The Walking Dead Goes “18 Miles Out” and Becomes Good

It’s almost par for course that a television series, after a certain number of episodes, after a certain number of typical start to finish storylines, will eventually go all in media res on us, thrusting the viewer right into the thick of the action, early, and then explaining as the story progresses. So it’s no surprise that The Walking Dead in the midst of its second season dusted off the trick and put it to work this past week for the opening scene of “18 Miles Out”. Glen Mazzara, the Brit who replaced the show’s creator, Frank Darabont, as showrunner this past July, has refreshingly decided to heighten the action and seemingly (if not actually) quicken the pace of the series, utilizing the tools at a writer’s disposal to the benefit of the viewer- our bloodlust and waning attention spans.

The teaser before the opening credits starts with zombies chasing folk; reminding everyone why ‘zombie apocalypse’ as a premise was appealing enough for AMC to remake Lost without any of the original’s selling points (no island, no time travel, and despite how hard Shane tries to Sawyer it up each episode, no Sawyer), and hypnotic enough to have record-breaking cable viewership each outing. While so much time has been spent up to this point closely examining the contrasting ideologies of the good cop and the bad cop, thoroughly dissecting what defines humanity and community in an allegorically bleak America, and other thematic bores, this episode, for the first time in an embarrassingly long time, brings the visceral image of zombies to the forefront, literally.

The zombies, like star pupils in a college writing workshop, show instead of tell and allow for more compelling story progression. The establishment of an A-plot that bears a resemblance to what the series once promised us, even makes the B-plot, and characters therein, flourish in ways the previous glacial pace hadn’t allowed. Did we know that the show had female characters before this episode? Maybe. Did we know that they were more than simply mothers, daughters, sisters, and liabilities? We do now.

While the boys were out expelling tension with fisticuffs (as men sometimes do) and piercing zombie skulls (as Lori claims men should always do), the girls discuss suicide and the role of women in a zombie-riddled society. The first ladies of The Walking Dead, Andrea and Lori, have understandably conflicting views and get at each other’s throats in a way that has all the perks of a cat fight while maintaining or even establishing these characters as dynamic female leads. Andrea stands on her own without clamoring to be simply Shane’s female counterpart, and Lori almost has us forget that she’s the worst person on the show. Sounds like progress.

The Black guy, the redneck, the Asian, the old guys, and the kid who got shot weren’t in this episode, but they’re still alive, so diversity for diversity’s sake is still preserved. This episode seemed to be more about moving away from being a “cul-de-sac” of narrative or The Talking Dead as some critics have written, and many viewers have lamented. It seems like at some point the show stood completely still on AMC, questioning if it could be the Mad Men that viewers actually watched or the zombie story that was about something more. Interestingly, in rolling out a trope of televised fiction (if I remember correctly, The Flinstones always teased in media res before the theme song), “18 Miles Out” was a confident step in the direction of setting the series apart from every other cable drama, if only for reminding us we have a show about zombies on television, something invariably special.

Zombies.

Zombies eating flesh and zombies getting their brains bashed in. Zombies slowly chasing people as they inexplicably trip. Close calls. Blood and guts. Why wouldn’t the first few pages of every The Walking Dead script look just like that?

Four Week Hiatus for Fringe

Sadly, Fringe won’t be airing at all in March and according to Carissa at TV Fanatic, the producers hadn’t intended to leave things as up in the air as last night’s episode, “The End of All Things”, may have. But why would we expect anything else from a season that has unfolded into some sort of an experiment in what a mind can manifest for itself when left in complete narrative darkness. With an abundance of theories floating throughout the fandom, both probable and improbable, last night’s episode provided, if anything, a flash of light to refocus our eyes. But what did we actually see?

It’s hard to say. For example, we saw two Nina’s. One was clearly in cahoots with David Robert Jones, who is ostensibly the bad guy of this arc (with a crescendo indiscernible in the darkness.) The other Nina is keeping quiet at FBI headquarters. She’s relatively more trustworthy than her counterpart, but that doesn’t amount to much with her history of suspicious actions and secrecy. And despite the assertion by Broyles that she’d be dead if there was a Nina-clone running around, meant to determinedly ease our minds, why would we ever be at ease with any version of Nina Sharpe? The very ground is unstable in this universe and there’s certainly no ceiling to where the series is willing to take us. Clones are always a possibility.

