Wax Banks

Still not done!

There is a file sitting on my ~/Desktop called 'to-fucking-do.txt.'

Its contents, in full:

write buffy/dollhouse sex porno mashup fiction

with PUSSY

I am a man with a purpose.

Brief note re: fans and how little they matter, the colonization of Hollywood by the likes of J.J. Abrams notwithstanding.

1) Abrams isn't ultimately a fanboy, though he has the aesthetics of one. He's a huckster, a carnival barker. He's interested in the same juvenile shit as the other kids who watched TV in the 80's instead of reading novels, but his cynicism is breathtaking. That said, fanboys have risen to some prominence in Hollywood in the last few years, Joss Whedon the most talented among them - the first Hollywood-writer generation to have watched Twin Peaks on TV - and we can thank them for expensive dreck like Abrams's Star Trek, Terminator: Salvation, X-Men 3, and Transformers.

2) Fans didn't save Dollhouse. Whedon's zero-budget coda 'Epitaph One' did - because it points the way to bigger profit margins for Fox. It's important to understand that this is quite literally the only thing the suits at Fox care about. If they cared about the content and cultural role of television they wouldn't, e.g., be working for Fox.

Bea Arthur, master comedian. RIP.

She could do more with a look than today's entire NBC lineup can with a week's worth of scripts. Her Turkey Lurkey is one of my fondest TV memories.

A great lady. She's missed.

Withdrawing from the Internet.

Hello y'all.

I'm not going to read the Internet again until next week, maybe the week after that. (I'll look at articles my wife recommends. BHITW and all.) I can't seem to comment on other people's posts without venting disgust at their ineptitude or turning it into a referendum on my own mindbrain; hell, most of what I read I only look at to irritate myself. And as you'd expect, it's bringing me down.

Maybe not just me.

Here's a helpful infographic to carry you through in the meantime:

The Whedon monomyth myth.

The line on Joss Whedon is that he writes pulp fantasy/sci-fi stories about 'empowering/empowered young women,' or 'strong female characters,' or some such thing. He's backhandedly 'praised' for his handling of characters like Kitty Pryde, Buffy Summers, River Tam, Echo the doll, even Ellen Ripley and her cyborg companion Call; word on the street is that Whedon has just one kind of story he likes to tell, one story he can tell.

But.

You tell me what the following stories have in common:

Barney the Vampire Slayer involves a young guy in high school, Barney, who finds one day that he's the latest in a long line of vampire hunters doing a thankless - and invariably fatal - inherited job. He stays alive through grit'n'determination, a little street smarts, and the tireless assistance of his friends, William and Andrea: the former a closeted gay nerd boy, the latter a dopey but well-meaning future lifelong Starbucks employee. Barney ends up creating a superpowered race of 'Slayers' in order to change the nature of the fight against eeeeevil, and in doing so realizes that his strength comes not from possessing power but from granting it. He dies a couple of times, but is brought back to life by his friends, who can't seem to live without him, and all involved experience a series of relationship catastrophes - particularly Barney, whose strength and self-reliance intimidate the women he dates. The show's tone varies from lowbrow comedy to witty farce to domestic drama to kung-fu action to grand biblical myth.

Firefly's galactic-Reconstruction-era space captain Mary Reynolds decides to take care of two twentysomething twins, Simone and Roger Tam, for reasons she doesn't quite understand. Roger, it turns out, has been experimented on by a government assassin school, and granted supernatural empathy and sensory powers that makes him practically psychic. Atop which he's played by a half-Asian actor (though his sister is played by a white girl), emphasizing how cut off Roger is, even from the person he loves most. Simone finds that she can't take care of Roger - or rather, that Roger needs to rid himself of the secrets and confessions to which he's been privy in order to start (ably) taking care of himself. Captain Reynolds decides to join forces with the twins to challenge the interplanetary government. The show blends joyously overwrought space opera, the working-stiff crew of Alien, a smart critique of Star Trek's bureaucratic moralism, and the iconography of the Old West (and the U.S. Civil War) into a multi-culti genre-bending stew.

A teenage mutant named Bobby Pryde has the ability to pass through solid objects. He falls in love with the most solid object of all: a woman whose body is made of metal. Russian woman to boot. After a long separation and tearful, stunned reunion the two end up (as usual) on a mission to a distant planet, where Bobby's lady love is thought to be a prophesied messiah/destroyer. To stop a giant bullet from destroying the earth, Bobby phases into its hollow center, and - when all efforts to stop the weapon have failed - simply phases the whole thing through earth itself and out into space, never to return. The tale deals with identity politics, politics at the cultural margins, religious fanaticism, the ethics of eugenics and mind-control, and (improbably) the the complexity of starting over in love, as a teenager or a middle-aged man/beast.

(That last story does seem a little appropriate for Easter, no?)

You get the idea. The point of this exercise is that if Whedon wrote about self-sacrificing superpowered young men, we'd be talking about the 'complex variations' on classic themes he was working in his fiction, the variety of genres and tones and moral frameworks he's worked in; and critics and fans alike would focus more closely on the complex specifics of those stories rather than the fact of their protagonists' genders. This irritating political fixation bothers me most in regard to Dollhouse, which is on one level a story about sex objects and yet is criticized (even by rabid Whedon fans!) for 'treating its [female] leads like sex objects.' I suspect that what keeps seemingly intelligent people from knowing the difference between representation and endorsement, critique and indulgence, is preoccupation with - among other things - the 'appropriate' treatment of men and women onscreen, the need to slide from complex ambivalent acknowledgment of the order of things to comforting, simplistic judgment. (Nothing is simpler or more comforting than this single bit of information fantasy: 'Good or Evil.')

You might pick up one of Whedon's stories because of simple identification, but that's not what makes them great stories. His political importance isn't the same as the aesthetic and moral value of his work; I hope that over time we'll be able to see that his 'celebration of strong women' has always been an expansive celebration of humanity regardless of gender.[*] That his particular form of feminism revels in the depiction of strong women doesn't make mere depiction his ultimate goal nor his sole method, and criticism worthy of his work will look on his increasingly complex treatment of sex, power, and 'justice' not as a shift in priorities but an illumination of what his priorities have always been.

[*] The limits of his political consciousness have been talked about elsewhere; suffice to say the phrase 'regardless of race' or 'regardless of class' would be out of place here, but I consider that a matter of Whedon knowing and pushing his limits rather than rejecting what lies beyond them.

Fuck hope and change - time for some good ol' fashioned paranoid foolishness!

Blackeyes?

Anyone out there got a copy of Blackeyes by the great Dennis Potter? I'd like to see it.

Because I think Joss Whedon is making a loopy sci-fi version of it called Dollhouse.

And that, Reader(s), is your TV-history nerdery for the day.

Echoes.

Jesus Christ, the latest episode of Dollhouse was a long leap beyond any previous episode! The talking heads were in some ways the most interesting parts of the episode. Though my wife and I are (at this very moment) arguing about whether 'rape' is the right word to talk about the mistreatment of Sierra - who is, after all, subjected quite 'happily' to far worse treatment, rationalized and sanitized by the money the Dollhouse makes off her subjection.

(N.B. My wife says unequivocally 'It's rape' and I've had wine so I'm all 'Nah nah devil's advocate!' and it's boring like it always is when I've had wine.)

This show isn't broken - it's nasty.

Being Jon Stewart.

Many, many thanks to MRhé for bringing this to our attention. One hour of Jon Stewart laying into corrupt politicians, complicit media, and a quiescent audience. If you liked the Cramer stuff you'll flip for this - lower-key but even more devastating in retrospect (not least for the total absence of economic discussion).

Why do genre-switching TV shows go down easier than their film counterparts?

Because the TV shows have fixed identities, series genres (cop show, domestic drama about a football team, fashion-world reality show) superseded only on the day by individual episode genres, so they can sell a one-off generic switchup - e.g. vampire hunters burst into song, or White House staffers spend all of 9/11 talking in an elementary school (though N.B. that was a stupid, offensive hour of TV) - whereas movies can't usually buy their generic instability with built-up serial goodwill. They're evaluated on what they are rather than what they've been - which is why we rush to see 'stars' (alas) onscreen, because they we know the genre of the movie we're seeing in advance: 'This is a "Brad Pitt movie,"' etc. Though N.B. that means the 'betrayals' (e.g. Benjamin Button?) seem like a bigger deal than they are, because we're fickle, brain-dead cowards. Though but then by the way N.B. also Return of the King had seventeen climaxes and codas and was nearly eight and a half hours long and they had to invent new categories of Oscars to reward every citizen of New Zealand for that shit, so this obviously also works for film trilogies.

Every episode of Seinfeld, $100.

Today only at amazon.com - click on the Gold Box.

If you watched TV in the last twenty years it shouldn't be necessary to explain why the full Seinfeld is a worthwhile purchase. It's gut-busting funny, a master class in several comedic forms, and is the Rosetta Stone for some of the most unfortunate vocabulary trends of the Clinton era. It led the Nielsen ratings and altered the American sitcom, the 'master of your domain' episode is exactly as important and uncomfortable (and funny) as you remember or have heard, and the finale was a kick in the teeth to tens of millions of viewers and critics and other willing braindead supplicants. In historical terms, the nine-year series mocked the conventions of American sitcoms with its 'no hugging, no learning' rule and is in some ways the endpoint of the traditional multicamera sitcom's development, a 'show about nothing' that sent up the gleeful carnival-freakshow misanthropy at the heart of the sitcom (and the culture that spawned it).

After Seinfeld came the era of the single-camera sitcom, which brought Malcolm in the Middle, The Office, and Seinfeld's natural successor Arrested Development (which had it both ways w/r/t sentimentality - sending it up and sweetly indulging). But Seinfeld was the old form perfected, starting with the cast: Michael Richards for slapstick, Jason Alexander as the Schlub Triumphant, the Julia Louis-Dreyfus as a post-Woody Allen take on the screwball comedienne, and in the middle Seinfeld himself, who was just enough of an actor to make bottomless bourgeois contempt funny and charming. Yes the show was a sendup of Upper West Side manners, but beyond its 'all this banal banality, alas' criticisms (its Jerry Seinfeld/Andy Rooney style) lay another, nastier sort of critique. Seinfeld's parade of grotesque one-offs (the Close Talker, the Low Talker, Banya, Poppy, the dentist who converts to Judaism for the jokes, and the rotund girl Kramer brings home in his guise as the 'ASSMAN') marked it as a freakshow, which isn't unprecedented of course, but the protagonists were always the very vilest creatures onscreen, stealing bread from old ladies, eating out of the trash, accidentally killing George's wife and glad to be rid of her...which is why the finale was so poorly-received. Admitting that you've been hapily rooting for the monster isn't easy, and the finale asked its audience for that admission. Ugly.

Its formal qualities are neat and so forth but you should get the box set because Seinfeld at its best was TV's funniest comedy bar none, and laughing is nice, right? Whatever you're laughing at.

Shorter version of previous post about Dollhouse.

If you saw the first few episodes of Dollhouse and thought, 'I don't think this is a good premise for a series,' then the show's central questions and your refusal to hold their possible answers in tension, rather than any (real or imagined) structural failings to the story, are messing you up. I'd argue that you simply, literally don't know what you're talking about. I don't know how to make that sound friendlier - which is, I guess, an indictment of my own (dis)abilities as a writer.

I gotta think about it a little more, cool down. It's a fascinating piece of fiction.

Why you don't like Dollhouse.

Hi Reader(s)!

If you haven't seen Dollhouse skip this one. Watch the show instead. If you have, and liked it, enjoy vicariously. If you have, and didn't, this Bud's for you, asshole.

