.

Now Life is one of those shows that has no idea what it's doing. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it makes Life totally perplexing. I will never forgive the clunkiest exposition ever — the narration is standard, except the flashbacks are told as a talking heads documentary, complete with subtitles identifying who's on screen and spontaneous, bleeped swearing. The writers were too busy handing the hero, Charlie, television-friendly quirks to be bothered with revealing the backstory through dialogue. I hate literary laziness.

There's a criminal-of-the-week plot, the serialized "who framed Charlie" plot, other stuff involving his ex-wife and her new husband, but the degree to which you tolerate Life is directly proportional to the degree you tolerate Charlie. (I've seen a lot of comparisons to House, and while both shows rise and fall based on their protagonists' "endearing" idiosyncrasies, that's where the similarities end.) My perspective is that a lot of Charlie's weirdness is unmotivated — I like his mantra, "I am not attached to material goods," while speeding his brand new Cadillac down the freeway — but Charlie's fruit obsession seems to come from nowhere and go nowhere. The decision to minimize the impact of Charlie's time in prison also seems wrong to me, since (I assume) that's the primary source of his current personality, and that's the conceit of the show, and that's why I'm supposed to care about him.

One of the final scenes in the Life premiere is Charlie looking at a mind-map of his case, trying to solve who framed him, but I just don't care. If anything, I'm looking forward to the standard Charlie and his partner cop scenes, which are, well, standard. I see that Life is also showing on the USA network, and it feels like, along with (superior) Monk and (inferior) Psych, that's where this show belongs.

Tonight: Moonlight on CBS, which I doubt I'm watching, because I don't have a three-year-old crush on Jason Dohring.

British Actors Remake Shows Your Parents Watched, Fall '07 Premiere Season: Journeyman and Bionic Woman

We have an immigration problem in this country: British actors are taking roles that American actors could be doing. They do the same job for less money, and its the studios' cheapness that's ruining America. Also the fact that they're dipping into the late-seventies, early-eighties well of weekday morning programming on the Sci-Fi Channel for ideas. I'll preface this by saying I've never seen the original Bionic Woman, but I have seen that episode of MST3K where they gave Tom Servo bionic sound effects (missing from the remake), so I'm totally qualified here. I also don't remember too much about Quantum Leap, other than in one episode, Scott Bakula was in the body of a monkey because someone in the writer's room was on crack that day.

I loathe Bionic Woman. I loathe Michelle Ryan and the projects she takes — I loathed her in the BBC's Jekyll, too. I also loathe Miguel Ferrer, although I sort of forget why, and that Chinese actor guy. I loathe the conceit of the show, and I loathe that there's an evil bionic woman, because that's just fucking stupid. I loathe the characterizations, and the fact that we'll be watching Ryan's new-fangled Jamie Sommers come to terms with her bionic arms and legs and etc for the next twenty episodes. I especially loathe how deadly serious the show takes itself. But mostly, what I loathe about Bionic Woman and Jamie Sommers is how much she makes me miss Buffy Summers (and Xander and Willow and Spike and not so much Dawn...) and how I totally never appreciated the complicated genius of that show.

I'm gonna be making more references to Buffy throughout this, because it looks like Bionic Woman is essentially Buffy's fourth season, except it makes you want to put something sharp through both your eyes, instead of just one.

Of course there's a secret government facility, which makes me already hate this show, and you know what? I'm changing my mind from the review of Chuck — it doesn't matter whether Secret Government Agency characters are competent or not, they still all suck. This SGA puts nanotechnology or something inside attractive women. Jamie's in a car crash, but she's hot, so our government will spend fifty billion dollars fixing her up. Meanwhile, forty-two million Americans can't get health insurance. Just saying. Apparently, having bionic robots or whatever gives you superpowers, all of which are pretty much copied from Heroes. Super-healing, super-strength, super-hearing: the future, ladies and gentlemen, is in nanotechnology, with the amazing power to turn ordinary hot women into Quentin Tarantino's wet dream.

I don't know where the show's going after expositing that nanotechnology pretty much makes you perfect and invincible in every conceivable way. Fake pregnancy, maybe? You're probably thinking, okay, if she has no physical flaws, maybe there's some intellectual stuff she needs to work through. Nope, sorry, she's already a genius. Problem solved. (Actually, in a stupid continuity error — and we're only in the first episode people — Jamie tells us and her also genius boyfriend that she's not that smart, so... did anybody even proofread this script?)

But is Jamie a computer whiz? No. Finally, it's like computers and needlepoint or something are the two things she's not perfect at. However, there's a younger sister who is a computer phenom, and who I'm sure will absolutely not be hacking into the SGA's firewall later this season, because that would be really, really fucking obvious.

Jamie's final power is an extraordinary ability to bitch about her amazing superpowers, instead of maybe being just a little grateful they saved her life. Every damn thing about the presentation of Bionic Woman is wrong, starting with the dense seriousness hated creator Laeta Kalogridis shoves into this silly, silly show. That's Whedon's brilliance: he realizes that the whole Buffy concept is kind of dopey, and he takes advantage of those parameters with the show's trademark humor and abrupt shifts between solemnity and absurdity. Bionic Woman does everything possible to make me believe that this is some real important shit — from the ridiculous scientific explanations ("We replaced one-eighth of your blood with anthrocytes."), the pretentious artsy blocking and camera-work, Jamie's groundless emotional breakdown in the middle of the episode. All the growing-up metaphors in Buffy, the conflict between her need for a normal teenage life and her coming-of-age destiny, Kalogridis replaces with inane Nietzschean meditations on the nature of power that basically boils down to "Power is good."

That probably makes mine the only Bionic Woman review containing a reference to Nietzsche. Proud!

