Tag Archives: Analysis

April 22, 2012 · 10:56 pm

Mad Men – “Far Away Places”

“Far Away Places”

April 22nd, 2012

Given that I still have a half dozen things to finish before my evening comes to an end, I am risking falling into a deep hole responding to this episode of Mad Men immediately after it airs, but there was a point I wanted to make that I decided wouldn’t fit comfortably into even a shorter series of tweets.

Accordingly, presenting this as a “review” of the trippy “Far Away Places” is perhaps a bit disingenuous, but I hope that a few thoughts about the structure of tonight’s episode will be worth your time despite not being surrounded by another two thousand words.

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April 22, 2012 · 8:53 pm

Game of Thrones – “Garden of Bones”

“Garden of Bones”

April 22nd, 2012

“Too much pain will spoil the pleasure.”

One of my general criticisms for “Garden of Bones,” which is Vanessa Taylor’s first script credit on Game of Thrones after joining as a co-executive producer this season, it’s that choosing a pull quote was a bit too difficult. It was an episode filled with lines that felt like they were aiming too much towards broader thematic ideas, pulling me out of the moment and placing me into the head of the writer.

It doesn’t mean that the episode isn’t filled with a lot of great sequences, or that those lines aren’t evocative of key themes that are valuable to the series’ future. However, there’s something about the episode’s exposition that calls attention to itself: a rarely seen character emerges with new confidence early on so that his comeuppance later has relevance, a single character out of a larger group is awkwardly signaled out by his full name for no reason other than informing the viewer who he is, and another name is conveniently used in a conversation just as another character needs to learn it.

It’s not enough, as noted, to entirely derail the larger function of “Garden of Bones,” but there does come a point where an episode that begins with a Westerossi Meet Cute begins to flow less naturally, a point that this episode reached as the exposition burden of the early parts of the season seems to come to a head.

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April 17, 2012 · 12:54 am

Sheltered by Speculation: How Smash Could Become a Different Show

How Smash Could Become a Different Show

April 17th, 2012

On the one hand, my opinion of Smash remains unchanged since the last time I dropped in on it: this is still a show that does not have a clear grasp on what it wants to accomplish, unable to move beyond the bounds of the musical with any confidence. While Uma Thurman’s arrival as Rebecca DuVall has helped flesh out the musical narrative, building on the detente between Ivy and Karen which makes them both more viable as characters, the show doesn’t know when to quit when it’s ahead: just as Julia’s personal life finishes imploding, Karen’s boyfriend Dev is elevated to a full-blown liability for both Karen and the narrative as a whole.

And yet I continue to watch. Part of me is simply riveted by the tone deafness of the series to its own creative struggles, and wonders how they believe this story should be resolved at the end of the season. However, more prominently, I am legitimately fascinated to see what this show looks like in a second season. Rarely has there been a case where that much hype has turned into this much vitriol, the squandered potential almost overbearing in our reception of the season’s final act (perhaps unfairly, even). And yet, despite all of this, the show has earned a second season since the last time I checked in on it, and so I find myself watching every episode wondering how much of this show, this near-complete mess of a show, will actually remain when it returns next season – the show, as the title suggests, survives on my DVR through its creative rough patches because it is sheltered by this anticipation for what might be to come.

Without entirely jumping the gun, given that the season isn’t yet over, I did want to offer a few thoughts on how the current model might need adjustment in the future, and why I’d argue this puts the show in a far more compelling place moving forward than its narrative alone would suggest.

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April 15, 2012 · 8:56 pm

Game of Thrones – “What Is Dead May Never Die”

“What Is Dead May Never Die”

April 15th, 2012

“They are the knights of summer, and winter is coming.”

This central idea has been at the heart of Game of Thrones from the very beginning: the children we’ve come to know, and the younger characters who jostle for power, do not know the true struggles of both the actual winter (starvation, struggle) and the metaphorical winter (war, bloodshed) that await them in the future.

