Monthly Archives: September 2008

September 19, 2008 · 10:34 am

Cultural Learnings’ 2008 60th Primetime Emmy Awards Predictions

Last year, during this important period of the pre-Emmy festivities, I had a bit more time to really delve into some key issues. This year, things are busier, but that doesn’t mean that I’m not going to make some prognostications about the end results. I’m going to be discussing more themes and the like tomorrow in my Emmy Preview, but for now let’s get to what we really care about: predicting who is actually going to walk home with Emmy Awards.

Outstanding Drama Series

  • Boston Legal (ABC)
  • Damages (FX)
  • Dexter (Showtime)
  • House (FOX)
  • Lost (ABC)
  • Mad Men (AMC)

There is some wiggle room here, as each some has something (Pedigree, viewership, buzz, etc.) that makes it stand out, but there is nothing on this list quite as emphatically received and, more importantly, different from your standard fare than Mad Men. I’ll discuss more of this tomorrow, but its combination of a small network, a small fanbase, fresh-faced actors and its attention to detail will be unstoppable.

Lead Actor in a Drama Series

  • James Spader (Boston Legal)
  • Jon Hamm (Mad Men)
  • Michael C. Hall (Dexter)
  • Hugh Laurie (House)
  • Bryan Cranston (Breaking Bad)
  • Gabriel Byrne (In Treatment)

This is a category where only one thing is important: that James Spader finally loses. Either Hamm, C. Hall or Laurie are in a position to usurp last year’s winner, and I’ve got my money on Michael C. Hall. After getting snubbed here last year, and with his show in the big race, voters might choose to recognize his brave and fantastic performance even when the show itself loses them with its dark atmosphere. But, this is maybe the night’s most up in the air race.

Lead Actress in a Drama Series

  • Sally Field (Brothers & Sisters)
  • Kyra Sedgwick (The Closer)
  • Holly Hunter (Saving Grace)
  • Glenn Close (Damages)
  • Mariska Hargitay (Law and Order: SVU)

This race, however, is not up in the air at all. Its highly serialized nature and red herring use might keep it from being the best drama series on television, but there is no way that Emmy Voters can ignore Close’s pedigree with such a richly portrayed character (even if I’d argue that character isn’t nearly as important as voters might think it is to the show’s success).

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September 18, 2008 · 12:02 pm

Project Runway Season Five – “Episode Ten”

“Welcome to the Real World”

September 17th, 2008

There’s something very scary about the transition between university and the real world – and while I am perhaps not convinced that a total fashion makeover will really alter this difficult period, it’s a start for these young, independent women. Although, considering that their mothers are still dictating what they should look like, I’ll perhaps challenge the “independent” element of that classification.

What we end up with is designers who need to learn some serious lessons about a lot of things, primarily dealing with the question of where to take this challenge: are you making them over for their career? Giving them a high fashion version of their existing style? Or trying to convince them that they REALLY want what you are looking for?

The end result is the usual things which happen when parents and clients who have opinions get involved: some people please their clients and the judges, but most please the clients and leave the judges questioning what, precisely, they were thinking. Of course, the one person who manages to do neither is the one who finds themselves heading home.

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September 17, 2008 · 1:19 pm

Gossip Girl – “The Dark Night”

“The Dark Night”

September 15th, 2008

If Josh Schwartz lives up to his word, at least according to Maureen Ryan’s twitter from yesterday after her interview with the producer, this may be the last time that Dan and Serena make up and break up. And, if this is true, I am going to be one happy viewer.

I’m not one of those crazy internet posters on the show who has an emotional connection to these characters and their relationship, which is really the problem. Watching The O.C. recently helped point out that the show’s problem in the third season was its inability to separate its slavish attention to the central “fated love” of Ryan and Marissa from the audience’s total disinterest: long before the show itself seemed to realize that nobody thought they should be together, the show was shoving them down our throats and hinging the story’s central drama on their future.

But, Dan and Serena (And Gossip Girl) can’t listen to the crazy fans who treat this series like the girls in the episode treated Gossip Girl: these are supposed to be real people, and they can’t possibly always fall back into the same patterns and cliches. It might seem weird that Blair is the only one making sense about relationships, considering her trajectory in the episode, but if Dan and Serena don’t actually deal with their problems there are serious issues here. Ryan and Marissa went through exactly the same thing at the start of The O.C.’s second season, but it should have ended there: if Dan and Serena can do the same, Josh Schwartz might be able to hold a teen drama together by the end of its second season.