Thematically, these recent episodes speak directly to the concept of identity that the series often plays with. The clones in earlier episodes of the season and alternate versions of our characters throughout established a fairly straightforward statement of who we are not. We are not our appearances or our physical image. Moreover, we are often not even what we look like we are. The freaks of the week have appeared as unthreatening as possible this season, young people and children for the most part with grandiose supernatural ability. The boy with the hivemind from “A Better Human Being” revealed identity to be more fluid and less individual-based than we usually accept; and the young girl with the ability to doodle images of victims of future misfortune pointedly offered a challenge to the truthfulness of the aesthetic image. Not only does a disconnect exist between what we can see and what actually is, there’s a sort of humanist possibility of change and redirection of identity.

So in last night’s episode, Olivia (It’s become increasingly strange to differentiate Olivia’s, especially when referring to one as ours; the implication being that others are less significant or less trenchant to our personal involvement in the show – a misguided implication, I think) fundamentally has an identity crisis. We all have one with her. It’s difficult to identify Olivia when she appears irreparably decentralized – aspects of Olivia exist across alternate timelines, in extension, across multiple worlds. She seems to acknowledge it, accepting it with mostly befuddled glee when Peter’s love acts as a sort of trans-reality bedrock. Not so much when he decides to retreat from the complicated situation. Many of us, as well as Peter, grasp onto the possibility of an easily identifiable Olivia elsewhere, but we don’t see that Olivia. We haven’t in a long time.

Once again, it’s tremendously difficult to make out shapes in the dark that Fringe has left us in all season. But if there was even a glimmer in this episode, in it we saw Olivia. We’ve been seeing her for a while but our minds were simply closed to the possibility, choosing rather to be unsettled by the change in the appearance of things. The revelation that the Observer’s are simply well dressed future folk with voyeuristic tendencies lends itself to this strange idea that we are who we are even when we aren’t. Identification through fate, destiny, what so have you. September’s interference, whether intentionally or not, changes several ‘things’ but never seems to be able to change the underlying identity of Olivia and Peter and the gang, even if their actions have in the past provoked certain questions: i.e. Which Walter is Peter’s real father? Which Olivia is hotter? WTF is going on?

We’re left to ponder for the next month new questions, but hopefully they’re a new sort of question unlike will Peter get back home? will we get our people back? This episode hopefully marks the end of all things like that. I for one enjoy this peculiar feeling of looking for someone or something with all your (tv watching) might and finding it right in front of you, sitting there the whole time, just inexplicably unrecognizable before. But to be honest, I might just be seeing things.

Completely unrelated thought: Peter walking away at the end reminded me so much of Angel (AV Club commenter BenjaminSantiago thought so too). Remember way back in the beginning when they tried to give Peter internal strife? Oh my, how they’ve grown.

Luck and the New Drama

Luck, a new HBO horse-betting drama created by David Milch of NYPD Blue fame, is, in a way, representative of the new look and feel of high-end television drama in the wake of shows like the Sopranos and the Wire. There’s a visibly top shelf Hollywood sheen to the cinematography, direction and recognizable faces emblazoned on the future DVD box sets. And beneath the Dustin Hoffman feature credit, often lies a murky, almost misanthropic depiction of America past or present or alternative zombie-riddled present. In ten episodes or so, less than half the amount of more conventional procedurals like House o CSI, this new breed of drama makes use of variable plot pacing to tell their story over the course of a shorter time, more akin to what television used to know as a mini-series, more like a film.