Unfortunately, almost all of these characters have been faced with this reality sooner than they anticipated, pushing characters like Sansa and Arya Stark, Theon Greyjoy, and Renly Baratheon into positions where they must reconcile their fears and insecurities with a path they might not have chosen if not for the circumstances. Their struggles, however, must remain largely personal: while Theon Greyjoy might struggle to decide between his two families, for example, he has no one on the Iron Islands to talk to but a single flame and a piece of parchment. When he chooses to burn what he’s written, he makes his decision by isolating himself and accepting that this is his burden to bear as his father’s son.

“What Is Dead May Never Die” is about exploring these kinds of relationships, and exploring really is the right word: although partnerships both begin and end in the episode, other scenes are more about the complicated politics of those partnerships as winter approaches. While the show is still at the point where plot remains on the backburner, the pieces moving into place no longer seem motivated by the whims of the script; characters are taking greater agency in this environment, and the result is a strong thematic piece which lays some important groundwork for characters both new and old.

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April 14, 2012 · 3:29 pm

Review: The Disarming Appeal of HBO’s Girls

At a point in the first episode of HBO’s Girls (which debuts tomorrow night at 10:30/9:30c), Lena Dunham’s Hannah suggests that she might be “the voice of [her] generation.”

It’s a clichéd statement, albeit one that Lena Dunham’s age and rapid rise to success within the entertainment industry have foregrounded within the discourse surrounding Girls. However, it’s also a statement that the show itself treats as a cliché, given the fact that Hannah is under the influence of drugs when she says it (and immediately realizes how pretentious it sounds even in her altered state). If her dream of being a writer is anything within the world of Girls, it’s a pipe dream, an idea that sustains her psychologically even as it does nothing for her financially.

I wouldn’t say that the show is about this, however. In fact, I’m not sure I’m comfortable saying what the show is about. While the show’s title suggests a broad investigation of young women, the universality it implies is undercut by the show’s reluctance to draw larger conclusions from these stories. It’s possible for cultural commentators to suggest this stands in for the experience of twenty-something white women living in New York City, but I’m not sure that the show itself ever makes the argument this is the experience for all of those women (or for all women in general).

In other words, Girls is a show about pretentious people, but I don’t find it particularly pretentious. Granted, HBO’s (successful) efforts to promote the show as a cultural touchstone have an air of pretension, but there is something very natural about the show itself that I found disarmed those larger expectations. Girls is a show based around situations more than “issues,” an incredibly isolated portrait of four young women at a very specific time, in a very specific place, and within a compelling televisual framework. Lena Dunham may not be the voice of a generation, but she’s a capable writer and director who has crafted a nuanced comic portrait of the drama of, if not everyday life, than a set of everyday lives, well worth watching.

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April 10, 2012 · 10:03 pm

Season Finale: Justified – “Slaughterhouse”

“Slaughterhouse”

April 10th, 2012

While I haven’t exactly had the chance to write about Justified this season, I haven’t exactly been silent on the subject: my good friend David Chen at /Film has been hosting the JustifiedCast all season, and I had the pleasure of joining him a few times over the course of the season, including in a mid-season interview with Graham Yost.

However, those conversations tended to be fairly episodic, and my general line in terms of broader thematic work was a “Wait and see” attitude that there isn’t enough time to expand on within a podcast setting. Now that we’ve reached the end of the season, however, I want to return to those larger questions I put off in earlier editions of the JustifiedCast, in part because I feel like “Slaughterhouse” rewarded my patience by embracing the tensions that had been creating some degree of dissonance throughout the season itself. This was not a cohesive season, but that did not keep it from coming to a meaningful conclusion, a fact that says something quite profound about the value of narrative play in the face of audience expectation and anticipation.

