Eric Gould : Contributors : TV Worth Watching

Boston Gets a Gift, New York Gets a Break -- And I May Get an Ulcer

January 23, 2012 8:45 AM

By Eric Gould

Standing at midfield with CBS Sports' JIm Nantz Sunday night, New England Patriots quarterback Tom Brady said into the microphone, his words reverberating throughout Gillette Stadium, "I sucked pretty bad today, but our defense saved us."

It was blunt and accurate -- though not, perhaps, the most eloquent post-game recap by a top national sports figure. Especially with kids watching. But you had to admire the honesty and the grit of the moment, which followed a tense, last-minute 32-yard field goal attempt by Baltimore Ravens kicker Billy Cundiff, with the Patriots leading by three points.

Cundiff proceeded to shank it to the left, and handed the Patriots a 23-20 victory they perhaps neither earned nor fully deserved.

Hours later, on another network and another football field, another special-teams mistake led to another last-second victory. Actually, it was a victory after the last second, because it was well into overtime when Kyle Williams of the San Francisco 49ers muffed his second punt return of the day, allowing the New York Giants to pounce on the ball deep in enemy territory.

Four plays later, Giants kicker Lawrence Tynes lined up his 31-yard field goal -- only one yard closer to the goal posts than Cundiff's shanked shot -- and kicked it through the uprights to secure his team's 20-17 win in overtime.

The result: the Patriots and Giants will face each other in a Super Bowl rematch of their 2008 jaw-dropper, when the Giants ended the Patriots' perfect season, and won Super Bowl XLII, with Eli Manning's miraculous last-minute pass play that still pains Patriots fans. Fans like me, for example . . .

Given Brady's passing fireworks this year (he was among three quarterbacks to go over 5,000 yards this season, the first time that's happened in NFL history), and the six touchdowns he threw last week in a divisional playoff (another record), Sunday's game was not the one most people expected.

The Baltimore defense, one of the stingiest in the league this year, played Brady tough all afternoon long. They picked off four of his passes, with two of the interceptions negated by penalties on the Ravens.

It was a game for the Patriots to lose -- literally, as it turned out -- especially with poor play-calling by the New England brain trust, bungling a chance to get a first down, and run out the clock, with two minutes left.

From the Patriots' formation on second down on that series, everyone in the stadium knew they were going to run. And they did. Running back Ben Jarvis Green-Ellis got stuffed behind the line, leaving four yards to go for a first down.

On the next, obvious, passing down they somehow made the ingenious decision to attempt to get the first down, and win the game, by throwing a short pass in the direction of Baltimore free safety Ed Reed.

Reed has been called one of the greatest defenders ever to play the position. Often, he has been referred to as just that by none other than Patriots coach Bill Belichick -- an icon himself, with a unparalleled winning record since he arrived in New England in '00.

Reed was all over the receiver, and that pass dropped incomplete. The Patriots were forced to punt, and Gillette Stadium and the rest of the national audience watched as the Ravens, with plenty of the time left on the clock, marched down the field against a New England defense that was one of the worst in the league in yardage allowed this year.

The Ravens knocked off some large chunks of yardage, and looked likely to score at the end to win -- or at least, easily, to tie the game and send it into overtime.

And then, the unbelievable miss by Cundiff sent the Patriots off in the direction of to Super Bowl XLVI in Indianapolis in two weeks.

It was one of those games where you wondered whether your team (for us here in Boston) won the game, or was just given a freakish gift by other team that shot itself in the foot, so to speak, on its way to tying the game.

You'd be hard pressed to find one pro NFL kicker that wouldn't routinely make that 32 yard kick, anytime, anywhere. Yet both games Sunday had their goats -- one an errant kicker, the other a fumbling punt returner -- and what matters, in the end, is that the Patriots and Giants are meeting again.

That Super Bowl won't be played on NBC until Feb. 5 -- but I'm tense already . . .

Bill Moyers is Back, So Let's Get Back to Moyers -- Starting with 'Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth'

January 9, 2012 7:45 PM

By Eric Gould

One of the greatest television miniseries ever made -- and made 25 years ago, no less -- is a documentary. Actually, a discussion: Two older men in chairs, talking. For six hours.

Be still, beating hearts -- it's not the lost footage of My Dinner With Andre. (Even though we love the action figures.)

Hard to believe, and harder to convey, but trust this: The 1987 PBS Bill Moyers interviews with Prof. Joseph Campbell] are impossible to turn off. Their discussions, ranging from shared mythologies and icons to beliefs in God, gods and the hereafter, carry along at the absorbing pace of the best scripted drama.

Entitled Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth, the series is brilliant in its simplicity -- and simply brilliant. Call it The Power of Television.

The series is TV Worth Watching any time -- but all the more so now, as Moyers resumes broadcasting this Friday, Jan. 13, with a new show, Moyers & Company.

(Check local listings for times, channels and even dates. The program is distributed to local public TV member stations via American Public Television, not by PBS. In many markets, including New York and Philadelphia, it will be shown Sundays, prior to prime time. For Moyers' own website, and for details, visit HERE.)

Bill Moyers has had a short retirement, and is returning to television a scant year and a half after leaving PBS in 2010, at the age of 77.

Probably no one has been a more passionate and ardent advocate of the public interest than Moyers. A veteran newspaper editor, network reporter and commentator, he's given us four-plus decades of TV series and specials covering government, ethics, religion and everything in between.

Moyers & Company is scheduled to debut with an extended interview with Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson, authors of Winner-Take-All Politics: How Washington Made the Rich Richer -- and Turned Its Back on the Middle Class.

Moyers says of the co-authors, "Their account does better than any I've read to explain how politicians rewrote the rules to create a winner-take-all economy that favors the 1 percent over everyone else, putting our once and future middle class in peril." (Take that, Oprah's book club.)

Moyers is at his best when he digs at the root causes of issues, and he often goes to artists, poets and philosophers to get a bigger picture of the meaning laying underneath the surface of everyday news. Plenty of such guests are scheduled for upcoming shows.

In these days of vitriolic, poisonous polarization -- and that's just in the halls of Congress -- many people wish for a more thoughtful, civil discourse on the hard subjects. Moyers has been doing just that for almost half a century. And it looks like we're still in good hands.

But perhaps the biggest feather in his cap, and the most enduring, were six shows of interviews he recorded with Dr. Campbell in 1987. As Moyers threw out questions and ideas, Campbell effortlessly recounted his work on different cultures and mythologies, and -- more important -- how religious and civic rituals incorporated them.

Campbell talked at length about how these were a means to help us, as civilizations, usher ourselves through childhood, adolescence, adulthood and old age.

When it first aired, The Power of Myth was a media phenomenon. In the relative early days of VCR recording, when not every household had one, many cleared their schedules to be home to see the PBS prime-time broadcasts when they first aired. (That's right, you had to be home to see it.)

It may have been cultural anthropology's one and only rock-and-roll moment.

And it still is today. The Power of Myth remains one of the few, true life-affirming and life-altering experiences television has offered. Here's a brief taste of one transcendent moment, as Campbell explains to Moyers -- and to viewers -- how, and why, to follow their bliss:

Campbell, 83 when he gave the interviews, had authored dozens of books on comparative mythology. He died before they aired on PBS in 1988, never having seen the series broadcast.