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September 17, 2008 · 12:34 pm

Privileged – “All About Honesty”

“All About Honesty”

September 16th, 2008

Since it’s the theme of the episode, I guess I should open with a little bit of honesty: I really quite like this show.

There’s nothing special about Privileged’s various parts: JoAnna Garcia is strong but not perfect in the lead role, the two daughters are total (well-played) stereotypes and the conflict between them and Megan quite simplistic, the love triangle between Megan and her two suitors is about as much of a cliche as you could imagine, and the family drama is like every other family drama you could imagine.

But the sum of these parts is what makes the show stand out: none of the elements feel like traditional exploitative soap opera storylines, but rather actual investigations into family, sisterhood, friendship, and the idea of attempting to confront all of them while deciding what to do with your future. It has a lead character who isn’t just a slightly less narcissistic member of the elite, but an outsider with a unique connection to this universe. This episode’s issues of trust and honesty don’t just feel like a frame narrative out of any sort of playbook, but actual important topics for someone in her position.

And this type of connection means that Privileged is doing something its lead-in (90210) isn’t: it’s trying to be something new. And, you know, good.

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September 17, 2008 · 11:59 am

Greek – “Gays, Ghosts and Gamma Rays”

“Gays, Ghosts and Gamma Rays”

September 16th, 2008

Operating at all cylinders, Greek taught the other Teen-like drama shows a thing or two as it continues a strong second season. It’s an episode where every storyline revolves around some sort of potential relationship or conflict, and yet in each instance it’s much more of an investigation into individual characters than it is broad cliches. Sure, I’m still a bit frustrated with Casey, but the rest of the episode (And her new beau) represents a sign that the ensemble is clicking together perhaps the best it ever has.

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September 16, 2008 · 10:40 pm

Fringe – “The Same Old Story”

“The Same Old Story”

September 16th, 2008

“Would you just talk like a person?”

Peter Bishop asks his father this question at the halfway point of Fringe’s second episode, and I couldn’t agree more: except that I’d apply this to Peter, and Olivia and just about every other character on the show. Because at this point, it seems like nothing that happens in Fringe is something that would happen to people, and that nothing they say seems to make any sense to anyone but the crazy person who created it all, in theory, seventeen years previous.

In the show’s pilot, this felt like an introduction into a new world, a world where things would be different and where mysteries would take on new contexts. However, what “The Same Old Story” offers is…the same old serial killer story, just with some fairly gimmicky applications of the fringe science the show is hinging its success on. Now, you could say that this is nothing new: The X-Files was essentially the same process, and Alias was your normal spy-type show but with Rambaldi’s artifacts as the reason behind the missions.

But Fringe buys into its own hype: too often the music bombasts to the point of self-indulgence, the characters talk about their own intelligence in a way that feels entirely unnatural, and the episode’s attempt at creating an emotional connection between Olivia and this week’s case is ultimately undermined by our lack of time spent with these characters in such a context.

More importantly, though, there was absolutely nothing fun about Fringe – the charm of the characters were either forced or so overpowered by the impending dread that the show never had a chance to breathe. The result is an episode that felt overlong, overtired, and an example of a show that still has me wondering just how this will turn into a series…or, even if the parts are present, wondering whether Orci and Kurtzman have the smarts to put it all together.

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September 16, 2008 · 9:33 pm

Season Premiere: House – “Dying Changes Everything”

“Dying Changes Everything”

September 16th, 2008

Well, thanks for the obviousness lesson, House. Or, more appropriately, everyone other than House.

After perhaps the most emotionally powerful episodes in the show’s history ending the show’s fourth season, it was easy to romanticize the world of House: we’re supposed to be paying attention to Wilson’s grief process and 13’s reaction to news that her lifespan has been cut in half by Huntington’s disease, but nothing about the season finale really dealt with the show’s other problems. “House’s Head” and “Wilson’s Heart” were two episodes that stand alone as an emotional highpoint, but their fallout is somewhat less groundbreaking.

Don’t get me wrong: I like the show’s choice to investigate reactions to mortality, and there is nothing wrong with House working hard to keep Wilson from leaving the hospital after Amber’s death, but the rest of the episode kind of struggles dealing with the rest of the series. Whereas the finale demonstrated an intense connection between case and character, here the case is quite literally just a pawn in House’s game and, at worst, just a bland cliche to the same degree as Wilson’s desire for a clean start. And the show does nothing to help deal with the imbalance between characters, spending so much time with mortality that it’s continuing to let some of them die off, figuratively speaking.

