Peaky Blinders Season 1 - Don't Let the Name Throw You

A good recommendation is hard to find.

I haven't been particularly enthused with television for the last while.  (Maybe you can tell by the fact that I didn't post a single review in all of 2014.  Yikes!)  There have been good shows, but nothing that really captured my attention and imagination.  (With the exception of Outlander, but that is whole other story.)

Talking with my friend KP the other day she told me that she was going to start watching Peaky Blinders.  This is show that Netflix recommends to me all the time, based on my viewing history.  But, honestly, I wanted nothing to do with it.  First off, the name is terribly off-putting to me.  It's hard to say and didn't give me a whole lot of information.  Second, the cover art Netflix uses didn't appeal to me.  I wish a were not so easily influenced by trivial matters, but marketing is important.  After explaining my reservations to KP, I asked her to let me know how she like the show.  Less than an hour after we were off the phone I got a text.

"You must watch this show."

Okay, right-e-o, friend.

I'm so glad I did.

Before I start gushing about everything that I love so much, how about I do the "what is it about" part.  Peaky Blinders is Thomas Shelby's story.  Thomas (Cillian Murphy) is the unofficial patriarch of the Shelby family, an Irish/Romany clan running an unlicensed gambling operation (along with other, um, endeavors) in their neighborhood of South Heath in Birmingham, England.  Tommy, his brothers, and his friends are all recently returned from France, decorated veterans of World War I.  The Shelby's are professionally known as the Peaky Blinders (see, I'll explain the name!), because they sew razor blades into the bills of their caps (peaks), allowing them easy access to a weapon (to blind with) when those around them don't want to do things their way.  Tommy, flanked by older brother Arthur (Paul Anderson), younger brother John (Joe Cole), and advised by Aunt Polly (Helen McCrory), is working out his plan to take over the the legal gambling syndicate of his rival Billy Kimber (Charlie Creed-Mills).  Tommy's desires become more complicated when he unintentionally comes into possession of a shipment of guns, which could bring him a financial windfall, but also puts in him the sights of Inspector Chester Campbell (Sam Neill).  Campbell has been sent by Winston Churchill from Belfast, a city he has "cleaned up," to retrieve the stollen guns, and relieve Birmingham from the sway of its criminal element.  Tommy's world is even further complicated by the arrival of Grace (Annabelle Wallis), a mysterious woman recently hired at his pub The Garrison, determined to bring singing back to the pub, a tradition Tommy has banned since his return from France.

Okay, done.  That's enough back story.  Can't hold back the love!

I basically love everything about this show.  The story-lines are intricate, thoughtful, and accessible.  Each piece moves the others forward and while the audience is often at a loss for Tommy's direction, all is revealed in due time, without feeling patronizing.  The characters are real, complex, and completely fascinating.  The styling is superbly detailed.  And the majority of the soundtrack is The White Stripes, The Raconteurs, and Arctic Monkeys.  Now that might be a detail that doesn't matter to most people, or that others might find infuriating since isn't "of the period" but the music is used a beautiful compliment to the action.  It just works.  Everything on this show just works.

I could talk in detail about every single character, but I'll focus on the main two: Tommy and Pol.

I'm not always an actor-watcher.  I can tell good acting from bad acting, but I'll put up with less than stellar performances for an engaging story.  No need to compromise here.  The cast is phenomenal.  This is Cillian Murphy's part.  For years, in my mind at least, he couldn't shake the creep factor of Batman Begins.  I didn't disagree that he was talented, I just didn't want to watch him because it was always vaguely unsettling.  Murphy brings all that intensity, intelligence, and restrained passion to Tommy, but also a humanity, dignity, and sly humor that makes Tommy both ruthless and sympathetic.  This is not a case of the viewer being forced to accept a monster as the hero (a trend in TV I'm not super into), but rather an unflinching representation of a deeply broken man.  It's a fine balance that most shows can't manage: displaying the flaws of an individual who has suffered a great fissure in his soul without either sentimentalizing or moralizing.  (Okay, here's my tangent about it.  I love broken characters.  I will go all in with real human beings with real souls.  I detest being told that bad people are good people.  It's almost impossible to turn on the TV without the disingenuous display of characters who behave selfishly, corruptly, and maliciously, but are praised as "really good people."  Besides morally offensive, I find it boring, because it's false.  More on this later.)  In the last episode of Season 1, Aunt Polly says a prayer for her family.  Her words to God for Tommy sum up the situation perfectly, "Protect Tommy, who does what he does for us.  I think."

The counter-voice of the Shelby endeavor is Aunt Pol, played to perfection by Helen McCrory.  Pol is unsettled, having been displaced from her position of visible authority as leader of the Shelbys by the return of her nephews.  Pol is unsure of her place or her influence, but this doesn't lead her to desperation or foolishness.  She loves her family, but it is a demanding love.  While she cannot understand the changes in Tommy, she is unwilling to let her fear of what he is hiding from her damage her respect for him.  Pol could easily devolve into a caricature of a displaced woman, shrill and uncompromising, but thankfully, Pol is delicately balanced between vulnerability and tenacity.

Commentary on John Donne focuses on his use of metaphor, especially his use of multiple, often contrasting, metaphors within a single poem.  Donne layered metaphors because he understood that a single metaphor, no matter how oft repeated, would be incapable of expressing the inexpressible and therefore multiple metaphors must be blended in order to illuminate the motions of the soul.  Peaky Blinders is steeped in metaphor, because it strives to illuminate the nature of loyalty.  From the overarching cultural surroundings, down to the details of the character's haircuts, each element is designed to more fully explore loyalty.  The larger cultural divides (Irish vs English, Catholic vs Protestant) are present, without becoming pedantic.  They are noted as a part of the atmosphere the character live in, without being the overriding concern for them.  The deepest division is between those who served in the Army and those who did not.  Campbell chooses to see an affinity between Tommy and himself; he wants to assert an identity between the them.  Tommy sees no such thing.  Campbell is unworthy of consideration or respect in Tommy's eyes because he didn't serve in France.  Tommy gave his loyalty to his King and was repaid with tragedy, therefore he cannot indulge the moral preening of a man who considers himself a servant of the Crown from behind the safety of a desk.  Tommy is driven to pursue the life he does so that he never need be in a position again where is loyalty is abused.  Campbell's eventual moral quagmire is the natural result of his lack of awareness of where his loyalty lies.

On the weaker side of things is the romance between Shelby princess Ada (Sophie Rundle) and Freddie Throne (Iddo Goldberg), a Communist agitator and Tommy's former best friend, who saved his life in France.  The benefit of almost a 100 years of history, and 10 of millions of brutal deaths, make is pretty much impossible for me to look with any kindness on Communism, so Freddie's plight (pursued constantly by police as he attempts to organize a strike at the BSA) holds no sway for me.  Ada is spoiled and lazy.  She seems to be devoid of Aunt Pol's intellectual gifts, as well as any desire to productive or useful.  But they love each other.  The obvious irony of their affair is fairly easy to dismiss, both for them and for the viewer, because Tommy is the really threat to their future happiness.  Ada and Freddie are meeting clandestinely for fear of Tommy's wrath, but while Ada is correct that Freddie and Tommy are divided, she wrongly ascribes the motive to herself.  The division between Tommy and Freddie may come to head over Ada, but it is fundamentally religious in nature. Freddie saved Tommy during the war.  Tommy's hatred toward Freddie is the conflict of a salvation.  Freddie has denied Tommy the death that would have ended his suffering and a man who wishes for death will be unable to love the man who delivers him to life.  The promise of healing their relationship holds more interest than the eventual fate of Ada and Freddie's romance, though the later provides the potential for the former.  Ada's role in the season finale confrontation between the Peaky Blinders and the Kimber gang displays some growth on her part, but she still has a long way to go.  (Here's hoping Season 2 gives Ada some depth and wisdom.)

In contrast to the somewhat flat Ada/Freddie storyline is the love between Tommy and Grace.  Slow, subtle, and controlled, Tommy and Grace fall in love with a natural passion that the viewer cannot help but be entranced by.  Tommy and Grace are drawn toward each other, and united by conflicting self-interested motives.  As Tommy draws Grace into his business world, she draws out of him the memory of who he was before the war.

Peaky Blinders doesn't do the work for you.  Often, when a show is culturally enclosed, the viewer is subjected to awkward exposition that defies any naturalism.  (Think about product placement in Top Chef, and how no one would every say the name of the brand of broth they were using while making dinner, or the model of car they are getting into.)  This is what separates a good show (or just an enjoyable show) from an excellent show.   At no point when discussing the BSA does anyone turn to anyone else and say "Oh, you mean the British Small Arms factory?  The large manufacturing concern that is one of many in this flourishing industrial town in southwest England.  That BSA?"  (Okay, at least that is what the internet told me the BSA is, because seriously, it is never explained.)  The show gives the viewer all the information necessary to understand, without twisting in knots to avoid accusation of difficulty.  I strongly suggest using the subtitles, though.  It helps.

Sometimes you find a show that feels like it was made just for you.  I can't wait to dive into Season 2.

Arrow: The Superhero Buddy Comedy We've All Been Waiting For

Last fall LilBro asked me a question:

"Have you watched Arrow?"

I replied that no, I hadn't.  See, what I didn't tell him (or maybe I did) is that I make very arbitrary decisions in my life, and one of those is that, aside from Batman, I am not a DC-universe girl.  I am willing to accept certain things as an either/or situation, and therefore in the case of superheroes I'd picked Marvel and wasn't budging.