And If that brings to mind the story of Moses, on the banks of the River Jordan, never crossing over with his people, it's appropriate. Campbell was a student and teacher of the great cosmologies and stories of the world, perhaps like no other -- and was a bit of a mythic oracle in his own right.

He was so in command of his subject, and his alacrity with the story of human mythology was so definitive and expansive, you feel fortunate it was ever caught on videotape. You're getting it straight from a master who had pondered and written about this material his whole life.

We get a picture of the spectrum of the whole of human history and belief, from grail quests to symbols of the snake. As Moyers says in one introduction, "The human imagination that led to myths and rituals fascinated Joseph Campbell. For him, mythic stories were not simple entertaining stories to be told for amusement around ancient campfires. They were powerful guides to the life of the spirit."

Campbell showed us how to look at the symbols of folklore, and how basic concepts -- the hereafter, ascension to heaven, the hero's journey, sacred geometries, and others -- would emerge, surprisingly, across different millennia and different religions.

As Campbell says in Episode One, "We want to think about God. God is a thought. God is an idea. God is a name. But its reference is to something that transcends all thinking. The ultimate mystery of being is beyond all categories of thought...

"Myth is that field of reference: metaphors referring to what is absolutely transcendent."

The guilty pleasure here is that as accomplished as Moyers was at the time, he was, like the rest of us, at the feet of Campbell's authority.

Campbell's intellect was towering, as was his ability to speak at will, without notes, on his subject. It's somewhat of a struggle, at certain points, to stay with him -- and it's often comforting that Moyers' reaction is, at times, as visibly perplexed as our own, as Campbell skips from symbol to image to divine idea to yet another reference we hadn't been expecting.

But such is the stuff of existence and transcendence. It's vaporous. It's quick. It's fleeting.

And of course, it's timeless.

Through the power of television, videotape, and now DVDs, so is Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth. Even though it's been 25 years, and he's long gone.

Order the series HERE, to enjoy, and be inspired by, one of the best TV offerings Bill Moyers ever presented. Then tune in later this week, and watch for another.

Oh, and those My Dinner with Andre action figures? You can enjoy them HERE, courtesy of Christopher Guest and 1996's Waiting for Guffman.

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Sketch Comedy From the Crunchy Fringe

January 6, 2012 11:30 AM

By Eric Gould

Portlandia isn't a show that bursts with big laughs or lurches into irreverent turns. It's more like watching nerdy kids spinning goofy improv in theater class. And that feel is due in part to its locale -- it's all shot in Portland, Oregon, the fertile left coast that sprouts the hyper-moral, alt-eco-culture quirks the show thrives on satirizing.

Returning for its second season Friday night at 10 ET on IFC, this half-hour of loosely connected vignettes in different locations across the city is the brainchild of Saturday Night Live cast member Fred Armisen, rock veteran Carrie Brownstein and director Jonathan Krisel.

Armisen, well known for his SNL impressions of half-blind New York Governor David Paterson and the dead but chatty Muammar Gaddafi, is the ringleader here. He delivers with quick instincts earned from 10 years under the gun in live TV.

Brownstein, a member of the defunct Sleater-Kinney band and a sometime writer, actress and resident of Portland, has a shorter resume. But she's an energetic co-conspirator with an impish, feral grin. She and Armisen have developed a good stable of crunchy Portland characters who are as PC as they are judgmental and bossy.

The better of these include Toni and Candice [photo at top], the self-important yet profitless owners of a feminist bookshop, and Spyke and Iris [photo at right], a clueless alt-couple hellbent on any scrap of trendy nonconformism they can latch onto -- as idiotic as their understanding may be.

After the friendship between Armisen and Brownstein blossomed about 10 years ago, they began producing their own low-budget internet comedy serial, Thunderant, in 2005. It was so successful that Armisen's boss, Lorne Michaels, executive producer of SNL and head of Broadway Video, agreed last year to co-produce Portlandia with the Independent Film Channel.

("Portlandia" comes from the name of a public statue outside the city's renowned Municipal Services Building, though the title here signifies the city's counterculture.)

IFC's tag-line -- "Always on. Slightly off" -- is apt for its stable of comedy shows approaching sketch routines from a purposefully fringe slant. These have included the recently finished five-year run of The Whitest Kids U Know, a wild but flawed half-hour that daringly crossed into some jaw-dropping territory, but flopped more often trying to be outrageous.

This year, IFC runs Portlandia alongside The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret (also starting its second IFC season, Friday at 10:30 p.m. ET). Often clever, Todd Margaret suffers frequent jags into juvenile scatology. (Although I still want to know how David Cross's London exploits turn out.) Portlandia gamely keeps it above the belt, wandering into genteel Allergy Pride Parades [photo at bottom] and the faux-epicurean distinctions between regular bartenders and hipster "mixologists."

This season's first three shows feature an eclectic stable of guest stars, including Jeff Goldblum [photo at right], Edward James Olmos, Eddie Vedder and SNL cast member Andy Samberg. Penny Marshall and Tim Robbins are on-deck for later.

It shows that Armisen and Brownstein are close friends, often working 60 hours a week on the show, and then making more time to hang out afterwards. Their world of Portlandia is an earnest one of likable but talkative neurotic characters who peck and pester away, eventually circling down to their everyday truths.

Not everything in Portlandia works. Some of the sketches are slow to launch. Others feel like SNL leftovers. And the season premiere episode is weaker than the following two, which show deeper range.

But there's something authentic and charming about the Armisen-Brownstein team, and their affection for the city and their oddball characters.

That's the winning part of the formula. Toni and Candice and the others are smarmy, clearly out of touch, almost off the edge, way out there in Portlandia -- but they're loved by their performers, and stand on ground firm enough for us to follow along.

The '99 Percent' of Lexus H8r's

December 23, 2011 1:03 PM

By Eric Gould

Yes, children, it's Christmas, and time once again to gather 'round the flat panel display and join in the holiday cheer as privileged hipsters receive luxury cars as surprise presents.

I'm talking about the 2011 Lexus "A December to Remember" campaign, of course. It's this year's version of the decade-long series of Lexus holiday commercials that feature the lucky, the well-to-do and the model-beautiful as they get what naturally comes to them -- high-end automobiles decorated with oversized bows.

It's a good bet that those of you in the so-called "99 percent" of the country do not appreciate the implication here and find, as I do, the entire scenario preposterous. It's aimed at the small but wealthy bandwidth that have $30,000 to $70,000 lying around to surprise smiling loved ones with new automobiles.

Even considering when times were good, I would be hard pressed to think of anyone in my circle of reference with the resources to toss around cars as holiday gifts.

And even if you did happen to find yourself, or one of your neighbors, on the snowy sidewalk Christmas morning grinning at a shiny new Lexus, chances are there would soon be a rant at spending all that money without asking the wife first, or that, idiot, it was the wrong color.

