Mad Men – “The Chrysanthemum and the Sword”

“The Chrysanthemum and the Sword”

August 22nd, 2010

Ted, the Don Draper-equivalent over at rival agency CGC, is not in Don Draper’s league: he is neither visionary nor genius, and yet by virtue of his insistence that he is a competitor he has been elevated to Don’s level. It’s the ultimate example of self-definition, of putting something out there (in this case, to the New York Times) and then turning it into reality. It doesn’t matter that Jai Alai went with another agency because its owner is delusional, or that Clearasil was a conflict rather than business lost: as it would appear to the outside world, Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce lost two accounts and CGC (under Ted’s leadership) gained both of them.

“The Chrysanthemum and the Sword” is filled with various examples of situations where appearance becomes reality, to the point where it even becomes a meta-narrative when the series’ positioning of Betty as a child-like figure becomes rendered in three-dimensions. It’s not the most pleasant or subtle of episodes, but it ends up making some fairly interesting observations regarding Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce as an agency, as well as the series’ general approach to simulating the past.

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2010 Creative Arts Emmys Predictions: Guest Acting

2010 Creative Arts Emmys Predictions

August 21st, 2010

Each year the Creative Arts Emmys are a celebration of the unsung heroes, albeit a celebration which remains largely unsung: few ever really get to see the awards, and so there’s a certain lack of fanfare. However, with the Guest Acting awards given out at the show and with the battles between shows like Glee and Modern Family unfolding for the first time, it’s a good early indicator for how the big awards will fall.

I’m still grappling with the idea of doing predictions for the big awards, and waiting until the Creative Arts ceremony is over is a good reason to put it off for another day. So, let’s take a look at the Creative Arts awards, and go from there.

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Season Finale: Sherlock – “The Great Game”

“The Great Game”

August 8th, 2010

Almost two weeks after it aired, I know that I’m late to the party in regards to the Sherlock finale, so I’m going to cut right to the chase: while not quite as strong as “A Study in Pink,” largely because of a focus on plot as opposed to character, “The Great Game” nonetheless sends the series off in a compelling fashion which bodes well for the series’ return sometime late next year.

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Mad Men the Weekend After: Critics accept “The Rejected”

Mad Men the Weekend After: Critics accept “The Rejected”

August 20th, 2010

I was without access to a television on Sunday evening, and in the chaos of moving I wasn’t able to get to this week’s episode of Mad Men, “The Rejected,” until yesterday. It was a bit nerve wracking to be in the dark regarding the episode, but this was a particularly strange episode to experience this with: I kept getting cryptic tweets about pears showing up in my Twitter feed, and every time I went shopping I had people asking if I had purchased pears at the store. It created an intriguing sort of mystery, a clue which I figured must be pretty important to have resonated so much with the audience.

Of course, the pears were an oddity, resonating with the audience because of how abstract that final scene seems in relation to the rest of the episode. This is actually one of the most thematically consistent episodes of the series in recent memory, leaning heavily on broad thematic material (in the form of a consideration of the value of marriage) and on our knowledge of previous events (in the form of Pete and Peggy’s divergent paths). It was an episode which rejected the series’ traditional sense that past and present relate to our own time and the nostalgic view of the 1960s, instead reclaiming past, present and future for these characters and their glimpses into the future.

And now, before I end up reviewing the episode in its entirety, let’s get onto “The Rejected” in a bit more detail and see what some critics thought about it.

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Cultural Catchup Project: Moving On while Moving Apart (Angel)

Moving On while Moving Apart

August 20th, 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.

When a series makes a pretty substantial change to its basic structure, we usually respond in one of two ways: either we fret over how the series will handle that change, or we shrug our shoulders and presume that things will be back to normal eventually. This is not to say that we don’t enjoy this change, but as someone who is averse to change as a general rule it makes me anxious when I see a favourite series taking a glimpse over the edge as if it plans on jumping, even if that jump ends up being a spectacular sight.