I have never been so happy to be wrong.

Don't let the cheesy promotional art fool you.  (Honestly, I think the cover art for Season 1, at least the one on Netflix, is rather lazy.  I can just see someone saying "how will we get people to watch this show?  I know, put a shirtless shot of our extremely buff star on the front, that'll do it."  Ugggg, poor choice to make your gritty sci-fi show look like a cheep romance novel.)   Arrow is well-crafted, engaging and funny.

Arrow has all the traditional elements of the hero story: after a young man is abandoned and forced by dire circumstances to shed his indolence and narcissism, he must return to his home and reestablish order by exorcising the corrupt.  Oliver Queen (Stephen Amell), the son of a successful industrialist, is rescued from a deserted island after being presumed dead in a ship wreck with his father five years before.  Oliver is covered in scars and stoic about his experiences, but wastes no time in setting out on his mission of ridding Starling City (which it took me almost the entire season to figure out is supposed to be Seattle) of the list of criminals and opportunists that his father passed on to him.  His family, mother Moira (Susanna Thompson), sister Thea (Willa Holland) and step-father Walter (Colin Salmon), and his best friend Tommy (Colin Donnell) are overjoyed at Oliver's return to life.  His ex-girlfriend Laurel (Katie Cassidy, aka original Ruby from Supernatural!) and her father Det. Lance (Paul Blackthrone) are less thrilled, since Laurel's sister Sara was on board the Queen's boat as Oliver's "guest" when it sank and Sara was killed.  They're not too happy about that.  Luckily, everyone soon has their hands full with Oliver-in-a-hood shooting arrows into all the scumbags and the evil conspiracy that his family may or may not be involved in.  Oliver recruits his mommy-mandated bodygaurd John Diggle (David Ramsey), a retired army officer, to help him, both as an extra set of eyes and as a conscience.  Before long team Hood (it makes me genuinely happy that Oliver never calls himself anything and that the two nicknames "the hood guy" and "the vigilantee" that his alter-ego is referred to as are assigned by the police) adds IT wiz-girl Felicity Smoak (Emily Bett Rickards), who reluctantly agrees that not all is well in Starling City.

Good sci-fi/fantasy tells stories about loss, redemption, courage, and struggle.  Removed from the confines of "realism" (which is a joke at this point, because really, how realistic are most show that claim to be set in the real world) sci-fi/fantasy shows have the freedom to tell classic stories that are deeply personal and truthful.  There is a never ending irony in that the more a show claims to be "realistic" the more likely it is to be a series of manufactured emotion, while a show that has an absurd premiss unlike to occur in reality is where one will find whole characters who behave as actual human beings do.  Accept the premise that Oliver is an expert marksman with an incredible capacity to allude the police, and from there you are able to ask questions about how a family copes when a dead son returns to life, about what is the difference between justice and revenge, and most importantly about what constitutes redemption; is it an accomplished act of internal change or is it a life-long dedication to continual gradual improvement.   Lost, in my opinion, wasn't successful because it wanted to have things both ways; it wanted the freedom to reach for truth that sci-fi/fantasy allows but it wanted the legitimacy of being like the real world that we live in day to day.  (I know, I know, is it possible for me to get through one post without complaining about Lost?  Well, obviously not.)

One of the best parts of Arrow is the Oliver is just plain awkward.  He talks to the side of people's faces, he's abrupt and vague, and says things that are socially inappropriate.  It's really funny.  Here's this handsome, rich, supposedly charming guy, and he's kind of a doofus because he was isolated from civilization for 5 years.  And he's a secret superhero.  It's much more humanizing than whining and brooding and agonizing would be and that is the way that shows usually try to soften boarder-line-sociopaths-as-main-characters.  The audience isn't subjected to a great deal of Oliver sitting alone thinking sad thoughts about his sad life and then having sad soliloquies about his sad life.  We are all better off for this, show and audience.  I'm not against a good brood on occasion, but it's overused and ineffective in most cases.  (Think about how awful those final David Tennent Doctor Who specials are, and really, it's mostly because The Doctor is a big sobby bore.)

Balancing the awkwardness, and preempting the brooding, is Dig.  The interaction between Oliver and Dig provides a great deal of the humor in the show, but also the opportunity to discuss the larger moral implications of extra-lawful activities without being heavy-handed about it.  Like my title says, Oliver and Dig are like buddy-cops; they quip and bicker, disagree about methods and morality, but share an ethical outlook that creates a bond of affection and respect.  Genuine male friendship are so satisfying to watch, not only because they are so rare on TV, but because it is a hopeful reminder to society that good men bring out the best in each other, and that men need strong non-sexual relationships just as much as women in order to grow as persons.  Strong friendship between men (not dudes) is a rebuke to a culture that has relegated men to at best well-intentioned buffoons and at worst predatory deviants.

There are some hilariously idiosyncratic elements to Arrow.  Like the fact that flashback-Oliver is styled to look like late-Dawson's Creek James Van Der Beek.  It took me a couple of episodes to pay attention to what was happening without snickering about how the bad wig and the completely buttoned up collared shirt.  Or that Oliver comes back from a deserted island with professional tattoos that he didn't have before he left, and no one seems to ask about it.  I mean, yes, we know Oliver wasn't on the island by himself, but other people aren't supposed to know that.  The Microsoft product placement is a bit forced in places, but not nearly as bad as it can be on other shows.  (This seems to be something that we just accept now, that a show will be both an entertaining story and an add for cars or computers or makeup.  What exactly does that say about us?)

The pace is excellent.  Neither too slow nor too fast, each episode both advances the current story of what is happening in Starling City and flashes back to what happened to Oliver on the island that wasn't as deserted as believed to be.  But, the audience is not so bombarded with information and plot twist as to make it impossible to recognize and appreciate the characters and their relationships.  Backstory and current story are balanced and neither is belabored.

And as far as I'm concerned, it never hurts a show to be a stop along the way for sci-fi actors.  Guest roles are filled by some of the greats from Battlestar Galactica, Doctor Who, Angel and Fringe.   This may not matter to anyone but me.

Now, not everything about Arrow is golden.  It pains me to say this, because Katie Cassidy can be a hands down badass, but Laurel is stiff and boring.  The morally upright crusader for the poor and downtrodden, Laurel is "caring" in that way that comes off a bit too sanctimonious.  In the beginning she's understandably angry with Oliver but before long, and far too easily, she forgives him.  I'm not against forgiveness, but there is little demonstrable evidence provided by Oliver to Laurel to warrant her change of heart.  It's seems clearly out of convenience, a necessary step in order to back up the assertion that Oliver and Laurel "belong" together.  And I'm fundamentally against the couple that "belong" together.  How do I explain this?  I tend to root for the couple that develops naturally, that results from respect and emotional understanding between the characters, and these are often the couples that struggle the most or don't make much sense.  I don't like being told by show overlords that this person will be with this person simple because that is what we say, not because who those people actually are.  Sadly, Laurel isn't a fully developed character.  Especially to Oliver, she is a figure of goodness, not a whole person with both faults and virtues.  Therefore, the attitude that their romantic reconciliation is inevitable isn't a genuine love story, but rather a formula (boy lost girl, boy gets girl back) that is dictated from the writer's room.  Oliver and Felicity on the other hand, now there is a couple to root for.

It's a pleasure to watch a show that you feel wants you to be pleased.  Too often now I find myself in the situation of trying to enjoy a show that seems to have set itself up to make it difficult for me to do so.  I love shows that make me think, that challenge my expectations, that have something that I want.  But the show also needs to want to give what it has to me.  I get the sense with many shows that I am scornfully being allowed to experience something I don't really deserve.  That's not a good dynamic between show and audience.  It's easy to get involved in Arrow because it all comes together in a way that invites you in, rather than makes it clear that you will bow to it's greatness no matter what.

So, thanks LilBro and SisterDear for keeping the bug in my ear about Arrow.

Doctor Who: Love Lights the Way

(Doctor Who: S6, E15 "The Doctor, the Widow and the Wardrobe")

My father died 17 years and 1 day ago.  Today would have been his 67th birthday.  In 3 days it will be my 29th birthday.

It may be needless to say that I have been a little drawn in on myself the last few days.  It happens every year at this time.  To call it depression isn't the right word.  Closed would be more accurate.  My heart closes, protecting itself from regrets of final mistakes and lost possibilities.  Around noon I was struck by a thought.  "Hey, I totally missed watching the Doctor Who Christmas special this year.  I don't really feel like doing anything right now, I think I'll watch that."  You see, in some respects I have very good instincts; even when I would rather not find an answer, something inside me will show me what I need.

And at it's best Doctor Who is what we all need.  We all need love.  We all need magic.  We all need strength in our suffering.  We all need rest in forgiveness.