There are lots of reasons you might put forth for why you didn't like the one or two episodes you saw of Joss Whedon's new Dollhouse. But let me suggest that most of your negative reaction actually has nothing to do with the 'technical' concerns you think you have, or the 'structural problems' you think you've noticed, or the 'limited range' of the lead actress, or the writers' 'tin ear' for dialogue...these are largely self-justifications, I think. I know this is a graceless tack to take, but I'm dead serious about the following criticism-of-critics, who (after all) tend not to know much if anything about how to structure TV stories, how to act for television, how to reproduce the rhythms of dialogue in a unique poetic language, or what the economics of high-tech prostitution might look like. I realize, too, that this probably sounds like fannish defensiveness - you don't like a Joss show? There must be something wrong with you!

You didn't like the first few episodes of Dollhouse. Well, let me suggest the main reason why:

There's nothing satisfying about it, by design.

In other words, I'm guessing that you don't like it because you don't know what to like.

(I am quite possibly objectively holier than all y'all thou.)

Every vector of possible satisfaction for the viewer has been poisoned, from the outset, by the show's premise. That doesn't mean the premise is bad - the premise is extraordinarily fertile - it just means that you (we) don't get to do your (our) normal routine of using borrowed jargon to rationalize your visceral satisfaction. Not the clunky mannerisms of academic criticism, nor the easy cynicism of what passes for 'media criticism,' nor the pop-schlub pidgin of newspaper/magazine critics and their Internet kidz.

The premise of the show is: What if a group of pimps - who happen to be neuroscientists - could erase the memories of whores who happen to be well-paid, extraordinary well-taken-care-of volunteers, and could use this power to effect amoral change in various economic strata? What would it take to suspend judgment toward such an operation, toward the whores, the pimps, the clients, the team of scientists and programmer-types who make it all possible? What sort of person would avail him- or herself of such an organization's services?

What kind of cop would become obsessed with shutting it down?

The complexity of the political allegory - depicting the quite literal return of individual and collective memory and desire heretofore repressed for economic reasons, the power of spontaneous organization to overcome institutional stricture, etc. - should be enough to overcome one's suspicions that Dollhouse is made in ignorance, with exploitation in mind, etc. And the writerly pedigree should cause one to think twice before assuming that the show's plots have been glibly chosen, its lines tossed off.

But I don't actually have to defend the show on those grounds; if it's well made and well-wrought, it'll stand on its own.

Here's my critical stance: It is not made to be liked. Nor to satisfy.

(I'm satisfied with my reading of the show, you know.)

Dollhouse asks the same questions of its characters as it does of its viewers; the unusual thing about the series is its total ambivalence toward the answers. One difference between Dollhouse and other (let's say...) antifoundational stories it that Whedon's questions are well-posed, i.e. it's clear what questions we're being asked, and the questions are complex and meaningful and pragmatic (unlike, let's say, 'Is there an outside-the-text?' or somesuch).

The security guard (Boyd) is sympathetic but his role is Male Protector of Helpless Female Who Nonetheless Can Not Help. He hates himself, doesn't know why he puts up with this shit. You can latch on his decency - but his job is indecent and he knows it. He's the primary father in the show, and variably effective in that role. He does evil.

The Madam is of course a Madam, a cold bitch by the looks of it, and whatever second thoughts she has about what she does, she runs whores and lets 'em die if necessary. Yet she's the primary mother figure in the show - and quite possibly effective in that role. She does evil.

The lead character, Echo, is barely a human being, doesn't even know to defend herself when endangered. And each week she's put in the position of victim, and finds her way out of that role, and gets to enjoy none of her victories. They're meaningless - they're not even hers. She works for the Bad Corporation like the rest of them.

The FBI agent is bugnuts, and wants to help kidnapped girls, and is a fuckup, and has no sympathy for anyone, and he's being lied to, and is a sap, and doesn't know how to work with people.

The Russian is a lie.

The Asian is a lie.

The obnoxious nerd is an obnoxious nerd, and hyper-competent, and sadly compensating, and clearly crazy, and a mind-raping pimp who happens to be the sole Artist Figure in the story - that's where his god complex comes from. He does evil, and knows it, and doesn't stop.

The characters with self-knowledge do evil, and the ones without it are pawns. The deck is stacked.

How could you possibly enjoy this story? There's no blinking arrow saying 'This Is Right.' Order is provisional, law is ad hoc, love is electrically-induced, pity is corporate, memory is false, the good guys are nuts, the bad guys mean well, and everything the lead character knows about her personality the viewer also knows.

She's going through the same thing we are. To the extent our moral outlook on the characters differs from hers, it's because we are judgmental and unfair and self-centered. That's the hazard, right there: we are self-centered, and can't pin that on anyone else in the storyworld.

Naaaaaaasty.

Atop which: the obvious Male Romantic Lead and the obvious Female Romantic Lead are separated by the inconvenient fact that the goddamn FBI guy hasn't shared a single scene with anyone from the Dollhouse (well, sorta). How can such a sexy show be utterly devoid of romance? Why would Joss Whedon do this to us who LOVE HIM SO MUCH. Why.

(I think I'm very smart.)

I don't particularly enjoy the familiar melodramatic inner structures of the episodes, in part because I'm conditioned to cringe at explicit genre cues (ahem grad school), in part because the very falseness and generically pat quality of the stories is a lie, that's the whole goddamn point of the show, and like any little boy I don't know how to be lied to. But I've loved every framing story, every flashback, every tangent, every glimpse into the Dollhouse itself. When Eliza Dushku looks like a woman acting-but-not-acting a part, I'm reminded that Echo is precisely that.

I trust Joss Whedon; the man has changed American culture for the better, and writes like a demon, and is burning this one at both ends. He knows what he's doing. I think you don't like the show because you also know what he's doing, and you don't like it. Your rationalizations are your own.

Give the goddamn thing a chance. Meet yourself. [And oh by the way, in case you didn't notice: Dollhouse isn't Buffy. Your expectations, embarrassingly, are your own too.]

[A bunch of new eyes on this one, thanks Mr Epstein. Hey TV-scripty types: more on related subjects here, here, here, here, here, here, sorta even here.]

Beau.

Knob at night.

Every few months I forget and then rediscover the Ricky Gervais podcasts. Having now heard many hours of the remarkable Karl Pilkington I'm less amazed than I used to be at his foolishness, and over a dozen episodes Gervais's keening air-raid-siren laugh does begin to grate. But Gervais and Merchant are a great comedy team, and Karl is...well if you've never heard the man and can parse heavily-accented Manc twattery, you're in for a unique treat. It's nearly a decade they've been doing the radio show, and I've never known Gervais or Pilkington to break Karl's Neanderthal-at-the-mixing-board character or undercut the abusive, disappointed-schoolmaster dynamic of the series. The metanarrative of the show is even more impressive than Pilkington's stonefaced improvisations and Gervais's increasingly-unhinged responses - the tale of Pilkington's rise from anonymity to minor media celebrity, with Gervais sincerely(?!) touting him as the funniest man in Britain, is currently the longest-running media performance in Gervais and Merchant's ongoing comedy career.

Pilkington is a virtuoso. Do listen to the show. They're doing new material now in a more focused format, and you can find the old shows online if you're crafty. The best of them are priceless.

Holy sweet baby American Jesus: Deadwood entire, $65, today only.

Go, just go god damn it.

As good as The Wire and The Sopranos are, Deadwood is the most interesting of the three great HBO shows, which together represent the highwater mark of American television (a title they're not likely to relinquish any time soon for reasons too complex to fit into this sales pitch). No other show approaches the verbal richness and complexity of Deadwood, which makes the cod-Italian malapropisms of The Sopranos seem trivial, and the reportorial virtuosity of The Wire seem hidebound. Line to line, David Milch writes better dialogue than anyone else on television, better even than the equally skillful but far less dense comic poetry of Joss Whedon. The tale of Al Swearengen, Seth Bullock, and the town they birth between them manages to bridge between the microscopic character focus of the Soprano family saga and the citywide scope of David Simon's Baltimore, but unlike its sister shows, Deadwood was left unfinished, and - for that reason among others - is in some ways the least essential of the three.

Its central questions are as explicit as The Wire's, but more philosophical in nature. Where David Simon concerned himself with the urban American drug war's dark transformation into a war on the (largely black) underclass, Milch asks: how do people organize themselves around a symbol, creating order in the absence of law, and what effect does it have on human relationships that the symbol - in this case gold - is intrinsically meaningless? (Remember that Deadwood was originally pitched as a cop show set during the early Christian period in Ancient Rome, substituting The Cross for gold.) Milch offers cynical answers for all these questions, yet Deadwood remains a hopeful show, and its spiritual message - human separateness is an illusion, we are all one organism, and are capable of recognizing our shared humanity in moments of extremity - is one that in a limited secular form Simon might share, though I wouldn't bet on the darker-than-dark David Chase reciting those mantras anytime soon.

Thematically and verbally the similarly-incomplete, far more abstract John From Cincinnati is Milch's followup and companion piece to Deadwood, less immediately involving and viscerally satisfying than its Western predecessor but attaining in its grandest moments a form of spiritual uplift that the resolutely materialist pioneers of Milch's Deadwood never get to experience. Deadwood shares the sense of impending doom that hangs over The Sopranos, but by the end of its truncated narrative you can recognize one key difference between the two shows: whereas just about everyone on The Sopranos (save Melfi?) is a bad guy of one or another form, from the sociopath Tony down through the ranks of enablers apologists criminals venal swine and 'sympathetic' villains, Milch's characters stumble and fall toward goodness, struggling - unlike the Sopranos - to be extraordinary instead of just victorious. They really do want to connect, and in Milch's eyes they deserve it; Chase seems to have a much lower opinion of his creations than does his former HBO stablemate.

But you don't even need to get to the thematic richness of the show to love its poetry, its comedy, the sheer joy the actors project in saying these fucking words. Look, damn it! The underling's lament, out of the mouth of the vile E.B. Farnum, hotelier:

You have been tested, Al Swearengen, and your deepest purposes proved. There’s gold on the woman’s claim. You might as well have shouted it from the rooftops. "That’s why I’m jumpin’ through hoops to get it back. Thorough as I fleeced the fool she married, I will fleece his widow, too, using loyal associates like Eustace Bailey Farnum as my go-betweens and dupes. To explain why I want her bought out I’ll make a pretext of my fear of the Pinkertons. I’ll throw Farnum a token fee. Why should I reward E.B. with some small fractional participation in the claim? Or let him even lay by a little security and source of continuing income for his declining years. What’s he ever done for me? Except let me terrify him every goddamned day of his life ‘til the idea of bowel regularity, is a forlorn fuckin’ hope. (Pours water on the stain) Not to mention orderin’ a man killed in one of E.B.’s rooms. So every fuckin’ free moment of his life E.B. has to spend scrubbin’ the bloodstains off the goddamned floor...

...to keep from havin’ to lower his rates." God damn that motherfucker!

Or better yet, just listen.

Nothing on TV has ever sounded quite like this. And if you give yourself to the story, it will gut you.

Go, just go. Today only. Go.

The Wire, complete, $82.

Must I say it again? Go get it. That's an obscene price. This, Deadwood, and The Sopranos are the thus-far high point of American TV drama, on par with the best of Dennis Potter. And of the three, The Wire is the most traditionally plotted and the least traditionally pitched and paced - easiest to enjoy from the start but demanding intellectual and emotional investment and patience of an unprecedented sort and scale. The Sopranos was as demanding but never as leisurely in its pacing as The Wire, in part because Tony Soprano's ruminations and the ongoing elaboration of his relationships with other human beings were the series, whereas David Simon's series is the tale of an entire city yet it takes a half-dozen episodes just to reveal its title character. Meanwhile Deadwood is both classically-structured/-toned (each episode a day, roughly soap-operatic pacing, the protagonists redeemed-bastard types) and unprecedented in its language, never mind the complex uplift of its particular 'We are one organism' moral message. It's the odd duck of the three, combining The Wire's institutional critique with the closeup Shakespearean self-overhearing and self-fashioning of The Sopranos.

In other words, if you watch TV and don't watch these series, you're dicking around. Go, damn it.

Lovely speech.