The only question is, what country is this vaguely Euro-looking couple from? Because they surely can't be from this one with failing towns and homeowners in default.

The smiling Lexus woman, bedazzled in diamond earrings, is barely able to conceal her excitement as she rides the elevator down to the street outside their luxury condo. Hubby -- scraggly, with fashion-forward bed-head -- slowly gets the idea he's in store for a treat as he, and we, are supposed to get a tip-off from the Lexus theme she somehow arranged with building management to get piped into the elevator car.

On one hand, we have our utter contempt for these characters, and their corporate puppeteers who taunt us each year around this time.

On the other, we have the nagging suspicion that this bitter recrimination isn't likely our most appealing quality -- and we find ourselves asking why it is that these successful people irritate us so much?

As the saying goes, "There are lies, damned lies and statistics." If you believe some of the latter in the press, the gap between those buying new luxury cars for Christmas presents and the rest has never been wider.

So maybe it's not the best time for luxury car makers to be out there in heavy rotation with high-end consumer fantasies.

And yet, the malls are full of holiday shoppers, the iPhone and iPad are smash successes in 2011, and who's to say Mr. and Mrs. New Lexus are all that out of touch?

It is safe to say, however, that whatever side you take on Couple Fortuna, once they turn the key, they could well run into something all of us can relate to, no matter our economic status.

That's "Mayhem," of course.

The Modern Life: Well Lived, Well Designed

December 18, 2011 6:07 PM

By Eric Gould

One of the many successes of AMC's much-honored Mad Men is its art direction. And now here's a documentary about two American designers who directly shaped the postwar modernism that's such an integral, sexy part of that series.

Monday night's film portrait Charles & Ray Eames: The Architect and the Painter (10-11:30 p.m. ET in many areas; check local airtimes) premieres in PBS' American Masters series as a colorful kaleidoscope of the furniture and other creative projects that made the married couple the face of American modern design in the '50s and '60s.

The Eameses' story is virtually canon among a whole generation of architecture and design students. It's a milestone model for young architects breaking through initially with furniture designs, recounting Charles' success as an upstart after the Second World War, selling a molded plywood chair to the national furniture manufacturer Herman Miller Company.

The Eameses were also a prototype for many collaborative designer couples to come, demonstrating how two designers could have it all -- a successful practice as professionals, and a rich, domestic life besides.

As smart and capable as the Eameses were, their personality and charm also fueled the publicity -- and the mystique -- of their Los Angeles-area firm in Venice, Calif. Charles had an infectious enthusiasm. He was trained as an architect, but had keen interests in filmmaking, graphic design and exhibit design, too.

Ray, a painter who'd studied in New York under the renowned abstractionist Hans Hoffmann, brought vibrancy and color to the modernist work coming of the Eames office. The documentary rightfully credits her for an essential role in making the products commercially viable and successful.

Together, they were an American model -- in the way of earlier French architect and modernist auteur Le Corbusier -- to show how architecture, design and art were really all of the same; that a creative person could cross over many different disciplines and not be restricted by the confines of his or her own.

As a former employee remarks in the film, "Everything she did in design, she saw as an extension of her painting; everything he did in design, he saw as an extension of his architecture. For them, painter and architect weren't job descriptions, they were ways of looking at the world."

The Eameses said that creativity was often an issue of problem solving, of asking the right questions and learning what was needed to get to a new place, a new revelation, to what had not been seen before.

It was in this sense they argued for a method that stressed the process of discovery, not the final product. It was one that was focused on learning, rather than setting out to make something already done.

As such, the Eameses were practicing examples of designers who knew their toughest obstacle was their own complacency. For a generation of designers and architects, they stood as practitioners able to see their own work objectively, striving to be their own most unrelenting and best critics.

Charles & Ray Eames shows how this attitude and enthusiasm took them through almost 40 years of projects, including a World's Fair pavilion for IBM, marketing films for Polaroid, and of course, a line of furniture for Herman Miller that remains in production today.

Maybe just as significant was the design and construction of their own home in Pacific Palisades, known today simply as The Eames House. It is two boxes, house and studio, and an early American example of a residence conceived as a prefabricated industrial "kit of parts." It's, as Corbusier said, a "machine for living," but filled with the decorative artistry that Ray brought to it.

Producers Jason Cohn and Bill Jersey go to great detail recreating the Eames experience, talking with a number of ex-employees, showing old handwritten notes and a model of the Eames office -- drafting rooms, wood shop, screening room, with a display of graphic art, collectibles and industrial objects that covered almost every surface.

You will immediately recognize the many Eames designs still around today, from the unmistakable Eames Chair to the ubiquitous molded fiberglass resin stacking chairs that have had thousands of copies and variations since.

Looking at these very humanistic products of industrial processes, Charles' trademark expression of products, people and prices is often quoted: "We wanted to make the best, for the most, for the least." It was perhaps a foreshadowing of today's IKEA sensibility, where modernism is fun, available, colorful and affordable.

And of course, the Eames legacy stands as a centerpiece of AMC's Mad Men, nearly 50 years later, and now, four years running.

Decades Later, A Psychological Thriller Still Gets Under the Skin

December 4, 2011 7:45 AM

By Eric Gould

The Singing Detective might not conjure a picture of holiday cheer, but still, it's an essential gift of TV Worth Giving, and certainly one Worth Getting. If you have a quality TV collector on your list who somehow, by some gross omission, doesn't have it as part of his or her home video library, here's your chance. You can give a milestone work of television art, and one that will keep giving, and keep rewarding, with each repeated viewing.

It's no secret that this 1986 British miniseries, written by the late Dennis Potter (who, seen at right, also concocted its equally daring 1978 musical miniseries predecessor, Pennies From Heaven) is an all-time TVWW favorite. Our Fearless Leader, the founder of this website, has written extensively on this peculiar clash of mystery, musical and psychoanalytic thriller. He devoted much of a chapter to it in his book Teleliteracy: Taking Television Seriously in 1992, and even wrote the liner notes on the 2003 DVD release.

(Which, it should be stressed, you can buy HERE, as a gift or for yourself. And should, if you haven't done so already. It's on sale at Amazon for less than $24.)

Make no mistake, the six-episode The Singing Detective is a trippy journey, and a dark one at that. It treads deep into the muck of adultery, betrayal and sickness. But if you stick with it, the payoffs of Potter's psycho-opera are like no other.

Potter's semi-autobiographical premise drops us into the hospital with pulp fiction writer Philip Marlow. (That's Marlow without the "e," but with an obvious appropriation of Raymond Chandler's hard-boiled private eye from The Big Sleep and other stories.)

The fact that we're getting another character from another writer is the first clue we're not in standard miniseries mode anymore.

And he's not the only Marlow here, either. The other Marlow is the tough-talking, hard-drinking Chandleresque detective in his pulp novel. But while the noir-ish Marlow cracking cases and making the dames, he makes money on the side as -- of all things -- a dancehall singer. Hence the program's title.

Back in the "real" world, Marlow the author suffers from psoriatic arthropathy (as did Potter in real life), where his joints are painfully crippled, particularly his hands. That's accompanied by another horrid condition, in which his entire skin is flaking off en masse.