Oh, yeah, I need to mention my most hated line from Bionic Woman. It's a throwaway, but I think it sums up everything that makes the show an exercise in pandering to women who think they're too ugly to find a man, and Quentin Tarantino. A mother and daughter are driving along some country road, and Jamie comes up running next to them at fifty-five miles an hour (which just seems really odd in itself) and the daughter, in awe, says something like, "Girls can run really fast!" Yay! Except they really don't mean it. Take a show like Buffy, or Veronica Mars, or Alias and no one comes out and says, "Girls rule!" because they don't have to. That message is in the show, and in the character. The view of Bionic Woman is, "Girls are weak without weird, non-existent mechanical thingies inside them." Stupid, stupid show.

Watch the defunct Now and Again instead. Michelle Ryan may be more fun to look at than Eric Close, but Now and Again, with real (still broadly drawn) characters in a genuine conflict with something at stake, is a lot more fun to watch.

Okay, now that I've got that out of my system, I have less to say about Journeyman. It's Quantum Leap. It's pretty dull. Guy who played Lucius Vorenus on Rome can't do an American accent. It uses the same time-traveling special effect, that shimmering background, that they used in Quantum Leap.

But... two good things. One, they're already finished with the inevitable subplot where Lucius Vorenus's wife doesn't believe he travels through time, and it threatens their marriage, etc. And two, they did a really nice job — and a really well-paced job — finishing it. Maybe one more episode, but I have a feeling I'm not going to have the patience for this one.

Tonight, three words: Dwight and Angela! Or, you know, if you've got a pulse, OMG!!!! PAM AND JIM ARE TOGETHER!!!!! EEEEEEEEEEEEE!!!!!!!

The Hap-Hap-Happiest Time of the Year, Fall '07 TV Watch: Californication and the Tell Me You Love Me pilot

One of the positive things about not writing about television professionally is that I can avoid slogging through the stuff that bores me, like HBO's once-promising and plodding new series Tell Me You Love Me. There was only one good reason to watch this "provocative and honest exploration of intimacy:" the actors, and they don't exactly deny it, are having actual sexual relations on camera. But in the pilot, there's maybe three minutes of naked bouncing and a lot — at least seven separate character arcs worth — of filler. Not narrative foreplay, just this tired, lethargic semi-philosophical conversation, as if HBO decided it wasn't really in the mood and was pretending to have a headache.

But onto the sex! The only thing I can say is that it's got a higher production value than most porn, and holy cow does reproducing look tedious. There's four couples: Dave and Katie, Jamie and Hugo, Caroline and Palek, and Old Sex Therapist Lady and her old husband. In the pilot, only one of them pushes any sort of on-camera limits. The good news is that it's Jamie and Hugo, the most physically attractive couple; the bad news is that all you can focus on are Hugo's balls and just... ewwww. It's only a minute of that, and the rest of their story is an extremely standard "she's pissed because he refuses to commit" plot that I'm sure cavemen and cavewomen were suffering through. Hugo's thinking — there's a lot of people in the world and chances are good he'll meet an additional someone — feels genuine, but everything that comes after it — especially garrulous Jamie's refusal to discuss this observation — is as forced as if Hugo met Bill Henrickson in church one day.

The other couples are really no less generic. Katie tolerates her passionless marriage until she catches Dave masturbating in bed one day. There's not even a lot of not-having-sex in that storyline — the scene where Katie and Dave are naked together and completely oblivious barely registers. Caroline blames Palek for her inability to conceive, but it too feels forced. Maybe this is a pacing issue; we never see Caroline and Palek (or anybody in this show, really) happy so there's nothing to contrast their break down against. There's two other problems I have with Caroline and Palek as well. First, whenever I look at Adam Scott, I see Mr. Rooks, the pederast history teacher from Veronica Mars, and when Caroline starts stroking something that, in the dark and from a distance, could be his cock, it's just really creepy. And second, the bathroom in their house doesn't have a door. Caroline's essentially peeing on a pregnancy stick right out in the open, and people who do that shouldn't have children in the first place.

The couples are connected through their couples' therapist, Old Lady May, who is having sex, although thankfully in the dark and under the covers. I guess even old people don't want to look at themselves in the nude... although if HBO was honest about pushing boundaries, that would be the one to push.

Also sex-heavy, but even more squeamish, is David Duchovny's Californication — its name tells you that it's licentious. And also that it takes place in California. Genius. Duchovny plays Hank Moody, a once-successful writer who sleeps with women (less than) half his age even though he's a complete prick. Californication manages to hit every single false note possible, largely because I can't understand for the life of me what Hank is so cranky about.

Look, the season premiere of House is tonight, and there's a character who's insufferable with some motivation. House is surrounded by idiots, some of whom are responsible for crippling him. I'd be pissed too. Moody, on the other hand, is an ungrateful little shit, with a Porsche, a great apartment in the hills, and a never-ending supply of easy women. It doesn't really help or hurt that Moody (or Duchovny) explores his own depths — the problem is that the show itself is completely disingenuous. Hank's book, "God Hates Us All," somehow wound up with a Hollywood beauty makeover and turned into a movie "A Little Thing Called Love" starring Tom and Katie. (I've gotta admit I found that funny.) He's hired to write a blog — oh, the indignity of people reading your words off a computer screen instead of a printed page! — for "Hell A" magazine. I get it already: California's full of phonies. Hank fits right in.

The ultimate issue with Californication is that Hank's own phoniness undermines what should be real moments of redemption for him. In the pilot, Hank stops in southern California's home of vanity, the Apple Store, and writes a quick couple of sentences about how he only likes going down on hairy women. Great — he's writing again — and he's being subversive! — but his prose is so clunky I wonder why he's a writer in the first place. The little voice-over at the end of the third episode, Hank decides to write the magazine's blog so he can be a role model for his daughter, is sappy enough I wanted to puke, largely because Hank is just the kind of guy who's barely even aware that he has a daughter unless she's standing right in front of him. All the griping and false, obvious revelations wear thin pretty quickly.