The complaints about Obama's inaugural address seem petty, small, and cynical - a matter of expectations, or partisan carping, or pageantry-fatigue. Or perhaps of an inability, or unwillingness, to see the sweep of the man's intentions. I haven't followed the runup to the inauguration, nor did I have much by way of expectations, so I gave in to the moment, and it was a doozy. A strong speech overall, and Obama delivered it as well as I've heard him deliver a written speech (you may recall that he's pretty good at it). It was well-organized and very cleanly assembled, and his few rhetorical flourishes were well-placed and well-turned.

More importantly, I was thrilled to hear the President of the United States talk passionately about respect for atheists, the restoration of public trust in science, and the need to pressure wealthy nations to embrace alternative energy sources. When he talked about dictators and autocrats being judged by history for what they build, not what they destroy, I teared up (again), and thought of the plutocrat George W. Bush sitting behind him, bidden farewell today by a whole nation - and not fondly. This wonderful passage was the most direct rebuke to Bush, but (and?) also the loudest applause line of the speech, as well it should have been:

As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake. And so to all other peoples and governments who are watching today, from the grandest capitals to the small village where my father was born: know that America is a friend of each nation and every man, woman, and child who seeks a future of peace and dignity, and that we are ready to lead once more.

[...]

We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense, and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.

Say it again: 'We will not apologize for our way of life.' And did anyone else hear this and think of David Simon?

Now, there are some who question the scale of our ambitions - who suggest that our system cannot tolerate too many big plans. Their memories are short.

This is an exceptional man. I'm glad he's working for me.

Go buy this right now.

Complete Sopranos on DVD, $150, free shipping, today only. This is one of the great artworks made in our lifetime and, irritating packaging issues aside, this is the edition to have.

The new Doctor Who is several years younger than me.

That is all.

Time to change the motto of this blog?

Obviously any long essay about modern television should be entitled, or at least subtitled, 'The Tedium is the Message.'

A couple of quick notes on how to watch Dr Horrible.

Well yes, I'm slow. This should more or less complete my earlier 'Horrible Ethics' post - to which, by the way, there were some excellent comments, which you should read, on the off chance you actually care about this arrant nonsense.

* The schema: Billy's the upstart new-media triumphalist who has no idea who even watches his show, and whose rhetoric doesn't quite match reality ('Anarchy...that I run!'). Hammer is the 'corporate tool,' the Big Business machine who makes things happen with a signature and who embodies everything the plucky creative types like Billy (rightfully) hate. In abstract terms, Penny is The Cost of the squabble between creators and big business. Billy seems to be all about Nobility and Truth and achieving his Pure Ideal - Penny, 'love,' whatever - but he's more than willing to settle for something else...

* A seat at the table: What does Billy/Horrible win at the end? Entry into a boardroom. That's his reward. 'Everything you ever...' isn't just a creepy reminder of what he's given up, it's a much creepier reminder that he's actually won exactly what he wanted. In allegorical terms, he has this great story to tell, and can't understand why everyone doesn't want to hear it. Like every goddamn blogger, he thinks 'honesty' is a style.

* Fans: The instant Horrible makes news, the fans are (ahem) all up on his joint. (Is my slanguage in step with the times?) And they don't just commemorate his awesomeness with merch - they actually produce fan art! Groupie #2 has got a little painting of Horrible (not 'Billy') at the end of the picture. Isn't that cute? She's employing her own creative talents to express her own relation to the text, etc., etc., etc. Yay fan creativity! Yaaaay!! The problem being, of course, Billy is nothing more than a thieving murderer, but hey NEW MEDIA BLOGS AWESOME

* Ethics, baby: As I said before, Captain Hammer might be a protofascist asshole, but he's also right on the merits about homelessness, thievery, poverty, 'scary alcoholic bums' (as in 'A hero doesn't care if you're...'), and - most importantly - about Billy. Talk about a perceptive reader: he sees Billy a hell of a lot more clearly than Penny, who can't even tell Billy's 'got a little crush.' Men's intuition, hmm? In the end, Hammer learns what pain feels like - but Billy fails to learn that Hammer would have been perfectly fine carrying on without him, and the fans would've shown up regardless. That's the nastiest thing about Dr Horrible as satire: Billy's obsessed with taking down Hammer and Hammer just doesn't particularly care one way or the other about Billy. He watches his video blog, sure, but he's not impressed. Meanwhile Hammer is learning, and growing, and when it comes to his big number in Act Three, he's actually inspiring! 'Your real home's in your chest,' he says. Kind of a nice sentiment when you think about it.

* User-generated content: Of course Hammer's also utterly disdainful toward everyone else's attempts to be a hero, even as he recognizes their validity. This points in two directions (curse you Whedon(s)!): yes, grassroots production can lead to 'heroic' work, but ultimately you reach the most people, and the most deeply, by putting your oh-so-precious personal impulses into a form that a mass audience can understand. Joss Whedon once pointed out that he could have made a grand feminist statement in a lecture series called 'Buffy the Lesbian Separatist' - but no one would've watched. Now he's reached millions, and indirectly (through Buffy's (proto-)feminist descendents), tens of millions. Hammer is making a related point. Again, remember the 'fan creativity' on display. Joss Whedon and his family may love fans, but the stories they tell about them are dark and ominous.

* The writers lost the strike: If you liked Dr Horrible then of course you need to listen to Commentary! The Musical, which is more musically complex, more acidic, generically unfettered, hilarious. Early on there's a brutal song about the Writers' Strike of 2008, which in Joss Whedon's view was unsuccessful. As he said back in the day:

"We need, now as much as ever, to act as if the strike is NEVER going to end. We need the rage that sends us out onto the picket lines, the passion that makes us look for alternate methods of financing and developing content, and the unity that reminds us how much the studios have taken from the community already by forcing this strike. As far as the WGA is concerned, the studios have not made one decision based on fair business practices. (Funny side-note: they've also abused writers as long as there has been filmed entertainment.) Some of the things that have been broken in these last months can never be fixed, some truths about the studios' power-grubbing inhumanity that can never be forgotten, or laughed over (as they have been for decades)."

Basically the writers slunk back to work with an almost imperceptibly improved status quo. It wasn't a labour movement, it was a power grab, and high-toned rhetoric about how most Hollywood writers are underpaid and destitute was absolute bullshit. The AMPTP brutalized the writers, conceded essentially nothing, and who's benefitting from the new order? As Captain Hammer says: 'You, and you, and mostly me, and you!'

If the goal of the strike was to make a connection with Penny, the strike failed. If it was to join the League, it succeeded. But what does it even mean to be in the League? It means approval, nothing more. Indeed it means finally having someone to boss you around ('Everything you ever...').

* Hence the arbitrariness of death: Seemed a little...excessive, killing Penny, no? Well no. Comic-book origin story, allegory about destroying creativity and lofty ideals, feminist enfilade against squabbling boy-men: these genres require a Big Death at the end. It's not excessive, it's the generic minimum.

* These are the lyrics to the villain's triumphant declaration song, written by Joss Whedon. He's frozen Captain Hammer (a literal work stoppage) and is disgusted by the silent slackjawed viewing audience around him:

Look at these people – amazing how sheep'll
Show up for the slaughter
No one condemning you – lined up like lemmings
You led to the water
Why can't they see what I see? Why can't they hear the lies?
Maybe the fee's too pricey for them to realize
Your disguise is slipping
I think you're slipping

Now that your savior is still as the grave you're
Beginning to fear me
Like cavemen fear thunder – I still have to wonder
Can you really hear me?
I bring you pain, the kind you can't suffer quietly
Fire up your brain, remind you inside you're rioting
Society is slipping
Everything's slipping away

So...
Go ahead – run away
Say it was horrible
Spread the word – tell a friend
Tell them the tale
Get a pic – do a blog
Heroes are over with

In Commentary! The Musical, Joss's only solo is sun over that scene. 'I tried to warn you - the truth never helps anyone,' he says. The song is about the futility and inappropriateness of asking about the creative process. Of the author of The Odyssey he sings:

He didn't say "Here's what it means,
And here's a few deleted scenes"
Charybdis tested well with teens
He's not the story
He's just a door we open if
Our lives need lifting

But now we pick pick pick it apart

The others step in:

Joss why do you rail against the biz?
You know that's just the way it is
You're making everybody mis...

These out-of-date philosophies
Are for the dinner table - please
We have to sell some DVD's...

Without these things you spit upon
You'd find your fame and fan base gone
You'd be ignored at Comic Con

And Whedon leads into the final verse:

I sang some things I didn't mean
OK let's talk about this scene

Not many Hollywood writers do smart comedy like Joss Whedon. But he is one angry, frustrated son of a bitch. Here's why he's worth watching: because he's angry, and sad, and he desperately wants to help everyone, and he's going to find a way to fix it all by entertaining you. And that's why he gets to make hundreds of hours of television and you have a weblog.

He's a complicated guy: A little Billy, a little Hammer, a little Penny. (Also probably some Moist.)

I finally experienced Dr. Horrible as an allegory for the end of the Hollywood studio system.

Oh my god. Fantastic. The whole second half can be heard as a spoof of blog triumphalism, the first half as a satirical look at the media landscape c.2007.

Well you know what's coming, Reader(s): A GODDAMN BLOG POST.

My means are limited,
wa.

Compete Wire, $90.

Yes, you read that right.

If you haven't seen The Wire, forewarned is forearmed: after this, nearly every other TV drama will feel somehow inadequate.

Best deal I've ever seen on Amazon.

Your corporate shill,
wb.

Arrested Development, full series, $29.

Go buy this now.

Among American sitcoms, Arrested Development is the only rival to The Simpsons for density and allusive subtlety; unlike that show it's an consistent serial narrative about recognizable grotesques rather than a loopy sketch show/broad-brush satire. Without a laughing audience the single-camera show is free to attain the pacing of an animated sitcom, but tonally it careens between goofy domestic farce and a pitch-black spoof on the hugging-and-learning family stories that Seinfeld deliberately set out to destroy. Indeed AD covers much of the same ground as The Simpsons and Seinfeld, but has a gravity neither of those shows ever attained, owing to a simple, traditional (and so daring) choice: it moves its story and characters through time, dares to change their circumstances, letting the audience feel the weight of those changes. The final episode of AD rounds out the show's central narrative (Michael's stewardship of the family and its business) without shortcuts or gotchas, which is rare and impressive; but it's the other stories - the doomed, ridiculous love everyone in the family feels, against their better judgment, for somebody else - that'll really get you. AD is a virtuoso piece more tightly constructed than any other American TV show this side of The Wire, but - weirdly - it's also just a nice story about familial love, unashamed of sentimentality but too smart to wallow in it.

(All that and I haven't even mentioned Henry Winkler and Ron Howard in a series of inside-baseball TV-historical references so precise and funny you'll swear they were plotted out years in advance - plus, double bonus, if you like a little cynical-critical vibe with your sitcoms, watch for an ongoing subtext about coded/masked Jewishness in pop culture. You'll, um, plotz - whatever that means.)

It's on sale for $29 today - three seasons, from the comparatively subdued(!) first year to the symphonic madness of Season Three (best bit: Charlize Theron in a five-episode series of James Bond parodies crossed with the most uncomfortable love story of the show's run). If you hate sitcoms, go buy this show. If you love sitcoms, go buy this show. It's on par with the finest TV comedies of our time - The Office, The Sopranos, Seinfeld, even that goddamn cartoon with the terrible art that everyone likes, I forget what it's called. It's very, very smart comedy for and by[*] grownups and I absolutely guarantee you'll enjoy Arrested Development.

Go, go!

* * *

[*] Sidebar: I wonder whether part of what puts me off about The Simpsons is the feeling that it's a broad-brush social satire written by people my age and younger whose main qualification is having worked for the Harvard Lampoon - the enshrinement of college humour as a TV comedy standard, a comedy by and for smart kids. The writerly equivalent of the Student Council president's essay on Heart of Darkness, neatly typed with no errors and a few neat observations, which at this point even the teacher can't bring herself to give a fuck about. I imagine I'm being unfair, that my impressions are founded on too small a sample, etc. Well OK, but give me the heavy-handed auteurist crudity of South Park, a show that takes risks The Simpsons couldn't even begin to imagine, any day of the week. (You do realize South Park goes from idea to air in roughly a week, don't you? Think about that next time you're watching a satirical TV cartoon that was in the can for a year.)