It's an off-putting portrait, to be sure, and not just physically. Marlow is a failing, embittered middle-aged writer with his few books now out of print and profitless. He's in debt, bed-ridden at a public hospital ward, and afflicted with what may or may not be hallucinations.

Meanwhile, the other Marlow -- The Singing Detective -- is in full good health, free to explore what may be going on in the novel. Or it just may all be occurring, and expanding, inside the deteriorating mind of Marlow the author.

Michael Gambon stars as the acid-tongued, spiteful Marlow, and it's such an engrossing, multi-tiered performance that Bryan Cranston's work in AMC's Breaking Bad just may be an agonizingly close second fiddle. Gambon is that good.

(And yes, that's the same Gambon who plays Dumbledore in the later Harry Potter movies -- and if you've got the courage to watch Gambon's portrayal of a ham-handed sociopath in 1989's The Cook, the Thief, His WIfe & Her Lover, you'll be amazed, and thoroughly shaken, as by no other acting experience.)

From Marlow the author's hospital bed, his point of view begins to fracture, and it's soon clear he is psychologically splintered as well. He's got a laundry list of poverty and trauma behind him in childhood -- things he shouldn't have seen, not to mention an obvious sexual maladjustment and the ensuing misogyny that has branded him.

He's the grimmest type of antihero, not winning any congeniality awards with the audience, or with his mates in the gray hospital ward.

Potter's Singing Detective will take some dedication early on, since Marlow is so dislikable, and we're unsure whether the action we're witnessing is primarily in his pulp novel, his childhood, his head, or someplace else. But as we are curiously lost, its various story lines unravel, then begin to weave together, and the rewards start to come by the second episode.

Most of the volumes written about Potter and The Singing Detective speak to how he, among a generation of modern TV writers, did for the miniseries and television narratives what James Joyce and others did for the novel earlier in the century. As they had done before him, Potter broke apart the conventions of storytelling, shuffling it into a lucid-dreaming, stream-of-consciousness experience -- expanding the genre into something decidedly other.

Potter took full advantage of the television series structure, adapting the pulp novel -- notably, years before Quentin Tarantino -- and building a compelling, but non-natural world. He filled it with dance numbers, mismatched flashbacks, and Freudian symbols that sought to evoke the nature of human experience and the back-washed, sloshy structure of memory.

And therein is the genius of Potter's working method: It breaks into four to five plot lines that cross and intertwine, with characters eerily switching costumes, hairstyles, and doubling roles. But with each shift, a new piece of the story is revealed, and in kind, Potter is unmasking his own, hard-won basic truths.

Likewise, as we watch these epiphanies, we can only feel and become acutely aware of that unpeeling -- for the hospitalized Marlow, in the literal sense -- and look to those deeply hidden layers, searching for the origins of who we are.

Even if you quibble with the results, you can't deny the integrity and the ambition of the project.

Potter said often that the detective novel was perfect for this approach, where readers expected clues that pointed them to the single solution. In The Singing Detective, Potter always remarked that he wanted an overflow of clues -- points of meaning and contradiction that formed a roadmap to things deep in the psyche -- and few, neat solutions.

Among Potter's many achievements are his disruptive trademark devices, such as characters breaking into lip-synched production numbers, singing to music by dance bands of the 1930s and '40s. Or, just as suddenly and disconcertingly, they begin to speak in sentences that include dictation-like recitation of the screenplay's punctuation: "Comma, dash question mark?"

Potter scored many visual triumphs in the art direction as well. One visual refrain shows Marlow, as a child, in his escapes to the remote forest near his village. He is often seen high in the trees, suspended in green, dangerously above the ground yet nestled safely in a pristine, Eden-like state.

Another, staged perfectly by director Jon Amiel, shows Marlow the patient being wheelchaired to the office of Dr. Gibbon (Bill Paterson), the hospital psychiatrist.

He goes down a ramp into the basement of the hospital. Down he goes, deeper into his illness, and the reasons for it.

In the basement office, the doctor's head (i.e., the intellect) is clearly shown as above the ground, outside the window as he leans against it. Now, visually split from his body shown below the window sill, it arguably captures Marlow's predicament. He's a writer, and has so intellectualized his dilemma in the world, he's cut off from his feelings, most likely repressed, and is disintegrated and disintegrating as a person.

In that subterranean room, Marlow and the doctor trade remarks with the rapid meter of a furious machine, each trying to catch the other at his game. These are some of the more brilliant, lashing exchanges in the drama, and true indications of Potter's artistry. The music of the language is staccato and brilliant -- and the words cut like blades.

It's worth noting that the somewhat basic 1986 production values, in hindsight, serve to underscore the accomplishment of the writing all the more. Decades later, the dialogue in The Singing Detective remains virtually peerless, and stands apart from any visual accents that might accompany it, no matter the level of technology.

There are moments in The Singing Detective in which Marlow meets Marlow. It's a telling hint of things to come in later modern meta-narratives, as when screenwriter Charlie Kaufman literally drops himself into his screenplay of a writer writing a screenplay in 2002's Adaptation. Or later, as Kaufman's character, playwright Caden Cotard, does in 2008's brilliant Synecdoche, New York.

First broadcast on the BBC in 1986, the series had an initial run in the U.S. on public television in 1988, but only on a station by station basis, and generally after 11 p.m. Its content was deemed too provocative, for its (small amount of) nudity and for its starkly adult language. It has never had a full network run in the United States -- not on PBS, and not on cable, not even on BBC America.

In Great Britain, The Singing Detective completed its initial run 25 years ago this month. It deserves an anniversary tribute -- even if you have to buy a copy to do so yourself, or for a friend.

Oy! to the World: Celebrating the 'Hebrew Hammer'

November 28, 2011 11:50 AM

By Eric Gould

No one covers holiday programming like TVWW, and by that, we mean Hanukkah, too. Case in point: we remind you of Shalom TV's annual roll-out of The Hebrew Hammer. It ushers in the annual Festival of Lights with a "Blaxploitation" parody sending up every Jewish cultural stereotype possible in irreverent Airplane style -- from the almighty Jewish Guilt to the meddling Jewish mother.

Released in 2003, this self-branded "Jewxploitation" film was the brainchild of Jonathan Kesselman while still in film school at USC -- where he made it, initially, as a short. It was picked up shortly thereafter by ContentFilm, and expanded into a full-length feature starring Adam Goldberg (Saving Private Ryan, Entourage).

The very, ahem, unorthodox Hammer in the title is Mordecai Jefferson Carver, a veteran of the Israeli Defense Force and now a private detective. Or, as he's identified in the stenciled lettering on his pebbled glass office door, a "Certified Circumcised Dick."

He's now the "Baddest Hebe this side of Tel Aviv," in the Brooklyn neighborhood where he's a lone wolf, protecting little Jewish kids and keeping them proud of their culture.

As The Hebrew Hammer begins, Mordecai has been recruited by Esther Bloomenbergensteinenthal (the ironically cast shiksa, Judy Greer) to save Hanukkah from certain extinction at the hands of Santa's renegade son, Damian (Andy Dick). Damian has dispensed with the moderate Santa in a Macbeth-style reindeer-led bloody patricide, completing his takeover of the North Pole. He wants December and Christmas all for himself -- and the WASPs.