However, I honestly didn’t flinch when Angel fired his staff at the end of “Reunion.” This isn’t because I am not enjoying the series, or that I am not engaged with its characters, but rather because the series is naturally suited to these sorts of changes. Admittedly, I knew in advance that reinvention was one of the series’ strong suits, but I didn’t expect for those reinventions to feel so purposeful: when Angel fires his staff, it feels like a logical progression of his character, and the crisis it creates doesn’t feel like an effort to shake things up for the sake of ratings. Indeed, instead of feeling shocking, the range of episodes from “Blood Money” to “Reprise” feel decidedly normal, a statement that even a substantial shift in the character dynamics of the series needn’t disrupt its basic themes or structures.

They aren’t the strongest episodes of the series, but they serve an important role: while they make the argument that Angel and his former employees will not remain apart forever, they also demonstrate how their separation only broadens the series’ potential, continuing a strong second season.

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A Cultural Vacation (if not a Cultural Hiatus)

Greetings all!

If you follow me on Twitter, or pay attention to that little sidebar to the right of your screen, you may have noticed that I’ve been a bit preoccupied with an ongoing adventure: tomorrow morning, I’m packing up my life (which, honestly, consists more or less of DVDs, video games, and electronics) and moving across the continent – I’ll have more on why, and how that’s going to be affecting things around these parts, in the weeks ahead, but in the meantime I’m going to be pretty busy over the next couple of weeks getting settled.

Now, this is not going to be an outright hiatus: I intend on catching up on some television as I join my family on an extended road trip westwards, and chances are I’m going to have a few things to say about it: I want to at least briefly discuss the Sherlock finale, for example, and for better or for worse I’ve become dependent on working some blogging time into my schedule even during the most hectic of times.

However, this does mean that I won’t be able to write about the Work of Art finale (which I won’t be able to see before leaving) or the So You Think You Can Dance finale (which I may not see at all until later next week, depending on how things work out) – and, ever so sadly, it means that I will be unable to see Sunday night’s Mad Men until early next week, and even then I won’t have nearly as much time to devote to it as I would like. I may still plan on being engaged with television, but the time to blog to my own standards (especially with something like the Cultural Catchup Project) is just not going to be there beyond a couple of nights in hotels where I plan on doing some writing.

Since I don’t want to remain entirely unengaged, even without the time to blog, I finally broke down and opened a Formspring account – for those who don’t know, Formspring is a site where you can visit someone’s page and ask them questions, which they will then answer at some point thereafter. It’s a really simple and elegant little process, and I figure it would be a way for me to stay engaged when I won’t be able to blog as often as I might like. Of course, it’s just as likely that I’ll blog just as much and still end up enjoying the process of directly answering questions, just making my schedule even more hectic, but I’m perfectly content with this.

So, feel free to ask what I thought of a recent episode of a series, my take on a series which I may not have written about before or stopped writing about, my thoughts on the upcoming fall season, how the blog came to be, or even something personal and unrelated to television (although there’s really not much interesting there, honest). I look forward to answering some such questions (I know the Cultural Catchup folks probably have quite a few), and look forward to an exciting year ahead here at Cultural Learnings.

My Formspring Account: MylesMcNutt

(Shockingly, someone took “Memles.”)

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Revisiting Cultural Learnings’ Work of Art Trilogy

Revisiting Cultural Learnings’ Work of Art Trilogy

August 11th, 2010

Tonight, Bravo’s Work of Art: The Next Great Artist finishes its first season, but unfortunately I won’t be able to cover the finale as a result of some (exciting) personal events which will have me heading cross-country in the days ahead.

When the show began, I never expected I would be so concerned about not covering the finale: I don’t cover Bravo’s other series, Top Chef, on a regular basis, and I didn’t expect for Work of Art to really break that particular trend. I enjoy reality television on a weekly basis, but there are rarely series where there is reason to write about it each week.

However, what I very quickly realized is that Work of Art is a special breed: as flawed as it is fascinating, the series has endless potential which is forced to fight against a limiting structure and a reductive reality construct which is consistently subverted by the actions of the artists and the very process of art itself. And so, after catching up with the series a few episodes in, I sort of became obsessed with the show, and have turned out a lot more academic(-ish) writing about the show than I thought possible.

And so, if you’re just discovering the show now or want to see why I might be so obsessed with it, I figured I’d collect the Work of Art trilogy together in one place. The three pieces cover the conflict within the series’ application of reality competition artifice onto fine art, the complex performance art which its most recognizable contestant has used to dominate the competition, and one contestant’s decision to “go rogue” by offering her own version of events in each episode on her blog in order to reclaim her personal reputation from Bravo’s editors – I might not recommend the show as reality television for which one shuts off their brain, but I certainly recommend it for those interested in the genre as a whole, and hope these pieces capture why.