On Christmas Eve 1941 Madge makes a wish.  Though we don't hear it, the Doctor does.  She wishes for a beautiful Christmas to ease the news she must tell her children that their father's plane has been lost over the Channel and that he has died in service of his country.  To repay her kindness in helping him a few years earlier when he fell from the sky in a backwards space suit, the Doctor meets Madge and her children Lily and Ceril at an old house as The Caretaker.  He's renovated the house with all children could ever ask for; moving furniture, a lifetime of toys, a fabulous tree, and a huge present to be opened the next morning.  Ceril can't wait and in the night opens the present: a doorway into a beautiful snow-filled forest, the prefect Christmas adventure.  The Doctor and Lily, and then Madge, all go through the box in search of Ceril, who has been taken by the trees, who are trying to transport their life-forces off the planet before it is burned for fuel.  Madge, as a mother, is able to take the life-forces into herself, to be a lifeboat for them, and must use her memories of home to guide their ship through the time vortex.  She wishes to hold onto her happy memories of her husband, and fights against seeing his last moments, but by facing the truth of his death, is able to create a light for his plane to follow, and the family is reunited on Christmas morning.  In thanks, and with a great deal of practicality, she orders the Doctor that he is not to spend Christmas alone, that he must go to his friends who think he has died. Forced by the unassailable logic of a practical mum, the Doctor goes to Amy and Rory, who set a place for him at dinner every year.  River told them that he wasn't really dead (of course!) and after a few shots from a squirt gun for his obstinacy, Amy and Rory lead him into their home, with the simplicity that love allows.  The Doctor allows himself a few private tears of happiness.

Outside of fiction space and time travel will not allow a lost loved one to return to us.  In that Doctor Who is beautiful wish-fulfillment.  There is no mad man with a box who can circumvent death.  But that does not relegate Doctor Who into trivial escapism, a wouldn't-it-be-nice fantasy.  Presents do not negate the loss of a parent, but pleasure is a comfort that reminds us that we will not always be in pain.  In grief our suffering is extreme, but to accept that suffering is an expression of the depth of our love.  And our love cannot be taken from us.  Death may physically separate husband from wife, parent from child, friend from friend, but with honesty in our heart, the true acknowledgement of both joy and sorrow, our love unfolds beyond past and future as the light of our present.

Happy Birthday Dad.  I love you.

Andrea

Top 5: Shows I Actually Need to Finish

Haha, what right do I have to talk about the proper ending of a TV show when it turns out that I have not gotten around to watching the finale of some of my most beloved shows?

Sometimes life gets in the way and you get behind on a show and it feels like you'll never catch up.  Or sometimes a show just really goes downhill and you have to give up or you will lose all your good memories of when the show was not sucktastic.

But it's pretty clear to me (and why don't I share it with you) that I have a few projects hanging over my head: shows that are done and complete that finishing my own viewing will provide me with a little peace of mind.  Or at least spare me the embarrassment of having to say "yeah, I didn't finish that..."

Friday Night Lights
Last Episode I Watched: Season 5, Episode 1
Why I Stopped Watching:  I just couldn't cry that much.  No seriously, that is the reason.  Knowing that  by the time it aired on NBC Friday Night Lights was officially and forever over, that there would be no more, that the fat lady had most definitely sung, made it kind of impossible for me to watch without just sobbing uncontrollably.  So much crying.  So I decided I didn't want to cry that much.  So I didn't watch.  Maybe I should put on my big girl pants...

Lost
Last Episode I Watched: Season 6, Episode 5
Why I Stopped Watching:  Do I need to say why?  Juliet was dead.  It was boring.

Chuck
Last Episode I Watched: Season 4, Episode 1
Why I Stopped Watching: I've made no secret of my ambivalence toward Sarah.  I've never really warmed to her and I get super annoyed when a show tells me how much I am supposed to love someone that I find kind of boring and selfish.  (This is one of my most pet of pet peeves.  I HATE it when a show, through dialogue, tries to impart upon me a singular opinion of a character that either isn't or can't be established through that character's action.  Hence my unending fury with Kate from Lost or Don from Mad Men.)  So when Chuck became pretty much completely about Chuck and Sarah's relationship, I just couldn't really work up much enthusiasm for watching.  I wanted to want to watch it, but I just couldn't take yet another discussion of their love.

The Wire
Last Episode I Watched: Season 3, Episode 7 (I think)
Why I Stopped Watching:  Because I thought my heart was going to explode.  In the scene where Stinger tells Avon that he had Avon's nephew killed in prison, I literally thought that I was going to have a heart attack, it was so frakking tense.  And that is always what it feels watching The Wire.  So I decided I needed a break.  And that break has turned into a year and a half.

Greek
Last Episode I Watched: oh my frakking goodness I have no idea!
Why I Stopped Watching:  It would seem after my rant-y-ness about Chuck that I wouldn't in any way endorse a show that really had no plot movement aside from who-is-getting-together-with-whom, but I really enjoy(ed) Greek.  It's simple, sweet, and surprisingly funny.  Time.  Time is why I stopped watching.  Each episode is 42 minutes, and it just never seemed to fit into the time that I had to watch it.  But I think I can work with that.  I mean, I know how it ends for Cappie and Casey (is there really any question about that?), but I would like to know what happens to everyone else.  To the Netflix!

The TV Girl

You Make Me End Where I Begun: Is There Any Way To End a Show Well?

I got a lovely shout out yesterday from my friend Calah on her blog (yup, I am the Andrea who couldn't manage to get along with a three year old) and it made me think "wow, I haven't blogged anything in FOREVER."  (In my defense, I have that thought every day, there have just been more important things in my life for the last year.)

So, the conversation Calah and I were having about all the failures of the BSG final season has got me thinking: is there any "good" ending to a show?

When shows end suddenly or after an unintentionally short run (Firefly being the prime example) viewers are often left with questions about storylines that never get answered, relationships left eternally in limbo, and bitterness towards TV executives who seems to find joy in the pain of the poor and innocent.  It hurts when you love something and it ends because not enough people out there are smart enough to love it too.  Couple this natural disappointment with frustrated curiosity ("wait, what would have happened if they had been given more episodes?") and suddenly you're sitting there mired in bitterness over the "terrible ending" of a beloved show.

Conversely, when a show has a good long run it can work itself into a corner ("tell me you have an exit strategy!") and when the planned and expected final arrives all the threads of the show are such a jumble the ending makes no sense.  My friend Alissa once quoted our friend Katy to express her own anger on this subject: "sometimes I think everything is fine, and then I remember how Lost ended."  I haven't gotten around to the end of Lost (the last 13 episodes have been sitting in the back of my mind for like 2 years), but I know what she's talking about.  There is nothing quite like watching a show for YEARS, waiting impatiently while it is on hiatus, revolving in your mind the various possibilities of how things will turn out, discussing the characters to the point where you forget that they are fictional, only to get to an ending that seems to be "well, sorry folks, we fucked ourselves royal and then just gave up trying."  I have professed many profanity-riddled diatribes against the sense of time-waste and emotional manipulation that spews forth from the soul when the screen goes black on a much anticipated finale that amounts to little more than a middle finger to my devotion.  The ending of Felicity still makes me livid.  (J.J. Abrams was disappointing me long before any plane crashes.)

Is there no solution?  Is there no way for a show to end that doesn't leave a scorched earth of angry viewers and backtracking writers?  Are we all doomed?

Well, no.  The easiest solution would be for me to care about TV less.  Don't care as much means won't be as disappointed.  But since that is NEVER going to happen, let's look at realistic solutions.

I think that the ending of a show is satisfying to the viewer when the show fulfills the promise made in the pilot (or I suppose we should say, at the outset, since not all pilot episodes are equal and sometimes it takes shows a few episodes to find themselves).  I am not necessarily talking about promises made by writers and producers in interviews and at conventions, though sometimes that factors into things.  I'm talking about the expectation evoked in the viewer based on premise, plotting, characters and the underlying moral and metaphysical perspective of the created world.  In a great pilot all of these elements are present, while in an excellent pilot all of these elements are fully developed and integrated into a whole (Supernatural is a case in point).  People are quick to scoff at the idea of "well, I guess we know what we are going to get for this" without acknowledging that it is completely natural that when we are confronted with a certain set of circumstances we expect a certain outcome.  It's not a bad thing.  (Although since this principle doesn't discriminate by taste, this does account for the continued existence of such crap as The Bachelor and Grey's Anatomy.  Those viewers get exactly what they were promised, even if it's garbage.)

So, do any shows actually worth watching live up to my high standards?  You might be surprised to learn, yes.  For example, Spaced.  The promise at the beginning of Spaced is that together Tim and Daisy will help each other towards functional adulthood by forming a loving bond that creates a family.    And they do.  Tim and Daisy work to bring out the best in each other, providing both friendly distraction and frank reality, so that neither wastes their talents in fugue state of a post university haze.  Behind the fake sexual relationship Tim and Daisy present in order to rent their apartment (man, Britain doesn't make any sense to me) real intimacy develops and that intimacy does exactly what it should: opens Tim and Daisy up to connecting with others, through which their friends and neighbors become kin.  The ending of Spaced isn't satisfying simply because Tim and Daisy are "together" at the end.  It's satisfying because they are both better people for loving each other and while understanding the joy and responsibility their relationship will require they both choose it.  The ending of Spaced is perfect because it is Tim and Daisy sitting on their couch, as they have for the whole show, but a little wiser and a great deal happier because they are the center of a community and no longer isolated individuals.

The ending of The O.C. is also great.

The TV Girl

The Killing: Of My Time and Patience

In January I started teaching 3rd grade, which has left precious little time for watching TV, let alone writing about it.  But, I have developed a new category of TV for myself which I call "TV for grading and worksheeting."  And it is exactly what it sounds like; shows that I watch while I'm grading math homework or making vocabulary worksheets or planning my next belabored science lesson.

