October 16, 2010 · 2:10 pm

Return to Rubicon: A Cultural Catchup Project

Return to Rubicon

October 16th, 2010

As some of you may know, I’m in the midst of starting a PhD program, which means that there have been certain televisual casualties this fall.

Some of them have been pretty insignificant: I don’t think that giving up on Undercovers after the pilot, for example, is a huge loss considering the series’ imminent demise. However, others have been more substantial, or more accurately have become more substantial with time.

Back at the end of August, I didn’t think that falling behind on AMC’s Rubicon was going to be a problem. While I liked the show, and thought it had potential, the first five episodes were not must-see television, and so the episodes started piling up on the DVR.

And yet, over time this became more problematic: critical and fan responses indicated that the show was starting to live up to is potential, and so it became a sort of social stigma to not be caught up with the series. Thankfully, the show seems to be fairly spoiler-proof, more interested in atmosphere than “plot” movement, but I was still anxious about being behind. I can see only so many “Arliss Howard better get nominated for an Emmy” tweets before I become uncontrollably curious, and so I knew that I would need to catch up before the finale.

As a result, I set aside all of yesterday to watch the last seven episodes of the AMC series ahead of the season finale – tonight at 9/8c – and I brought (some of) you along for the ride; over a 12-hour period, I watched all seven episodes, and returned here to offer some commentary, some links to other reviews, and a record of my growing appreciation for the AMC drama.

It’s not as substantial as it would have been if I had kept up throughout the season, but I’m just excited to finally enter into this conversation that will hopefully be enough to get the series a second season.

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October 15, 2010 · 1:10 am

30 Rock – “Live Show”

“Live Show”

October 14th, 2010

The most common word I’m seeing in evaluating tonight’s 30 Rock is “experiment,” which is more evaluative than you might think.

We call it an experiment because it wasn’t actually very good. This is not to say that I didn’t enjoy tonight’s 30 Rock (I did), or that the episode was a failure (it wasn’t). If the episode had actually lived up to expectations, we’d call it a risk worth taking, or a ballsy decision, but instead we consider it a one-off experiment in order to better reconcile its struggles within the show’s larger creative efforts.

As noted, I thought “Live Show” was fun, and think that there were parts of the way the episode was designed which worked quite nicely, but any deeper commentary built into the episode was killed by the live format. Many of the jokes landed, and a couple of the meta moments were successful, but any character development and much of the potential meta-commentary were lost in the midst of audience laughter.

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October 13, 2010 · 10:27 pm

Cougar Town – “The Damage You’ve Done”

“The Damage You’ve Done”

October 13th, 2010

When Cougar Town changed (for the better), it could have completely ignored its past: considering that Jules dating younger men was a failure, there was every ability for the show to just pack up and move on.

However, while the show did change its focus to the community developing amongst the characters, “The Damage You’ve Done” actively unearths the show’s past. Jules runs into one of her ex-boy toys, someone who I had completely forgotten existed, and the show returns to an event that I had no recollection of which it could have swept under the rug.

And yet, in some ways it’s Lawrence and Biegel showing off: they’re sticking their tongue out at the skeptics, proving that the community they’ve developed is strong enough to withstand explosive secrets. However, at the same time, the episode is not without its consequences, maintaining the sense of weight that the show has carried even as it has established its casual atmosphere.

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October 13, 2010 · 9:59 pm

Terriers – “Ring-a-Ding-Ding”

“Ring-a-Ding-Ding”

October 13th, 2010

Terriers is the best new show of the season, but “Ring-a-Ding-Ding” is a fairly dangerous outing.

I don’t mean to suggest that the show is doing anything particularly risky, but this is a thematically homogeneous episode in a way that presents distinct challenges for a serialized procedural of this nature. The episode is all about marriages, as each of our main characters grapples with the prospect of marriage while the case of the week deals with a marriage in its final hours.

For a show which is trying to establish itself as something more than a P.I. procedural, this homogeny – which would normally be commonplace in low rent procedurals – has the potential to go off the rails, but “Ring-a-Ding-Ding” is a satisfying and successful hour. Instead of using the marriage theme to simplify the storytelling, the show uses it as a point of conflict, offering a noir-ish take on procedural storytelling befitting the young series.

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October 12, 2010 · 9:30 pm

Glee – “Duets”

“Duets”

October 12th, 2010

I’ve talked a lot about the “Three Glees” theory in the past (TM Todd VanDerWerff), where each of the three co-creators have a different perspective on the series. However, in most instances we focus on the whiplash between the various different episodes, a sort of multiple personality disorder, but what I don’t think we’ve theorized on as much is the way in which these Glees comment on one another. I think this was because, before “Duets,” I don’t think there had ever been an episode of the show which so clearly commented on the work of one of the other writers.

Since the show is basically serialized, there is always an element of connection between the episodes, but “Duets” offers direct commentary on both long-term characterizations and specific events from “Theatricality,” an episode which I had some serious problems with earlier in the year. Ian Brennan, scripting his first episode since the premiere, has created an episode which adds unseen depth to previous storylines, makes pretty substantial strides with characters both old and new, and in the process convinces me that in a scenario where one writer is to take over the series, Brennan is without question the show’s white knight.

“Duets” is not the most daring episode of the series, but it is unquestionably the most consistent, and that alone makes this one of the series’ finest hours.