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April 8, 2012 · 8:53 pm

Game of Thrones – “The Night Lands” and Sexposition

“The Night Lands” and Sexposition

April 8th, 2012

People who coin new terms are very rarely trying to coin new terms. When I used the term “sexposition” to describe a particular kind of scene in Game of Thrones, I wasn’t staking a claim to a corner of the cultural lexicon so much as I was trying to be clever. In fact, for a while – and still, really – I refused to believe it was possible to “invent” such a simple portmanteau – all I did was add an “s” at the end of the day. However, the word has caught on, leading to a bizarre couple of weeks in which Esquire magazine and The Guardian were contacting me on the subject, I was listening to Nikolaj Coster-Waldau and writer Bryan Cogman talking about it on the DVD commentaries, and now it even has a Wikipedia page not to be confused with “sex position.”

What I realized in chatting with these journalists, though, is that we (as a larger Game of Thrones-viewing community) had never come to a clear understanding of what sexposition even was. The first thing the Esquire journalist did was run a definition by me, and I realized that I didn’t really have any corrections because I had never actually thought much about it. While I had a number of scenes connected to the term in my mind, expanding it beyond Game of Thrones would require a more rigorous set of criteria, something that became clear when Michael Hann at the Guardian began talking about sexposition in the context of Showtime’s Homeland.

While Hann’s article captured the overall issue quite well, asking broader questions that speak to why the word is useful in considering the implications of this particular narrative device, I was confused by the evocation of Homeland, a show I would not associate with the term (which is a larger conversation that would require spoilers, so if you really want me to expand on that let me know). Also, in following fan discussion around Game of Thrones, I’ve seen sexposition become more of a catch-all term for the overuse of sex and nudity in general, something that obscures the specific implications of the neologism.

“The Night Lands” features what I’d consider the season’s first explicit use of sexposition as a narrative strategy, but it also features other sequences that feature similar amounts of nudity but which I would not associate with the term. Before delving a bit more into the rest of the episode, which features some of my favorite moments in the early parts of the second season, I want to tease out this distinction in an effort to consider what this sex is accomplishing, and what we make of the show effectively doubling down on the practice.

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April 8, 2012 · 1:10 pm

Welcoming the Zeitgeist: One Direction’s Saturday Night Live Invasion

One Direction’s SNL Invasion

April 8th, 2012

One of the (many) perks about being an academic studying elements of popular culture is the ability to turn any obsessive tendencies into “research.” I’ve spent the better part of the last month and a half obsessing over Justin Bieber’s “discovery” of former Canadian Idol contestant Carly Rae Jepsen and her subsequent rise to fame in America, and that became “research” when I wrote about the challenges of transnational stardom (and the awkwardness of an 18-year old mentoring a 26-year-old who has been in the music business longer than he has) for Antenna.

However, I don’t mean to suggest that I felt I needed to “justify” my interest in Jepsen’s rise to sudden fame by writing about it – the people who are following Jepsen as a fan, the Beliebers jumping on the bandwagon at the behest of their master, are just as justified as I am. That being said, though, there is a point where I want to be able to turn my interest into something more productive: while for fans this might mean writing fan fiction or creating a fan page, for me it means writing a scholarly blog post on the subject.

This brings me to the subject of this post, which is another pop culture obsession of sorts. I did not know British boy band One Direction even existed until I turned on my TV one morning to discover the band was performing on The Today Show. It was an unseasonably warm day in New York City for mid-March, but that wasn’t enough to explain the screaming throngs of teenage girls watching the performance. Even if Matt Lauer and Ann Curry weren’t pushing the comparison, it certainly evoked the aesthetics of Beatlemania (complete with the floppy hair), and the performances raised what was (to me) an intriguing question: what exactly does a boy band look and sound like in 2012?

In an internet age, the answer was only a few clicks away: Wikipedia offered some background on the band’s creation (formed as part of the British X Factor, finishing in third place), YouTube offered some clips of previous performances (including a preview of their performance on last night’s episode of iCarly), and Spotify allowed me to listen to their album, Up All Night, in its entirety over the course of the past three weeks. Pop culture curiosities are dangerous in this environment, as it’s all too easy to fall down the rabbit hole and come out the other side knowing most of the lyrics to an album of frothy bubblegum pop.

