January 19, 2011 · 9:02 pm

Friday Night Lights – “Don’t Go”

“Don’t Go”

January 19th, 2011

If Friday Night Lights had ended after three seasons, I would have been incredibly disappointed. The fourth and fifth seasons of the show have featured some tremendous moments, introducing new characters and offering more opportunities for Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton to demonstrate their command of the Taylor family dynamic. The idea of losing the tragedy of “The Son,” and never meeting Vince Howard and Luke Cafferty, is the sort of televisual counterfactual that I don’t even want to consider.

And yet, “Don’t Go” made me consider it. While the episode demonstrates the degree to which these two short seasons have made a considerable impact, it also demonstrates how far one character in particular has fallen. While the series may be reaching its conclusion, there has been no attempt to sugar coat the fact that not everything is going to turn out in the end. In fact, “Don’t Go” is very much about the interrogation of what exactly would constitute a happy ending for this series, questioning if there is any combination of conclusions which won’t simultaneously touch our hearts and break them in half.

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January 19, 2011 · 9:12 am

Ch-Ch-Changes: Thoughts on January’s British TV Invasion

Ch-Ch-Changes: January’s British TV Invasion

January 19th, 2011

While television in general has become inundated with adaptations of British series, or shows about adaptations of British series, or shows which have been imported from Britain, the past few days have been particularly overwhelming for me. Having put off watching Showtime’s Shameless (a British series being adapted for American television) and Episodes (a show about a British series being adapted for American television) the week before, and then pairing them with a marathon of PBS’ Downton Abbey and Monday’s premieres of MTV’s Skins and SyFy’s Being Human, I gave myself what has to constitute an overdose of transatlantic television.

And, unsurprisingly, I ended up with quite a few things to say about it. The process of adaptation is hardly a consistent one, and its function in these various texts is wide-ranging: It is the subject of satire for Episodes, a topic of debate for Shameless, Skins and Being Human, and a complete non-starter (albeit not without a controversy of sorts, as I’ll get to in a moment) for Downton Abbey.

The response to these various shows has been diverse, but beyond the legitimate concern that the industry has become creatively bankrupt there lies a shifting understanding of change and how we respond to it. Do we want adaptations to be “true” to the original, or do we want them to change in order to find a distinct identity? What, precisely, makes a good adaptation, and does the degree to which a series changes from the original alter our critical focus beyond how we would consider original pilots? And, if it does, should it?

The following is my attempt at answering these questions.

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January 17, 2011 · 8:26 pm

How I Met Your Mother – “Last Words”

“Last Words”

January 17th, 2011

Response to “Bad News,” HIMYM’s last original episode, was decidedly mixed. What struck me most was the way the episode-ending reveal that Marshall’s father had passed away became so problematic despite the fact that this is the kind of show which should be capable of handling such delicate matters. I’ll certainly agree with those who felt that there was some potential incongruity between the playful nature of the countdown and the eventual reveal, requiring a sudden gear shift which made the episode considerably divisive.

However, while the series is no so heavily serialized that we need reserve judgment on an individual episode until seeing how it carries over into the next, I would say that “Last Words” is in a position to sort of payoff the buildup offered in “Bad News.” The result, I feel, is an infallible merging of the comic and dramatic elements mashed together two weeks ago – with more time to establish the balance, Bays and Thomas emphasize the way in which well-drawn, longstanding characters offer great potential to take even a fairly rote storyline to a truly emotional place through some sharp writing and some stellar performances.

And that’s the sort of self-actualization the show was missing last season.

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January 17, 2011 · 3:57 am

Four More Years: Another Cultural Anniversary

For the first few years of a blog’s life, every milestone is…well, a milestone.

When you get through your first year, it’s a reflection of your own resolve: how many blogs appear and then disappear, start out as an exciting exercise and end up a relic of an earlier commitment to productivity?

Your second year, meanwhile, is a statement against the haters. Haters is probably an overly strong term, but there are always those who doubt that the commitment to a lightly read blog is worth the time and effort, so getting through a second year is a signal that you have no intention of giving into such skepticism.

By the time you reach your third year, however, it’s a reflection of your readers. Stubbornness can keep you writing for a couple of years, but by the time you reach three it means that there are people who are reading, people who make writing that much more satisfying.