But good news — like I said, House premieres tonight, and that's pretty much guaranteed to be somewhere between solid and great. (Their last two season premieres were pretty much in the "solid" category.) Reaper is supposed to be good, Damages is improving now that Rose Brynn's incredibly dumb character is actually playing that high-powered legal (and extra-legal) game, and Heroes didn't suck last night, even if we now have three characters who can fly, signaling that the producers have officially run out of ideas for superpowers.

Fall '07 TV Watch: Chuck

This moving picture box fad has really taken off, with everybody and their mother putting up some TV criticism blog, and the Television Without Pity website expanding dramatically. TWoP has also suffered a corresponding dramatic fall in quality — like if I wanted to know what happened on last week's "Weeds" without any snarky commentary, I'd just watch "Weeds." Message to Sars and Wing Chun: I know you still think you're coasting on the fact that you watched "Dawson's Creek," only you were doing it ironically, but get over yourselves already. If you can't find anything to make fun of in "Weeds," what are you going to do with actual comedies? The only funny parts of the recaps for "The Office" are the jokes copied verbatim from "The Office."

Sadly, they'll have to do. I don't have the time to recap every episode of every show on television because not enough of you are clicking on my affiliate marketing links (more precisely, none of you) so I have to do a non-television related job.

I don't think I've been watching that much NBC over the summer, so I'm not sure why I feel like Chuck has bludgeoned into submission with the most annoying ads this side of HeadOn. I'm a little surprised to say that I like Chuck — not the show Chuck, just the protagonist Chuck. Pretty impressive comic acting job by Zachary Levi then; even Masi Oka took more than a few episodes to grow on me last season. (That sentence doesn't sound right.) Look, let's just say that creator Josh Schwartz, who's also behind The O.C. and this season's eye-candy teen drama Gossip Girl, understands nerds about as well as he understands that public defenders, even in Orange County, don't earn nearly enough to live among California's high society, and also that they generally don't adopt their troubled teen clients. I'm just saying.

Despite Schwartz's best efforts to cram every single geek, nerd, dork, and doofus stereotype from the mid-eighties into Chuck, Levi tends (okay, sometimes tends) to transcend the material and also transcend his irritating, horny, and naturally greasy best friend Morgan, played by Joshua Gomez with significantly less subtlety. Gomez is more or less Fogell from Superbad, but what's funny for a high school kid with a litany of hidden insecurities is incredibly irritating when it's played for laughs by a grown-up with facial hair and zero self-awareness. I'd seriously rather watch the HeadOn commercial than listen to Gomez forcing a line. Hint: if you're watching the pilot, you can mute the TV whenever he's in a scene and you won't miss anything.

The rest of the cast does the sort of perfunctory job you expect from people playing the straight man in a spy-comedy series. Yvonne Strzechowski is extremely watchable and gratuitously in her underwear for a couple of scenes; Adam Baldwin continues to remind me of an animatronic in the Hall of Presidents. Whatever. Levi absolutely owns the show; it thrives when Chuck knows that he's good at being a nerd, like the scenes when he's talking with Sarah on their date or the brief scene when he's running through the hotel fountain instead of around it, and it dies a painful sputtering death when he gets into dense Urkel territory.

As you know from the commercials, Chuck accidentally downloads a bunch of government secrets... INTO HIS BRAIN!!!! Huh? In a pilot that's half exposition, no one's even going to take a stab at explaining that one. Naturally, evil government types try to capture and/or help him, and I would just like to say about the U.S. government. First, please invest in a damn firewall, so our nuclear secrets don't accidentally get sent to some kid browsing the net for porn? And second, is being an anonymous secret agent in an anonymous suit and tie a civil service job or something? Every show, there's always just like one person in the CIA who's competent at their job and a bunch of nincompoops waiting to get their asses kicked. As a matter of national security, we need a training course for new recruits, because one day, our agent who knows what the hell they're doing is going to come down with the flu, and the next thing you know, we're all speaking Russian and our nation's capital is Putingrad.

I bet you're wondering how this plot can become even more absurd. Well, our agents Blonde Chick No Longer in Her Underwear and Poor Man's Duane "The Rock" Johnson (...or is The Rock the poor man's Adam Baldwin? I don't know.) have to track down Chuck because.... I know what you're thinking. They need to track him down because he has all these secrets in his head and they need to make sure he doesn't share them with, like, Iran. Cause that makes sense, right? Well, that's not exactly the reason — you see, he has the only copy of all these secrets in his head. That's right, our government was too lazy to go to Best Buy and purchase a memory stick so they could back up only our most important national secrets. What if someone spilled coffee on the Ultra-Secret Computer, or the hard disk crashed after one too many games of Minesweeper? God, you should always have a backup! But now, if our government wants to know where an Serbian evildoer planted a bomb, they need to ask Chuck.

Chuck becomes an unlikely spy and has to go into all these dangerous situations that he's comically unprepared for. It's not particularly clear why, since he's not all that useful, aside from being a human reference desk, and if Blonde Chick and Poor Man's The Rock need to know something, well... it's not like he doesn't have a phone or anything. But then we wouldn't have a show; instead we'd have a somewhat amusing misfit nerd who I'd actually want to watch.

I'll keep up with Chuck, although I said that when Jake 2.0 came out and I gave up on that after two episodes. That's a pretty bad omen for Chuck, since they're exactly the same show. And The Lone Gunmen before that. What I'd really like to see is Chuck without the supporting cast and the show going into full-on quirky mode. The pilot's directed by this guy McG, who also directed the first Charlie's Angels movie and therefore doesn't want anybody knowing his real name. He's an artistic coward, making both a half-assed action show and a half-assed comedy. Someone like Bryan Fuller or Joss Whedon could probably get the balance right and make the show fun to watch instead of a crapshoot between lame setpieces. The final verdict on Chuck is: if they changed everything about the show, it would be good.