Two Hollywood films in particular, Big Trouble in Little China in 1986 and Ocean’s Eleven (the 1960 original or any instance of the 2001 remake franchise would do), relates to Luck intimately, in non-obvious ways. Big Trouble in Little China, starring a young Kurt Russell and an even younger-looking Kim Cattrall, also showcased Dennis Dun, one of Luck’s many recognizable if unnameable faces, in his most noteworthy role as Russell’s Chinese sidekick. The deeper relation to Luck reveals itself in the similar ways Dun and race in general are used to provide credence to the depiction of a dark realism – dark with oriental mysticism in the film, dark with disrepute and sleaze in Luck.

Whereas the rest of the television landscape struggles to find a use for race in their worlds, Luck and other neo-dramas employ a sort of racial pragmatism for the purposes of providing grit and authenticity. Dun portrays Leo Chan, a crass card playing business owner with a stereotypically thick Asian accent. Elsewhere in the storyline, we are exposed to the Latino cadence of Escalante, a respected and charismatic horse trainer played convincingly by John Ortiz. Luck, more than other shows in recent years, implores the viewer to work a little harder on parsing dialogue and story progression (will we really have to learn to differentiate horses?), Escalante and Chan perform exactly this function, while providing necessary color to an otherwise all-white canvas. Like Big Trouble in Little China typifies the Hollywood moment in the 1980s where it was discovered that color added invaluable texture and credibility to familiar narratives – adventure in Chinatown or a Black detective in Beverly Hills; Luck represents a similar “enlightenment” on the small screen.

Luck luckily has the benefit of contemporary Hollywood’s callousness to issues of race; standing in contrast to pre-1980s Hollywood’s general insensitivity to those same issues. Racial themes today are usually communicated within predetermined archetypes and cliches; otherwise, race is largely a functional tool wielded when necessary by film and television.

Perhaps more directly, the basic premise of Ocean’s Eleven, an all-star roster of parts all with specific contributions to the team’s success, is related not only in Luck’s apparent plot (degenerate and decrepit gamblers are fundamentally the same as dapper and handsome criminal minds) but in the show’s very inception. Nick Nolte is certainly the muscle of the show. He flexes his chops and the audience reveres as if trained. Dennis Farina provides the brains; not the intellect, but the mind of the series. He asks questions for us and holds our hands while we explore an unfamiliar world of jockeys and ponies. Richard Kind provides comic relief in the most entertainingly dirtbag-like way he can muster. And if seeing Jill Hennessy return to television doesn’t do something comparable to watching Julia Roberts in film, as in make your heart flutter, there’s something wrong with you, not Luck.

Throw in Dustin Hoffman, Michael Mann, and David Milch to fill out the executive portion of the IMDB page and you have a rat pack. Throw in an obscure niche subculture, the aforementioned funny talking ethnics, and keep the stakes high enough to maintain the suspense every week and you have an all-star roster, every part functioning in this new drama machine. The suspense is very much the glue guy of the team. It convinces us that Dustin Hoffman’s character is somehow as interesting as the always impending horse race. Suspense keeps all the moving parts as well the viewers hooked to the machine like a drunk with a pension at an OTB. Luck is like that. It undoubtedly takes something away from you as you watch, whether that is simply time, patience, or willingness to watch horses die. But that’s the gamble and the fun. These first highly entertaining episodes, however, give us hope that there’s winnings to be had (at least by white people.)

Fact: In an Alternate Reality, More People Watch Fringe than Grey’s Anatomy

Following up on a previous post, Grey’s Anatomy’s ‘fuck it’ phase of melodramatic writing is once again illustrated in the episode ‘If/Then’. The episode is an experiment in alternate reality storytelling, halfheartedly parading the what if’s that no one was asking, and aggressively asserting something like “we are who we are, no matter what.”

By the end of the episode, we discover Yang and Meredith are kindred spirits despite ostensibly conflicting personalities and ambitions. We see Alex Karev self deprecating and lamenting lost love. We find Meredith and Derek flirtatiously ogling one another after Derek’s failed marriage and Meredith’s maternal strife. Callie hints at being gay. Owen more than hints at having PTSD. Bailey finds her strong Black woman cliche in adversity. And so on. Fundamentally, this episode is a sheepish rerun dressed in a new episode’s clothing.