I think, though, that the fourth year may be the point at which milestones stop feeling like milestones. It isn’t that I am unsatisfied with the fact that this blog has come a very long way since January 17th, 2007, and I have no doubt that the third-year university student sitting in a Politics of Mass Media lecture would laugh in my face were I to go back in time and inform him that his blog would be far closer to the mass media than he could ever imagine in four years’ time; it’s just that the first-year PhD student has become sort of comfortable with what the blog has become, its existence having become so much a part of my daily life that time just doesn’t seem as important.

This is Post #1994 in the blog’s existence, a number which would be higher if I had not purged some of the early posts which had no relationship to television. In an ideal world, there would be another 1994 by 2015, but I sincerely doubt this will be the case: the days of such intense productivity may be behind me for the foreseeable future, left to the summer months and to brief spurts where I simply can’t keep myself away from tackling the bounty of television at hand.

For now, though, a bit of a trip through Cultural Learnings history: I’ve gone back into the archives and pulled out a post from on (or around) January 17th from each of the past four years. They’re probably not the ideal way to chart the blog’s evolution (although keeping the typos intact demonstrates my early lack of commitment to even the most basic copy editing), but I think it’s a reflection of what a four-year anniversary means in the blogosphere: at a certain point, milestones stop being about the blogger and start being about the blog itself.

So, Happy Birthday, Cultural Learnings – you’ve been good to me.

A Lesson in Post-Super Bowl Programming

Date: January 18th, 2007

This might be the only time this season that Criminal Minds has a chance to engage younger viewers and hope to pull them away from Idol. They need to change their fundamental style, not just throw in every cliche in the book. They need to mix things up a little, create an event out of this episode. Really, both Grey’s Anatomy and Alias had it right. Episodes that opened with some T&A, and then went into plotlines that went above and beyond what the show had done previously. Alias completely changed in “Phase One.” I guess I’ve given up hope that Criminal Minds can do the same.

I’ve written about this subject a few times, and will be returning to it again with Glee this year, but this first post has some silly rhetoric that would be quickly abandoned in subsequent posts. However, it was the first bit of “blogging” I did after my initial introductory post, so it’s a nice archive of the early stabs at writing about TV.

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January 17, 2011 · 1:58 am

Ricky the Rabble-Rouser: The 2011 Golden Globe Awards

Normally, watching the Golden Globes is a fairly solitary experience for me.

Sure, my parents or a few floormates would often be in the room as I liveblogged, livetweeted, or took notes during previous years, but the focus was on putting together short-form snark and long-form analysis of the night’s events. It was just me and the internet, as I awaited the (relative) flood of page views which come with writing about any event of this notoriety.

This year was somewhat different – I attended a lovely Golden Globes viewing party held at some colleagues’ home here in Madison, where the collective snark of my Twitter feed was replaced by the collective snark of a bunch of media studies grad students. We enjoyed some fine food, some fine wine, and I took advantage of being the only obsessive follower of award season prognosticators in order to win the prediction pool. While I have much love for the online community which has formed around this blog, and around my work in general, I will admit that there was something nice about being (largely) disconnected from the online snark in favor of a more interpersonal form of social interaction (which is perhaps fitting considering The Social Network’s dominance of the evening’s proceedings).

However, as a result, I didn’t quite have the time to prepare the lengthy analysis I might normally have written, and which I normally write much of during the show to facilitate its completion. Instead, I put together a more concise and focused piece on the evening’s reflection of ongoing questions surrounding the Golden Globes’ legitimacy over at Antenna. It’s a question that I’ve had on my mind for a while now, and something I wrote about at length for a term paper on the Emmy Awards last semester, but some of Ricky Gervais’ jokes at the expense of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association offered a nice entry into how precisely an awards show that nominates The Tourist, Burlesque and Piper Perabo can hold any sort of legitimacy within the industry.

The Gilded Globes: Legitimacy Amidst Controversy [Antenna]

Every year, the Golden Globes give us a large collection of reasons to dismiss them entirely. The Tourist and Burlesque are perhaps the two most prominent examples on the film side this year, and Piper Perabo’s Lead Actress in a Drama Series nomination for USA Network’s Covert Affairs offers a similar bit of lunacy on the television side. While these may lead us to dismiss the awards as a sort of farcical celebration of celebrity excess, the fact remains that the Golden Globes hold considerable power within the industry.