To the funk beat of a '70s-style black action film, the "Hammer" is true to his tough-guy brand. He's dressed as half pimp, half Hassid, variously sporting a prayer shawl (the Tallis) as a scarf and a Rambo-style headband. He's one step ahead of the plot to kill Hanukkah, smirking to the Chief of the Jewish Justice League (JJL) who sends him into to action with, "it's your Bar Mitzvah, baby."

The fun of Kesselman's script is his willingness to upturn any sacred cow in the culture, equal to Larry David's extremes in HBO's Curb Your Enthusiasm and notably ahead of Adam Sandler's 2007 ethnic exercise in comedy, 2007's You Don't Mess with the Zohan.

Kesselman pretty much pulls out all the stops, and covers everything from the Hammer's joyless childhood spinning top -- every Jewish kid's deadly-dull Hanukkah Dreidel -- to mocking references of conspiracies shown in the film that, true to bigoted suspicion, do actually control world-wide finance and media.

Kesselman also pairs The Hammer with Mohammed Ali Paula Abdul Rahim (Mario Van Peebles), himself a leader as head of the KLF -- the Kwanzaa Liberation Front. Together they go after Damian's plan for worldwide Christmas domination, a clever teaming of two minorities with unexpectedly similar comic axes to grind.

Part of Damian's scheme is to have dealers, to the tune of the Superfly theme, flood the Brooklyn neighborhoods with bootleg copies of It's a Wonderful Life, in order to get kids irretrievably addicted to Christmas. Mordecai fights back, making interventions with copies of Yentl and Fiddler on the Roof that he keeps in the trunk of his pimped-out Cadillac.

From there, a la Airplane, there are sight gags galore -- and they're the best part. (These include an aerial shot of JJL Headquarters in Washington, D.C., a military complex in the shape of a Star of David, above, instead of the expected Pentagon.)

But there are clever verbal jokes, too, as when Esther whispers to Mordecai to talk dirty to her before sex. He whispers in her ear: "I want to have lots of children by you. Get a good paying, stable job. Settle down in Long Island somewhere. Someplace nice. Fancy, but not fancy-schmancy..."

Kesselman's Hebrew Hammer pokes fun in the best traditions of Jewish humor -- from Lenny Bruce and Mort Sahl onward -- with its spearing of the mainstream culture and its simultaneous self-deprecating, mocking of its own, as a way of getting some equal footing.

Some of the gags may seem a little too inside the culture -- but all in all, it's broad enough for a good romp around the Hanukkah Bush.

This film will get you laughing, as Hammer says, "Six ways to Shabbas, baby."

The Hebrew Hammer is available, free, on the Shalom TV channel, via on-demand services of TV providers like Comcast, Cablevision, Time Warner, Verizon FiOS and others, through Dec. 31

Here's the YouTube trailer, just to give you a taste:

The Many Faces of Woody Allen

November 18, 2011 7:15 AM

By Eric Gould

Coming up on PBS Sunday and Monday at 9 p.m. ET, Nov. 20-21 (check local listings), are four hours of actors, writers and critics lining up to pay homage to one of the true auteurs of our time -- one who somehow was able to muse on life's great metaphysical mysteries while slipping on a giant banana peel, or dressed as a Hassidic Rabbi.

As shown in this new American Masters retrospective, Woody Allen: A Documentary, he often did it in the persona of his own doppelganger -- a nebbishy intellectual who could capsulize the human comedy, and win the affections of leading ladies, all in couple of quips...

Now 76, Allen has given us an amazing 50-year-plus career of short stories, New Yorker articles, stand-up routines, TV appearances and films. And he's still going. He roared back this year with the international success of the remarkable Midnight in Paris.

And in the middle of it all, he married a girl who was, ostensibly, his step-daughter.

With Woody -- to those who know him well, including Diane Keaton, Dick Cavett, Sean Penn, and Larry David -- it's all about the work. And that's what they're there, along with Allen himself, to discuss. The origins and scope of it. The depth of it. The brilliance of it.

And in so many fascinating ways, that's what the documentary should be taken as: the definitive survey of a brilliant body of work.

Woody Allen: A Documentary is four hours in two parts. It was made when Allen finally relented, after numerous requests, and gave filmmaker Robert Weide six interviews, access to his Manhattan apartment, and allowed himself to be filmed on set directing.

Perhaps the most surprising thing we learn, and early on, is that it all came so easily and naturally for Allen from the beginning. He was, essentially, a teenage prodigy, a paid joke-writer for New York columnists while still in high school.

He was that smart, that good. In a CBC interview from 1967 he says, "I'm always amazed when somebody can draw a horse. I can't figure out how they could possibly do it... and I can't draw a horse, or anything else.

"But I can write jokes. And it's hard not to write them. If I walk down the street -- it's like it's my normal conversation. It just comes out that way."

And then, one after another, come the career achievements. Wresting total creative control for his second film, Take the Money and Run, in 1969, and never relinquishing it again. Getting four Oscars for Annie Hall in 1977. A Best Picture Oscar for Manhattan in 1979. All seem to fall in line, like brilliant plot points of one of his well-crafted scripts.

Perhaps most revealing, and somehow expected, is how Allen as an artist is in constant struggle with the success and peril of his work.

Right at the start ofn the documentary, he sums up the futility and absurdity of trying to make a great film, which he feels he never has.

"Writing," he says, "is the great life, because you wake up in the morning and you write it and you imagine it's Citizen Kane... But when you have to then take it out and do it, then reality sets in. Then all your schemes about making a masterpiece are reduced to: 'I'll prostitute myself any way I have to survive this catastrophe.'"

And the documentary goes on, in some detail, to flesh out the impassioned risks and mishaps of a great writer tearing up hard-won pages, cutting out chunks of scenes in the editing room, and interviewing actors during casting meetings, never letting the conversation go to himself as a subject.

There are wonderful insider moments on his habit to take clutches of scribbles and notes and churn them into brilliant pages of dialogue, as he's done for a half-century on the same old Olympia typewriter.

And more. But there is always the scandal.

To Weide's and Allen's credit, they do address his spilt with Farrow, and the ensuing marriage to Soon-Yi Previn, albeit slantingly and indirectly. Unfortunately for us, for Allen, and for his friends and colleagues, what is referred to in the documentary as the "upset with Mia" is something that will always be just underneath the surface of his legacy, and remains in this documentary.

If Weide prefers to side-step here, in practicality, how could he not? As the documentary unfolds, the subjects of Allen's writing and interests are so complex and intertwined, you realize that the upturning of his life for a tabloid scandal cannot have a simple explanation or understanding. Nor should Weide and the actors be put in the role of apologists.

So it's left only to ponder the relationship for what it was and how it came to be: bohemian, immoral, deviant, ironic Greek tragedy, Freudian mess, or whatever else best seems to characterize it.

It's the best that can be done. Especially if you're still a fan of the work. And Allen himself might have us look to it and perhaps form answers, and meanings, of our own.

