Scattered thoughts on TV
Oct. 3rd, 2013 11:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beer_good_foamyMarvel's Agents of SHIELD (which I guess will forevermore make it impossible to talk about The Shield in Whedon fandom without causing confusion): I'm not overly impressed. While there's some good humour here and there, with a distinctly Whedonish tone, so far it's mostly superficial on top of a standard comic-book style action series, and with surprisingly flat characters at that. (Though it's nice to see an action series where a full third of the core cast - Gregg and Wen - are circling 50.)
After the second episode, though, I'm really looking forward to the Stockholm episode. Given that their Peru looks like Mexico, and the Sendero Luminoso is turned into a popular uprising, I can't wait to see what their version of Sweden looks like. I'm guessing we'll either be a socialist dictatorship or still at war with Norway. Oh well, it's comic-book history, I guess.
Though there is a promising thread about rebellion vs authority, supermen vs ordinary people etc that could be interesting if they choose to take it halfway seriously; in two episodes, we have two villains - J August Richards in ep1 and the (mostly unseen, but explained by Skye) guerilla in ep2 - who are given a reason for their refusal to bow to the men in suits. It begs the question - just whom does SHIELD serve? Is it their job to look out for te little guy, or to keep the balance of power intact, and are any of those goals as simple as they sound? Action series are generally reactionary, they take for granted that we want to trust the killers guarding our (internal or external) borders; perhaps not their superiors, who are generally corrupt and caught up in politics, but definitely the plucky action heroes. If they want to, Agents of SHIELD could play around a lot with that. Though the resolution to ep1 doesn't exactly give me hope.
Breaking Bad. Other people have said it better than I could, so I'll just note that damn, that was a brilliant, brilliant series finale.
...OK, I do have a few words.
Now, everyone loves a good anti-hero. Or anti-villain. Let's face it, apart from The Middleman, uncomplicated knights in shining armour are boring (which, again, most action series...) We love those shades of grey, we love to see good people do bad things... and bad people too. A lot of great TV series of the last 10 years have spent season upon season digging deeper into the souls of people doing horrible things for, what they maintain, are good reasons. At the centre is usually a man, who more-or-less genuinely Loves His Family, who has his own Code Of Honour, who does things for what he things are The Greater Good, who is trapped in a Culture Of Violence, etc etc etc. Basically, he is Just Like Us. Except he's also a (check any that may apply) racist, misogynist, sociopathic, mass-murdering, drug-dealing, hit-ordering, raping, self-righteous, hypocritical, wilfully-blind-to-the-effects-of-his-actions villain. Fine; those make for good stories. But sooner or later you get to the point where you need to end this story. And then what? You can't end it with our anti-hero retroactively turned into a knight in shining armour; that would be dishonest. Yet you can't end it with him simply getting his just desserts either.
The Sopranos set an interesting example. David Chase has said that almost every viewer he spoke to before the last season took for granted that the series had to end with Tony either dead or in jail. Or at the very least, tragically trapped by his own actions like Michael Corleone in The Godfather Part II (of Part III I'll only say that OK, sure, it's canon.) And Chase hated that idea, because it let the audience off. It would let them spend six seasons cheering Tony on, only to then piously tell themselves "See, Crime Doesn't Pay. I knew it all along, I was cheering for him to get caught, honest. He's a Bad Man. I was watching it for that FBI agent." So how does The Sopranos end? With Tony Soprano at a table with his family, old wounds still there but living with them, his position challenged but not ruined, his son telling him to "remember the good times", and then smashing to black in the middle of a Journey song, with Tony staring straight at the audience - we're at his family table, we don't stop believing. There's no catharsis there. The story just goes on, and we're part of it. It's the inverse of the Angel finale; the fight against good goes on, and it does so not under cover of darkness in dark alleys but right among us, by people exactly like us.