However, since the piece features very little of my opinion surrounding the night’s winners and this is likely why you’re here, some brief thoughts on Gervais and the awards themselves after the jump.

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January 12, 2011 · 11:47 pm

15 Minutes in Westeros: Previewing HBO’s Game of Thrones

15 Minutes in Westeros: Previewing HBO’s Game of Thrones

January 12th, 2011

There were two things which struck me as particularly strange while watching the fifteen minutes of footage from Game of Thrones which HBO has made available to critics (and which debuted at the TCA Press Tour last week).

The first was that it seems almost unfair that I’m seeing this footage while the majority of the show’s fans must deal with only detailed rundowns. I understand why it isn’t being made publicly available (it is unfinished, with temporary music and effects), but even as someone familiar with the books I know that there is a much larger audience out there who are much more anxious about this footage. Accordingly, I take on a sort of additional responsibility, knowing that the audience for my impressions (which are, of course, provisional based on the temporary nature of the footage) has an insatiable desire for information makes watching it a unique experience.

The other bit of strangeness is that it’s weird to see bits and pieces of a narrative, even when you know the rest of the story. Alan Sepinwall, who is going in without knowledge of the books by his choice, chose not to watch the footage simply because he didn’t want to see brief glimpses of a story that will, in the future, be a complete whole. And so while I might be in a position to fill in the gaps, knowing the meaning of each of these scenes and how they place within the larger narrative, there’s still the sense that we’re missing key pieces of the puzzle that would allow us to put to rest all of our curiosities surrounding the adaptation.

However, let’s not bury the lede here – it might seem weird to be sitting there watching this particular collection of scenes from Game of Thrones, but the more we see the less “weird” this adaptation seems. While the fandom has largely avoided snap judgments, resisting the urge to outright reject casting choices and waiting to see the final product, I still didn’t think that it would seem quite this natural. There are little hiccups here or there, but the world that’s been built is showing that a bit of faith, and plenty of talent and financial support, can go a long way in making a story work.

And, even in fragmented form, this story’s working.

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January 12, 2011 · 9:02 pm

Friday Night Lights – “Gut Check”

“Gut Check”

January 12th, 2011

Thanks to a particularly busy schedule and some difficulties getting access to the episodes in question, Friday Night Lights’ fifth season has been mostly absent from Cultural Learnings. And yet, this is about to change, both because of greater access and because there is a growing sense of urgency.

Not really within the show itself: while there is certainly plenty of tension on the series right now, it continues to follow the slow burn mentality it always has. And yet my relationship with the series has taken on a certain tension, as it is becoming more and more clear that this is a show which is about to come to its end. I could have waited until the NBC airings to cover the show, but this is going to be the real ending: this is when critics will write their posts on the series’ legacy, this will be when the fans will respond to the fond (or, who knows, potentially tragic) farewells, and this is when I want to say goodbye.

And so I’ll likely be checking in with the series weekly from now until the finale – for now, a few brief thoughts on the season as a whole and a more detailed review of “Gut Check” after the jump.

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January 12, 2011 · 1:42 am

Review: Lights Out – “Pilot” and Beyond

“Pilot” and Beyond

January 12th, 2011

The central contradiction in FX’s newest drama series, Light Out, is not uncommon in serial dramas. It is a show about the tension created during times of great stress, when individuals are forced to choose between the path which is “right” and that which allows them to keep their marriage, or pay off their debts, or survive another day. And yet, while the show wants us to empathize with Patrick “Lights” Leary and his decision to take the path of least resistance (and least blows to the head) and the forces threatening to pull him back in, the show is actually more like his younger brother. The show doesn’t really have the same sense of tension, the same pull in different directions: it knows what needs to be done, and lays a clear path which lacks much of the ambiguities which plague its central figure.

I don’t call this a “contradiction” to suggest that it undermines the series tremendously – Lights Out is a fine series, one which grows over the course of its first five episodes and eventually finds moments which do more than echo great drama series of the past decade. Those echoes are not without value, and with generally strong performances and some solid action the show does not come across as a blatant copy so much as a prestige pastiche (a pastige, if you prefer), but there always remains the sense that the show is following a decipherable logic. Characters fit into fairly small boxes, boxes we understand better than we would in an ideal situation, and the conclusions they come to are logical more in terms of pre-existing tropes than in terms of human behavior.