Woody Allen: A Documentary includes wonderful clips from Annie Hall and Manhattan, milestone films in which he began to fuse his slapstick wit with deeper, adult themes of love, death, anxiety and existence.

These would go on to form the future underpinnings for dozens more. We revisit the more oddball but more direct variations, such as his homage to Italian director Federico Fellini in Stardust Memories. And, always, there are the unforgettable, often revealing one-liners.

As his neurotic character Alvy Singer says to Keaton in Annie Hall, "I feel that life is divided up into the horrible and miserable... The horrible would be like terminal cases, the blind, the cripple. I don't know how they get through life. It's amazing to me.

"And the miserable is everyone else. So when you go through life, you should be thankful that you're miserable. Because you're very lucky to be miserable."

Perhaps most ironic about Allen's near professional self-destruction in 1992 was that he had almost completed Husbands and Wives, an uncanny, eerily timed peek into his personal life just as it exploded. It is just given just a few moments in the documentary, but it serves to remember Sydney Pollack's character of Jack, who, lamenting his midlife foolishness for leaving his wife for an aerobics instructor, rues how "the heart wants what the heart wants."

The line isn't directly quoted, but, it certainly foretells a certain philosophical surrendering of reason, and an almost simultaneous dread of the consequences. And it all came to be too painfully true to life.

While we assume Husbands and Wives was ripped from the personal pages of his life, Crimes and Misdemeanors is another opportunity in the interviews for Allen to issue his ongoing denial: namely, that he is not the same as the characters he plays, while we usually, reflexively, presume the opposite.

Weide is clever enough to give time to 1997's Deconstructing Harry, about a writer inventing a character for a novel. All the while, Allen's doppelganger Harry argues that his fictional subject, whom the public suspects is really Harry himself, has nothing to do with him at all. It's a meta-Russian Doll routine, the fictional equivalent of Allen's factual argument.

Except, in the film, the audience is the rube. Allen, portraying Harry, is asked about his relationship to the fictional alter-ego characters he creates. "It's me," he admits to an interviewer, "thinly disguised as the character. In fact, I don't even think I should disguise it any more. It's me."

It's an inventive double-switch, a meta-confession by a clone -- and an assertion that keeps his audience guessing, and frees him to explore himself directly in film, or not, without ever having to admit it, or directly discuss it.

It's a shell game to make any literary recluse proud.

In this American Masters two-parter, Allen discusses these and other public assumptions about him with a lack of affectation and casualness, as if listing the ingredients of barley soup. This passivity and intellectual happenstance is as much his trademark as his rumpled corduroys, and it serves him well.

As such, he's detached. He's well known for the wide berth he gives to his actors, preferring them to draw upon the talent that got them into his films in the first place, rather than maneuver a performance out of them.

Sean Penn pinpoints it best when he says, "HIs feeling is that the best, complete thing he is going to get is going to come out of the actor's instinct... When it comes to directing an actor he has a bare-bones clarity that any personality can understand and interpret."

And you can see the triumph of this method over and over again, in clips from Mighty Aphrodite, Purple Rose of Cairo, and many others.

Allen's closing words are very funny musings -- that, while achieving great things in life, he still has the vague, free-floating anxiety that he still got screwed somehow. The joke is utterly consistent with his life-long celluloid psychoanalysis.

But maybe a less flippant closing, one made soberly and with heart, would have been a better ending -- and Allen already has filmed it. It's the closing monologue from 1989's Crimes and Misdemeanors, which telegraphed what was to come for him, as well as the metaphysical territory he now occupies.

The sentiment can be found, and heard, on YouTube, in the clip HERE. But in what it says, and how it says it, the words written by Woody Allen deserve to be quoted verbatim in print, and pondered seriously:

"...We define ourselves by the choices we have made. We are, in fact, the sum total of our choices. Events unfold so unpredictably, so unfairly, human happiness does not seem to have been included in the design of creation.

"It is only we, with our capacity to love, that give meaning to the indifferent universe. And yet, most human beings seem to have the ability to keep trying, and even to find joy from simple things -- like their family, their work, and from the hope that future generations might understand more."

Sunday, Bloody Sunday

November 12, 2011 11:15 AM

By Eric Gould

Once the sacred territory of horror and slasher films, hefty servings of fetishized blood and guts are now regular television fare in plentiful supply on Sunday night. And every other night of the week, for that matter -- but somehow Sunday, with its massive audience and its collection of daringly dark drama series, gets the lion's share.

The new AMC western Hell on Wheels premiered earlier this month with prairie enemies meeting their makers via various scalpings, impalings and one well-struck axe to the chest.

Not to be outdone, HBO's Boardwalk Empire has set new violent lows (or, to some, highs) of its own recently, with Michael Pitts' bootlegging character of Jimmy Darmody and his colleague scalping a wheelchair-bound villain -- a full, deep cutting that circumnavigated the skull (picture at top).

Maybe the old buzzard deserved it -- but all the same, it was an unnerving detail we probably could have done without.

Undaunted, Darmody wielded his blade again the very next week. He executed an underling as the helpless man was hung upside down from the ankles, like a side of beef. Darmody killed him with a full slash across the man's neck -- and the camera shot held as the poor schmuck bled out onto the warehouse floor.

These followed the travails of AMC's Breaking Bad crystal meth kingpin Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito) this year, who finished his season as the victim of a literally explosive climax, going out in a blaze of gory: with half his face blown off, an eyeball gone, and yet precisely adjusting his tie before keeling over like a Chaplinesque sack of potatoes.

Then there are the weekly dismemberments over on Showtime's Dexter, by various serial killers and by Dexter himself. Bloody Sunday scenes may be expected there -- but how about Fox's Family Guy?

In this season's second episode, that animated comedy series' pet dog (and former New Yorker columnist) Brian Griffin engaged in his own sharp-edged, sharp-knifed act of violence -- and in this case, it was self-mutilation.

Brian, on a bad trip of magic mushrooms, severed his own ear in a deluded attempt to "prevent World War II from happening." As he bled on the bathroom floor, baby Stewie scratched the dog's severed ear to see if it still "worked."

And it did. Brian's leg still doggy-kicked in contentment -- even though it was a ghost limb reflex, and he was unconscious from a loss of blood.

The day TV WORTH WATCHING goes all Grumpy Old Man and begins its criticisms with a weary "Back in my day..." will be the day you can permanently replace this link with your next choice for a television discussion site.

But one has to at least measure the distance we've come on Sundays, from Walt Disney's Wonderful World of Color and Ed Sullivan giving a goodnight kiss to the cuddly mouse-puppet Topo Gigio to the current 21st-century torrents of TV blood.

Gone are the days, it seems, of gruesome stuff suggested just off-camera, leaving only the screams of the unfortunate victim, or the horrified takes of bystanders, to suggest the worst. Also gone: the era when we could at least expect the graphic stuff to be limited to premium pay cable, a kind of de facto gatekeeper in the form of the extra cost.