But the gimmick of the what if’s is an intriguing one. The 1998 film ‘Sliding Doors’ starring Gwyneth Paltrow adopts the technique and comes to mind throughout the episode for its similar dramatic tone if not for its identical assertion by the end of the film that “we are who we are, no matter what.” Where Grey’s falls short in comparison is the actual exposition of its contrary to fact alternatives. The premise of Meredith being engaged to Karev or Derek and Addison staying married doesn’t offer much to advance what we know of the characters other than awkward happenstance. In the case of Derek and Addison’s dysfunctional marriage, this has been explored ad nauseam from the onset of the series and surely every season since.

The tweaks to the familiar dynamic are impotent and superficial throughout the whole outing. Despite a new hairdo, Yang being overly competitive and surly could have been pulled from many previous scripts verbatim. And another new hairdo reveals alt-Little Grey to be as transparent and ineffective as the original. The episode functions more as a reinforcement of the things we already know about the characters. One problem is that this episode also reveals that we may know too much about these characters, especially if there’s so little left to reveal that even when we flip the whole Seattle Grace universe upside down nothing changes. It might be argued then that that’s the point as Meredith narrates throughout. But another problem is: NOTHING changes. Absolutely nothing. The episode ends less on a note of fate and destiny and resolute identity, and more on a bleak appraisal of its characters one-dimensionality and predictability. PTSD is a serious affliction and probably can’t be remedied by marrying a shapely (read: sexy) Latina surgeon. And homosexuality probably can’t be wished away with baby making and a handsome ginger husband. But if the covert hopelessness that Grey’s Anatomy is peddling claims that gaining two parents that love and support you still leaves Ellen Pompeo as one of the most listless leading ladies in primetime, then truly, fuck it.

Go watch Fringe. Grey’s will be here when you get back, unchanged. Promise.

White Collar Wants You to Enjoy Yourself

On White Collar, Neal Caffrey’s hair is immaculately coiffed. He wears tailored suits and fedoras linked sartorially to the mid-20th century – Cary Grant or the Rat Pack. He’s portrayed strikingly by Matt Bomer on the USA original series and Bomer certainly isn’t too hard on the eyes himself. When he’s on your television set, the plasma or LEDs are doing what they were meant to do. The production team painstakingly makes sure of it. Even New York City appears more vibrant and handsome with nary a homeless person or trashcan to be found, under a sky that is almost inappropriately blue.

Yet still, there is crime. White Collar floats somewhere between a crime drama and a weekly caper show à la TNT’s Leverage. In fact, the first half of the current season revolves around Caffrey’s inability to decide which sort of series, which sort of protagonist he really wants to be: the redeemed ex-con, close friend and partner of star FBI agent Peter Burke or one of the most impressive fine art thieves, forgers, and con-men in the series’ very fictional world – a world full of Nazi treasure and timely explosions in the middle of Manhattan. The very fact that these are the options is a testimony to White Collar’s commitment to effect, dramatic and aesthetic.

Suspenseful kidnappings, perilous circumstances, and murders are fodder for White Collar’s drama formula, worked while carefully preserving cosmetics, sharpness, and fun. There’s not much else to it. Often the show’s plot holes are like potholes in the real New York City, but if you like it here and decide to stay, you tend to avoid them. There’s fun to be had and cynicism has no home on USA Network original programming, where all you need is an upbeat color palette and a pun-title for your premise to launch a similarly quirky series.

White Collar stands out on USA for its execution (like Psych stands out for its high success rate of obscure jokes and allusions.) As Kenny at A.V. Club points out, White Collar’s mid-season premiere “is, to its credit, a case-study in storytelling economy.” The show isn’t revolutionary in content or plot points. Our guys, the good guys, will always come out on top. And the bad guys will get their comeuppance in due time, when depending on their quality of inciting drama. Still viewers ofttimes can’t predict what’s coming their way next. Good. Throughout three seasons the writers have proven their ability to effectively tie up loose ends while skillfully laying the ground work for future storytelling, perpetual ups and downs of tension and danger, manufactured beneath a swank cloak of obscurity.