"If My Words Are Your Words..."

I wrote that David Milch deserved the benefit of the doubt with his inscrutable allegory John From Cincinnati, and now that the season's over I can judge for reals. There's no doubt that Milch is a brilliant person... but John From Cincinnati is like a piece of modern art, where you stare at something like an aluminum tube splattered with paint and you're just not sure whether the artist is a genius or a hoaxer. There's that little artist's intent wall-blurb talking about the individual's isolation in the Internet age, and it sounds like an interesting idea, but it's just not in the aluminum tube hanging on the wall. Perhaps Milch bit off more than he could chew in ten episodes — Deadwood had a fraction of the philosophical intensity of JFC and it still took Milch three seasons to finally realize his point. The trademark Milchspeak is probably the writers choking on the myriad themes.

So when JFC manages to express a complete, intricate thought about these characters and their universality, it's exhilarating television, and rarely does TV actually say something. The final three episodes, where Imperial Beach coalesces into a community based around their fear and awe of John's miracles, flew by — the scene near the end where some perv makes an obscene comment to Tina was fun (even if some characters' personalities shift way too suddenly), especially compared to the corresponding scene in the fifth (sixth?) episode. On the other hand, when JFC blathers — and it blathers a lot — the show becomes a mess of contradictions: profound and petty, damning and redemptive, stationary and motile, and it's a bitch to muddle through. John's limited vocabulary doesn't help any, as his words spin around what he's trying to say so much it makes you dizzy.

"Ragheads are gonna get themselves eradicated." All the 9/11 imagery, for example, was lost on me — even though it seems to be the turning point in society, interpersonally, for Milch. 9/11, and the reductivist images Americans were bombarded with in the days following changed how we see other people. We categorize everything into "stuff I understand" and "stuff I don't understand," and then work to eradicate the latter rather than understand it. I get that. But from the commentary, not the show, and — I'm sure this is contrary to Milch's expectations — I'm not planning on re-watching the show until I can interpret every scene and line. It's not Ulysses. Redemption generates community, and community generates redemption, and unfortunately many impenetrable plot lines are left purposeless in the cold.

Supposedly.

Maybe someone much more brilliant than I — someone with a literature degree from Yale — picked up on the deeper significance of the Stinkweed parade (John's idea), but I just cynically saw it as an evil corporation making a buck off (what looks to us like) a miracle. Milch, perhaps more globally cynical than me, was writing something completely opposite. Who knew? Freddie's imaginary drug war ended simplistically, which seems to work for the show's themes but not the show itself. Mitch's reunion with his family doesn't seem to negate that he's an oblivious new age pinhead. I saw germs of our knee-jerk reaction, and mis-reaction, to fear in the hospital's lawsuit against Dr. Smith, but again I couldn't follow it anywhere. Cunningham remains cryptic with his teddy bears, and I'm pretty sure there's a major plot point regarding him and Cissy that was barely alluded to ("You had shown me a kindness in the past.") and I had to find out about through Wikipedia. Extracting anything out of this show is downright maddening.

I'm afraid that Milch is setting up a second season, given the bizarre "Where are they now?" list that the series ends with, plus the never-explored (apparently) celestial relationship between Cass and Kai. I will not be watching JFC, Part Two, which is never going to get made. Wonderfalls, basically the same concept, except it was a comedy and it was comprehensible, didn't get a second season and it deserved one. Yeah, you still had to think (which viewers of the FOX network apparently don't like), but you could have an epiphany with Wonderfalls. All JFC will give you is a headache.

That being said, Ed O'Neill's performance is amazing. I mentioned this last time, but maybe some Academy of Television Arts and Sciences people didn't read my earlier post. I would love to see a show, nixing the sprawling socio-philosophical ideas, about Bill and Zippy. Maybe they solve crimes together or something.

Summer TV Watch, Part Two

It's no surprise that the comedies premiering off-season, with the exception of Flight of the Conchords, all got lousy reviews. Networks tend to save the funny stuff for when it'll pay the bills. I had low expectations for the non-premium channel dramas, too, except for Damages, with FX's mixed success at creating good drama and because I couldn't figure out what the hell it was about from the teasers. So there's been a lot that I'm not even giving a chance, and I don't think I'm missing out on anything, but let me know if I am.

Creature Comforts: I had the misfortune of having a video store clerk recommend to me the British first series of Creature Comforts. I was in my "Nick Park plus modeling clay is the coolest combination on earth since peanut butter and jelly" phase, and Wallace and Gromit was already checked out. Creature Comforts left me completely flummoxed — because no one bothered explaining the conceit to me. It's genuine interviews (with shut-ins, in the original incarnation) animated through anthropomorphized animals, so think Crank Yankers or Fonejacker, with some insight into the human condition. On reflection, it seemed like something tailor-made for me, but it was boring at the time and I didn't feel like giving Creature Comforts another go.

Heartland: I totally forgot about this show, where the dad from Everwood plays a transplant doctor who has issues. Who doesn't, these days? But Heartland has three strikes going against it: its name is a pun (and not a very good one), its name implies that it's the most inoffensive and unchallenging medical show since twice-removed Golden Girls spin-off Nurses, and frankly I don't think there's anything Treat Williams can do to put a dent in my man-crush on Dr. Gregory House. Morena Baccarin, maybe.

Side Order of Life and State of Mind: They're like Lifetime movies-of-the-week that keep revisiting you, bringing you into the sharing circle and spreading mild PTA gossip. At least Lifetime's gotten bored with droll but hot detective shows. (Yes, I caught... uh, glimpses of them all.)

The Kill Point: I guess I'm turned off by anything on Spike TV that's just dripping with testosterone, but The Kill Point got some favorable reviews. Maybe if I run out of other things to watch...