What is The Office now?

[I wrote this a couple weeks ago, have sat on it too long for that venue, but it's fine for this one.]

The Office started out as a sharp satire of office culture and has turned into...something else. I finally got turned on to 30 Rock this year and the two shows are increasingly similar on the surface: 'wacky workplace sitcoms' (decades-old generic staple of American TV) with the emphasis shifted from workplace to wacky. You've seen that shift before: NewsRadio, WKRP, The Wire (psych!). Did Ally McBeal go the same route? I had too many Y chromosomes to care...It's a specific version of the general shift that so many long-running serial/episodic entertainments on network TV have made: they start out about their premise (gold strike in the Black Hills, alcoholic cops, wacky DJ's, vampire with soul - a 'drinking problem' - tries to atone) and end up as depictions of surrogate families. That's why Seinfeld, maybe the greatest American sitcom, was so revolutionary: 'No hugging, no learning.' And yet watch that weepy clip show that preceded the final episode: any story you let into your living room for nine years becomes in a literal sense part of your family. (OK class: compare the end of the hopelessly involuted, earnestly sentimental Arrested Development - maybe the second-greatest of our time - to the end of Seinfeld.)

The major difference between The Office and its generic forebears - and the light-n-fluffy 30 Rock, which is basically sketch comedy blown out to episode length - might be the Jim and Pam story, which for three years was contemporary TV's most agonizing will they/won't they narrative and which, in the truncated fourth season and this, the show's fifth year - is that rare thing in successful drama, a happy relationship that's worth watching. Joss Whedon used to say, 'Happy Buffy is boring Buffy,' and Greg Daniels and his writers are testing the fates by giving us Boring Jim and Pam. It's like the third act of a Tom Hanks romantic comedy stretched out over two years, interwoven with the increasingly friendly hijinks in the rest of the office. It looks kinda...safe.

Indeed the entire show seemed to climax at the end of Season Three; had it ended with 'The Job' we'd be discussing whether The Office was the best sitcom since Seinfeld. But: we can't go on, we'll go on. Last year Jim and Pam had nothing but good times, but the season finale ('Goodbye Toby') raised the specter of Jim's pathological fear and recidivism (he keeps coming back to the officemate who jilted him twice - and for an oblivious, emotionally vacant asshole, no less!). His failure to propose (Andy's fault) was the 'cliffhanger' for the year, along with Michael and Jan's babychild and the arrival of button-cute Amy Ryan as Holly the new HR lady. But the writers weren't terribly interested in cliffs as such: Michael helped Jan a little with the baby and had a brief romance with Holly, who's gone now; Jim proposed at the outset of Season Five; Toby came back. In terms of Big Events, the major ongoing crisis at this point in the show is the Dwight/Angela/Andy love triangle, the most uncomfortable subplot the show has run.

Yet the show is richer now than it's ever been. Indeed it's started to take on a little bit of a late-Sopranos feel in terms of running plotlines and characterization. Here's what's great: while the week-to-week events are as silly as ever (e.g. last night Toby came back for a full week before Michael new he was there; then Michael called the cops on him - and remains improbably unsued and unfired, of course), the characters' emotional lives are getting richer by the week. Last year Stanley's 'Did I stutter?' episode gave Leslie David Baker (Stanley) a chance to gather up four years of rage-played-for-comedy and just fire both barrels at the unsuspecting audience; Pam went off to NYC and traced out what was essentially a fantasy arc, putting Pam's artistic aspirations and organization acumen in a startling new light - cf. Vito Spatafore escaping Tony Soprano to New Hampshire in Season Six - then fell right back into her crap job at Dunder Mifflin (just about everyone on this show, like The Sopranos, is a recidivist); Dwight has gone from just-plain-freak to needy, genuinely creepy romantic foil for the ever-more-sympathetic Andy; Michael delivered a stunning speech in the airport at the end of last week's episode, berating Dave Wallace for basically pissing all over him for several years and denying him something like true love; and check out Andy and Oscar bonding last week over romantic troubles!

(Weirdly thrilling to see such a nuanced portrayal of an ideologically homophobic, operationally egalitarian grownup frat boy - in that regard Andy is just President Bush with a smaller paycheck.)

In other words, the show has gotten broader over time in its weekly premises, taking more and more 'field trips' (beach, boat, fun run, hospital, New Hampshire(!), Schrute Farms, NYC, etc.). But at the same time it's now more serious than it's ever been about the emotional consequences of those events. Robert Penn Warren gave the true name of all stories: "Tell me a story...The name of the story will be Time,/But you must not pronounce its name." Having spent several years getting bigger and sillier in terms of events, The Office has fully embraced authentic drama, the Real Stuff, which is only: the small wins and losses of everyday life, irrespective of the black-and-white 'dramatic value' of events. We cringe to see Jim and Pam having such a good time now, sure that something has to go catastrophically wrong in a stupid Ross-and-Rachel (Sam-and-Diane) way; on TV something always does. But maybe things just go anticlimactically right sometimes. Bumps in the road might be enough. That would seem to violate every rule of serial TV writing, but that's what great shows seem to do (even though they don't - after all, Michael did call the cops on Toby this week).

I've written elsewhere that The Wire offered TV's most realistic portrayal of bureaucratic procedure, but more importantly, of boredom; the great achievement of HBO's gold-standard shows (The Wire, Deadwood, The Sopranos) is their procedural approach to domestic drama, eschewing quick-hit network melodrama and advertising-driven four-act structure, depicting Mere Living for a dozen episodes or more before finally popping the cork on a given plot. The Office ain't that; it's still a zany comedy. But in its Jim and Pam plot, in aspects of Michael's story, in the supporting cast's willingness simply to live with one another despite obvious tension, I'd say Greg Daniels's show is the closest a network comedy has come to that HBO-style storytelling that has defined (and crowned) this Golden Age of TV.

(Second class discussion: The Sopranos is in fact a domestic sitcom, an update of The Honeymooners and All in the Family, and The Office is its direct descendant.)

Enjoy this show, folks. It leads in to a funnier show (30 Rock) on Thursdays, but to my eyes there's no greater achievement in TV comedy on any channel - unless you count the news channels' political coverage, the great nauseating unintentional comedy of our era and maybe the right topic for the next article, and How Do You Do, That's Just Fine.

Cheap, cheap X-Files.

If you like this ridiculous show, the entire run plus the movie - plus the original DVD extras not included on the current season box set editions - can be had for the even more ridiculous sum of $125.

That's such a good price I'm tempted to sell $100 worth of books and just buy it, damn. Though at the end of the operation I'd own...The X-Files. Oy.

Seinfeld complete set, dirt cheap - today only.

Go go go to the Amazon.com Black Friday sale - today only, 50% off the complete run of Seinfeld, the gold standard of traditional multi-camera sitcoms. $140 for nine seasons, people. That's ridiculous.

Cultural politics: very, very complicated.

Ralph Nader, folks:

Shep what's-his-name sounds like a fool here, but this is an interesting moment. And Nader is clearly making an important point about selling out to hegemonic interests (in this case corporate). Unfortunately he's doing so using language that means 'a nigger who acts white to curry favour.' Some days I just don't understand things.

A 'center-right country'?

Consider the following statements:

Barack Obama is a socialist.

Barack Obama won the popular vote with a convincing margin and the electoral college with a very comfortable one.

Barack Obama's election reflects the will of the majority of voters - particularly new entrants to the political process.

Conservatism - small-government conservatism as sold to the guns/god/gays crowd, and libertarian-themed conservatism as espoused by wealthier Republicans - is now an opposition belief in the USA, a political counterforce threatened by the rise of pluralism, multiculturalism, liberal class warfare, atheism, etc.

YET America is a 'center-right country.'

* * *

In order to believe all these things simultaneously you must also hold on to a bridging belief, namely that conservative voices are marginalized and silenced in America unlike other voices - indeed, to a degree unimaginable to favoured minorities like 'poor blacks.' The implied solution to this problem is obvious: get louder. Now that we've seen the beginning of a committed liberal-centrist media infrastructure (ThinkProgress et al., to a limited degree MSNBC, etc.), the conservative pundit-corps will, after a short period of soul-searching, get even rowdier and even more baldly partisan in order to drum up more noise from its 'base' (what a sadly abused word). This is the limit of the imagination of movement conservatism as embodied by e.g. today's National Review. This is the difference between the Goldwater Republicans and the Bush Republicans: the earlier group set out to change the party by changing its ideology. Now: '¿Qué? You can't understand what I'm saying? Lemme scream it in your ear.' The deep-seated will of the American people has gone unexpressed: that's the narrative.

You can see the next logical stage. Sarah Palin for President.

The Obama infomercial.

Moving, skillfully written (flowing nicely between topics), not a little bit saccharine and overwrought. And it did a very effective job highlighting the candidate's blue-collar economic appeal. The old man with the second job at Wal-Mart nearly destroyed me. A half-hour of that for only $3 million? A bargain.

Buffy 7x22, 'Chosen': a fan's commentary.

Well this is mortifying but it's done, so there.

A few weeks ago I recorded, for whatever reasons, a commentary track for a Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode - the series finale, 'Chosen.' Here it is. [direct mp3 link] I'm a big Buffy nerd, so carrying on about the show is fairly easy for me (as my poor friends can attest). It would've been easy to gush about the episode and pick at niggling details and in-the-moment questions for forty minutes.

However, this track - a 40+ minute mp3 - makes a single argument, perhaps belaboring obvious or trivial points but (mercifully) without descending into drooling uncritical fanboy love, puns, or awful in-jokes. In other words, it's a fan's commentary but it aspires, in its way, to be for listeners who aren't necessarily fans (whether or not it's entirely accessible or indeed relevant to such listeners). I thought that this commentary would be the right venue in which to make the Critical Reading 101 point that there are various levels of interpretation at which we can interact with texts, that they all matter to varying degrees, and that we can derive more pleasure from (whatever) text by considering its formal character even as we give ourselves to its sweep and story.

In the case of Buffy 7x22, that might mean considering the production/reception history of the show, tracking the evolution of the show's feminist 'mission statement(s),' trying to imagine the writers' encounters with the characters, itemizing the year-by-year changes to the show's template (though with less attention to arc structure than I'd have liked, in retrospect), and mulling over the different expectations that fans and casual viewers have - and how those expectations are manipulated and deferred/fulfilled by the show at the levels of form and content.

You can listen to the track without also watching 'Chosen' - though the visuals may make a nice counterpoint to the vox. Honesty compels me to say that this is a lecture on Buffy with occasional references to 7x22, not a scene-by-scene commentary on 7x22 itself. Well honesty also compels me to point out that you're the one wrist-deep in a blog post about a Buffy fan commentary. Huzzah!

This isn't really for academics though its language has, in places, an academic cast - or in any case a teacherly one.

And just so you know: I dislike the sound of my own voice and grant that you may feel the same way, but I feel the argument, which does unfold over the majority of the track, is worth making. Call me what you like but I struggle mightily to be something other than a narcissist, and submit this recording as evidence - if not of success, then of the struggle.

[Update!! Christ, I feel much, much better. I went and listened to a few fan-commentaries, on both Buffy episodes and a few features. Reader(s), I have nothing to be embarrassed about.]

Absolutely Horrible ethics.