Last weekend/week my accompaniment was AMC's The Killing a show now famous for it's potentially frustrating season ending.  The Killing follows three threads of the investigation into the murder of Rosie Larsen (Katie Findlay): the emotionally damaged and ethically compromised police detectives Sarah Linden (Mireille Enos) and Stephen Holder (Joel Kinnaman); the working class family with a suspicious history Stan and Mitch Larsen (Brent Sexton  and Michelle Forbes); and the shinny mayoral candidate Darren Richmond (Billy Campbell) who may have more to hide than his affair with his campaign manager Gwen Eaton (Kristin Lehman).  Over roughly two weeks, we plod along as the Seattle rain alternately soaks and mists the various characters while they brood, cry, stare at seemingly random objects, cry, chase down false leads, cry, give obnoxiously self-righteous political speeches, cry, stumble accidentally onto evidence, cry, oh and, cry.  The season does end with an arrest, but in keeping with the general themes of evasion and incompetence, some of the evidence is fake.

Have I indicated properly that this show is rather pedantic?

The Killing isn't exactly boring, it's more that it's detached.  With a moody, understated and a torpidly paced crime drama the audience needs an investment in the outcome achieved in one (or more) of three ways: through understanding and connection to the victim; through a superbly crafted villain; or through the (relative) integrity and humanity of the investigating officer.

We never really find out very much about Rosie Larsen (for all they say her name all the frakking time) and what we do find out is too late to be sensible or have a great deal of impact.  The fact is that Linden and Holder don't really investigate Rosie's life.  They accept without question a few cliched assurances from Rosie's friends and teachers that Rosie was "a nice girl who loved life but never got into trouble." When they immediately find evidence that at the very least calls into question these reassuring but shallow descriptions (Rosie, whose from a struggling blue-collar family has a pair of 2,000 dollar high heals in her locker at school), Linden and Holder don't follow through with any urgency because the Larsen react with the typical "you don't know anything about our baby girl" when the detectives ask the first time if Rosie could have been hiding anything.  This is a deeply troubling exchange because it exposes the crux of the difficulty of this show.  No, Linden and Holder (and the audience by extension) don't know anything about Rosie.  It is their job to find out everything they can about her in order to find out where, when, how and most importantly BY WHOM she was killed, but at the slightest opposition to the unpleasantness of personal questions, they allow themselves to be bullied into simply not doing as they are supposed to.  Therefore their investigation is completely haphazard, and the audience has little more than passing curiosity in who the murder is.  It seems unlikely that one could find a murderer without more than a passing glance at the victim's life choices, and it is almost impossible to engage an audience when the core character uniting the various story-lines is more of a void than anything.

Further obscuring the familial element is the serious miscasting of Michelle Forbes.  I really like Ms. Forbes and anyone who can play a legitimate nemesis to Admiral William Adama isn't a lightweight.  But she is not remotely maternal and so her overwrought emotional exhibitionism never gave the sense of genuine grief.  At one point, supposedly so distracted with sorrow for her slain daughter, she almost kills her two young sons by leaving them in a running car in a locked garage, but a moment that should be terrifying comes off as strange tangential event because Mrs. Larsen gives the impression of a weepy Alzheimer's patient.  It doesn't help the situation that the character's name is "Mitch," giving no room for softness or nurturing instinct.

As for a captivating antagonist,  The Killing offers up all the usual (and male) suspects; the rich douchebag ex-boyfriend, the now drug-addled childhood friend, the formerly mobbed-up dad, the possibly sexually exploitative teacher, the obsessive family friend, the too-perfect politician.  But the brush is too broad.  There isn't enough heft to any of them to justify the brutality with which Rosie is killed.  Nor do any of the possible killers have the psychological intricacies to fascinate the audience.  In order (I assume) to keep the audience guessing about the identity of the murderer by overloading the show with options there isn't any room to layer the characters in a way that would lead the audience to wonder both IF a certain character COULD have killed Rosie but also WHY WHOULD he have killed her.  In choosing breadth over depth another avenue of engagement is closed off to the audience.

So without an empathetic victim or a compelling villain the burden is on the detective to carry the show, and ostensibly Det. Sarah Linden appears to be the protagonist, but again The Killing seems to know what it was supposed to do but then just didn't.  Linden finds Rosie's body on what is supposed to be her last day at the Seattle Police Department before she moves with her son to Sonoma, CA to get married.  That is the basic pattern of most episodes; today will be Linden's last day and then she'll hand the investigation fully over to Holder but at the last minute she always misses her flight because she is emotionally incapable of leaving the case unsolved and isn't 100 % committed to her fiance.  Her obsessiveness in her profession life is balanced out nicely by an almost complete cluelessness about even the most basic facts about her 13 year old son Jack.  Maybe it's that Linden is rather bad at her job that made me actually laugh out loud to find out around the mid-point of the season that Linden once became so consumed by a case that she ended up a patient at a mental hospital in a state of waking coma.  Really, I laughed, because it just struck me as ridiculous.  No, Linden is never with her son, is utterly oblivious to the behavioral issues he is having, and can't even work up the facial expression to pretend she wants to get married, but none of that is shown to be because she is so hard at work investigating Rosie's murder by following up witness statements, verifying alibis or pinning down Rosie's whereabouts before she was murdered.  She goes running, chews gum, and looks piercingly at videos, photographs or docks and (not kidding here) gets caught up in a totally bizarre and distracting terrorism plot-line, but all without either a systematic approach or much fruitful result.  I mean really, if you're totally absorbed in you job, shouldn't you at least be good at it?  Furthermore, at no point are we convinced of some overriding sense of justice or duty that animates this woman that would at least give some credence to her own lack of interest in her personal life.

There is a failure of motivating in The Killing.  There is no distinct motivation of Rosie's murder, for Linden's personality, or for the audience to watch.

The TV Girl

Top 5: Characters I Unexpectedly Fell For, Hard

Hi everyone.

So, it's been two months.  More.  Yeah, well, um, okay.

Let's just skip over all the "where have you been" and such.

Kathleen and I were talking the other day about Legend of the Seeker; she's mid-way through S1.  I asked if she had met Cara yet, and that got us talking about the Mord Sith, and both of us agreeing that as characters the Mord Sith are kind of sympathetic.  Our conversation moved on to Game of Thrones and ended with me exclaiming how Jon Snow and Tryrion Lannister are the heroes of my heart.  (Yes, I AM amazed people will be friends with me, you don't need to point that out.)  It got me thinking about the characters that I love when either I had no expectation to do so, and maybe that I shouldn't: when intellectually they are not my kind of people, or have serious personality deficiencies, but for some reason I just totally dig them and want what's best for them.  (This isn't the same as villains I love for being villainous.)

Omar Little, The Wire
I'm only halfway through The Wire, so maybe I'll change my tune on this, but I get giddy every time Omar shows up.  Like really giddy.  Yes, Omar robs drug dealers and shoots people who get in his way, but he is so unapologetically honest about what he does and who he is that you just want to respect him.  Let's be clear, I do not want to be friends with Omar, I in no way think we should hang out.  He scares the ever living shite out of me.  He starts whistling and I get the shivers.  That said, I greedily soak up every word he drawls out; whether he be rebuking shady lawyers, or explaining the logical conclusion of what-do-I-do-with-my-hands-when-a-gun-is-pointed-in-my-face, or giving McNulty an ethical argument for becoming a state's witness. I would like to hire someone to high-five him.

Caroline, The Vampire Diaries
By all rights I should hate Caroline: she is demanding, overachieving, overbearing, and more often focused on her current boyfriend drama than the mayhem and death surrounding her.  Always planning parties that end up as bloodbaths, she never seems to catch on that being a vampire might preclude her from being a typical teenage girl.  But I adore Caroline.  She is so ridiculous, she's awesome.  Initially treated as a third wheel in the Elena/Bonnie friendship in desperate need of being placated, Caroline turned out to be far more interesting than either of her frenemies, both proving herself capable of a competency and loyalty that eludes the epically enamored Elena and demonstrating the necessary sense of humor that dour and self-righteous Bonnie sorely lacks.  (And no, I don't blame Jeremy for "cheating" on Bonnie with Anna.  Bonnie is the worst.)  I mean come on, give the girl a hand, she turned Tyler into not-a-scumbag and still managed to remain student body president.

Tyrion Lannister, Game of Thrones
It isn't all that surprising that I love Tyrion; smart matters to me more than almost anything.  Not that ridiculous "wow look at this stupid freak trick that I have, aren't I so much smarter than the rest of you" smart (90% of current police/medical procedurals, I'm talking about you), but actual intelligence.  And drinking, wenching, nephew-slapping Tyrion can do no wrong in my eyes.  I want him to sit on the Iron Throne, send everyone to help the Night's Watch against the snow-zombies, and put Littlefinger on a leaky ship heading West, because Tyrion is the bestest best there is in Westeros.  Okay, but seriously, he's smart, funny, realistic, and brave.  Tyrion rocks!

Juliet, Lost
I don't give a flip what other people say, Juliet was one of the very few tolerable characters on this show.  I enjoyed Juliet; I liked watching her grow from Ben's disgruntled hostage to Sawyer's soul-mate.  I actually got upset when she died, and her coming back in the finale might be enough to get me to plow through the last 10/12 (can't remember) episodes I haven't watched yet.  It took her a bit, but she realized Jack was a total waste of space, stood up for herself and made a decision to do what she though was right, did what no one else on the bleepedy-bleeping-bleep of an island seemed interested in and built a real life based on love and respect, which she then willingly sacrificed so that her husband could be spared the imprisonment he'd been subjected to.  But (surprisingly) Juliet continued to be a rounded person: even though she had NO reason on any earth to be insecure about hysterical, useless, whiny, self-justifying, (BORING) Kate, Juliet still suffered from the all to human anxiety surrounding seeing your man with his ex.  In a huge cast of rather unpleasant people, Juliet was a shiny surprise of someone I truly liked.