Fine. But it's not an ending, a lot of people complain. We want the story to wrap up, we want to know who lives and dies, we want to see bad people get punished and good people live. We want the case to be solved, damnit. So let's look at two very different police shows:
The Wire doesn't have one obvious hero, or one obvious villain. It has few of the former and plenty of the latter, all of whom are given moments of character depth and motivation. The Big Bad is the System. The dying industrial society, the failed economic system, the corrupt political process that has all the characters trapped. The few who try to break out and live as if they were free to make their own decisions are, for the most part, either metaphorically or actually killed. The ones who try to use the system against itself lose. The ones who realise they're just rats in a maze and exploit it to sell cheese to the other rats prosper, if they're clever and ruthless enough. (Well, except Cheese himself, of course.) And so there can be no ending; the series ends with a repeat of the very first opening collage, with younger characters stepping into the old ones' roles, with everything going on, with the only change being that the system gets more cynical as the people working it realise that it's unbeatable. The case is solved; one or two people (oh, Bubbles) are saved; it doesn't make any difference in the larger scheme of things.
JIMMY MCNULTY: What the fuck did *I* do?
The Shield takes the almost exact same premise to the other extreme: Vic Mackey, not entirely unlike Jimmy McNulty, is a cop who doesn't play by the rules, who sees the city around him crumbling and decides no more. Except his solution is more radical: set himself up as the crime lord of LA, use his team as enforcers, and make sure as few "innocent" people as possible get hurt - for the Greater Good and to Provide For His Family, y'know. The pilot episode ends with him executing an undercover cop spying on him; he and his team then spend 7 seasons trying to control gang violence and stay out of jail, dodging the repercussions of their actions and trying to keep it all from his bosses and family, until the ending. He cops a plea bargain: confess to everything, put the guilty people in jail, and he'll go scot free and have a steady job with the Authorities. He's one of theirs, after all. So he gleefully confesses to everything, every murder, every drug deal, every robbery, every instance of torture, while the DA gets paler and paler and the colleagues who have spent years trying to close him down fume with impotent anger. And then he gets the whopper at the ending: his best (and at this point, only) friend kills himself and his family rather than go to jail, his other partner gets prosecuted for everything Vic did, his wife flees into Witness Protection taking his kids with her, and he himself is given his new job: a desk job. He'll spend the next ten years putting on a tie every day, coming into the office, filing reports in triplicate, doing absolutely nothing he considers worthwhile. Just another helpless cog in the system. And he's told in no uncertain terms that if he steps out of line once, if he even uses the wrong form once, his deal is voided and he's off to jail for (a presumably very short) life. He's in hell.
That's a very satisfying ending. Vic stays a villain, and yet we can't help but feel that while he got what he deserved, we also feel sorry for him. The show doesn't (unlike Dexter, which bought its protagonist's bullshit long ago - anyone remember back when the ticker-tape parade at the end of s1 was ironic?) forget what Vic is. At the same time, though, it's almost too satisfying. While the show begins in chaos, with Vic preaching the traditional Dirty Harry idea that the system doesn't work so A Man's Gotta Do What A Man's Gotta Do, it ends with the system stepping in and punishing the guilty, like it's supposed to; it can't do it the proper way, so it finds another way. Move along, nothing to see, sleep tight.