If Hell on Wheels, The Walking Dead, Dexter and Breaking Bad are any indication of trends to come -- or ones already in progress -- we can expect our best shows to be trolling the bottoms each week for mayhem we can queasily witness while half-turned away, watching through one squinted eye, half-open.

The question is, are these shows -- arguably the best -- any worse without their scenes of graphic violence?

The Godfather of modern graphic television violence, HBO's The Sopranos (1999-2007), perhaps employed violence in a literary way -- one that was central to the gangster characters mobbing it up in modern New Jersey, all the while living the double life of suburbanites.

The Sopranos gave us, among many mood-establishing early scenes, the all-too-unforgettable beating of a stripper to death outside Tony Soprano's club. It gave us an undeniable portrait of the sociopathic rage of these louts, no question. If you didn't fear these sorts of guys before, after that scene you knew better.

But would the series, as a whole, be worse off without that particularly disturbing scene, and others like it? Notorious Boston mobster Whitey Bulger infamously knocked off a girlfriend, among many other victims -- but will we need to see that murder reenacted in detail when Matt Damon portrays him in a movie due for release next year? Do we need the grisly details of that murder to get the true measure of the deviancy of Bulger's character?

Maybe we do. Maybe we need to be "made" to look.

You could argue that Boardwalk Empire co-producer Martin Scorsese is well within his artistic license by illustrating how endemic violence has become in American culture and history. (He showed this legacy and lineage most profoundly, perhaps, in the 2002 film Gangs of New York. That one gave us an axe square between the shoulder blades.)

And in Boardwalk Empire, Darmody, after all, has returned from the European trenches of World War I. He's a victim, and a veteran of, the horrors of mechanized modern warfare and hand-to-hand combat to the death. Coming home, he now finds a way, ironically and sadly, to use the talents taught him by the military to give him muscle and profits in illegal bootlegging.

Family Guy, to its goofy credit, smartly satirizes all kinds of rehashed movie tropes to clearly show us conventions and contrivances to which we've become blindly accustomed, and accepting. The Griffin family members are regular victims of spurting, cartoon carnage that is plainly critical of our own desensitization as an audience.

It may be unfortunate, though, that at least in the case of Hell On Wheels, the weekly meat parade is more center stage than the more common, arguably even more dramatic horrors of the old West. A more likely and more gruesome fate for Western pioneers, rather than being scalped in an ambush, were long, ugly, excruciating deaths due to illness and disease, with no doctors or treatment available for hundreds of miles.

Now that's more of a relatable, real terror, if you're looking to both involve and frighten an audience.

Since the bloody floodgates are now open, like the elevator doors in The Shining, we can reasonably anticipate an unofficial compendium of atrocities that haven't been televised yet, or much, in life-like detail: evisceration, cattle prodding, water-boarding, fingernail-ripping.

Whatever the method, expect new TV atrocities on your screen sooner rather than later.

And I'm not talking about another revival of Charlie's Angels...

'Hell On Wheels' Goes Full Steam Back to the American West

November 3, 2011 7:53 PM

By Eric Gould

Hollywood's John Wayne westerns gave us a tidy-looking old west with meticulously pressed costumes, freshly shorn hair and brightly lit saloons. With portraits like Robert Altman's McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971) and HBO's Deadwood (2004), we got a more physical feel for the time and place -- muddy streets, scraggly beards and bad teeth.

And that's a good bit of the appeal of AMC's new Hell On Wheels (premiering Sunday at 10 p.m. ET) -- it palpably grounds us in the post-Civil War frontier of the transcontinental railroad race westward. It's a dirty, harsh, engrossing set piece.

Comparisons to the foul-mouthed Deadwood will, fortunately or unfortunately, be coming early and often for the AMC show. There's just too much crossover between the two ensembles not to notice -- from ex-soldiers haunted by their horrific pasts, to the grizzled, happy hookers accompanying the workers camp as they lay rails west.

But while Deadwood perhaps focused exclusively on the moral relativism of individuals on a lawless frontier, Hell On Wheels is much broader in scope. It takes on the rebirth of a nation after almost splitting apart, with all the political and ethnic strife that comes along with it.

The new country of HOW is a vast and largely empty America -- raw, natural and harsh. Its virgin landscape is crawled by bands of bitter Southerners, freed blacks, Irish immigrants and hostile Native Americans, all out on the open range, with only their own groups to rely on. Everyone else is not to be trusted. More likely, they're to be cheated or bushwhacked.

Alongside Mad Men and Breaking Bad, this is another visually rich AMC banquet of hauntingly rough and beautiful panoramas. Tantalizing period accessories and obsolete technology put us right into the time and space of things.

So does the sound -- the startling dynamite blasts just over the hills ahead of the train gangs, cutting the terrain back, black plumes all too clear and portentous. The railroads are blasting and clearing their way west in a kind of historical eco-terrorism that, of course, set the tone for things to come in the 20th century. It's an American tale of making nature submit.

Most notable here is yet another brilliant AMC choice of a lead actor, this time Anson Mount, as ex-Confederate soldier Cullen Bohannon. He heads the cast and the railroad construction gang pushing their way through Nebraska toward the Pacific. The show rests squarely, and successfully, on his shoulders.

Bohannon is a shadowy figure, a former slave owner with perhaps a few war crimes of his own. He's on a mission of vengeance -- to track down the Yankee squad that raped and murdered his wife as the war was ending -- which is the show's long arc. He's going to find and pick them off one by one, if the first few shows are an indication.

Mount's masterful performance highlights one weakness of Hell On Wheels. Around complex characters such as Bohannon, or widow and railroad pioneer Lily Bell (Dominique McElligot), we get flatter, almost cardboard cutouts.

Colm Meaney, playing real-life railroad entrepreneur Thomas 'Doc' Durant may as well enter on a silent screen, to the tune of a player piano and the subtitle card "Curses -- it's Snidely Whiplash."

Meaney's character is saddled with expository rants, one assumes, because the producers of Hell On Wheels don't trust the audience to absorb the moral gray areas of the backstory. Long chunks of history lessons are packaged as idle musings by Meaney's megalomaniac character. It's a relatively minor but regular intrusion that stalls the story, if not quite -- er, derails it.

"Plottus Interruptus" aside, there is AMC's continuing grim commitment to leading the way in unvarnished ad-supported violence, once the territory of premium cable. Standing on the shoulders of their gut-fest The Walking Dead, Sunday's HOW pilot serves up, count 'em, a full and graphic scalping, multiple close-up stabbings, various impalements, and one ax square to the chest.

Chilling stuff, and a vision of the west far removed from that of, say, Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman with its quaint homesteading values. Are these necessary arrows in the storytelling quiver to set the historical values of the piece, to ram home the thinness of life on the harsh prairie?

In any event, Hell on Wheels has the right ingredients to sustain a compelling series. The question, as with Deadwood, is whether Hell On Wheels can forge a new-style western that finds a dedicated audience, or whether it's yet another signal the genre is pretty much played out for now.

Punch a ticket for the ride, and see.