All in the sake of fun. In the world of White Collar, a resistance to fun is a resistance to being surprised when Caffrey gets away with a heist or attracted to Tiffani Amber Thiessen (again). It’s possible and some people might be somehow predisposed to doing so, but it’s a regrettable state of being after buying many a movie ticket or paying a cable bill. In fact if you don’t like White Collar, you probably won’t like any USA Network series, a bold but merited proclamation, and I suggest you reconsider paying for cable. Honestly. It’s a new day filled with new avenues of potential entertainment and storytelling and a series like this tries hard, not always successfully, to hold on to a more fun yesterday, like wearing a fedora with no irony.

Is Alcatraz FOX’s Way of Telling Fringe to Get Lost?

Yup. There’s an intentional pun in that title. And it refers dutifully to Wednesday nights of yore, way back in 2004 when committed sci-fi fanatics and casual remote control wielding Americans alike were first introduced to the ABC ratings goliath choreographed by J.J. Abrams and company, set on some island somewhere. It follows then that déjà vu abounds when J.J. Abrams stamps his name on a new series for FOX focused on another island that may be more infamous than the one where viewers first fell in love the Oceanic Flight 815 survivors, if in name alone. In its two-hour series premiere, Alcatraz makes it abundantly clear that it aims to aggressively court the viewers with a keen eye for nerd-bait as well as the regular chums with expendable incomes and Nielsen boxes – the bread and butter of the once resplendent Lost fandom.

Jorge Garcia fundamentally reprises perhaps the most iconically uncontroversial character in recent television history without even bothering to get a haircut. New Hurley does and says old Hurley things as he obsesses over this new old island and explores this new 50 year-old mystery (about supposedly old inmates turned new.) He’s a bit taken aback by the possibility of supernatural time-traveling crooks, but only a bit because he’s the protector of the Island now, or that’s what we’re meant to infer. On occasion you may even catch him mid-soliloquy, discussing how familiar he is with the Island and some but not all of its secrets.
There’s certainly other Lost easter eggs here and there but just like its titlecard font, Alcatraz is reminiscent of but clearly not Lost. In fact, Alcatraz is J.J. Abrams’ new sci-fi police procedural hybrid darling on FOX. A series for those in need of a serving of smart, intuitive, young blonde detective with a problematic history that she somehow uses to fuel an ambition to solve unconventional cases. Maybe she’s an FBI agent. Maybe her partner’s dead. Maybe give her a specialist/consultant/expert as a partner in his stead. She uses unorthodox methodologies anyway and kicks enough ass for the both of them. Right?

When Fringe first premiered on FOX in the fall of 2008, during the fourth season of Lost, Lance Reddick seemed to carry intrigue and enigma from one universe to another – along with strong acting chops exercised on the Wire. Fringe enjoys a bit of the Lost-but-not treatment as well, subtly for the most part (an Oceanic boarding pass here or there), but has developed into something wholly independent with some of the most ambitious and original storytelling on television today, in its fourth season. But alas, the numbers, as they’re wont to do, fall short in supporting this fact. In fact, besides ratings, Fringe is getting increasingly more expensive to produce as time progresses, an unattractive position to be in.

Then comes Alcatraz. Plainly put, Alcatraz is Fringe with less. Less cost. Less plot. Less science. Rebecca Madsen (played by Sarah Jones), the lead detective closely following the supernatural events surrounding Alcatraz island, even has significantly less blonde hair than Olivia Dunham (played by Anna Torv), the lead FBI agent of the Fringe division. There’s a leanness to Alcatraz that positions it in opposition to Fringe, even while on the same network. Fringe has been on cancellation watch since nearly its onset because of attributes that simultaneously limit its viewership yet contribute to its remarkably consistent quality – almost everyone now plays two characters in two parallel universes just for kicks. And sadly, the old tricks to save both worlds, like Warner Bros finding lucrative licensing deals, may not work this time around.