Greek: Clark Duke isn't gonna save this one for me. On a related note, did you know that some wonderful person put all eighteen episodes of Undeclared up on Bittorrent?

Saving Grace: This seems to happen a lot in television: a bunch of people come up with the same mediocre idea, like a song lyric remembering contest, at the same time. Saving Grace is about its protagonist, conveniently named Grace, and her divine redeemer. Sounds a little familiar, doesn't it? The hook is that the troubled soul in Saving Grace is a woman, so naturally that's gonna create some problems, plus snag the viewers who are missing their Lifetime crime procedurals. But there's always The Closer, which seems to get by just fine without the angels.

With all that out of the way, I've got plenty of time to drink in what looks most promising. Right now, that's Matthew Weiner's Mad Men, on AMC, the network that seems to think Murder by Numbers, Psycho II, and The Flinstones in Viva Rock Vegas are all "classic" movies. I had lost faith. Now, I can't attest to the historical accuracy of Mad Men, set in an advertising agency in the 1960's, right before the fiction of American domestic bliss was about to crumble under the counter-cultural revolution, but it does a very nice job of capturing the impending transitional, with both the hindsight of the audience and the blase indifference of the characters, unaware of what's sneaking up on them. Don Draper embodies the cavalier attitude of the era, where nothing can ever go wrong and the power dynamics between men and women, individuals and their families, and consumers and their products will never change, even as the first episode's tobacco company sub-plot hints at the shift. Draper's gotten by hawking the health benefits of light cigarettes ("four out of five doctors smoke 'em") and is helpless when the government steps in and bans that tactic.

I really hope this show stays on the air, because I'd love to see if and how Draper re-manufactures his relationships with his clients, family, and the women in his life as the culture changes. I'm also looking forward to watching the group dynamics among the characters marginalized in 1950's society: the gay illustrator; Rachel Menken, the Jewish department store owner; the secretarial pool, not to mention the decline of the "all-powerful" telephone operators (including Mel!!!). Mad Men has built-in potential, and I expect good things from it.

Damages, on FX, is a wild card, depending on how it conceives, and how Glenn Close plays, Patty Hewes against the FX slimeball protagonist tradition. I went into Damages thinking of Patty as a Vic Mackey-type of antihero, a compromised person whose (little) goodness comes from her struggle out of her morality play, but now I'm not so sure. The pilot, after two twists that I totally called and a gratuitous third one that left me feeling dirty, had more of a Nip/Tuck vibe. You're a voyeur into a world where everyone's utterly reprehensible: Patty, her billionaire nemesis Ted Danson (in a role I thought only Tim Curry was allowed to play), and all of their tool henchmen lawyer acolytes. I'm afraid it's not going to be a story so much as psychological porn.

Thrown into this mess is just out of law school Ellen Parsons, who I'd love to identify with if she weren't so damn spineless and politically dense. The pilot moves back and forth in time, starting with "Six Months Later," when Ellen stumbles out of her (?) apartment building naked and covered in blood, refusing to talk to the police — and we don't have a lot of information here, so there might be a reason for her behavior here. But it doesn't really contrast with Ellen's denseness when the first guessable twist is revealed — when we all figure out why Patty hired Ellen, but the scene is written and played so gently, and with such distance from the topic at hand, that the question wasn't how Ellen is going to use this revelation but if she's even aware that it's been revealed. Her endgame in the pilot is so beyond stupid, so beyond deductive reasoning that I actually felt bad for her, like Patty's taking advantage of a child or something. Maybe she smartens up quickly, and there's your story, but right now it seems like we're focused on the antagonism between Patty and Ted Danson and Ellen's just a pawn.

Finally, Burn Notice, which along with Monk, Psych, and repeats of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit, is perpetually being shown on the USA network. It's a guilty pleasure... well, I've caught four episodes so far, but never from start to finish, and while they're not the horrendous dreck this action-spy comedy could have been, it's not all that much pleasure either.

I think the producers were hoping that all it would take to make this show work is pretty pictures of Miami and ex-secret agent or something Michael narrating obvious tidbits about spycraft for you to use next time you're stuck in a Syrian prison or something. Remember the voice-overs from the first two seasons of Veronica Mars, and how they were always in there because the execs at UPN thought their viewers were morons (maybe they had good reasons...) who couldn't follow the action on the screen at that very moment? Imagine that, and pretend Veronica had to freeze the action and put a subtitle under each new character, with their name, occupation, and relevance to the plot. It's not like they've come up with such a unique take on the Cuban drug dealer that I'm completely stumped or anything.

Lazy, lazy writing. Also lazy: Bruce Campbell, who's gained about a hundred pounds of fat since the Evil Dead movies. And what's with all these scenes of people doing their nefarious business in fancy restaurants or nightclubs? Maybe plot your world domination scheme in private, where there aren't a hundred people who could be listening in or seeing you act all sketchy. This is why rooms were invented, people.

Maybe I just miss MI:5.

Summer TV Watch, Part One

Remember the old days, when summer television used to be good for nothing but newsmagazines and repeats? Now summer's good for newsmagazines, ridiculous prime-time game shows, and repeats. What an improvement! Thankfully, there's cable, which is serving up one great offering, one incomprehensible offering, and a lot of stuff with potential that will either rise and become classic or fall into cheesy melodrama. And Meadowlands.

Flight of the Conchords is the only summer show this far that I look forward to seeing, and it's not just because I have a huge crush on fan-slash-stalker Mel. In the recent evolution of the sitcom, where Two and a Half Men is the hunched-over neanderthal polluting the gene pool with its laugh track and The Office is the Star Child, Conchords is the cave-painting cro-Magnon, top of the food chain comedy. On paper, it's your standard icy entertainment industry conceit with Bret and Jemaine breaking into sometimes-relevant musical numbers for a change of pace, but it has a slacker vibe to it that's kept well and mercifully subdued. There are hits and misses for Conchords, but the ratio is pretty high and climbed as I got used to the quirky, off-paced, and usually small jokes, like the cameraphone Bret glued together for Jemaine ("You ruined the camera. And I don't think the phone works either.") or Murray's bureaucratic insistence on taking roll call before every three-person band meeting.