Luke Cafferty, Friday Night Lights
I think it's kind of amazing that a show can introduce a new character in the 4th Season, and make that character someone you are so glad you met.  In both physicality and personality, Luke looked to be our replacement for the departing Matt Saracen, since after all, what is a show set in Texas without a sweet little mumbling underdog for us to root for?  But make no mistake, Luke isn't the poor-man's Matt.  I would even venture to say that Luke turned out to be a better person. (Please don't kill me Internet!  I love Matt Saracen, I promise I do!)  Luke's familial situation was less dire than Matt's, it was in fact rather like a Steinbeck story, therefore he was less emotionally distraught by the unreasonable pressure of his situation than Matt, and as such was less likely to act carelessly.  (I swear, I adore Matt Saracen, but boy was kind of an idiot some times.)  For the most part, Luke acts with integrity and humility.  In his halting, sincere apology to Tami that he lied to her about his address he acknowledges that she was right to insist that he be sent to East Dillon and asks that she forgive him for betraying her trust, showing that he actually understands the underlying ethics of the situation, and all without anger or self-pity.  Even though all of his focus and hard work was directed to getting a football scholarship so he could go to college and leave the family farm, he wanted to take responsibility for the child he created with Becky, and there's no reason to think he wouldn't have been a very good father, eventually.  I didn't think there was room in my FNL heart for new people, but then there was Luke.

Doctor Who: Someone Said It Better

(6.10, "The Girl Who Waited")

I cried and cried watching the most recent episode of Doctor Who.  I thought it was beautiful.  But, I'm not feeling super articulate about it, so I encourage you to click the link below for Kyle Anderson's review on Nerdist.  He says what I would say, if I wrote as well as he does.  Enjoy!

Kyle Anderson's "The Girl Who Waited" Review

The TV Girl

Sons of Anarchy: Wedding Bells and Bullet Holes

(4.01 “Out”)

The boys are out of prison, Jax with some fun new scars.  Otto’s still inside, and happens to find a razor blade in his boiled egg (I’m not sure how that works, but ok), which he turns on his wrist, but he’s found by a guard.  Charming changed in the time they were away.  Opie is getting married.  Jacob Hale is building a fancy new sub-division, the type of McMansion development that Charming has been so lacking in. Tara had her baby!!!  (Thomas, named after Jax’s deceased brother.)   And there is literally a new Sheriff in town.  Riding through town on their way to the welcome home party at the garage, the Sons are stopped by Sheriff Eli Roosevelt (Rockmond Dunbar), instated during the time of incarceration, and unwilling to see any cuts on the newly paroled riders.  After the happy reunions at Teller-Morrow (where Gemma gives Jax a paper bag containing “the one he picked out”) it’s back to business.  Even with tidy profits, it’s time to renegotiate SAMCRO’s place in the deal between them, the Irish, and the Russians.  Since they have a tail, everyone rolls out: Clay, Jax and Opie to the meeting with everyone else providing a distraction for the all too easily manipulated cops.  While his employees are being played, the new Sheriff is attending a super secret meeting with an odd looking man whose renting the top floor of his building: ASUDA Potter.  He explains to Roosevelt the design of the governments RICO case involving SAMCRO, the Irish and the Russians, which is progressing nicely due to a highly placed FBI agent within the Russians, and asks for Roosevelt’s cooperation, as Charming will most likely be the site of the showdown.  All cop, Roosevelt accepts.  At the meet with the Russians, the FBI agent observes Jax agreeing to the “it’s all just business” apology offered for his shiving in prison (hence the new scars), a new deal is struck and Opie invites them all to the wedding, a lovely pretext for sneaking off to look at guns.  Back to Charming for um, reunion time.  Pillow-talk topics include: (for Gemma and Clay) Unser’s declining health, Clay’s declining health, and retirement; (for Jax and Tara) getting married, how to raise their boys, that John Teller was a coward not to take his sons out of the life, and how Jax just needs to bide his time and save some money so that the can leave SAMCRO and never look back.  Now in the infirmary, Otto is handed a scalpel as another prisoner is wheeled in next to him.  (This can’t possibly end well.)  Also on the list of things that are most likely HUGE mistakes, time for Opie and Lyla’s wedding.  All the gangs are there (on reservation land, so cuts allowed), and Lyla emerges looking much more like the bachelor party entertainment than the bride, but after a few (thankfully) short and awkward vows, Opie and Lyla are pronounced man and wife.  During the reception Chibs and Juice sneak off with some of the Russians (including an un-miked FBI agent) to look at the guns. Otto unhooks the cuff on his bed.  Clay and Jax take Putlova off to fire off a few from a particularly lethal looking handgun. In the warehouse, they test the merchandise on the Russians who brought them their, killing them all.  Otto shoves the scalpel through the ear and into the brain of the man strapped in the next bed, saying, “this is for Jax Teller.”  And out in the woods Clay shoots Putlova’s bodyguards before the others hold him down so Jax can stab him repeatedly in the chest, which is just business after all.  The now dead FBI agent is the last body to be dumped onto the new Hale development sight.

Well wasn’t that just a hi-we’re-back bitchslap?

I mean that as a compliment.

I admit that I find the details of who-has-a-deal-with-who-and-for-what-and-why rather hard to follow on this show: it’s always very intricate and usually changes in the time it takes to flip the safety off.  Therefore it was rather helpful to introduce two new law enforcement characters to explain to each other where the criminal enterprises of the Sons stand.  Without seeming forced or condescending, we got a quick update to bridge us from the previous seasons, and part of the organic presentation was the initial strength of our new lawmen.  Potter, a smoking, paranoid, motorcycle-riding wisp of a dude, is a bit odd, but in now way quirky or cutesy.  He’s like the anti-Stahl: patient observation and quiet cunning instead of furious proclamations and half-baked ideas.  He admits he needs Roosevelt’s help because his team has no credibility in gang warfare, while Roosevelt has vast experience.  He doesn’t strong-arm what he needs, but there’s no doubt (to him or to us) that he is going to get it.  One look at his extensive walls of photos and relationships is enough to make clear that this man won’t be taken in by any Jax Teller triple/ quadruple/ whatever –crosses.  And Roosevelt, what a welcome addition to Charming.  He’s the savvy, upright, committed Sheriff that the town (and the club, because without the law, there’s no such thing as outlaws) so desperately needs in the void left behind by David Hale’s untimely death.  But as a transplant, and therefore without Hale’s hometown attachment to Charming, Roosevelt stands a better chance of protecting the town because of his emotional distance. 

But there is another new character, even if he won’t have any lines.  Emily the Roommate can tell you I was genuinely distressed over whether or not Tara was going to have an abortion.  (I missed the video that would have put me out of my misery sooner.)  It’s not just that I’m Pro-Life, but also that it would have been out of character for Tara.  And it would have just upset me to no end to see Tara have a similar look to the one on Lyla’s face when Opie mentioned expanding their family.  Welcome Thomas Teller, I’m so happy to meet you.  Now please make yourself useful and help you dad propose to your mom.

Seriously, Jax’s proposal to Tara was so frakking prefect I wanted to die inside.  Not some over-the-top declaration of adoration everlasting, but rather a humble acknowledgment of the family that they already are, Jax unreservedly opened himself up to Tara’s rejection by letting it show in his eager expression and halting sentence just how important her answer is.  And as much as he avows that Tara is his savior, brought to him to take him out of the violence of his life, he came to her having thought out her needs, demonstrating to her that he’s asking her to marry him so that he can be her husband, not with the expectation that she will simply be his wife.  Perfect.

And it was nice to have that perfection for half an episode, because at the end we had to question if it had all been a lie.  Where exactly does Jax think he can go where the repercussions of this won’t follow him?  The merits of eye-for-an-eye justice are debatable.  Putlova tried to kill Jax, so within the context of their criminal world, Jax killing Putlova makes sense, and could possibly be something that everyone could move past.  Slaughtering all the Russians is more of the scorched-earth approach, and given that one of those Russians was an undercover FBI agent, the landscape surrounding SAMCRO now looks to be as salted as Carthage after Cato finally got his way in the Roman Senate. 

Sons of Anarchy, how I have missed you.

The TV Girl

Top 5: Shows I Watch Alone

On the opposite side of the spectrum from when last we spoke, there are some shows that don't lend themselves well to happy fun let's-get-together-and-watch-that-show parties.  It's not that I want to keep certain shows to myself (I do not get the pseudo-hipster attitude of NOT telling people about awesome things) but rather that some shows, usually the ones that I am particularly engaged in or attached to, are not ones that I want to watch with other people.  At least the first time that I see an episode.  Some shows I have to let be mine first.

Sons of Anarchy
KP visited a couple of weeks ago and we were trying to figure out a show to watch while we were hanging out.  There was a quick mutual agreement that SoA, though a favorite of us both, just wasn't something you watched with someone else.  Part of the brilliance of SoA is that it reaches inside of you and claws at all the things that make you human.  It's visceral, terrifying, and I wouldn't give it up for a second.  But, well, it's just a private experience.