So we get to Breaking Bad. Which, in a lot of ways, ends the same way as The Shield, but from the exact opposite viewpoint. And it's even more satisfying. Over the past 5 seasons, Walter White has become more and more of an outright villain. He keeps telling us and himself that it's for his family, etc (there's no Greater Good in Breaking Bad; some critics have compared it unfavourably to The Wire exactly because of that - it doesn't capture the larger scheme, we almost never see the users of Walter's product, it's a Shakespeare drama with a dozen characters on stage and the outside world a featureless desert... which on the other hand is something it does better than The Wire.) So, much like Vic Mackey, the finale has Walter confess to his crimes. But unlike Mackey, he doesn't do so with a smile; he confesses to himself as much as to Skyler and Jesse. (And of course, to the audience.) "I did this for me," he says, almost surprised at how it sounds coming out of his mouth. The show could have easily ended with Walter returning, the atoning hero, handing a wad of cash to Skyler and the kids before going off to dying to save Jesse... Which is, of course, what happens. But if it had been done exactly like that, in a heroic fashion, it would have invalidated all the moral ambiguity of the 5 seasons before it. Likewise, it could have ended with Jesse giving him another speech about how he ruined everything and killing him, like he wanted, letting him die a villain, justifying his own actions and getting others to do his dirty work to the last. Instead, he stops making excuses, he stops pretending he ever did it for anyone but himself. The story tells us to try to reconcile the loving father (and surrogate father) Walter White and the ruthless, manipulative Heisenberg; the ending tells us there's nothing to reconcile, they were always the same person. He goes in there not for Jesse, or for Hank, or for Heisenberg's money, but for himself. If there's redemption for the Walter Whites of the world, perhaps it lies in exactly that: in giving up trying to justify their actions. That's something Tony Soprano could never do; the more psychoanalysis he had, the more he learned to make excuses. It's something Vic Mackey and Jimmy McNulty could never do; they were too busy looking at the big picture. But Walter White is just self-serving enough to finally look in the mirror and see himself - and possibly save himself, at least long enough to die on his own terms, in the place where he was the happiest.
WALTER: I want this.
JESSE: Then do it yourself.
Of course, I'm still left wondering... what the hell happened to Huell?
Did that get long? Sorry. I did it because I liked it.
Speaking of making excuses, though, the current season of The West Wing running on all channels really sucks. I know the Sorkin years were criticized for making caricatures of republicans, but it's nothing compared to this. When your supposedly adult characters start acting like 3-year-olds holding their breath until mom buys them ice cream, you need new writers.
And speaking of endings, How I Met Your Mother is just phoning it in for the last season, isn't it? Don't get me wrong, HIMYM phoning it in is still better than 90% of the sitcoms on TV, but we know this plot and we know these characters and we know how it's going to end and they should just have made a 2-hour movie and been done with it.
But at least I'm still watching it, unlike Under The Dome which never managed to breathe even a spark of life into a pretty good idea and seems content to be a poor man's Lost. Give me an ambitious failure over a competent bore any day.
Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing was pretty neat, though. And on one final musing on endings, The World's End does a neat job with a loosely connected film trilogy - building not on the characters but on the themes, and aging (or refusing to age) along with the actors.
After the second episode, though, I'm really looking forward to the Stockholm episode. Given that their Peru looks like Mexico, and the Sendero Luminoso is turned into a popular uprising, I can't wait to see what their version of Sweden looks like. I'm guessing we'll either be a socialist dictatorship or still at war with Norway. Oh well, it's comic-book history, I guess.
Though there is a promising thread about rebellion vs authority, supermen vs ordinary people etc that could be interesting if they choose to take it halfway seriously; in two episodes, we have two villains - J August Richards in ep1 and the (mostly unseen, but explained by Skye) guerilla in ep2 - who are given a reason for their refusal to bow to the men in suits. It begs the question - just whom does SHIELD serve? Is it their job to look out for te little guy, or to keep the balance of power intact, and are any of those goals as simple as they sound? Action series are generally reactionary, they take for granted that we want to trust the killers guarding our (internal or external) borders; perhaps not their superiors, who are generally corrupt and caught up in politics, but definitely the plucky action heroes. If they want to, Agents of SHIELD could play around a lot with that. Though the resolution to ep1 doesn't exactly give me hope.
Breaking Bad. Other people have said it better than I could, so I'll just note that damn, that was a brilliant, brilliant series finale.
...OK, I do have a few words.
Now, everyone loves a good anti-hero. Or anti-villain. Let's face it, apart from The Middleman, uncomplicated knights in shining armour are boring (which, again, most action series...) We love those shades of grey, we love to see good people do bad things... and bad people too. A lot of great TV series of the last 10 years have spent season upon season digging deeper into the souls of people doing horrible things for, what they maintain, are good reasons. At the centre is usually a man, who more-or-less genuinely Loves His Family, who has his own Code Of Honour, who does things for what he things are The Greater Good, who is trapped in a Culture Of Violence, etc etc etc. Basically, he is Just Like Us. Except he's also a (check any that may apply) racist, misogynist, sociopathic, mass-murdering, drug-dealing, hit-ordering, raping, self-righteous, hypocritical, wilfully-blind-to-the-effects-of-his-actions villain. Fine; those make for good stories. But sooner or later you get to the point where you need to end this story. And then what? You can't end it with our anti-hero retroactively turned into a knight in shining armour; that would be dishonest. Yet you can't end it with him simply getting his just desserts either.