It's actually a nice breather when you think about it. Comedy, especially television comedy, gets a lot of mileage out of the Grandiose Doofus character, you the audience react along with the leading straight man to Cosmo Kramer or Dwight Schrute's antics. Kudos to Flight of the Conchords for being antics-free, to the point where it realizes (part-time) comic foil Bret can be replaced with a mannequin and a backing tape. The show is aimless, one long digression sprinkled with brain farts: "Girl tonight we're gonna make love / You know how I know? / Because it’s Wednesday / And Wednesday night is the night that we usually make love / Tuesday night is the night that we usually go to your mother’s place and I teach / her how to use the video machine again / But Wednesday night is the night that we make love..." Like that.

HBO's other new summer program, John From Cincinnati, is an impenetrable mess with a lot to live up to as the show that premiered right after The Sopranos finale and the show that got Deadwood cancelled. I can sympathize with the arguments for hating it, even aside from the fact that it makes Twin Peaks look like Friends. Rebecca De Mornay has spent pretty much the whole series with her volume on eleven, Greyson Fletcher (and to a lesser extent, Keala Kennelley) are wooden and painful to watch, the characters — save for perpetually moody Cissy Yost and her new age tool husband Mitch — are personality-challenged, and the ponderous dialogue is... well, can you tell that David Milch used to be an associate professor of literature at Yale? Yes, yes you can.

I can't really disagree. John From Cincinnati, this far at least, is no substitute for Deadwood and I think its biggest flaw is that lack of that stark character contrast dynamic, good and evil (and later anti-hero) played out between Seth Bullock and Al Swearingen. But... two things. After Deadwood — and I admit that it took me a couple of attempts to get through the first few episodes and figure out what the hell was going on — I think Milch deserves the benefit of the doubt that he's going somewhere with John. (It's not like people have this issue with the similarly semi-cohesive Lost.) The themes of divine redemption are everywhere and its clear they're sneaking up on the Yosts, and I trust that by the end of the first season, everybody in Imperial Beach will receive what they've earned, which is more than I can say for any season of Lost.

And John has its moments of sheer brilliance. Ed O'Neill's despondent widower performance, especially his one-sided conversations with Zippy, rivals anything that Ian McShane did with his Milchian soliloquies and the Indian chief head-in-a-box. John's speech on the astral plane or whatever, about his Father and the ones and zeros in Cass's camera and general hugeness, was exhilarating, even if I didn't understand ninety percent of it. Watching John From Cincinnati is like watching a static field — sometimes literally — but maybe that's an antidote to its bizarre information overload, time to process the telepathic bird, and John's magical pockets, and the haunted motel room, and why Mitch is levitating, and John's parroting speech patterns, and why does Butchie Yost need to get back in the game, and what happens on September 11, 2014?

At least all the clues point in the same direction here.

But speaking of weirdness, Showtime imported a competing freak show called Meadowlands over from England. I only watched the first episode — so somebody please let me know if the remaining seven episodes are worth watching — where some British guy, his British wife, their British daughter, and their alternately autistic and articulate British burn victim son get shepherded away to an isolated community for people in witness protection. It's seriously a rip-off of The Prisoner, only with the writers high on paranoia instead of LSD. Again, just a bunch of crazy characters revolving around a (relatively) sane family. The difference between Meadowlands and John From Cincinnati is that there's a sort of storytelling logic behind the latter. The craziness is there to affect these characters, force them to grow. In Meadowlands, it felt bizarre for the sake of being bizarre — like you couldn't just make a show about a family in witness protection. They have to be a family in witness protection with a matronly sexpot neighbor, and a creepy handyman, and an objectified obese girl, and a whole stupid town that welcomes newcomers by line dancing. Oh, I probably just spoiled Cloverfield for you. Sorry.

More tomorrow, on what basic cable's offering...

I took some time out of my not-so-busy yesterday to check out NBC's struggling Friday Night Lights, and holy shit, how was I missing out on this!? Let me make one thing perfectly clear: I don't care at all about Texas, high school, football or Texas high school football, but Friday Night Lights manages to be about so much more — these not-quite-kids but not-quite-adults with the burden of leading their sleepy community bound by this eternal morality play, us versus them, exhibited in the football stadium every Friday night. I guess that's not as marketable an idea as "cute football jocks and cheerleaders," although it's not like NBC is having a ton of success marketing their high-concept shows where one genre becomes a microcosm of larger, universal themes, like Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip or Battlestar Galactica, which I'm not watching because I thought it was for sci-fi geeks. I wish NBC would hire the advertisers that got me to watch Sports Night during its initial run — not that they had a ton of long-term success either.

Not that I'm going to be able to generate buzz or anything, but here's my list of the new fall programming that you should be (or you should've been) watching:

• 1. Friday Night Lights. I haven't seen anything this year that comes anywhere near the artistry of Friday Night Lights. Thief, from way back in January, comes close, but it's a bit more parochial in scope. Fifty years from now, the Friday Night Lights pilot will be, if anyone's around to remember it, the cornerstone of the Western television canon. So naturally the dippy Hollywood Foreign Press Association snubbed it with the Golden Globes nominations. There are (very few) better things on television, but none that represent the medium quite as well.
  