Fringe
The truth is that when I started watching this show no one I knew watched it also.  Therefore I watched it on my own and by the time other people I knew started watching I was too far ahead to invite them over for new episodes on a Friday night.  Now, the idea that there would be other people around when new information trickles in about Peter, or Olivia absorbs her next in a never ending parade of blows, or Walter makes his latest food request just seems too strange to me.

Game of Thrones
I'm too fucking involved in GoT to watch it with anyone else.  I rejoice, I cry, I yell, I bite my nails, I stop breathing, sometimes I even get to laugh.  I exclaim my love and hate at the screen.  I panic for what has happened, what is happening, for what is yet to happen, for everything.  I can't say that it is a pretty sight.  It would annoy the living bejesus out of someone to be watching this with me, and it would annoy me to try and tone down my reactions.  I was once told that a sign of maturity is to recognize and live within your limitations.  I consider it the hight of maturity for me to watch GoT alone.

Dexter
Dexter is all about honesty: are we telling the truth or are we lying?  Because so much of the show is about exposing the truth you end up as a viewer feeling a bit exposed yourself, and in that it is a little uncomfortable to glance over and see a loved one.  Dexter leaves you feeling raw, edgy, kinda giddy and very much in the mood for a bit of solitude to mull over the state of your being.

Legend of the Seeker
I'm fairly sure that if anyone saw just how unabashedly I love this silly little defunct fantasy show that they would disown me in a heartbeat.  (Actually, LilBro might have watched a few minutes with me before deciding I was a lunatic and he had better things to do.)  They might be right to do so.  But, to save both myself and them from the pain of separation, I'll just keep LotS for rainy days when family and friends are out having real lives.

The TV Girl

Top 5: Shows I Enjoy Watching Collectively

I've been having a really rough week.  The kind where you want to cry all the time and you don't know why.  Everything that everyone says makes you hurt but not because they're mean or rude, just because, well, because.  In that frame of mind I feel this ridiculous need to justify myself, to explain not only why I am NOT ashamed of the amount of TV I watch, but also why I love to write about it.

TV can connect you to other people.  It's more than if you have show in common you have an easy conversation topic with another person (You watch Fringe? I watch Fringe! So that thing with Peter, what's that all about?), even though that is amazing for socially awkward people like me, and I have friends with whom I can have lengthy conversations entirely about TV.  (Every time KP and I hang out in a group our friend roll their eyes when we start talking TV, knowing if they don't intervene we won't stop.)  It's more than that.  Recommending a show to a friend lets them get to know you better; you trust them a bit more by granting them access to your opinions and thoughts, when you agree it becomes a bond, when you disagree it become fodder for debate and seeing things in a new light.  When you watch a show with someone you create the memory of that act, and when you watch that show later it makes you think of that person.  I adore the texts I get from friends that say "I was watching such-and-such today and it made me think of you."

So in the spirit of TV as act of community, these are shows that I prefer to watch with other people.  I will watch these shows by myself, but if I have the chance to share them with someone else I will, because it makes already enjoyable shows so much more enjoyable.

Burn Notice
For Sis and LilBro this is like OUR show.  I'm not sure how, I'm not sure why, but somehow it became our go-to show to watch when we're all in the same place, usually only a few days at Christmas now that we're all adults and such.  And without them I just don't enjoy the show as much.  I still like it, just not as much.  Sam seems funnier when my brother is there to laugh with me.  Michael's schemes seem more outlandish and fun with my sister cheering along too.  At this point it almost feels like a betrayal to watch Burn Notice on my own, like I'm cheating myself and my siblings out of the lazy hours, bottles of wine, and random bullshitting conversations entailed in watching.

Battlestar Galactica
I will watch this show anytime, anywhere, with anyone or with no one.  While I do not love it any less when flying solo, watching BSG with other people is one of the supreme joys in my life.  I can tell when, where, and with whom I watched every episode of this show, and all of that information informs my relationship with Battlestar Galactica.  The mini-series was an adventure in Christopher and Calah's apartment, our second semester of grad school,  their infant daughter alternatively laughing hysterically or crying depending on how much attention we were paying to the show.  The first time I saw "Unfinished Business" I only caught half the dialogue because Jennie, Jason and I were occupying a table at the Knight's of Columbus in Dallas where Tom was tending bar and it was a raucous night.  (Of course, the immensity of that episode wasn't lost on us, we understood even without the sound.)  The revelation of the final five Cylons has less impact on me than I think it should have because I was watching by myself on Mal in the middle of the night, in my room in the apartment shared with the roommate who frightened me.  The finale was extra sad because it was the end of "BSG Viewing Party at the Russells'."  Watching BSG together made a little fleet out of me and my loved ones, no matter how far flung we get.

The Office
Awkward humor is so hard for me to take, even though I love many shows that revolve around awkward people doing awkward things that make me feel awkward.  Therefore, I'm more likely to turn off an awkward-humor show if I watch by myself.  (At least the first time I see an episode.  Re-watch isn't as bad, but that necessitates getting through it the first time.)  The Office is the best example of that personal phenomenon.  If it's just me I get about 2 minutes in and bury my head in my arms and then can't watch anymore.  If I'm watching with a group I bury my head in my arms, but the solidarity with others keeps me going, and I'm better off for it.   This is a show where without other people it wouldn't have happened and I'd hate if I'd have missed the many wonderful seasons (and don't forget that this show was really wonderful for a long time) of the Dunder-Mifflin bunch because I get going when the going gets uncomfortable.

Doctor Who
A major theme in Doctor Who is the fundamental need for communion.  The Doctor always has a companion, things go to complete fuckery when he doesn't.  So it makes sense to me that traveling with the Time Lord is just more fun when my blue box (aka my blue couch) is occupied by more than me.  Especially since I spend so much time while watching Doctor Who going "wait, what the bleepedy-bleep just happened?!?"  It makes me feel less like a crazy person when there is someone to hear those exclamations.
Also, Doctor Who has the tendency to float you along on jaunty adventures and quippy dialogue only to sucker punch you with devastation and tragedy (Davies, I still don't forgive you for Donna); the comfort of a watching companion or two gentles the experience because there is a hand to grab when something exciting is happening but also someone to pass the box of tissues when your heart (inevitably) breaks.  Plus, accent decoding is much easier with multiple ears.

The O.C.
This show is so ridiculous and awesome and awesomely ridiculous that it demands to be watched with others.  The Cohen-Atwood-Cooper-Roberts blended family is always a joy to watch, but it gets so much better with a friend to simultaneously roll their eyes at Marissa's dumb-ass-ery or get a little equally verklempt at those perfect Ryan and Seth moments.  I have happily spent many an afternoon cleaning and organizing to the background of soapy sunshine and emo antics, but the full glory of The O.C. (the touching family moments, the funny declarations of love, the sad sad car accidents) really comes into being when observed in conjunction with good friends.  And by good friends I mean people who have an equal lack of shame and love of upper-middle-class drama.  Or just people who drink as much as you do.

The TV Girl

Ringer: Show I Will Actually Watch This Fall

Every Fall, when new shows start and old friends return, I am full of optimism.  I believe that I will find time to keep up with dear loves and add the shiny new shows into rotation.

Yeah, um, we know that doesn't happen.  But for ever so many reasons I can say that I am genuinely excited about Ringer and that for ever how long it lasts (wow, that's not optimistic) I will be a faithful and diligent little viewer.  I mean watch the trailer for this show and tell me for real that you aren't at least interested enough to watch the pilot.

The TV Girl

Game of Thrones: The Dragon(s) Reborn!

“Blood and Fire” 1.10

Wait, no, different ungodly long fantasy book series.

And if anyone tries to make Robert Jordan's desperately-in-need-of-an-editor-with-a-machete books into a TV show I will punch them in the face.  For reals.

Please be warned, this is not a coherent review at all.  Sorry.

Okay, I am in a really tricky situation.  I (finally) watched this episode on Monday.  I saved and saved it, knowing it is all we’ll have for a while.  But, because I was so busy savoring it I didn’t write any notes about the order and details of events as the show presents them.  So Thursday I went to the internets to watch the episode again, and write notes, but all of the places that I borrow videos from had nothing to give me.  (Bastards.)  Add to this some sort of huge disagreement my computer Mal (yes, named after the one and only Captain Malcolm Reynolds) is having with the wireless router in my apartment and you get my current conundrum: I know what happened in the episode and I have lots of opinions and impressions but I cannot remember enough to write a description along the lines of what I’ve done for the previous episodes.  I feel like such a failure.  I thought I would actually account for a whole season of a show, but alas, look like I have sabotaged myself, yet again.

So here’s what I’m going to do.  It’s what I do for everything else.  I’m going to talk about what I liked and what I didn’t, and I’ll give as much background information as I can/deem necessary to be clear, and I’m going to trust that you’ll have already seen this episode, or that you will watch it sometime in the future.  I might fail, but I like to announce my failure, not just slip away with a bit of dignity.  But I have to do something.