Dr Horrible's Sing-Along Blog, this summer's 45-minute web-serialized musical 'comedy' from Joss Whedon, isn't as rich as the best episodes of his long-form work; for instance, 'Restless' and 'Once More With Feeling,' respectively the dream-sequence and musical episodes of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, are on par with Dr Horrible in terms of formal interest, but are enmeshed in seven years of complex narrative continuity that the low-budget one-off tale doesn't have (for better or worse). The advantage of a one-off is the chance to present familiar thematic material - the rush and burden and attractiveness of power, the ongoing victimization of women in men's power struggles, nerdly social difficulty - in stark terms, free of overdetermination and accumulated sympathies. The downside: a 45-minute show with 20 minutes of singing doesn't leave a lot of breathing room.

If you're a hack, that means you sacrifice complexity and just hit your one-two-three Big Points.

If you're Joss Whedon, on the other hand, you draw on whatever terrifying intergalactic power source brought you to this planet in the first place, and work the usual assortment of miracles.

On its own terms Dr Horrible is every bit as impressive as Whedon's other work. It's not as heartbreaking as issue #5 of the new Buffy comic, nor as eerie as 'Restless,' nor as audaciously bleak as the two-part Firefly pilot, but Dr H offers Whedon what looks like his most personal topic and generic framework yet: a young male nerd, smart and talented and genuinely nice but pathologically shy and kind of an overbearing jerk (but an...honest one), who happens also be a comic-book hero, or rather a villain. The quiet nerd falls for the even quieter nerd girl, the mousy do-gooder who predictably falls for the alpha male bane of the titular beta male's existence. It's every comic book geek's nightmare, in the form of a deeply uncomfortable, unquestionably funny story that might not be a comedy at all. Unlike Buffy, which stemmed, I think, from Whedon's bountiful sympathy for a certain kind of fictional character and the young girls doomed in turn to sympathize with her, Dr H seems to deal directly with Whedon's firsthand experiences of sexual not-bliss.

Dr Horrible sets out to be a lot of things - more than you might expect from a low-budget web musical written by three brothers and one wife. It's Whedon's most multifarious short work, and its ending [spoilers ahead] casts Dr H in an uneasy light. Joss Whedon's most easily empathized-with protagonist might be his least sympathetic. Here's a rundown of what's going on in this, the most impressive online film production yet made. Some of these readings contradict one another; that's OK. If you wanna read this text, maybe start like this:

A Mary Sue story about Mary Sue stories. Dr Horrible is a doofus who makes himself into a comic-book villain (in a world complete with superheroes and superbadguys); he works with a vocal coach to get his evil laugh right. 'That's about standards,' he says. He's also close to Joss Whedon's self-description: awkward, smart, exceptionally talented, and shunned by ladies who prefer dimwitted alpha males. He's a lot like the protagonist of the typical 'Mary Sue' fanfic: an original character inserted into the ongoing superhero story, who solves everyone's problems, is smarter and more morally nuanced than everyone else, sees into each villain's neuroses and each hero's unfulfilled needs, and gets the girl...only it doesn't work that way. Few TV personalities have the cult of creator-worship that Joss Whedon does; he knows fans (he is one). Dr Horrible is a meditation on how fucked up and lazy their self-projecting fantasies are.

It's an origin story. Of course the shape of the story is familiar: it's the tale of a man's first confrontation with his nemesis, how he becomes a comic book character. The formative event. Dr Horrible wins this one, against the odds - it's an ascension - but the origin moment of the character is also a defeat. The big deal with Dr Horrible is that he lost someone (Penny is Dr Horrible's Gwen Stacy, if you know what I mean) even as he beat the bad - excuse me, the good guy.

Moreover, this is Captain Hammer's origin story too, for the same reasons - he loses the girl he 'loves,' and is born to new consciousness and so forth. 'With great power comes...' In other words, the animating question under the tale of Dr H is: What is the cost to the 'villain' of being a player in the hero's drama? Does the villain know what he's doing? Of course he does: Whedon is fond of recalling an interview with Willem Defoe, who said that villains and heroes are no different from the actor's point of view. 'Everybody thinks he's righteous.' Dr Horrible is an illustration of that point.

As the lyrics to the closing song points out, Billy gets exactly what he wants.

Authenticity. Double-edged sword here. Billy is a good guy who does bad things, it seems; Captain Hammer appears to be a bad guy who does good things. Whedon's tale poses the question, 'Which is the hero, really? In society's eyes, who's the admirable one here?' Hammer doesn't even stick around to take care of his girlfriend Penny ('Yeah, we totally had sex'); Billy comforts her in her last moments. Of course she believes in Captain Hammer - sucks for Billy!

Here we can point out the obvious: Penny is barely a person in this story. Interesting choice for Whedon. (Don't think eh makes such a choice lightly either - he turned the goddamn X-Men into a war-of-the-women story!) Why's she so content-free? The guys around her make her so. Billy just wants Penny to notice him - not to be with him, really. Because he has no idea what that requires. Whereas at least Cap'n Hammer knows how to show her a good time. He lives in the world of other people. Billy's sentiments are real, as are his resentments; you watch him struggle with them. But he shares them inauthentically - he doesn't have a single moment of conversation with Penny that doesn't rest on a lie. Think about it: the yogurt fake-out, the petition, 'texting,' Gandhi, dissing Hammer, 'I don't love these - see ya'...

...indeed the only honest moment is when he's talking about being a supervillain and how much it would mean to him to make in that way.

The real Billy is nothing more than Dr Horrible. (Know any other superpowered guys named Billy of whom that might be said? C'mon comic book nerd, this one's for you. Shazam!)

Billy is a blogger. Embarrassing. The meta-story of Dr Horrible is about the transformative power of personal media, grassroots technology, and new storytelling channels. The text of Dr Horrible is about a nerdy little shut-in who doesn't know how not to fuck up people's lives. The world is better when he's in his basement. 'There are no villains in this story.' Wrong! There's at least one. And he's the character who most closely resembles the average viewer. Does that seem nasty to you? Could the comic-book creator be cautioning us against simple identification? What a jerk.

Both guys were offered the same choice. 'A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do / Don't plan the plan if you can't follow through / All that matters (is) taking matters into your own hands.' Both guys respond to the world according to their natures. Captain Hammer's response to the world is...to help it. What's Billy's? This is the protagonist of the fucking story we're talking about, and this isn't one of those implication-free Book Club Suggested Study Questions you don't have to think about it in order to enjoy the story. Billy is...what? He's a bad guy. Why is Joss Whedon making a comic book story about him? Why does he want us to identify with this horrible little fucker? To show us what we're capable of.

Fans. Ask yourself why the three fans, who collect Captain Hammer's hair and wear shirts with his pictures on them, are wearing Dr Horrible shirts at the end of the story. Why would Joss Whedon paint such a hugely unflattering portrait of these media fans? (I mean, by the end of the story they're probably reading his blog.) They want what Billy now has - power. Not goodness, which is what it only looks like Hammer has. (Betcha Hammer wins new, weepier fans once he starts crying to his shrink.) People are drawn to power; Hammer's an alpha male, and he happens to work for good. When we judge him morally we should forget that he's a dickish alpha male and remember that he runs around saving citizens from villains, because he chooses to. Same with Billy: he wants 'anarchy...that I run.' Nasty business. And once he's running it, the fans flock to him. Nasty.

And yet again, with feeling. A side note concerning the music: Dr Horrible is a step ahead of the Buffy musical, 'Once More With Feeling,' both lyrically and musically. The best of the 'OMWF' songs ('Under Your Spell') combines a moving love song with a creepy subtext: Tara sings about being seduced and brought out into the world by love, while under a literal magic spell that erases the memory of fights she's had, so that she's both right about her growth and eerily wrong about what's enabled it. 'OMWF' is all over the map musically, a cheeky pastiche of musical-comedy staples (check out the devilish 'Those Were the Good Old Days' strain in 'What You Feel (Sweet's Song)') with an overall pop-rock feel. That latter feel is where Dr Horrible lives, and the lyrics are more attentive than ever, doing as much work as Joss's Buffy-words while starting from scratch in terms of character. From the opening song's elegant metaphor for romantic desperation to the spot-on mirror lyrics in 'My Eyes' to the hectoring finale and its gut-punch final moment, Whedon really nailed the Dr H tunes. With the exception of Penny's song - easily the weakest of the bunch, its smart 'Everything happens' message notwithstanding - each song in the bunch is a step up from its 'OMWF' predecessors in intensity, formal rigor, and (importantly!) singability.

False consciousness. 'Anyone with half a brain / Can spend their whole life howling in pain / The dark is everywhere and Penny doesn't seem to care / That soon the dark in me is all that will remain,' sings Billy at the top of Act 2. But by the end of that episode he's belting it out: 'Penny will see the evil me / not a joke, not a dork, not a failure.' A 'brand new me,' he says. But then look at where he goes in Act 3: 'No sign of Penny, good / I would give anything / not to have her see...here goes no mercy...' And in the end, it's not like he turns down the Evil League of Evil's invitation - check out the fancy new blood-red threads! He's even got fans for god's sake. From 'Penny doesn't seem to care' to 'Penny will see the evil in me' in one act: which translates to 'This is all your fault.' Preemptively lifting blame, because he doesn't really want to kill Captain Hammer. Golly, he's not even a good villain, and he lies to himself constantly, near as we can tell.

We are that way too.

This fact doesn't make Dr Horrible more sympathetic. It makes us less so.

'I can not believe my eyes.' This is big Penny/Billy duet at the top of the second act, and it's practically each character's mission statement. Each character sees only what he or she wants; the self-deception is absolute (Billy's right that Penny is only treating the symptom of social ills - 'The fish rots from the head!' as he points out - while Penny herself is evidence that Billy's a pessimistic misanthrope in love with his own style). That's how you know they're either perfect for one another or really not. This leads us to the weirdest part...

The only honest character in the whole story is Captain Hammer. 'The day needs my saving expertise / A man's gotta do what a man's gotta do.' It does, and one does, so he does. 'When you're the best you can't rest, what's the use.' 'Everyone's a hero in their own way / In their own not-that-heroic way...It's not enough to bash in heads / You've got to bash in minds.' Hell, he even finds it in himself to cheer on plucky homeless types! 'A hero doesn't care if you're a bunch of scary alcoholic bums / Everyone's a hero in their own way.' Shit, that's kind of nice!

Yes, the man's an idiot - 'So you wonder what your part is / 'cause you're homeless and depressed / But home is where the heart is / So your real home's in your chest!' But that's the right kind of idiocy. He's right, after all. Take things at face value and try to help people and you can get away with being an asshole - and as long as 'getting away' isn't your secret goal, maybe that's enough.

Not a bad guideline. But wait, I thought Hammer was the villain hero bad guy good guy wait I don't understand. This is supposed to be simple. Why isn't it simple.

A much-needed break.

Ladies and germs, John McCain and Barack Obama:

Maybe the 'October Surprise' this year is that John McCain kills up there.

Brooks, Biden, Palin.

[Did I forget to post this? Shit. But also: shit, this is a mess. So maybe I didn't 'forget' at all. Well a post that isn't posted isn't a post.]

Of course David Brooks is a Republican hack. His main tactic is to feign nonpartisanship and evenhandedness, even as he carries on a relentless campaign of apology for every Republican/conservative malfeasance and stupidity. But as long as you're not desperately clinging to the same myths as he does, Brooks's political intentions and predilections are easy to understand.

Moreover, he's a cloying, syrupy writer and, line to line, an embarrassment to cultural commentators (who obviously aren't embarrassed that easily). Brooks's pop-sociology is weak and its ideological baggage transparent, and his aww-shucks tone masks partisan drum-beating of an utterly mainstream sort, which absolutely compromises his 'critical' perspective. He wins approval from non-conservatives and wannabe contrarians for criticizing American materialism and invoking the language of class war, but his political perspective is entirely resentful; that he's an articulate TV commentator and an avid student of the grotesque political horserace gives him cred, but not the sort you'd want. Get down into his writing and he's just like his conservative fellow-travelers, George Will without the good grades and experience.