What I’ve been waiting for is an excuse to discuss the whole situation, which for me often means some sort of connection with television. Last night was therefore a golden opportunity, given both the aforementioned appearance on iCarly (which I’d consider highly logical given the band’s target audience) and their slot as the musical guest on Saturday Night Live (which I’d consider much less logical). And given that Ryan McGee has jokingly identified One Direction as my favorite band in his recap of last night’s SNL, I figure the least I can do is spend a bit of time discussing how this performance fits into my “more expansive than I initially intended” knowledge of their oeuvre, as well as ongoing controversies surrounding the show’s musical guest bookings this season.

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April 5, 2012 · 3:23 pm

Reduced to a Scheduling Experiment: The Cruel Fate of NBC’s Bent

Parks and Recreation launched as a shortened six-episode order because Amy Poehler was pregnant at the time, and they weren’t able to shoot any more episodes. The show that debuted was effectively an experiment, the first stab at merging together the mockumentary-style of The Office (the show originated as a spinoff before being turned into an entirely disconnected project) with the show’s cast as performers (or thespians, to refer to them with the respect they deserve).

Parks and Recreation was an experiment that NBC nurtured (likely because of its pedigree), giving the show a plum post-Office time slot and renewing it despite continually plummeting ratings. Now finishing its fourth season, and likely to be renewed for a fifth, the show will be heading into syndication with the potential to make NBC Universal a not unsubstantial sum.

Bent was ordered as a six-episode first season, and positioned as a midseason replacement simply because NBC was unwilling to commit to a larger order. The show never quite found the right gear for Jeffrey Tambor’s character, but the cast dynamic was strong and the central chemistry with David Walton and Amanda Peet gave the “romantic comedy” side of things some definite credibility.

Bent was a perfectly solid show that NBC turned into a scheduling experiment, airing the six episodes in three one-hour blocks spread out over three weeks. Although Josef Adalain has NBC sources on record suggesting this was actually an attempt to help the show, that doesn’t change that the choice to experiment effectively doomed the show before it had a chance to become, well, anything.

Given that Walton was cast in another pilot this morning, the chances for a renewal are effectively nil, but I want to expand on this comparison briefly and reflect back on the two weeks and six episodes that are likely to remain the extent of the charming, pleasant Bent.

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April 2, 2012 · 1:14 am

Mad Men – “A Little Kiss” & “Tea Leaves”

“A Little Kiss” & “Tea Leaves”

March 25th/April 1st, 2012

When James Poniewozik announced a few weeks ago that he wouldn’t be reviewing Mad Men’s fifth season week-to-week, I quietly made plans to follow suit given a busy semester with a whole lot of Monday deadlines. The idea of covering Mad Men without screeners in addition to covering Game of Thrones (for which I have screeners), all on the night before my busiest day of the week academically-speaking, was simply inconceivable until at least the end of May.

However, a few people sent emails and tweets wondering where my coverage was, at which point I realized that I had never exactly made these plans public. While I’m sad to be in a position where writing about the show weekly isn’t a feasible option, I’m also a little bit glad, if we’re being honest. I didn’t get to watch “A Little Kiss” until Wednesday night, but there was something freeing about watching it without a computer on my lap.

This doesn’t mean that I didn’t have opinions, and I want to share a few reflections on the first two episodes after the jump, but there’s a point at which the exhaustive writeup becomes, well, exhausting. As has become clear this year in particular, I no longer have the time to write post-air reviews of every show I watch, but I also think that with time I lose the inclination. Between the long hiatus and the weight of writing 2000+ words per episode for four seasons, Mad Men has simply transitioned into a show I enjoy more when I don’t feel the need to stake my authority over each episode in the hours after it airs.

However, as noted, I do want to offer some thoughts on the season’s beginnings, and would like to write with more regularity (if not necessarily on a weekly basis) once the semester ends and the season moves into its final episodes.

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