In a very real way, Alcatraz represents a faith worst than death for Fringe and its loyal fanbase: the knowledge that in an alternate universe where Fringe wasn’t as creative and Anna Torv’s hair wasn’t as long and Joshua Jackson wasn’t as fit, things might be different. It’s important to know this if Fringe doesn’t make it and the Others on the island somehow thrive. Alcatraz is a series with promise that may or may not meet expectations, but Fringe is undeniably in the company of Alias and Lost when it comes to Abrams productions that contributed greatly to sci-fi action dramas on primetime.

So when asked what they died for (the Lost pun game isn’t easy), be sure to tell them that. The End.

P.S. Did you know J.J. Abrams created Felicity? And in other news that you don’t necessarily want or need, here’s a map of Fringe ratings throughout the US courtesy of tvbythenumbers. That is all

Californication: Blackness and Why Bukowski Chose to Die Long Before 2012

Meagan Good (pictured above) is featured prominently in these early episodes of the new season of Californication and her presence solicits certain questions as to the direction of the series. On the surface she provides eye candy akin to many of the past guest features in this series – Carla Gugino and Addison Timlin made appearances just last season. But this season, Good’s accompanied by a plot line that invokes the main protagonist’s understanding of Black people or lack thereof.

For the most part, it’s a familiar plot: There’s a career opportunity on the line and Hank’s a bit reluctant to accept; whether because of artistic integrity or personal conflict or simply a predisposition to being as difficult as Showtime needs him to be. Either way Hank Moody doesn’t want to write (read: do) what is expected of him and this leads to conflict – the punch to the face kind and the socio-metaphysical identity crisis sort. Par far course with the show.

What’s different this season is not that the main characters have to acknowledge race – when Michael Ealy was making the sex with Moody’s baby’s mother we were reminded often that he was black, just as when Hank and his best friend Charlie Runkle say “nigga” we’re forcibly reminded that they’re not – the difference now is that the show seems to be flirting with the notion of doing more, perhaps being more than just a pale image of Bukowski’s magnum opus Women, with solid laughs and the once-improbable Agent Mulder as the face.

The series, Californication is still very much like the novel, Women, in that despite how it may seem, these two works are unabashedly about masculinity, men. Not LA life. Not being a writer. Not women. Not gender relations, adulthood, parenting, or sex. But men, and everything else only inasmuch it relates to masculinity. Hank Moody like David Duchovny like Chinaski like Buckowski exists comfortably in the space of masculinity etched out by the successes of feminism and the rise of more developed and varying roles for women in society. The novelty of all this is that he actively keeps fucking them, (and fucking with society, man.) He has sex with lawyers and actresses and teachers and students and wives and mothers and daughters. And through living this kind of superficial man’s fantasy, we’re exposed to what real men experience and endure: being a father, being in love, dealing with work, being a friend, failing – like a man.

But back to Ms. Good. Meagan Good is the type of actress you wish read more bell hooks when you see the sort of roles she subsists on but somehow you suspect that she’s intimately familiar with the tragedies of Toni Morrison with how she carries herself on screen, enigmatically seductive. She’s a black woman and plays them on television without hesitation. What she does for Californication is force a show that’s been about men to be more explicitly about white men. Race like the word “nigga” has been the punchline to a joke for Hank Moody and company since the series premiere in August 2007. Now in season 5, the show-runners want to see where this can go. Bukowski didn’t. He stayed tucked away in Los Angeles until his death in 1994, a time where race relations were boiling over most vehemently but a locale where ignoring it is most persistent, and he remained a curmudgeonly old white man until the end, a literary Archie Bunker. What gives Hank Moody the right to live in 2012, compliment a sexy Black woman on the fullness of her lips, have sincere conversations with brothas about their contrasting world views, and still maintain the mystique of a brash, intellectual non-conformist drunkard? It’s a tall older surely for a show past this far into its run. The RZA’s brick-like performance alone would leave anyone a bit skeptical.

House of Lies: What is a management consultant?