So while dying is supposed to change everything, it doesn’t appear to change House much at all; while this means that the show is still entertaining, it’s taking its time to get to the point where it can improve on last season’s problems.

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September 16, 2008 · 3:24 pm

Season Finale: Weeds – “If You Work For a Living, Why Do You Kill Yourself Working?”

“If You Work For a Living, Why Do You Kill Yourself Working?”

September 15th, 2008

During Weeds’ first season, I would have never expected that it would fall into a pattern.

It was a show about a mother who deals drugs to support her family, with two children completely unaware of their mother’s ways to pay the bills, living in a gated community that harbours an assortment of characters so unhinged that Nancy often looked like the most normal of them all.

Since that point, though, the pattern is simple: at the end of one season, things get bad to the point where we as an audience question how much time Nancy Botwin has left before she is arrested or killed. Then, at the start of the next season, the show spends four or five episodes dealing with the fallout from that event before settling into a rising action, a new location or force in Nancy’s life that will result in yet another near-death experience.

Because of this, we go into last night’s Weeds finale with qualified expectations: yes, we expect it to be quite good, but we know that it won’t immediately solve the nagging issues from this season. It isn’t about providing closure, justifying the show’s move closer to the border, but rather creating enough tension that the road into season five is opened up when the show returns next year.

By these standards, “If You Work for a Living…” is a near triumph: an episode that manages to both clearly outline the next season’s action while actually creating a twist that might actually maintain the status quo as opposed to immediately saying goodbye to it. It’s not a perfect episode, and there’s a couple of nagging issues that still make this season a growing experience, but this feels like the type of finale that Weeds needed: not a rebirth, but…well, a birth.

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September 15, 2008 · 11:00 pm

Terminator: Sarah Connor Chronicles – “Automatic for the People”

“Automatic for the People”

September 15th, 2008

“That was dangerous. It could upset people.”

This is what Cameron tells John the morning after their season premiere ordeal, a statement that he thinks is about the people he placed into danger directly (Derek and his mother). Cameron corrects him, though, noting that the issue is in the future rather than the present: in other words, John’s future reliance on or relationship with Cameron is clearly a concern for the future.

And this is an episode all about the future, about turning back to a show that is your standard mission-driven action series that uses the various qualities of your main characters. While this is good, as there’s some decent setup for the season ahead here (including a wonderfully contrived plot device), it does seem like a bit of a let down after last week.

When it looked like John was finally going to grow a pair, somehow I didn’t expect him to go all out and…invite a girl over to his house and refuse to make her leave. Oooh, what a badass. In all seriousness, though, it’s a bit of a momentum killer, even if the show still has a good trajectory.

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September 15, 2008 · 9:41 pm

Mad Men – “A Night to Remember”

“A Night to Remember”

September 14th, 2008

Describing Betty Draper to the representatives from Heineken, Duck Phillips identifies her as “well off and educated.” Now, in the context of the scene, we breeze right by it: they’re selling this pitch, so it’s not like anyone’s going to put on the brakes. However, let’s be frank: to this point, and even after the events of the episode, would anyone really consider Betty Draper to be educated?

This isn’t to say that she is not intelligent, or that she is not capable of achieving great things, but rather that her tragic flaw is her ignorance to the outside world, to the world that she is constantly being surrounded by. When she becomes the punchline of Don’s pitch to Heineken, she isn’t necessarily just reacting to Don’s use of her as a tool: rather, it’s that he knows better than she does what her role is, what demographic she’s in, and what she’s likely to buy when she goes to the grocery store.

But that’s Don’s job, as it is Peggy’s: it’s their job to tell people what they want. It’s just that, as both found out in this episode, you need to know your audience: whether your wife or the Catholic Church, there are certain rules that need to be followed if you’re going to let your role in the ad game dictate the rest of your life decisions. And, as seen with Don, Peggy and Joan, the balance between these two sides of one’s life, in whatever form they take, will eventually get the better of you.

And when that happens, as it did to Betty Draper who doesn’t even have a single role she could really latch onto in her lowest moments, it will serve as…well, you can read the title of the episode, you know where this is going.

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