Here's an example of all of the above, from his column on the Biden/Palin debate:

Their primal need for political survival having been satisfied, [Palin's] supporters then looked for her to shift the momentum. And here we come to the interesting cultural question posed by her performance. The presidency and the vice presidency once was the preserve of white men in suits. As the historian Ellen Fitzpatrick pointed out on PBS Thursday night, if, in 1984, Geraldine Ferraro had spoken in the relentlessly folksy tones that Palin used, she would have been hounded out of politics as fundamentally unserious.

But that was before casual Fridays, boxers or briefs and T-shirt-clad Silicon Valley executives. Today, Palin can hit those colloquial notes again and again, and it is not automatically disqualifying.

It's easy to see what he's doing here. The conclusion of the second paragraph should be that the fundamental unseriousness of the American entertainment media - of which televised political news is a popular part - does not excuse our politicians' own lack of seriousness, expertise, and even basic attention; Brooks is using the vacuity of political coverage to excuse Palin's vacuity, when - like a growing number of politically left-leaning and centrist commentators - he should be seeing her ascendancy as part of the same general trend that grants Tucker Carlson and post-talk-show Geraldo Rivera the title of 'journalist,' and leads TV commentators to go immediately and without discernible irony or self-awareness to 'spin alley' for reactions to each debate. Palin doesn't just happen to warm the hearts of Fox News viewers and Michelle Malkin readers; she was chosen in part because she embodies the principles of association that keep the Republican 'base' together at this time!

Which is why Brooks was so nervous watching Palin debate (and make no mistake, when he talks airily about Palin supporters and Republicans in this column, he's describing his own reaction - a fact that might change your charitable reading of the piece...). If she does poorly, then resentful 'anti-elite' (i.e. anti-liberal-education, anti-gay, anti-city, etc.) voters will work up a myth about how They wouldn't give Sarah a chance, and they should have 'Freed Sarah,' and so forth. But what's really at stake in this election is not public perception of the Republican base but the very 'philosophy' that sticks it together.

Brooks knows this. Much as he claims to want 'anti-elite' candidates, much as he approves of Palin's question-dodging canned answers and transparent lack of expertise on any subject (her 'energy expertise' is a farce, as various reporters and researchers continue to demonstrate), he and other educated conservatives are now confronting the fact that their media darling is woefully unqualified for the job of Vice President - which is bad but won't be a problem after Election Day - and, more importantly, that they're going to have to find new reasons to back Republican candidates. It turns out that being uneducated and parochial really is a major goddamn liability on the national political stage.

[Which is also a point about George W. Bush, of course, who's equally foolish and happy to prostitute himself as Palin but has much, much better handlers (for some value of the word 'better' that covers the demonic, ultimately unsuccessful Karl Rove) and is actually a useless dry drunk who nearly failed out of Yale.]

Brooks refers to the 'interesting cultural question posed by [Palin's] performance,' which is apparently: can a national politician get away with being - forgive me for choosing a short word instead of a nice one - a fucking rube? Two terms of Bush Jr. suggest that the answer's 'Yes,' and Brooks wants to use the debate as evidence for that assertion.

Two amazing things about this maneuver: (1) Brooks takes no position, here, on whether one should be able to get away with repeating talking points without directly answering a single tough question, for ninety minutes, in a nationally-televised Vice Presidential debate. To me, it reads like he's desperately hoping the answer is 'Yes,' because if it isn't, then his 'anti-elitism' falls flat, and the pitchfork-carriers are gonna come looking for him and his ilk, asking why they ever thought something so foolish. (2) Brooks can simply make his answer the correct one, for many many people, simply by repeating it. For whatever reason, he's got a column in the NYTimes, and so he has the power to change people's attitudes toward education (or rather, educatedness) almost by Imbecile's Fiat. If you respect learning, education, educators, and the improvement of human lives through the attainments of civilization, that should worry you (when the vomiting's done).

Down at the bottom of his column, Brooks brings up Biden for a paragraph. In a way, it's the most startling text of the entire piece:

Biden, for his part, was smart, fluid and relentless. He did not hit the change theme hard enough. He did not praise Barack Obama enough. But he was engaging, serious and provided a moving and revealing moment toward the end, when he invoked the tragedy that befell his own family and revealed the passion that has driven him all his life.

Still, this debate was about Sarah Palin.

Well no, it wasn't. In any case, watch Brooks here: he's interested purely in media images. 'He did not hit the change theme hard enough'? What, exactly, the fuck is David Brooks talking about? Of course the answer is, 'David Brooks is talking about his own cultural fantasy, in which people like Sarah Palin are shining heroes and men like Joe Biden are dimly-imagined villains, their reasons unfathomable, their concerns lofty, too much so.' Brooks doesn't want to talk about the substance of their debate because Palin didn't engage with any substantive questions. Watch Brooks wriggle (i.e. lie): 'Palin broke no new ground, though she toured the landscape of McCain policy positions with surprising fluency. [...] Palin could not match Biden when it came to policy detail, but she never obviously floundered.' By 'surprising fluency' he means only that Palin 'never obviously floundered.' That's the level of his interest in the debate; that's what he takes to be not only the tactical but the moral content of the debate.

From her first "Nice to meet you. May I call you Joe?" she made it abundantly, unstoppably and relentlessly clear that she was not of Washington, did not admire Washington and knew little about Washington.

Brooks's rhetoric mirrors Palin's appeal: he's hoping that it's OK to know little about Washington, so he acts 'as-if.' It isn't OK, of course; it makes for good press and ineffective leaders. But if he's wrong in his supposition then there's a really big problem with the principles of association that govern his party.

This is villainy. We ought to guard against it. There are better ways than blogging.

Carmela for president - an oldie.

Wrote this during the primary, don't think I posted it.

***

Tell me if this story sounds familiar. I saw it on HBO.

A politically shrewd, fleshy sociopath with a strong will to power, having committed traditional sexual peccadilloes startling in number, buys the silence his loyal, wily, aspirational wife with side projects and promises of future liberty, free then to indulge his capitalist cravings (couched in borrowed transformational rhetoric) and carry out an occasional hit on the disloyal or inconvenient. She's got a touch of Lady Macbeth to her - the behind-the-throne influence part, not the crazy part - and may well be the smarter of the two, yet she substitutes the occasional haircut for personal transformation; he embodies a kind of debased masculinity, somehow charming to women despite his lack of obvious physical appeal, and though he's a by-the-numbers Boomer narcissist, he talks a good 'lost greatness' game, almost as if he believes it. The two of them give off an inexplicable sexual energy, but the ratio of convenience to compatibility in their marriage is never clear, and probably unfavorable. He rises to the top of his organization by glad-handling, by good connections, by competence (yes) - and by appealing to 'moderates' with his business sense (he sells himself well).

Still, he doesn't dwell on the fact that though he's a (self-)made man, his authority is utterly dependent on the institution to which he's beholden. Doesn't matter that he's smarter than his colleagues; he's still merely one of them, a hand-picked 'golden boy' who hates the people who picked him. She's aware of this, of course, and clearly resents it too - but she also doesn't give away what she feels they deserve, no matter who it comes from. (When he takes a hit, she defends him - and keeps the checks coming.) He takes absolute power in his organization, and the malfeasance and cynicism of the apparatchiks who work for him begin to boil up into public view: soon he's dealing with betrayal and investigation (a witch hunt, he'd claim disingenuously), and disloyal employees. 'Family,' they call themselves, but that doesn't stop him kicking his fellow-travelers to the curb and worse.

She does get a little liberty, in the end: he throws her a major project all her own. She pursues it conscientiously, with vigor and intelligence; it blows up in her face, of course, because while she insists (perhaps foolishly, if perhaps nobly) on micromanaging every detail of the project, it's grown out of the culture of corruption and loyalty-first self-deception of which she and her husband are a part. She tries to reinvent herself as her own woman but always trades on her relationship to the Man in Power - and his professional relationships come to be defined as much by the psychodrama of his home life as by his undeniable competence at the business.

When the story ends, we're sorry to have to turn away from this couple; they have a morbid fascination, and while it's nice not to dwell in such squalor, it's kind of sad to let go of an expansive consciousness. Their ironic theme song echoes as they fade out: 'Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow.'

Excuse me: I mean, 'Don't Stop Believing.' I got confused.

See, the show (of course) is The Sopranos, the tale of Tony and Carmela and their two families, and the danger of mixing house and home with troubles on the job - which in Tony's case is the Mafia.

But the story is that of the nation's grotesque First Couple: Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Lowry on Palin.

Magnificent:

I'm sure I'm not the only male in America who, when Palin dropped her first wink, sat up a little straighter on the couch and said, "Hey, I think she just winked at me." And her smile. By the end, when she clearly knew she was doing well, it was so sparkling it was almost mesmerizing. It sent little starbursts through the screen and ricocheting around the living rooms of America. This is a quality that can't be learned; it's either something you have or you don't, and man, she's got it.

This is like FurryLesbianNaziDating.com - it may only have two subscribers, but they're fucking meant for one another.

Lowry's excited because an obviously crazy right-wing mom who attended five colleges in six years happens to be attractive. That's...actually you know what? That's awesome. Even warmongering imbeciles deserve love.

Some of us have been bleating this stuff for years, man!

Screenwriter Alex Epstein on J.J. Abrams's new show, Fringe:

I'm also disturbed that the show is establishing a template where they will solve the mystery, in every third or fourth act, by some science-fiction deus ex machina. In the pilot, Agent (should be Special Agent) Dunham goes into an isolation tank, drops LSD, has a spinal hookup to a guy in a coma, and comes out with a face. In this episode, it turns out you can take the images off a dead person's retina.

I wouldn't mind the latter in the first act; I'll accept most anything as a premise. But not in the third or fourth act, where it's helping the heroes. That's going to alienate the audience. Why get involved in the mystery? In act three or four, Dr. Goofyhead is going to explain how you can use Google Maps Beta to locate the characteristic heat signature of an empathic metamorph, and hey! There she is in Harvard Square!

I think there's a lot of bad, sloppy writing in LOST^H^H^H^H FRINGE, and there's no excuse for it. It's all visual and cool, but I can't get involved, because the show is insulting my common sense.

(The ctrl-H joke is mine, of course.)

Look, Abrams has been pulling this shit for years. He's the cocreator of one of the big TV-drama successes of the 21st century and years from now we'll look back and wonder what the hell people were thinking, praising that show. Expecting Fringe to be anything but splashy effects, pulp plotting, and low-rent 'philosophical' handwaving has transformed into the battered wife of Media Boulevard, the fanboy. Here's a long-time-horizon bet for you: someday we'll reach the consensus that Abrams is a talented huckster who doesn't have a great TV story in him, only half-formed ideas for sale at outlandish rates (remember, he's made the most expensive pilot in American TV history not once but twice now).

I hate talking about this stuff.

Lied to.

David Foster Wallace argued, in his haunting McCain-and-Young-Voters essay 'Up, Simba,' that much of the excitement around McCain came not from the man himself, nor (certainly) his 'Washington's full of corrupt swine but when you get down to it I'm just one of the guys' policies, but from the feeling that voters were, for once, simply not being lied to about everything. Lying hurts everyone, he said - the liar, the lied-to, the world that's then a little less trusting and a little less trustworthy. And the thrill of cheering for McCain was in part that voters were being given permission to 'really fucking cheer.' You may think this is the most depressing thing you've ever heard.

McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds went on Fox News this morning; liberal bloggers were surprised to see him getting grilled over the McCain campaign's relentless lying about Palin and Obama.

I was able to watch less than ten seconds of Bounds's initial response, about Barack Obama's alleged unwillingness to discuss his 'record.' I couldn't bring myself to get past his second sentence.

The U.S. banking system appears, by all accounts, to be close to a long-predicted meltdown. I was excited to see the term 'shadow banking system' in commentaries last night; who doesn't love a good conspiracy story? But when I found out what it means I was inexplicably sad: it refers, as I understand it, to nondepository banks, many in number, handling financial transactions vastly more complicated than 'Billy puts a hundred dollars into his savings account' and, when you get down to it, simply less real.