Management consultants aren’t traditionally good people. The Martin Kihn title, House of Lies: How Management Consultants Steal Your Watch and Then Tell You the Time, which provides the source material for the new Showtime series starring Don Cheadle, thoroughly explores that premise. But to enjoy the television show, that very premise may need to be explained to viewers. In fact, for many the logic of the show may need to even address a simpler question: What is a management consultant?

It’s not a stupid question ask. Their livelihoods rely heavily on their ability to exist within the ambiguity of necessity that comes from fiscal figures being high but not quite right. They seem to solve problems in some way. Or perhaps act as harbingers of problems. Or are they opportunists? Experts? Swindlers? Who knows? Consultants know and it is usually in their best interest financially to make sure you don’t. Consultancy in general isn’t typically even a career you see explored on the small screen or any screen for that matter. It’s used at best as a plot tool or a cheeky code word for a characters occupation or role. (Peter Bishop on Fringe was brought on board as a consultant for the FBI.)

Sadly, House of Lies isn’t really about the world of management consultants either. Not really. It purports to be but where there exists subtlety and nuance and intrigue in Kihn’s text and the industry itself, House of Lies asks us simply to find Cheadle endearing. Unlike the book, which argues a sort of malicious conspiracy orchestrated by management consultants, the show doesn’t implicitly define the industry, it chooses rather to rely on cliches to present a shoddy anti-hero in Cheadle’s character, Marty Kaan.

Kaan’s the head of a team from the #2 ranked management consultancy company in the country. He’s a bit of a womanizer, but a sympathetic one. He’s a single father struggling to raise a unique son. In the series premiere, Kaan anxiously goes up against his sociopathic ex-wife (his ascription) and somehow comes out on top, overcoming the greedy bank execs.

“Overcome” is perhaps too strong a word. Kaan makes a devious deal with the bankers after portraying them as corrupt, their image as tarnished, and their prospects as bleak, inextricably aligning the consultant’s amorality with that of the financial sector. But the problem is we know the story of the big bad banks, subprime loans, and the housing bubble. They’re not good people. But how do Kaan and his team fit into all of this? What is a management consultant? House of Lies won’t answer that very basic question for you in any meaningful way. The profession is treated unprofessionally (silly restaurant fights and the lack of anything that represents actual work); the supposed cynicism and amoralism of a show about corporate culture and greed and misdoings (with “Lies” in the title) is just insincere and impotent; and the plot just suffers because of this.

After one episode, House of Lies doesn’t seem to have the foundation to stand on its own. It needs to more effectively utilize the fodder of the real corporate world of management consultancy and not merely pretend to. Unless that’s the joke. The lie. The swindle. If so, lol. Kristen Bell iz hawt!

HBO cancels Hung, Bored to Death, and How to Make it in America

…and that may not be such a bad thing for fans.

The premise of a blue collar white man driven to prostitution by the recession, perhaps not surprisingly to most, doesn’t seem to write itself like it used to in 2009 when Hung first premiered. Without speculating too much on how or when the shark was jumped by Ray Drecker (played by Thomas Jane) and his sizable penis, it has long been common wisdom that the show wasn’t ‘as good as it’s first season,’ the season with all the hype and promise and emphatic conversations with friends about what they’re missing out on. The season before dick jokes became stale. The season when a teacher as a whore sounded as fresh and entertaining as a housewife as a drug dealer, except not really.

First season hype has doomed each one of these failed HBO experiments. Bored to Death received rave reviews from the sort of critics and friends alike that make a series more unapproachable than attractive. The merit of Jason Schwartzman, Ted Danson, and Zach Galifianakis going on detective adventures throughout New York City is undeniable. The praise the show received early in its run seems to assume that there were actually people who would attempt to deny it; as if there were those that enjoyed these three guys’ style of comedy, were liberally educated, NPR listeners with Rushmore on their Netflix queues, but for some reason were on the fence about Bored to Death. The series simply wasn’t built to manufacture new viewers – the American education system and cultural polarization wouldn’t allow it. But if not for the unwieldy hype, the series may have been able to keep its unique sort of ratings points.