Kind of like Jon.  Okay, not at all like Jon, but good transition right?  Jon decided that he needed to join Robb, even though deserters from the Night’s Watch get beheaded, but Sam, Grenn and Pyp followed him and convinced him to return.  Lord Commander Mormont wasn’t too upset, mostly because he’s decided to assemble the men (Jon included) and go north of the Wall, to find out what’s the what with the zombies and the wildlings, as well as find Benjen Stark, dead or alive.  It might have seemed like such a cheep joke to have Sam fall of his horse while pursuing Jon, who turns back to make sure his friend isn’t injured, and as much as it was funny, it wasn’t just a throw away sight gag.  Jon needed to badly to see that honor isn’t always the most heroic looking thing, that sometimes what is right is awkward and uncoordinated.  Jon and Sam are continually struggling with the difference between expectation and reality.  Both believe the best of each other, therefore they in turn ask the other to set aside expectation (self-inflicted or otherwise) and see their own hearts clearly.  The fact that Sam does this in a (maybe unintentionally) humorous way is part of what makes him so vital, to Jon and to us.  Jon doesn’t want to betray his vow, but because he’s been taught that the world will always see him as an abomination, he can tell himself that desertion is in his nature.  He needs to see Sam literally fall to realize that he doesn’t have to, that he can live up to his vow.  And what a vow it is.  I know we’ve heard it before, but every time the vow of The Brothers of the Nights Watch fills my heart.  You could argue that the scene, the three friends gathering in an ever tightening circle around Jon and picking up the lines until they spoke in unison, was overdone, too overtly "dramatic" set in the darkness as it was.  Not to me.  To me, it was beautiful.  It was a roughly elegant example of why Game of Thrones (books and show) have captured me so fully: WORDS MATTER.  Those simple sentences (subject, verb, object) spoken from sincere hearts break through Jon's conflicted soul.   In case you’ve forgotten, the oath of the Night's Watch is as follows (from Wikipedia): 

Night gathers, and now my watch begins. It shall not end until my death. I shall take no wife, hold no lands, father no children. I shall wear no crowns and win no glory. I shall live and die at my post. I am the sword in the darkness. I am the watcher on the walls. I am the fire that burns against the cold, the light that brings the dawn, the horn that wakes the sleepers, the shield that guards the realms of men. I pledge my life and honor to the Night's Watch, for this night and all the nights to come. 

This is a powerful oath; it is asking men (and in some cases just boys) to completely abnegate the self, to sacrifice their entirety to be the first and last defense against, essentially, evil.  It is the fundamental human mandate, to preserve against destruction, and when they agree to this they are agreeing to do so for an entire nation of people.  The enormity of their charge radiates out of these forthright declarations, elevating the men who speak them.  Gives me shivers.

The Night’s Watch aren’t the only ones on the move.  Tyrion will be taking a journey next season as well.  Tywin, rather put out that Robb has captured Jaime and that Joffery’s execution of Ned has eliminated any possibility of peace, decides to send Tyrion to King’s Landing to act as Hand of the King while he (Tywin) hunts down the Young Wolf.  There’s a catch; Tyrion is to leave Shae behind, but Tyrion decides to ignore/defy his pops, and Shae starts packing her bags.  Honestly, if Tyrion has any hope of getting that little sociopath he calls a nephew in line, Shae is a bit of an unnecessary distraction.  But, if Tywin hadn’t been such an ass-hat about telling Tyrion not to bring her, Tyrion might have left her behind.  Because Tyrion is so good he has a sense of loyalty to his family, he wants to help them, and he wants to use the gifts that he has to create peace in his homeland.  Left to think it through on his own, he very likely would have put aside his own desires in order to fully focus on the task at hand.  If only Tywin, having finally acknowledged that Tyrion is the smartest of his children and the best qualified to put a leash on Joffery and Cersei, could have restrained his own desire to knock his son down.  He doesn’t want Tyrion to mistake (grudging) semi-respect with esteem or, gods forbid, affection.  Not only is it just cruel parenting (seems to run in the Lannister family), it is terrible leadership.  (I almost wrote “human resource management” there, and then realized that I’m not talking about my job.)  If you need someone to do something for you, and do it well, you don’t point out to him/her your disdain.  You aren’t going to get what you want/need, and if you’re operating in the context of a civil war, the stakes might be just too high to justify indulging in petty jabs.  Anyone wondering if Tywin would have made a better king than Robert should have witnessed that little exchange with his second born son, which provided a very definitive NO.  

Luckily, Tywin’s sons are so much better than he is.  I have to give away a bias, because I’ve done a shit job of holding it in, and damn it, this is my blog, no one pays me for this, and I can say whatever I want.  I started reading these books upon the recommendation of my friend Brandon (he’s kind of my geek guru and he’s way smart and funny) and he gave me a piece of advice when I started: hold back from becoming attached to the characters, because war is a fickle bitch and you don’t know what is going to happen.  I NEEDED this advice, because as anyone whose read more than about two words of what I write knows, I think of characters as real people, they take on actuality and reality within in my mind, and I get super attached to them, and way too frakking judge-y judge-y about them.  (For example, please see my INTENSE HATERD of Catelyn.)  In order to help me, Brandon mentioned to me that Jaime had become one of his favorite characters by the end of Book 4.  I was shocked, how could that possibly be?  Incest guy who pushed darling Bran out a window?  But I trusted Brandon and tried my best (with varying results) to hold off from being me about the characters.  And I kept an eye on Jaime.  Damn it if Brandon wasn’t all too right, because by the end of Book 4 Jaime was as firmly fixed in my heart as Jon, Arya, and Tyrion.  What happens to Jaime (in the books) is utterly astounding, and I’ve tried to explain it to people (both obliquely as to not give too much away as well as by going into detail without concern for spoilers) but in a way I’m still processing it, and that should tell you how stunning Jaime as a character becomes: months and months later, I’m still trying to find the words.  (One of the things that keeps me coming back to literature is when I encounter something that knocks me back to the point where I cannot form an argument around it, that frustration and awe makes me happier than almost anything on this earth.)  Why am I telling you all this?  Because as much as I suck at hiding my biases, I’ve tried harder with Jaime than with other characters on the show, in order to not spit out everything that other people might not know yet and wouldn’t be at all prepared for.  This episode (yes, at some point I’m actually going to talk about the TV show) freed me up a bit, because they are preparing us!  Jaime and Catelyn’s conversation was brilliant.  Without any hesitation he told her that he pushed Bran out the window, with the intent to kill him, but he won’t tell her why, and you get to see that he wants to.  He wants to give her the answers she needs, he isn’t trying to torture this woman who is on the edge, who with very little provocation could be goaded into killing him.  And he can’t and that doesn’t sit well with him.  He isn’t nearly the fool or the monster that everyone assumes that he is: he can’t tell the mother of the rebel leader that the king is a pretender but he recognizes that he owes Catelyn, as a mother and grieving widow, some measure of peace.  And it’s so clear to us just how thin the persona he’s taken on has become.  When Catelyn approaches him he defaults into flirting with her, to insulting her by sexual advance so that she’ll consider him beneath concern, and when she hits him across the head with a rock the shell literally cracks, he can’t hold onto the defenses he’s used to manipulate people his whole life.  We’ve seen the hint in pervious episodes that there is more going on inside him than he lets on (his comment about Theon being like a shark on a mountaintop was a particularly telling moment) but facing all of Catelyn’s rage and sorrow, caught between a desire to be honest and his sense of duty that keeps him silent, was a revelation from which there is no turning back. 

Much like there is no turning back from declaring Robb the “King in the North.”  I’ll admit it, I choked up a bit. 

Funny enough, Dany didn’t choke when she walked into Drogo’s funeral pyre to retrieve her newborn dragons. Yes, live baby dragons were waiting in the eggs she was given as a wedding present.  (The blood spell killed Dany’s baby while in the womb and Drogo’s soul still parted from his body.  Dany smothered Drogo with a pillow.  Hence the funeral pyre.)  Am I the only one who isn’t entirely comfortable with Dany having dragons? And as much as Dany is the proper person to whom the dragons would come to, it just makes me a bit nervous, because she isn’t always so stable.  I have to give Dany a break, she is very young and her upbringing was, um, unconventional.  She isn’t a particularly good judge of character, evidenced by the witch who had no trouble whatsoever convincing Dany to exchange the life of her unborn child for the continued heartbeating of her husband.  People tried to warn her that she was making a mistake, and that bitch was super shady looking, but Dany convinced herself that a) she would be treated with a certain degree of respect due to her station and family, and b) that she had really thought through all the contingencies of what she was doing.  Leadership is as much strategy as it is veneration, and being given the later by some of her followers she neglected the former.  It’s rather difficult to empathize with her when bad things happen because she REFUSES to listen to anyone, to even for a second admit that she might not completely and totally know what she’s doing, but on the other hand it’s understandable why she would behave that way, since she’s never had anyone she could trust and rely on to guide her.

But as Sansa clearly demonstrates, it is possible to have the best guidance in the world and not realize it until it’s too late.  She should have pushed Joffery off that bridge.  Just shoved that little prick for pure revenge. 

We will have to wait awhile to see if she regrets not joining the ranks of kingslayers.  It interests me to watch a season finale for a show that has a certain future.  HBO picked up a second season of GoT before the 3 episode aired, and frankly after the pilot there wasn’t a doubt in my mind that this show would come to as abrupt and end as some of it’s characters.  Instead of either a cliff-hanger, some hugely surprising event that occupies the viewer’s mind creating a desperate need to see how the next season plays out (and maybe thereby stave of cancellation) or a resolution, where the various plots are wrapped up in a way that can both fulfill and thwart our expectations, what we got here was a combination of both: our character know where they have been and are prepared to set out for the next stage of their journey.