Deadwood was a show about the last major gold strike in the continental U.S. (Black Hills, 1870's). The title of Deadwood's second-season premiere was 'A Lie Agreed Upon.' The title refers overtly to a web of provisional interpersonal compromises and deceits in the episode (culminating in the arrival of Bullock's wife and her first meeting with Bullock's lover). But the central meaning of the show, its deep-down premise, deals with another lie entirely: the value of gold itself. David Milch's claim is that every aspect of life in Deadwood began with the need to accommodate and neutralize the central lie, the fiction that gold was anything other than a vessel for abstraction. You didn't come to Deadwood to sell because the gold was there to be acquired; you sold goods in Deadwood because if you didn't, the gold had no meaning.

Alan Greenspan is appearing on news shows today to talk about the ongoing financial crisis. He likely will not be asked about his role in birthing and intensifying it - the courtesy extended to TV guest stars. Nor will Bill Clinton; nor will George W. Bush. 'A well-armed populace is the best defense against tyranny' - while we're on the topic of shared fictions.

David Foster Wallace killed himself the other day. And: he was no fool. But: death is death. So: can you blame him?

Abrams.

Fawning little article about J.J. Abrams and his new show Fringe in the NYTimes last week:

As the “Fringe” creators further developed the show, they decided it should have an overarching narrative — that its many paranormal phenomena and mysteries would turn out be part of a larger pattern, referred to simply as the Pattern — to tie its individual episodes together.

[...]

In the case of “Fringe” its creators say they have figured out a finale — naturally, they declined to describe it — that could be deployed at any point in the series. “If we’re canceled at Episode 13,” Mr. Orci said, “we’ll tell you at Episode 13, and if we go on, you could literally find this out in seven years.”

Recollections differ as to how much of the increasingly complicated “Fringe” story line was pitched to executives at Warner Brothers and at Fox when the series was ordered. “You always have to be on the up and up with your studio and your network,” Mr. Burk said. “There’s too much at stake, and they’re taking the biggest gamble.”

But Mr. Abrams cautioned against too much candor. “There are certain details that are hugely important,” he said with some mirth, “that I believe, if shared, will destroy any chance of actually getting on the air. These are the kinds of things that scare people away.”

[My emphasis.]

OK, this is why J.J. Abrams is a smart, talented hack, P.T. Barnum without the wit.

Abrams's best-known show is Lost, which is entirely about its breathless narrative trickery, nothing more; it's morally empty, a sci-fi freak show for teenagers, squandering the creative resources of at least two of our brightest young screenwriters (Vaughn and Goddard, honorable mention to Lindelof). His film-directorial debut was Mission: Impossible III, a piece of big-budget refuse, a Tom Cruise star vehicle devoid of anything but stylistic merit. His new show, Fringe, is built around a single revelation that could take seven years to reveal. Think about that: a piece of information allegedly central to the story-world but so loosely related to its construction that it could be revealed at any time without altering the essential nature of the story - a pattern of events so generic it's referred to as 'The Pattern.' (We'll see how his Star Trek comes out. On video.)

Abrams tells stories for adolescents - primary colours, loud noises, logic puzzles posing as moral questions, style masking fear. The 'big questions' on Lost exist only to push people to answer them; their answers exist only to signal that the next question is coming up. They have no meaning. (What difference does it make what the island is? Who cares whether Ben is a hero or a villain, so long as percussion instruments are playing loudly in the background?) Fringe is by all accounts CSI: The X-Files, and what's the point of either of those shows? And what's the point of the new one? The mystery itself. Abrams talks a good game about the 'meaning' of mystery (cf. his recent TED talk), but his work concerns itself with spectacle, mechanics, satisfaction.

There were no mysteries on Deadwood; the identities and wrongdoings on The Wire were largely known to viewers in advance. Each show raised questions, and dared to offer answers; each concerned itself with moral rightness and human failings. Each offered meaningful choices to characters and viewers alike, and neither conformed to stereotype (or even archetype, half the time). And each was a genre show (one a western, the other a cop show, sorta). They told grownup stories concerned with issues bigger than 'What happens next?' They weren't obsessed with their own feelings.

J.J. Abrams has not, to the best of my knowledge, made anything of which we can say the same. He could; he's no fool, and he's got a hell of a lot of clout. But he doesn't.

That's the mark of a hack. All power to him. The next question should be 'Why do we pretend things are more than they are' but we can't seem to find time to ask it.

Milch, me.

Disconnected thoughts - a freewrite gone awry - on David Milch and my own self-sabotage and self-pity. Posted for the sake of accountability, not readability. I recommend standing clear.

[The post is less miserable than this introduction, mind.]

* * *

Deadwood for 50% off.

24 hours only - go now. This is one of the great TV productions in American history, people. Just go.

Josshole moment, if you please, for Melaka ('Mel'? 'Mal'?) Fray, and Joss's favourite themes.

The 'Lurks' in Fray are, of course, sprung from the same well as the Reavers in Firefly (as are Joss Whedon's future-archaism slang, like 'rutting,' and the Western flavour of the proceedings - 'They called it the cavalry'). Indeed, Melaka Fray has as much in common with Malcolm Reynolds as with Buffy Summers, down to the lust for battle and stupid fools-rush-in improvisatory tendencies and 'it's about the guy in the foxhole next to you' soldier sense. You might say Fray is a test run for some of the Firefly sensibility - not surprising, given that it sprang into being in 2001, during Season Five of Buffy, when that show was reaching its teen-apocalypse apex and Buffy (not coincidentally) was moving decisively into adulthood. With the future-Slayer comic, Whedon could deal with a character whose hardness was less constantly negotiated than Buffy's, which was surely a clarifying and liberating experience for Whedon - it is, after all, a terrific comic book. [Update: I left out the killer panel: Melaka's standoff with Icarus! The dropped scythe, then: 'Faith.' Basically it's a teaser for Firefly with Mal and River rolled into one. Hello Whedonesque types!]

There are a few throughlines like this in Joss's work; after all, Alien: Resurrection is in many ways a dry run for Firefly, as I outlined before:

A band of misfit smugglers tracking down a dangerous killer from the depths of space aboard the government spaceship on which they've been captured. A crotchety mercenary. A noble captain. A loving criminal couple - of which the husband is lost in the line of duty. A young girl with superpowers - who by the way is able, when she wants, to 'become' a spaceship - and who's as dangerous to the crew as to her enemies. A sentimentally-named starship. Folktales of earth that was.

Can you identify this Joss Whedon sci-fi story?

Of course both are heavily indebted to Star Wars too - Whedon has described Firefly as a series version of Act Two of Star Wars.

Whedon is the patron saint of a certain screen/comics tough-girls movement, as well he should be, but he also comes back to his non-feminist (or only implicitly feminist) hobbyhorses often. That's part of what makes it so easy to like him rather than just one or two of the things he's done: there's a certain way of structuring the world that gets ported from one of his tales to the next. Not just the typical American sitcom's surrogate-family structure, but a particular left-of-the-law outcast circle standing for the moral right (indeed the need) to be imperfect. Not just young people standing up for themselves, but young people realizing that they have to help peers above and below them on the status ladder stand up as well. Not just Big Hero Moments, but the repeated staging of the moment when power is given, and as often given up (check out the latest Buffy comic, the finale of Drew Goddard's arc, particularly the way Dracula's behaviour in the final fight surely prefigures a great sacrifice at the end of Season Eight). Not just a complex revulsion/worship toward childbirth - there's never been a happy birth on a Whedon show! - nor the usual generation-gap resentments, but a belief in the possibility of grownups and kids becoming more like one another through vocational interaction and apprenticeship, a belief (in other words) in continuity of experience, rather than the irritating streak of teen-exceptionalism that shoots through nostalgic depictions of adolescence.

Whedon isn't a lazy nostalgia peddler or even centrally a pulp writer; he's a hardheaded ethicist, and even a comic as outwardly ridiculous as Fray (futuristic criminal superhero fights demons!) is part of a rigorous and - here's the important bit - surprisingly consistent moral argument about the meaning of 'family' and the nature of 'maturity.' He can do silly pulp - see the funny, forgettable Sugar Shock for a reminder - but even his silliest big works are dead serious. I confess that I kind of love the guy.

Comedy and drama writing: multiplicity.

Why is TV comedy much more group-written than drama, line to line? That is to say, after the writers' room breaks the story, only a small number of people put their hands on an hourlong drama script, whereas it's common for the entire writers' room to go over every line of a half-hour comedy script. Why is that?

It's about wrongness, of course. To a first approximation, 'funny' means a particular form of paradox or 'incorrect' juxtaposition, trauma encapsulated and sanitized. The laugh is recognition of the thing survived. But what's the thing? A violation of expectation made safe. Why did the chicken cross the road? There must be a reason. Asking the question in the first place puts the listener in mind that there must be an answer, because 'to get to the other side' is implicit in crossing the road. We assume it must have higher motives, must be plotting, thinking like us. When it turns out the chicken is doing what we know all chickens do, we laugh - at ourselves, but also at the wrong notion of a Machiavellian chicken.

Drama, on the other hand, tends to rest on continuity or investment, on linked or intertwined causes, on the visibility of momentum. Not for nothing is dramatic storytelling illustrated with graphs of continuous functions. Drama violates our expectations as well, but we stand differently in relation to it; revelations and surprises tend to cut against our assumptions about the world portrayed, with the authorial expectation that we will integrate our new understanding into the world. When it works, Deckard is a replicant. When it fails - in most viewer's eyes though not mine! - a rain of frogs falls on William H. Macy and John C. Reilly. One change we wonder at, which is to say ask about; the other we might laugh at, which is to say we might make ourselves the dramatic object for a moment. Comedy is the enemy of narcissism but unintentional comedy, 'ironically' viewed, is a tool for narcissists.

So, why is comedy group-written? Because if you pitch me an idea, I can respond 'correctly' with a deepening of the dramatic situation you're outlining, 'insufficiently' with a bad answer requiring clarification of the situation (for my sake, though accidentally for yours too), or 'incorrectly' - with a violation of dramatic expectation. Most answers, as any realist can tell you, are incorrect; dramatic continuity is a hard thing to maintain. The deeper the drama the deeper the comedy (because the stronger the expectations, willful or not). My job is in part to pull at the fabric of your storyworld, which I'll tend to do defensively anyhow, because I'm chickenshit. Because it's easier to destroy than to create. (There are 'gag writers' but there are other types of comedy writers too, sometimes sharing a single skull. The opening of Juno with Rainn Wilson is all stupid gags; the closing is something else.)

A good gag writer knows how far she can go before destroying the dramatic structure - before making it impossible to return to the altered/expanded premise.

In a very funny drama - yes, like Buffy, but also The Sopranos, Deadwood, etc. - the writer faces the task of violating expectations within the dramatic structure, rather than expectations of it. In a straight-up comedy what's being fooled with is the nature of the world; since continuity is a predicate of most drama (we might reasonably say 'all good drama' but let's not be judgmental, eh?) the funny drama risks death if it takes the viewer too far into her own expectations about the narrative experience. And since that's where a lot of comedy lives, there are warring temptations for the writer. Example: early in the movie Serenity, during the hovercraft chase, the criminal captain Mal yells out to his driver, 'Faster, faster, faster would be better!' It's a funny line but not funny-about-the-story - it's funny-about-the-character. As writer Whedon points out, it's something that Mal would say (and Nathan Filion improvised the line, for what it's worth).

Meanwhile the gag reel to Serenity includes a clip of the cast filming the other big chase scene in the movie, the climactic space battle/chase, in which Mal barks orders to his pilot, a real back-seat driver. Eventually the pilot throws his hands up: 'Do you wanna drive the fucking thing?' 'Yes I do!' yells Filion, and he takes the wheel while the rest of the cast simply leaves the room. It's funny. It was funny on the day, but of course it wouldn't belong in the film. It's a joke at the expense of the situation, of its dramatic integrity. The take Whedon ended up using - Mal and his pilot going back and forth, 'Yes,' 'No,' 'Yes!' 'No!' - is a funny illustration of their relationship; Mal is telling his genius pilot what to do, the underling is simply ignoring Mal's input, and Mal clearly doesn't mind. He never follows up on his constant threats to fire his crew; this becomes a trope of the show, a kind of comic runner, but he always makes these threats earnestly, in a dramatic context. The comic refusals by his crew build the world, their relationships - they don't cut against it.