How to Make it in America relied on a younger more easily herded demo to thrive on the network. The buzz around this show often contained the words “new Entourage.” But that was more of a design goal than an accurate assessment. Then there was the “hipster” claim, and it became clear that the show was chasing ghosts, and would forever be too many steps behind its own constructed visage. (HBO decided it’d take more than a year to air the second season of a show reimagining the  young people’s New York of last decade.)

The reason the cancellation of these shows may prove to be beneficial for their fans is simple: They get to keep the hype. Cancellation in 2012 isn’t cancellation as we’ve known in the past. These shows aren’t actually going anywhere. Three seasons of both Bored to Death and Hung and two seasons of How to Make it in America, can still provide their respective fans with a fluid and cohesive encapsulation of what they enjoyed (or thought they enjoyed), without any significant adjustments or alterations that often make a long-running show seem unfamiliar towards the end. Each show can even be scrutinized with the questions of what could’ve and should’ve been, never yielding the answers that would undoubtedly ruin the magic. Everyone now gets to digest the shows at their own pace, without ratings based-hype, but rather gravitating towards the shows that are consistent with their character. (Maybe put Bored to Death on your cue behind Twin Peaks. Maybe find a Hung torrent one bored summer.) Television is yours to keep now. So when a show with just one joke, merely the allure of familiar faces, simply a momentarily trendy look to flaunt, gets the axe, don’t worry. There’s nothing wrong with any of those things. And you still get to hold on tightly to them.

The Good Wife: The Smartest Show on Television Today

I know. “The smartest show on TV” is a pretty lofty title to bestow but it must be said that I didn’t take it the least bit lightly. By far, The Good Wife is currently the smartest show on CBS – not that they care. “Smart” tends to run havoc on Nielsen boxes throughout the country so networks are often wise to steer clear. Hawaii Five-O and Mike & Molly are certainly fun but also don’t ask much mentally of you or even their protagonists. CSI(s), NCIS(es)  and Criminal Minds(es) pretend to think on occasion but that’s seven shows all thinking as one, like seven hands all fiddling a Rubik’s cube but only aiming for reds on one side. And the comedies, Big Bang Theory in particular, show us each week how dumb smart needs to get in order to have people tuning in.

The Good Wife seems to stand out from the pack in that on its surface it’s a legal drama that’s ostensibly ignorant to the fact that we don’t watch them anymore. Remember when Ally McBeal and The Practice had a crossover episode? (Remember Night Court!?) Probably not. That was a long time ago, in a different television landscape where lawyers with their fast talk and book smarts and suits as sharp as their cynicism ruled the air. Now all we have is a wide-eyed Kathy Bates in Harry’s Law dumbing down legalese for regular folk, thoroughly playing the “I’m not that sort of lawyer” card.

The Good Wife is chock-full of that sort of lawyer, those sort of people – the smarty-pants. Alicia Florrick, played convincingly by a beautiful Julianna Margulies, is a smarty-pants junior litigator with a complicated personal life. What makes the series itself smart is how she can navigate a drama like this without a punchline; there’s no catch. The writers treat every character like an adult and in doing so treat the viewers like adults. The show uses its legal cases and scandals (like Alicia’s husband political career) to ask the viewer if they’ve not only read the paper recently (like Law & Order is known to do) but if they understand the news. The repercussions of a politician committing adultery, for example, take time to unravel and the writers have adeptly opened a window into the lives of those involved.

Chris Noth does a great job playing (Big playing) Peter Florrick, a smart-pants State’s Attorney who has an entertainingly strong grasp of both law and politics and contributes largely to the true-to-life mess of a romance between him and Alicia. Josh Charles, as Will Gardner, rounds off the love triangle that’s made the show irresistible recently. In fact, every one’s just great. Michael J. Fox and Anika Noni Rose even stop by now and then to make sure. This is truly the show that you deserve as a grownup. There are certainly other shows out there that are rich with genius (Community may come to mind) or try really hard to come off as thought-provoking (surely Kelsey Grammer’s new hustle, Boss) but I don’t think any show on television today thinks you’re actually smart and treats you as such as you watch. Watch it. The Good Wife comes back this Sunday, January 8.