The Sopranos set an interesting example. David Chase has said that almost every viewer he spoke to before the last season took for granted that the series had to end with Tony either dead or in jail. Or at the very least, tragically trapped by his own actions like Michael Corleone in The Godfather Part II (of Part III I'll only say that OK, sure, it's canon.) And Chase hated that idea, because it let the audience off. It would let them spend six seasons cheering Tony on, only to then piously tell themselves "See, Crime Doesn't Pay. I knew it all along, I was cheering for him to get caught, honest. He's a Bad Man. I was watching it for that FBI agent." So how does The Sopranos end? With Tony Soprano at a table with his family, old wounds still there but living with them, his position challenged but not ruined, his son telling him to "remember the good times", and then smashing to black in the middle of a Journey song, with Tony staring straight at the audience - we're at his family table, we don't stop believing. There's no catharsis there. The story just goes on, and we're part of it. It's the inverse of the Angel finale; the fight against good goes on, and it does so not under cover of darkness in dark alleys but right among us, by people exactly like us.
Fine. But it's not an ending, a lot of people complain. We want the story to wrap up, we want to know who lives and dies, we want to see bad people get punished and good people live. We want the case to be solved, damnit. So let's look at two very different police shows:
The Wire doesn't have one obvious hero, or one obvious villain. It has few of the former and plenty of the latter, all of whom are given moments of character depth and motivation. The Big Bad is the System. The dying industrial society, the failed economic system, the corrupt political process that has all the characters trapped. The few who try to break out and live as if they were free to make their own decisions are, for the most part, either metaphorically or actually killed. The ones who try to use the system against itself lose. The ones who realise they're just rats in a maze and exploit it to sell cheese to the other rats prosper, if they're clever and ruthless enough. (Well, except Cheese himself, of course.) And so there can be no ending; the series ends with a repeat of the very first opening collage, with younger characters stepping into the old ones' roles, with everything going on, with the only change being that the system gets more cynical as the people working it realise that it's unbeatable. The case is solved; one or two people (oh, Bubbles) are saved; it doesn't make any difference in the larger scheme of things.
JIMMY MCNULTY: What the fuck did *I* do?
The Shield takes the almost exact same premise to the other extreme: Vic Mackey, not entirely unlike Jimmy McNulty, is a cop who doesn't play by the rules, who sees the city around him crumbling and decides no more. Except his solution is more radical: set himself up as the crime lord of LA, use his team as enforcers, and make sure as few "innocent" people as possible get hurt - for the Greater Good and to Provide For His Family, y'know. The pilot episode ends with him executing an undercover cop spying on him; he and his team then spend 7 seasons trying to control gang violence and stay out of jail, dodging the repercussions of their actions and trying to keep it all from his bosses and family, until the ending. He cops a plea bargain: confess to everything, put the guilty people in jail, and he'll go scot free and have a steady job with the Authorities. He's one of theirs, after all. So he gleefully confesses to everything, every murder, every drug deal, every robbery, every instance of torture, while the DA gets paler and paler and the colleagues who have spent years trying to close him down fume with impotent anger. And then he gets the whopper at the ending: his best (and at this point, only) friend kills himself and his family rather than go to jail, his other partner gets prosecuted for everything Vic did, his wife flees into Witness Protection taking his kids with her, and he himself is given his new job: a desk job. He'll spend the next ten years putting on a tie every day, coming into the office, filing reports in triplicate, doing absolutely nothing he considers worthwhile. Just another helpless cog in the system. And he's told in no uncertain terms that if he steps out of line once, if he even uses the wrong form once, his deal is voided and he's off to jail for (a presumably very short) life. He's in hell.