Point of View: Bravo’s Work of Art a (Fascinating) Piece of Work

What I find so fascinating about Work of Art is that it is both a tremendous success and an absolute failure, a series which is flawed by traditional reality competition standards and yet offers ancillary, and unique, opportunities for viewer connection which the show’s structure isn’t built to really capture. While many contestants aren’t participating in the reality series they’ve been cast on, they are participating in a larger quest for creative fulfillment, and at moments the show successfully invites us into their own little worlds and gives us a legitimately fascinating glimpse into their creative process which overshadows the tired machinations of the Magical Elves.

Who is Miles Mendenhall?: Confronting Work of Art’s Engimatic Antihero

Miles sits at the heart of this contradiction, in that he seems to be the most talented artist amongst those remaining but is also the one contestant who is unquestionably “playing the game.” Never before has there been a reality television contestant whose behaviour revealed so clearly the slippery notion of “reality” within these series, and without him I strongly believe that Work of Art wouldn’t be half the series it is. Regardless of your opinion of the way he is playing the game, the fact remains that he has managed to be one of the first reality contestants in history who panders to the cameras while simultaneously subverting the artifice of the reality show he’s taking part of.

Worked Over: Jaclyn Santos’ Online Reclamation of her Work of Art Narrative

Jaclyn’s true subversion has taken place after the competition came to a close: frustrated with how she was being portrayed, her personal blog has evolved from an opportunity to celebrate her appearance on the series to an effort to reclaim her personal reputation and her artistic point of view from what she sees as Bravo’s manipulative editing. Investigating that blog offers a glimpse of something we rarely see: a reality contestant confronting their depiction head on, in the process heightening the series’ clear – and likely unintended – willingness to unearth the contradictions and conflicts inherent in reality television as a whole.

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Huge – “Poker Face”

“Poker Face”

August 9th, 2010

After last week’s journey into slightly hokey territory, Huge returns to its roots with an episode that brings weight back to the forefront with the all-important weigh-in.

However, there’s a reason that it isn’t called “Weigh-in”: while “Poker Face” does return to each camper’s anxiety over their weight, it is more interested in how they respond than about how much weight they lost. Even with something this monumental, the show is still more about those small moments where campers confront the challenges which face them every day rather than those big moments where they stand on a scale.

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Mad Men the Morning After: Critics get “The Good News”

Mad Men the Morning After: Critics get “The Good News”

August 9th, 2010

Things are a bit busier today, and in fact for the foreseeable future, so today’s Mad Men the Morning After will be a little different: there’s one review I want to dialogue with, but I might have to settle with links and quotes for the rest of them, as much as it pains me to not go into further detail, especially since “The Good News” was an episode with a lot of subtext and, as it turns out, some disagreement.

This is actually the format I’m likely to be going with from now on: writing about each review is great in theory, but I just won’t have the time to keep it up: however, I like the idea of the critical dialogue involved, so I think I’ll be finding an hour of my Mondays to collect the reviews in the future.

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Mad Men – “The Good News”

“The Good News”

August 8th, 2010

I spent a good half hour stumbling over how to start confronting this episode before eventually deciding to sleep on it, and upon waking up this morning I discovered why. “The Good News” is a tremendous episode of television, but it’s an episode of television which confounds how I normally confront these reviews. It’s difficult to write about, for me, because its continuities are largely unrelated to the season thus far: while parts of Don’s story theoretically connect with his behaviour thus far this season, it connects even more with his past as Dick Whitman, and since Joan Holloway and Lane Pryce are getting their first showcase of the season we’re required to dig back into the third season as if this were their premiere.

There are connections between the two sides of this story, but the episode is so clearly divided by Don’s time in Los Angeles (or Dick’s time in Los Angeles, more accurately) and Don’s return to New York that it’s not unlike two entirely different episodes – that it still feels cohesive is a definite accomplishment, but it’s something that makes tackling every minute detail of the episode as I tend to do more challenging.

However, it also makes it entirely possible to address it more briefly while leaving some material for a “Mad Men the Morning After” later today or tomorrow, so let’s get to “The Good News.”

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