And yet, as I think the “Pilot” demonstrated quite nicely, there is value in treading over familiar ground so long as it still provides a certain thrill. While it may not always transcend its genre trappings, and has some down moments throughout its first five episodes, Lights Out is the kind of show that breeds appreciation if not necessarily fandom. I didn’t feel as if I needed to watch one more episode, but once I turned it on I didn’t start looking at the clock to see when it might be over. It doesn’t exactly pull you in but it doesn’t push you away either, and while that distance creates some of the resistance to the series you may see above, it also creates room to let the show sort of settle; it’s room that I’m hoping the series uses to its advantage in the remainder of its first season, as there’s plenty of potential to work with here.

[Spoilers for the Pilot, and some vague comments on subsequent episodes, to follow]

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January 11, 2011 · 12:05 am

Review: Greek: Chapter Five – The Complete Third Season

Listening to the audio commentary on Greek‘s third season finale, I was struck by the mention of a “Save Greek” campaign – not because it brought back nostalgic memories of a barrage of red cups flooding ABC Family’s offices, but rather because I didn’t know such a thing existed.

Greek is one of those shows which operates outside of critical consciousness: there were no critics lining up to ensure that the series got a short ten-episode fourth season in order to conclude its storylines, and what fan behavior there was never seemed to bleed into even popular journalism. Instead, the campaign was apparently much like the show itself: inconspicuous, subtle, but ultimately effective. Without the ratings success of The Secret Life of the American Teenager, or the scandal-driven storylines of Pretty Little Liars, Greek has pretty much been left to its own devices, and the result has been a compelling if not necessarily earth-shattering comic drama series.

Admittedly, I don’t write about the show a great deal – it just isn’t something that suits weekly critical analysis, although I did recently get the opportunity to review the fourth season premiere at The A.V. Club. However, I was extremely excited earlier this year when it was revealed that Shout! Factory would be taking over the DVD production for Greek (as well as the beloved, and sadly missed, Huge): the company has a sterling reputation when it comes to creating polished sets worthy of their respective series, and while this is normally in relation to beloved classics or cult favorites (Freaks and Geeks, Undeclared, Sports Night, The Larry Sanders Show, My So-Called Life, etc.) they are in this case bringing the same sense of care to an ongoing series.

The result is hardly groundbreaking: this is not a complex show which would necessitate a detailed DVD package, and where one might normally find retrospectives or numerous deleted scenes you’ll instead find small snippets of behind-the-scenes footage and packages which seem aimed squarely at the show’s rabid fanbase rather than the television connoisseur. And yet I am acutely aware that I am not, in fact, the target audience for Greek: Chapter Five – The Complete Third Season (which releases today, January 11th, in North America at your retailer of choice). This is for the fans who sent in those red cups, the people who watch the show from an angle where Casey/Cappie are a portmanteau-worthy coupling rather than an ultimate detriment to the series’ success.

This set, dubbed Chapter Five for reasons I’ll discuss after the break, should please those long-term fans – it is also a good value, though, for those who have yet to discover the series’ charms.

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January 9, 2011 · 10:31 am

Why Justin Bieber on Glee is not the Gleepocalypse

Why Justin Bieber is not the Gleepocalypse

January 9th, 2011

In light of recent reports that Glee would be doing an episode based around the musical oeuvre of Justin Bieber, there was plenty of snark.

And trust me, I wanted to be right there with them.

However, I think we need to take a step back for a moment. This isn’t a show which needs to be appealing to the current trends – or, if you prefer, fads – in order to stay on the air, which means that this wouldn’t really desperate. Sure, it would be shameless, but in the context of how Glee has built previous theme” episodes I’d actually say that Bieber would be a step up – narratively. While it may not offer the deep catalogue of Madonna, or the cultural significance of a Britney Spears, the fact of the matter is that the Justin Bieber story actually goes back to the series’ very roots and says something about young people striving for greatness.

And sure, Ausiello’s initial report at the new TVLine has since been debunked by Ryan Murphy, but the initial reaction to the news says something about how we respond to Glee‘s use of particular artists, and how the definition of “Theme Episode” is constantly shifting. Yes, Bieber’s music is not the most challenging aural experience, and his life story just so happens to be heading to the big screen days before the episode featuring at least one of his songs is scheduled to air, but that doesn’t necessarily make it any less effective as a storytelling device.

At the end of the day, isn’t that what matters?

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