That's a very satisfying ending. Vic stays a villain, and yet we can't help but feel that while he got what he deserved, we also feel sorry for him. The show doesn't (unlike Dexter, which bought its protagonist's bullshit long ago - anyone remember back when the ticker-tape parade at the end of s1 was ironic?) forget what Vic is. At the same time, though, it's almost too satisfying. While the show begins in chaos, with Vic preaching the traditional Dirty Harry idea that the system doesn't work so A Man's Gotta Do What A Man's Gotta Do, it ends with the system stepping in and punishing the guilty, like it's supposed to; it can't do it the proper way, so it finds another way. Move along, nothing to see, sleep tight.
So we get to Breaking Bad. Which, in a lot of ways, ends the same way as The Shield, but from the exact opposite viewpoint. And it's even more satisfying. Over the past 5 seasons, Walter White has become more and more of an outright villain. He keeps telling us and himself that it's for his family, etc (there's no Greater Good in Breaking Bad; some critics have compared it unfavourably to The Wire exactly because of that - it doesn't capture the larger scheme, we almost never see the users of Walter's product, it's a Shakespeare drama with a dozen characters on stage and the outside world a featureless desert... which on the other hand is something it does better than The Wire.) So, much like Vic Mackey, the finale has Walter confess to his crimes. But unlike Mackey, he doesn't do so with a smile; he confesses to himself as much as to Skyler and Jesse. (And of course, to the audience.) "I did this for me," he says, almost surprised at how it sounds coming out of his mouth. The show could have easily ended with Walter returning, the atoning hero, handing a wad of cash to Skyler and the kids before going off to dying to save Jesse... Which is, of course, what happens. But if it had been done exactly like that, in a heroic fashion, it would have invalidated all the moral ambiguity of the 5 seasons before it. Likewise, it could have ended with Jesse giving him another speech about how he ruined everything and killing him, like he wanted, letting him die a villain, justifying his own actions and getting others to do his dirty work to the last. Instead, he stops making excuses, he stops pretending he ever did it for anyone but himself. The story tells us to try to reconcile the loving father (and surrogate father) Walter White and the ruthless, manipulative Heisenberg; the ending tells us there's nothing to reconcile, they were always the same person. He goes in there not for Jesse, or for Hank, or for Heisenberg's money, but for himself. If there's redemption for the Walter Whites of the world, perhaps it lies in exactly that: in giving up trying to justify their actions. That's something Tony Soprano could never do; the more psychoanalysis he had, the more he learned to make excuses. It's something Vic Mackey and Jimmy McNulty could never do; they were too busy looking at the big picture. But Walter White is just self-serving enough to finally look in the mirror and see himself - and possibly save himself, at least long enough to die on his own terms, in the place where he was the happiest.
WALTER: I want this.
JESSE: Then do it yourself.
Of course, I'm still left wondering... what the hell happened to Huell?
Did that get long? Sorry. I did it because I liked it.
Speaking of making excuses, though, the current season of The West Wing running on all channels really sucks. I know the Sorkin years were criticized for making caricatures of republicans, but it's nothing compared to this. When your supposedly adult characters start acting like 3-year-olds holding their breath until mom buys them ice cream, you need new writers.
And speaking of endings, How I Met Your Mother is just phoning it in for the last season, isn't it? Don't get me wrong, HIMYM phoning it in is still better than 90% of the sitcoms on TV, but we know this plot and we know these characters and we know how it's going to end and they should just have made a 2-hour movie and been done with it.
But at least I'm still watching it, unlike Under The Dome which never managed to breathe even a spark of life into a pretty good idea and seems content to be a poor man's Lost. Give me an ambitious failure over a competent bore any day.
Whedon's Much Ado About Nothing was pretty neat, though. And on one final musing on endings, The World's End does a neat job with a loosely connected film trilogy - building not on the characters but on the themes, and aging (or refusing to age) along with the actors.