• 2. Dexter. Michael C. Hall does an amazing job of balancing the dichotomy of Dexter and its title character. Scenes play out like a CSI with humans instead of zombie actors in the main roles, with an analytical mind that's funny and charming, almost lulling you into complacency... then Dexter has his monotone voice-over and all of a sudden, you're reminded that the show's about an emotionally vacant psychopath. Maybe Dexter's serial killer code — he only kills criminals beyond the reach of the law, which, between this show and Nip/Tuck, Miami is apparently teeming with — is a bit of a cop-out with the character's development, but his murders are only a conceit. Dexter is perfect as a tragic hero when it's the mundane, obvious stuff that hits a chord for him, and his futile struggle to at least appear normal when he's too emotionally stunted to realize there is no such thing is heartbreaking.
• 3. 30 Rock. It won't substitute for Arrested Development, but 30 Rock is the season's only funny new comedy, thanks not only to Tracy Morgan's total commitment to his outlandish character, but the entire cast's total commitment to their less outlandish characters. A lesser series would've focused the humor on Tina Fey's straight woman... and probably included a laugh track, too.
• 4. Kidnapped. A little too self-righteous, a little too over-the-top, and a little too scrubbed and polished, Kidnapped was like reading The Corrections on a long plane trip while the fat slob sitting next to you was engrossed in whatever Dean Koontz novel he picked up at the airport bookstore, i.e. FOX's totally unnecessary Vanished. What could've been pablum rose above its irritating characters and unfortunately baroque dialogue through absolutely perfect plotting and pacing. Someone in serialized television actually remembered that it helps to pay attention to your characters (Are you listening, producers of Heroes?) and to move them towards an end (Are you listening, producers of Lost?).
• 5. Nothing. Sorry, but there weren't a whole lot of good ideas that blossomed into well-made new shows this year.
• Farther down the list, maybe 8 or 9. Ugly Betty is amusing and cute and totally not ugly. Which is a bit of a problem since she's supposed to be, well, ugly. I'm looking forward to the future spin-off Not Gay Nephew Justin.
• 10. Heroes. The most bipolar show on television, Heroes would strive for mediocrity if not for two things. First, it has the most gripping plot of any of the new series, even if its unfolding is lumbering, meandering, and framed by the most pretentious voice over ever. And second, the rest of the cast is pedestrian at best, but Masi Oka rules! I thought he was a grating dork during his early scenes in Tokyo, but his ingenuous demeanor really shines when he's out of his element in America.
• 11. The Nine and Daybreak. Two more useless shows formed in the mold of Lost, predicated on holding back information from the audience. The Nine looked promising at first, but the characters failed to develop and I couldn't care what happened to them after the bank robbery until I found out what happened to them during the bank robbery.
• Even farther down the list, like 20. Men in Trees, What About Brian, Six Degrees, and Studio 60. Shows for people who watch Grey's Anatomy now and watched Dawson's Creek ten years ago. I guess advertisers like them.
• Huge gap of nothing.
• 2000. Jericho. This is the show that makes me sad Mystery Science Theater 3000 is dead. You've got a nuclear holocaust and a town full of the dumbest people God ever created, who go around asking each other, "Did you notice anything strange happen lately?" Dude, the world freaking ended! That doesn't strike you as a little strange??? I don't like to think too much about Jericho because it just makes my head hurt.

Throwing in the returning series, The Wire is, without question, the best show on television. The HFPA seems to be unaware of its existence, which I guess is only fitting for a show about how society marginalizes good people and their struggle to find dignity within their larger institutions' indifference. The Wire is too convoluted and sprawling to grab a new audience in the middle of the five-season arc, and I applaud HBO for keeping it on the air nevertheless. Also strong was the first nine-episode arc of Veronica Mars, which I'd rank up on the list right below Dexter. The beginning episodes of the season worried me a little, as they seemed like the kind of scatterbrained pacing that characterized the second season's overly-ambitious mystery, but it turned out that the story had the economy I came to love in the first season and some nice, subtle misdirection, too. Well done, writers.

NBC's new Thursday night "Must See TV" lineup is funnier than the original, even though I'm not a fan of Scrubs and I don't lose any sleep over missing My Name is Earl. I still prefer the British version of The Office and its tragic anti-hero to the American counterpart, but Steve Carell and company are still damn hilarious, plus Ed Helms as Michael Scott's new sycophantic best friend always gets laughs. The comedy pickings on TV are slim — I like Weeds, for example, but it's about as funny as Desperate Housewives — but The Office and 30 Rock make a nice Thursday night combination.

I didn't get to watch CBS's Smith, but it got extremely mixed reviews. And the CW's Runaway was off to a promising start until some producer decided the family's three kids should have the collective IQ of a brick.

Message to the Writers of House

I can't stay quiet about this any longer: Will someone please, please, please make my Christmas merry by killing off the asinine Tritter story arc that's been dragging House down for the past two months or so? I know I'm not alone here and everyone wants to see Tritter get run over by a bus two or three times or eaten by a mountain lion or whatever. I don't care. I've gotten to the point where I can imagine a satisfying story in which Tritter comes down with a mysterious disease that only House can diagnose, which is a good win for the forces of triteness.

If it's any consolation, I'll be your rare detractor who appreciates that you've written yourselves into what's becoming an annual tradition of corners full of slippery plot contrivances, but yesterday's episode was a perfect escape route, and the charms of Hugh Laurie sniping with an irascible little person — one of the show's funniest scenes since the first season — barely, barely earns you my forgiveness for not taking it.

Tread lightly, show, because I'm not seeing a way out of this conflict that won't turn House into Law and Order: Prescription Enforcement. Maybe they'll do a show where Tritter harasses some poor guy with a cold and too many boxes of pseudoephedrine. I feel like whoever's coming up with these stories, the ones where it's House versus some omnipotent antagonist, has meandered off from the show's conceit and left the characters we know and love in a lobotomized, impotent haze, with the audience's nitpickery leading them to clarity. Whatever happened to the fifty-thousand dollar a year House-is-insane legal fund that Cuddy set up? And what's House's current lawyer, at $450 an hour, been up to lately? There's no way House or his minions would put up with Tritter's vindictive crap, and it's frustrating watching them take it like bitches (except for Chase, cause he's a pushover anyway). It's infuriating watching them fall out of character just to make a halfway formidable showdown with this asshole who does little to nothing to illuminate House anyway. This is a guy who cheats at poker, steals organs, and not infrequently deliberately kills his patients, but he wouldn't fuck the police? If I wanted to watch a show about passive, whiny doctors, I'd tune into Grey's Anatomy. Then I'd kill myself.