The TV Girl

Summer Suggestions: Misfits, Series 1& 2

Simon -Maybe we're supposed to be super heroes.
Nathan -In what kind of fucked up universe would that be allowed to happen?

We associate summer with freedom, and not just because of American Independence Day. As the weather gets warmer we show more skin, play hooky with less guilt, and can't help but think that a gin and tonic is the perfect ending to a day.  And so, similarly, is it with TV.  We pack away think-y dramas and sophisticated meta-comedies for fast dialogue, bright locations, and implausible but entertaining stories that leave us feeling like a day in the sun; satisfied and relaxed.  (The USA Network has managed to become quite successful catering to this seasonal need, and boy do I love them for that.)

In a way no one is freer than the delightful little juvenile offenders of Misfits.  In another way no one is less free than them.  But, either way you see it, I am immensely happily spending part of my summer with these crazy kids.

Nathan (Robert Sheehan), Simon (Iwan Rheon), Kelly (Lauren Socha), Alisha (Antonia Thomas) and Curtis (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) have been assigned community service at a local community center as punishment for various misdeeds against society.  On their first day they, and their probation officer, are struck by lightening in a freak storm, and they being to develop unnatural abilities.  Total insanity ensues.

Part of what makes Misfits special, why is stands apart from other teen dramas or super-hero fantasies, is that being endowed with super powers doesn't make them noble or generous.  Their newly bestowed gifts, amplifications of their traits and fears, cause nothing but havoc in their lives and damage to those around them: initially lacking the knowledge of how to control things leading to mortal mayhem, when they do figure out some control, they more easily do things they shouldn't be doing in the first place.  You know, like, stalking.  The easy route (for a show) is the traditional understanding that if one gets superpowers they'll immediately recognize the pull of universal machinations.  The difficult route (for a show) is the unconventional but more realistic concept that one would take the easy route, use their powers in a self-indulgent or trivial way, but to still make the viewer cheer for the characters.

Here is where I think I should throw in a bit of a warning.  Please don't watch this show if you are easily offended.  I mean it.  These 5 offenders are offensive: they are drugging, drinking, promiscuous, foul-mouthed and immensely disaffected.  (Not to trivialize recent and extremely unpleasant events, but I have no doubt that some commentators in Britain made comparisons between these fictional youths and the all too real rioters of the last weeks.)  Objectively, they're kind of shit people, and it is very easy for their antics to grate on moral sensibilities.  I just want you to know.

Despite what could be considered the off-putting qualities, Misfits succeeds in drawing in the audience, in bonding the viewer with people we'd maybe rather not know in real life. Some shows just work perfectly, and it's almost impossible to describe why.  There is a magical combination of character development, plotting, pace, humor, and plain out and out ridiculousness that works so perfectly, even when it shouldn't.  All of that principle actors give fully committed and natural performances.  In particular Robert Sheehan plays Nathan with a fearlessness that makes Nathan's audacious behavior equally palatable and painful.  Much like the other characters, the viewer knows everything Nathan is saying is completely ridiculous, but damn it, he just makes you want to listen to him.  (I promise, you will hide your head in your hands because you can't stop laughing but you're so uncomfortable.)  In pitch perfect contrast is Iwan Rheon, who plays Simon with an almost deranged constraint in a style that strongly reminds me of Michael C. Hall.  (Honestly, I wish he had played young Dexter in the flashback scenes on Dexter.)  While maintaining a very few overarching storylines, the series remains for the most part episodic, and is much stronger for the fact.  By introducing and resolving complications for our heroes within each episode, Misfits keeps the quick pace necessary to retain both viewer attention and the suspension of disbelief.  I'm all for the calculated unfolding of a grand plot (Firefly), but in this particular genera the slow-build is more susceptible  to leaving the viewer bogged down in disconnected threads and unmet expectation (Heroes).  Alternately, in taking the long-view regarding character progression, the surprising shifts in personality are organic and rewarding, especially in the case of Alisha.  She doesn't end at all where it seems like she will when she begins, but she earns who she becomes in a plausible (within the structure of the created universe) and endearing way.

For all the pro/con arguments to be made about it's favors and faults whether or not you want to watch this show is really a matter of taste.  If it's the kind of show that appeals to you then you'll really enjoy it, it's excellent.  If this isn't where your inclinations lie you probably won't be seduced by it's merits.  For my part, Misfits is crack, and I am it's itching, shaking, fiending bitch.

The TV Girl

(This show was a project with Emily the Roommate.  She had seen it all and thought I would like it.  I love having friends with good taste!  In case you don't have an Emily (or a KP, or a Jennie, or a Calah), the series has been added to Hulu over the last couple months, a new episode every Monday.  It should be close to being complete, but I don't know how long the episodes will stay up.  Get on this shit.)

Love Letter to a Fictional Character: Rory Williams (Doctor Who)

Hey everyone!

It would make more sense to explain my week + absence from my blog if I were a more regular blogger (you know, not totally lazy like I am) but I actually have a good excuse this time.  I was on vacation, at home in Portland.  The cool weather, good food, nice people, familial bonding, and the heartwarming wedding of one of my brothers has made me slightly less of a cranky-pants than normal.  I'm sort of in a gushy mood, and thought I might channel that into, well, gushing.

Last night Emily the Roommate and I began our re-watch of Doctor Who S6 P1, in preparation for the second half of the season beginning next weekend.  Among everything, there were many cheers and exclamations of affection every time Rory Williams, aka Mr. Amy Pond, appeared on screen.  Emily and I share a great love for Rory, because he is WONDERFUL!

When we met Rory it looked like we were getting a rehash of Mickey: the hapless boyfriend whose abandoned for the dashing Doctor.  I was afraid we would again be put through the vaguely annoying misery of seeing a basically decent guy get his life torn up because he wasn't up to the task of matching the sparkly adventures of the last Time Lord.  I mean really, could the slightly bewildered small-town murse really be the proper partner for bold, brave, and bruised Amy?  Hell yes he could be!  Rory is not Mickey, any more than Amy is Rose.

When the strange man he met two years earlier during an (almost) world ending event pops out of a cake at his stag night and announces that his fiancee hasn't been kissing only him, Rory doesn't even get mad.  He blinks, sputters a bit, but he doesn't start freaking out about how a practical stranger has humiliated him in front of every dude he knows or that the woman he's going to marry might not be faithful.  He's puzzled, but he's willing to accept the Doctor's solution that Amy and Rory need a time/space-travel-y date to reconnect, so that she stops thinking she wants to "connect" with the Doctor.  Because essentially Rory is a level-headed person.  He stays calm, thinks the situation through, gets all the facts he can before making a judgment or taking an action.  Emily was remarking to me last night that it's in "The Impossible Astronaut" and "Day of the Moon" that we really get to see that Rory really is the one who keeps his wits about him, who retains his composure in dire circumstances. And we've been led to see this throughout S5 and 6.  In "Cold Blood" after Alaya (the hostage) is killed Rory insists that they return her body to her people, even knowing that doing so could put Amy's life in more jeopardy than it already is.  He is afraid to loose Amy, but he is rational enough to know that honesty is the only possible way to salvage the situation.  When Rory the Roman offers to guard the Pandorica in "The Big Bang" the Doctor tries to dissuade him, to impress upon him that he will be alone for thousands of years and probably loose his mind, but Rory the Roman is having none of it.  With a fortitude that can only result from a well-honed perception of the truth, Rory makes the simple choice that if Amy will be safer he will stay with her.  So when Amy is kidnapped in "Day of the Moon" we expect nothing less from Rory than his impassioned speech to the Doctor that Amy can always hear him and always knows that he will save her.  And damn it if we don't know it too!

Rory loves Amy unendingly.  I mean that.  He loves her without end.  Through death, being erased from time, being reborn as a plastic Centurion, being reborn again through Amy's memory, and ALL OF IT, Rory loves Amy.  Even though she kind of forgets about him sometimes, and flirts with the Doctor, and really has trouble expressing her emotions.  It doesn't make him some kind of saint or dopey optimist: Rory has moments of insecurity, needs affirmation from his wife, and he's always aware of the seriousness of engaging in the Doctor's shenanigans.  His steadfastness takes a toll on him, his mind continually weighed with the reality of sacrifice.  In "Day of the Moon" he tells the Doctor that he remembers the years he guarded the Pandorica, but not all the time.  He has earned his happiness and appreciates it all the more because of that fact.

In a way unlike any other companion Rory is the mirror of the Doctor.  Where the Doctor has this bountiful love for the human being, Rory has a specific love for one woman.  Where the Doctor rescues in the nick of time, Rory comforts and repairs in the aftermath.  Where the Doctor basks in the unspoken esteem of others (because after all he is rather clever), Rory doesn't expect others to notice what he does.  Where the Doctor drops in and out of time and space and lives, Rory is the anchor.  The two men reflect each other, presenting different refractions of similar traits.  But also, Rory shows how the qualities that others find so appealing and fascinating in the Doctor are possible for a regular person.  It in no way diminishes the special-ness of the Doctor to see how his characteristics manifest in a person, but rather Rory simultaneously connects the Doctor even more to humanity and serves as an example to strive for.

And Rory repeatedly watches Laurel and Hardy movies! How frakking precious is that?

Amy is the girl who waited, Rory is the man who endured.  And I love him.  Seriously, love him.

The TV Girl