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October 12, 2010 · 12:30 am

Cultural Catchup Project: “The Gift” (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)

“The Gift”

October 12th, 2010

You can follow along with the Cultural Catchup Project by following me on Twitter (@Memles), by subscribing to the category’s feed, or by bookmarking the Cultural Catchup Project page where I’ll be posting a link to each installment.

As you may well have noticed, the conclusion of Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s fifth season within the Cultural Catchup Project has been a bit of an anti-climax, if only because of the long delays as we moved towards the finale. In fact, it was a good thing that the Netflix episodes had the “Previously On” segments intact, because I think there would have been some details (like, for example, the “Knights that say Key”) which would have been initially befuddling.

I think, though, that it’s also partially the fact that the fifth season doesn’t exactly follow a logical narrative pattern. I want to talk about both “Spiral” and “The Weight of the World,” but I will likely spend more time on “The Gift” due to its climactic qualities, or its somewhat sudden climactic qualities. I like Glory just fine, and think the season as a whole was quite effective, but we cannot deny that the overarching plot of the season sort of sat still for the back nine or so. Mind you, that was the period where Buffy was preoccupied with her mother’s death, so it’s not as if the show was boring or uninteresting during that period, but it sort of made the conclusion seem a bit sudden (although it does develop over the course of the last few episodes).

In other words, the challenge of “The Gift” (and the episodes before it) was bringing the seasonal arc to its conclusion in a way which ties it to the characters’ personal journeys over the course of that season, overcoming the sense that Glory’s story arc did not necessarily follow a traditional rising action pattern. And while I think that it lacks the sense of climax prevalent in “Becoming” or “Graduation Day,” I think the fifth season finale lives up to this task: it may not be the perfect conclusion to the season, or the perfect note for these characters, but it delivers a meaningful hour of television which demonstrates the complexity (or, depending on your point of view, the flaws) of the series’post-high school structure.

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October 11, 2010 · 7:56 pm

How I Met Your Mother – “Subway Wars”

“Subway Wars”

October 11th, 2010

This is precisely the kind of episode which is particularly dangerous for a show in How I Met Your Mother’s position. “Subway Wars” feels like a gimmick from the very beginning, and the show is at a point where it risks seeming unsubstantial. Back in the second season, something like “Subway Wars” might have seemed novel, but in the context of a sixth season it seems almost a bit desperate.

That being said, I think “Subway Wars” ends up working because it quite successfully ties the race towards Woody Allen into a personal journey for each of its characters. By grounding the journey in Robin’s belief that New York is turning on her, and Marshall and Lily’s struggles to conceive, the episode manages to make broad subject matter transition into legitimate character stories without too much difficulty.

It isn’t quite as well-oiled as it may have been four seasons ago, but I think that the risk ended up enough reward to make “Subway Wars” a solid entry.

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October 10, 2010 · 11:18 pm

Mad Men – “Blowing Smoke”

“Blowing Smoke”

October 10th, 2010

“Not no; not now.”

As the penultimate episode of the season, “Blowing Smoke” has to do more than, well, blow smoke; while last season demonstrated the ability for a finale to offer an exciting climax without much direct plot momentum carried from the previous episode, the fate of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce has been developing for a few weeks, and the worst thing that could happen is if its impact is lost.

What’s interesting in “Blowing Smoke” is that the show mirrors its characters: still somewhat in shock from the new of Lucky Strike’s departure, they find themselves sitting around with nothing to do. They can’t bring in accounts thanks to concerns over their longevity, they can’t make dramatic changes without seeming to be in crisis mode, which leaves almost no options to feel as if they’re really making a difference.

This episode is about that circumstance, what it drives Don Draper to do, and whether trading certain doom for an uncertain chaos is the right path to take – in other words, it’s about the danger of a situation where it’s not no, but it’s not now, and how a person like Don Draper lives within that liminal space.

The answer is different depending on who you ask.

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October 9, 2010 · 12:27 pm

Season Premiere: Caprica – “Unvanquished”

“Unvanquished”

October 5th, 2010

Returning to numbers below its performance earlier this year, Caprica seems to be heading for an early death. On the one hand, this disappoints me: as a fan of this franchise, I am interested in seeing where the show might be headed. However, watching “Unvanquished” I realized that I do not feel any particular need for the series to continue. There is a decided lack of urgency to the way we approach the series: I’m co-editing Antenna this month, and I concur with Derek Johnson’s question mark in regards to our anticipation regarding the series’ return (in fact, I couldn’t prepare his piece for publication until I watched the finale, which only happened last night, thus proving his thesis).

What’s fascinating is that “Unvanquished” seems like an incredibly intelligent start to the second half of the season and yet does nothing to make the series seem more exciting; it seems more logically planned out, but logic is not enough to convince me that this show deserves to be saved.

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October 6, 2010 · 10:04 pm

Cougar Town – “Makin’ Some Noise”

“Makin’ Some Noise”

October 6th, 2010

There’s an interesting duality to Cougar Town: the series is more consistently driven by change than any other television sitcom, and yet at the same time it feels the least vulnerable to the effects of those changes. “Makin’ Some Noise” is about how Jules and Travis each deal with a major change (Travis going to college), and yet it never seems as if those changes will be insurmountable or even that challenging.

Instead, the episode manages to create the sense of real change while also emphasizing that nothing is going to actually tear about this particular cul-de-sac. It’s the best of both worlds, delivering the sense of familiarity we expect from sitcoms without abandoning the real emotions of Travis’ move and its effects on his relationship with his mother (and her relationship with Grayson).

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