At least Vogler fleshed out House's ethics, not to mention the lack of integrity shared by the Princeton-Plainsboro Teaching Hospital Board of Directors and the health-care industry in general (totally surprised by the latter there). But even then, I felt cheated; we'd already gotten a sense of his utilitarianism in "Maternity" and how he applies his standards to himself in "Control." Tritter, on the other hand, is a foil for House's... what, exactly? It's like the writers' room meeting went, "We've already got Cuddy reflecting the arbitrary constraints of the real world that House rebels against, and there's Wilson standing in for House's elusive emotional groundedness. What else is there?... I know, let's create a character who's as obsessive and single-minded as House, forget all about why House is obsessive and single-minded, and irritate every last one of our viewers! Great idea!"

More Fall TV Reviews: Reunion and Bones

Here's my self-promotional bid for a job as a TV reviewer at one of our local newspapers. Not that I have anything against the Star-Ledger's current TV critics, Alan Sepinwall and Matt Zoller Seitz. It's just that I'll watch TV and write about it for free, so why pay more?

Reunion looked like crap from the ads, like someone said, "Let's take Dawson's Creek, set it back in the eighties, and let's throw in a mystery so people will keep watching even though these characters are boring as hell." I wasn't going to watch it, but then the New York Times weekly television insert did a front-page story on Reunion and I thought that it couldn't be that bad. Well, it is that bad. Even for FOX, the network that thrives on ridiculous conceits (i.e. Prison Break, Skin, 24) like I thrive on Prozac, Reunion looks desperate. First of all, the show's not going to tell us which one of the main characters is dead in the opening scene. I guess the lazy-ass writers thought it would just be easier to give everyone stilted, unnatural dialogue where they can't mention the deceased's name rather than write material that actually illuminates the inevitable death around May sweeps. Strike one.

Strike two: Are these six kids all great friends? I can't tell. Someone only tells me how close they all are like every five freaking seconds. Just random extras will walk into the scene and say things like, "I've never seen six such good friends, and I knew they'd be friends for the rest of their lives." That line, by the way, comes courtesy of the gang's high school newspaper photographer, who's delivering the eulogy because.... why? Their junior varsity football coach wasn't available? All I know is that if my high school newspaper photographer were delivering my eulogy, I'd probably... well, I was going to say that I'd kill myself, but I suppose that wouldn't work out too well. Okay, anyway, they're great friends and we have the photos to prove it except they never actually do anything reminiscent of what people who are friends with each other actually do. There's a lot of brooding in their clique, and they spend a good deal of time yammering about how awesome their lives are, and there's some man-hugging. But nothing that indicates these people are actually friends. Like I said, lazy-ass writers.

Strike three: Every forty-four minute episode chronicles exactly one year in the story. So we have episode titles like "1986," which ends with the gratingly obvious line, "So that was 1986. Now, why don't you tell me about 1987? That way, we can bludgeon our audience with the setup for the next episode." Just tell the damn story; don't make me get a calendar to keep track of your stupid show!

The worst part is that the whole flashback-to-the-eighties structure gives the producers license to clutter the soundtrack with those kinds of songs Michael Bolton reminisces about in VH1's I Love The 80's, songs that really should have been put out to pasture back in, well, the eighties.

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We also had the premiere of Bones last Tuesday, a show that proves Joss Whedon is a god by making David Boreanaz somewhat watchable. (I'm still not shelling out ten bucks for Serenity though.) Boreanaz is basically typecast as dour, lifeless Angel, although since Bones is a plain-old CSI ripoff instead of a unique genre-twisting film-noir-meets-fantasy black comedy, we get fewer crazy make-up effects. More insert shots of people putting dirt into test tubes, though.

Also, there's this woman played by Emily Deschanel (who FOX is plugging like anybody's actually heard of her before) nicknamed "Bones." And she's a forensic anthropologist, whatever the hell that is, which means she studies bones. And she and Angel solve crimes by examining the victims' skeletons, and skeletons are made of bones. Get it? Oh good, you're not retarded.

There's also a supporting cast of irritating know-it-all scientists, each one wackier than the next. You've got your innocuous intern toady scientist. You've got your crazy paranoid conspiracy-theory scientist. You've got your sexually liberated well-adjusted scientist. You've got your generic scenery-chewing scientist. Basically, all they're missing is a mad scientist with the Einstein hair and the thick glasses cackling maniacally over a leyden jar. None of them can go a scene without mentioning how they're all super-cool cause they know all these awesome science facts, but how they're also emotionally damaged and unable to relate to, you know, those of us who manage to get along without throwing the words "diaphantious soil" into our conversations. Oh, did I forget to mention that Angel and whatsherface have issues? I did? How silly of me...

Her parents disappeared when she was a teenager and now she's afraid to trust anybody who's not a rotting corpse. And he lost his soul and killed lots of people, then he got his soul back and is racked with guilt. No, really, that's the subtext. Somehow, this gives them license to behave as childish, narcissistic assholes oblivious to the consequences of their actions. I don't know. That shit works on The Sopranos, but not so much when you don't have an anti-hero.

On a side note, there's an early scene where the forensic anthropologist lady is at an airport and beats up one of our nation's crack homeland security officers, which I find quite disturbing. Not as disturbing as this, but still, I'd prefer our homeland security department had the upper hand over the forensic anthropologists when it comes to stopping terrorism.