Too many hands on a dramatic script and you have warring expectations. If the script itself can't make up its mind as to what it wants the audience to do and feel - where to draw the eye, what the viewer should be anticipating - then the dramatic purpose will be undercut. When the head writer on a drama takes a pass at the script, her job is to bring the writing more in line with the show's tone and continuity and so forth, which means integrating character and comedy, making lines more dense with meaning, getting them to do more work. As my dad would say: Seeing that one hand isn't laughing at the other.

Good drama pulls you along, good comedy pulls you to pieces. If you're picturing people with ropes at cross-purposes, then we're picturing the same thing. Which might not be the noblest writerly goal in the world - but we'll see what we can do with a running start, won't we!

Barack on BET.

The GF and I went looking for a TV broadcast of Obama's speech; we found it on BET. Afterwards they ran a 'Top 10 Campaign Moments' special - chatty VH1 stuff and totally uplifting. Today is a historic day but it was nice to get a little chatty and tawdry with a bunch of comedians and actors I'd never heard of talking about great it was that 'black love was alive and living in America.' (I'm serious, it was kind of fantastic.)

Anyhow the show included clips of Obama's 2004 DNC speech, and the difference between that man and today's candidate is night and day. He was much more conversational in that speech; the range of his intonation was much wider, his face more animated, his manner less grave. It makes me kind of sad, actually, that the campaign has ground him down so much. (Of course Clinton seems to have had the opposite experience, apparently thriving on the poisonous campaign atmosphere, drawing nutrients from bile. Pretty impressive evolutionary adaptation actually.) Notwithstanding the beauty and intelligence of his Philadephia speech (the Big Race Speech), Obama hasn't really spoken in that idiosyncratic, freewheeling way in a long time, though flashes of his easygoing wit have shown through at times - cf. 'Out there in the duck blind!'

Clinton's speech tonight was awful, as was McCain's, but I find myself longing for the period when Obama was a little freer, more loose-limbed. It's easy to forget that high-up politics essentially destroys good people, erases their individuality, reduces them to a single principle (survival); it's sobering to see that process at work on Barack Obama. I believe he'll do extraordinary things as president (and believe me, he's gonna win), but the personal cost to him is already apparent. His willingness to pay it appears generous rather than avaricious; maybe a little crazy too. But it's a good night for crazy.

As a middle-class white guy, I experience Obama's candidacy sympathetically, wholeheartedly, but without a familial connection. Watching BET, of all things, I was reminded of the other languages in which his campaign speaks, not at all cynically. I admire him more knowing what he means to the American family.

S4 Lost finale thoughts. (Our problem is our eyes are broken. Nobody cares.)

The finale of Lost's fourth season wasn't bad; indeed if you think of it as a three-parter (the way it was written), then two thirds of the episode were excellent, just about as good as Lost gets. Indeed the middle third contained the funniest stretch of any Lost episode since maybe the first season (before the show's huff-n-puff portentousness and self-seriousness overwhelmed its good humour). Since the middle of Season Two the show has offered no better character pairing, no more complex couple, than Ben and Locke, and episodes 4x12 and the two-hour 4x13 offered plenty of Ben/Locke interaction to chew on. The strike-shortened season actually worked in the show's favour: the five episodes that aired after the show's midseason hiatus were the densest of the series, answering plenty of questions (of the mechanical sort) and sticking to the show's strengths, namely fast action and loopy plot twists of limited believability and sense. The finale benefited most of all from this compression, with no wasted time, no narcoleptic flashbacks, and only a few of the show's laughable attempts at social portraiture.

The characters on Lost live their lives entirely within a very narrow storyworld, protected from pesky limitations like the laws of nature or even human nature; they have no contact with anything like real people, no normal or straightforward motivations, no complex or ambiguous experiences, no community. The finale, like most of Season Four, was constructed such that the story never ran up against these limitations. By the last two hours of Season Four, there was nothing left for the writers and actors but pure action; indeed most of what happened in the finale (with the exception of Penny's heartwarming appearance at sea) was purely mechanical, the answer to the season-long question 'How did the Six get off the island, and why only them?'

It doesn't matter that the events of the finale were implausible, cliché-ridden, and in places mind-numbingly stupid. (Jin and Michael stand around for hours looking ineffectually at the bomb? Sawyer's plunge into the sea is enough to save the Six? The Others really are a lunatic cult willing to follow John Locke around? The fantastic metaphysical laws governing the island require that Jack come back with the entire Season One cast of principals in tow? No one in the press cares that the Oceanic Six story is obviously a lie? Keamy really put on a transmitter that would blow up the boat if he died? One that works hundreds of feet underground on an island surrounded by 'electromagnetic fields' strong enough to warp time and space? Why, why would he do something so stupid? And the entire island shoots off through time at the half-turn of a donkey wheel?!?!)

It doesn't matter that the characters, with precious few exceptions, are as thin as ever, that their backstories have amounted to essentially nothing: from Jack's pop-psych control freak problems to Kate's criminal past to Sawyer's conman-made-good rascal style to Sayid's fairweather romanticism (remember the lamentable Shannon?), the show has boiled each character down to a type and dismissed the first three seasons' endless, laborious flashbacks. Everyone on the island has in common both pluckiness and a sad failure of wit (with the exception of Sun, who's both plucky and witty, Desmond, who's 'British,' and Locke/Ben, who are basically comic-book fantasy figures to whom the writers can't resist giving all the good lines).

It doesn't matter that a first-time viewer could be excused for thinking that Lost is a show about a dozen absolute morons, barely able to string together coherent sentences or communicate even the most basic of sentiments without ham-fisted duplicity, trapped inside a parody of an adventure story, in which no action-hero couplet could ever in the history of mankind have emerged from the mouths of actual human beings ('What are you thinking, Biff?' 'We need to get to turn off the phlebotinum generator, Bob.' 'Why is that, Biff?' 'Because if we don't, Bob, EVERY LIVING THING ON THIS ISLAND WILL DIE'), in which every twist and turn is underscored by ludicrous blaring low horns, in which human life is valueless unless it belongs to one of the principal characters. It doesn't matter that the show continues to insist that surprise is its own reward, a schlock-suspense anthology desperate to justify its improbable production values.

You can set those problems aside, for one night a week. Maybe. OK, maybe one night every few weeks - but you can do it, if you drink a sufficiently large mojito on a half-full stomach and try to forget everything you've learned about how 'the script is always about the characters' and 'stories should make sense by the end' and 'you can't cheapen every moment with loud music and explosions' and 'it's all about the quiet moments' and 'the audience has to understand the central conflict' and, ultimately, 'the story has to mean something.' If you can forget those things, and all of the above, and all the boring up-n-back nonsense of Season Two, and the pseudointellectual blather and pretension (Bentham? Locke? Hume? Christian Shephard? C'mon), and the sheer nonstop adolescent dumbness of it all...

...it's fair to say that Season Four of Lost ended reasonably well and was worth seeing, even if it was the least provocative or interesting finale of the show's four seasons. I had a good time and my disappointment and disillusionment didn't fully set in until today, the day after, which is about 14 hours later than usual, so that's not nothing. And I look forward to Season Five, though as usual my interest in the show has more to do with my own hangups and neuroses than with the show's dubious claims to aesthetic value. Well I liked it, and I hope you liked it, because the good lord knows we don't need anymore worthless bullshit in our lives. And if we had fun then How Can It Be Worthless?

Lost finale question: Who's in the casket?

Answer: Seriously. What difference does it make?

TV scripts I will not be writing.

Dennis ][ Society: A series adaptation of Steve Martin's The Jerk in the more comforting mode of Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, this is the story of a young white man raised by a black family in the Deep South, admirably (if a little eccentrically) brought up to believe that he's no different from his five dark-skinned adoptive siblings. One day he's called to his high school principal's office for a meeting and informed that his biological parents have been found. Dennis - who didn't even know he was adopted, har har! - goes off to live with his biological family, and is pressured to get into the family business. In doing so, he brings a fresh hip-hop sensibility to the upper-crust white world in which he now lives; when his biological dad dies, Dennis steps up and takes over the biz, which happens to be the local chapter of the Ku Klux Klan. Riotous comedy ensues as the show follows the twin formulae of 'fish out of water' workplace sitcom (echoes of Mary Tyler Moore!) and class-anxiety domestic sitcom (notes of sitcom classic Benson!).

Wacky future episodes include:

'Hire Learning': Dennis implements nondiscriminatory hiring practices at the firm (which he's rechristened KK&K Ltd.), and reaches out to his adoptive brothers and sisters to offer them internships. The Klansmen are taught the meaning of friendship.

'The Mos That Roared': KK&K Ltd. is threatened with merger with another branch, and Dennis holds a benefit concert - with hip-hop artist Mos Def headlining - to raise enough funds to keep them afloat, and does an impromptu freestyle rap about the pressures of knowing he's an affirmative action hire. Bill Cosby guest stars.

'Strange Fruit Loops': The rollicking, heartbreaking first season finale (hourlong). When Dennis's white girlfriend is faced with a tough choice - whether or not to get an abortion - Dennis brings both his families together for a conference. In an unexpected moment of solidarity, they set upon him and string him up as a race-traitor and a fornicator; at the height of comic tension the rope turns out to be too long(!!) for the tree they're using, and luckily the group is struck with the inhumanity of what they're doing. The cops, seeing a crowd of black people assembled without a permit, arrests Dennis's adoptive family. The Klansmen use the noose to string up a piñata - it's the perfect height - and bail out Dennis's adoptive family to hold a life-affirming fiesta centered around their shared dislike of Latinos.

Keith Olbermann, ladies and gentlemen.

That is how you deliver a speech.

Thursday TV: Office finale, first part of Lost finale.

As we walked over to Cyrus's house to watch Lost after a big boisterous group showing of The Office, I said to the GF [paraphrased], 'Here's what's gonna happen. Lost is gonna absolutely suck, it'll be all setup, I'll be totally unsatisfied with the cliffhanger, and I'll complain loudly about it even though I know what's gonna happen, because all I wanna do is talk about The Office and how extraordinary that episode was. I'm dying inside with how awesome that episode was.'

I was wrong. Lost was as good as it's been all year (the bar is lower for Lost, as for a mentally challenged child - any achievement seems great). In fact it was out'n'out riveting, compressing several episodes' worth of plot into 42 charged-up minutes. As usual you had your stupid bits; for once they were outweighed by concision and momentum.

All of which would be a bigger deal if The Office hadn't been a mould-breaker in its own right: an entire season's worth of plotlines closed out or dismissed entirely, a revelation every couple of minutes, a big Season Five story arc setup for all the major characters. The last few weeks have ranked up there with the best of the show's run - with the British Office in fact - and this episode paid it all off, careening between satisfying climaxes (that pre-credits tag! Damn!) and shocking anticlimaxes (Michael and the HR lady, and sweet Jesus Jim and Pam...). I was worried, at first, that Season Four would be disjointed, too random, too sentimental. In the end it was none of those things; indeed the finale was as strong a dramatic showcase (especially for Steve Carrell, maybe the best actor on TV right now) as anything Greg Daniels and company have written. The tight-lipped desperation of Season One was there, in slightly different form; the romantic sweep of Season Three was there, subverted. For my money Toby's farewell was better, all around, than 'Casino Night' (the Season Two finale, which of course ended with The Kiss).

It was - and it's been a long time since this could be said of a Thursday - just a great night of television all around. And I'm already looking forward to the next Lost, two weeks from now. What was the last time that could be said? Two years ago?