'Fabric of the Cosmos' Is No Simple Cloth

November 1, 2011 9:47 PM

By Eric Gould

The British scientist J.B.S. Haldane famously mused on the universe, and has since been quoted as many times as there are stars in the sky. In 1927, he wrote, " . . . Now my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we 'can' suppose." Meaning, we're simply not even capable -- yet -- of imagining what we need to know.

Watching the new PBS NOVA series "The Fabric of the Cosmos" (Wednesdays through Nov. 23 at 9 p.m. ET), you'll find this idea even more striking, as when some scientists liken the concept of dark energy (about which we're only guessing) to living on land and not being able to understand or describe the water around us.

But yet, we try. And fortunately for us, we have physicists like Columbia University's Brian Greene, our NOVA host the next four Wednesdays (check your local PBS listings), who are jazzed about showing how the past and the future might be the same thing. Or how there might be more than one universe. Greene is gifted and enthusiastic. and breaks things down in small enough bits that we can follow right along.

It's heady stuff. Greene, a veteran of NOVA's 2003 series "The Elegant Universe" and the author of popular books on physics, brings together highlights of the theories blazed by Newton, Einstein, Hubble and others (relativity, space-time). He shows how speed and movement can change the rate of time, and what seemingly empty space might actually be made of, knitting the entire fabric of the universe together.

Greene then moves onto things such as dark energy, a mysterious force thought to compose perhaps 70 percent of the universe's mass -- except we have no direct evidence of it.

Says Greene, "The series is a journey that challenges audiences on things they take for granted and is an exciting opportunity to change that mindset in startling ways . . . It will convince people that everyday perception is a thoroughly, completely, profoundly misleading guide to the true nature of what is actually out there."

Turns out, space itself is a warped potato chip, and may be expanding and pushing the matter of the universe out in such a way that, eventually, things would be so far apart that no other galaxies or stars would be visible in the night sky. (Though not from this planet, which would be long gone by then.)

Imagine that, Syfy dudes.

If you're curious about the nature of things, television has helped enormously over the past decade with its proliferation of new science shows that not only get into esoteric cosmologies, but do so in an accessible way, making the top physicists in the field play like rock stars engaged in thrilling work.

You can easily imagine kids getting so jazzed about their work that it might be just as cool to go into science as it would to be voted onto the next American Idol.

The Science Channel aided the cause over the summer when it combined popular physics with ideas more on the fringe of things in the series Through the Wormhole, narrated by Morgan Freeman.

But it's hard to do it better than PBS and NOVA, going on 40 years now. Greene and the producers have raised the bar with up-to-the-minute computer graphics providing a new appreciation of tantalizingly strange ideas about how the universe is organized.

And yes, that includes Greene's discussion of superstring theory and the idea of multiple dimensions, which, according to some equations, may be as numerous as 11.

That's right -- as in This Is Spinal Tap, it just might go up to 11.

That's eight more, isn't it? At least eight more than I'm accustomed to. But I'm willing to go there, with the right physicist illuminating the way.

A Halloween Master of Disguise

October 29, 2011 1:46 PM

By Eric Gould

It's Halloween, and since it's the time of year for the utterly icky and strange, there's no better occasion to flip through the archives for a show that introduces us to a spineless, pale Cephalopoda with large, smart-looking eyes that shifts shape, and that can also attack with an eight-armed face.

The 2006 NOVA documentary called "Kings of Camouflage" is all about the squid-like cuttlefIsh, a truly bizarre-looking sea creature that is about as easily explained as the multiple shapes it assumes.

Best of all, this one-hour show taking a thorough look at the slimy chameleon is online, free, and just a click away.

Picture a cross between an octopus and a mollusk motoring along on a rippling, fleshy skirt. It's also got an electric-like skin that can start with a dull, bumpy seaweed look and then swell into shrill, hot colors. Then you'll have something close to this creepy little freak that ranges from a half-foot to sometimes over three feet in exotic cases.

Initially, the video of this undersea alien morphing and spasming might make your skin crawl just about as much as the animal's own skin does.

But then it becomes as queer and alien as anything you've seen, and -- so to speak -- you're sucked in. It's another fascinating natural-world study from NOVA that serves up creations stranger than any screenwriter could conjure.

And speaking of being served up, cuttlefish are invertebrates. They make a tasty protein treat for larger predators, so camouflage is their only defense.

This chameleonlike magic also contributes to their elaborate reproductive techniques, some of which include the clever, smaller males that essentially cross-dress as plain-looking females. While the larger alpha males fight over the females to, the little guys slide in, literally, under the radar to do their business.

Turns out, says Massachusetts oceanographer Roger Hanlon, that DNA testing shows the females choose the cross-dressing males by more than 70 percent for their next fertilizations. "The only reason we can think of is that this is a very bold, smart tactic, and the females may be acknowledging that in evolutionary terms . . . so this trick, as strange as it seems, is very successful."

So there you go, guys. Even a squid can learn the mind of its partner and outwit the marketplace. Take from that what you will.

Either way you slice the calamari, cuttlefish are as unique as they come. Dr. Jesse Purdy, a researcher of these intelligent invertebrates says, "We are testing an animal that's very alien. It's as close perhaps, as we're going to get to studying an animal on another planet."

Here's the link to watch NOVA: "Kings of Camouflage" free online.

And incidentally, for a doofus Master of Disguise who learned absolutely nothing from the cuttlefish, see this video.

Dumber and Dumberer: MTV's 'Beavis and Butt-Head' Are Back, Heh-Heh!

October 25, 2011 7:34 PM

By Eric Gould

Watching MTV's new reboot of Beavis and Butt-Head (premiering Thursday at 10 p.m. ET), you get the same feeling you had when the series premiered in 1993 -- why in the world am I wasting time on these idiots? I mean, serious idiots.

And when Butt-Head reprises his role as couch-bound commentator of MTV videos and shows, it strikes you: You're watching these dopes watch TV. You've become complicit in some sort of meta-moronic ritual making a new low-water mark on the tidal gauge of Western civilization.

Beavis and Butt-Head are still utterly stupid. And silly. And as the two incessantly chuckle, they're still "cool."

Mike Judge, creator of the series, went on to make the indie milestone Office Space (1999) and the longer-running, more sophisticated animated series King of the HIll (1997-2009). When Beavis and Butt-Head debuted the first time, Matt Groening's The Simpsons had already been going a few years, setting the stage for an animated show to serve up the inanity of modern media culture and our dependence on it.

Little did we realize at the time how fertile that territory would be, paving the way for today's adult cartoons including Family Guy, The Ricky Gervais Show, Archer and others.

It's a bit curious that Judge and MTV have decided to bring B&B back from the dead, and bring them back now. After all, the characters' original adventures ended in 1997.

Judge is on record as thinking there's more for the characters to do, particularly since media and music culture have expanded so widely and into so many different formats. There's more material for them to interact with.

Then there's a whole new generation of MTV viewers that can take its own ride with these dumb-asses of the highest order.

For the uninitiated, Beavis and Butt-Head are two socially inept, chronically underachieving idiots forever stuck in high school. (Although we do get to see them age in a flash-forward in Thursday's premiere.)

They know just enough to know that being snarky and sarcastic is cool, but are so dim-witted and uncultured that they don't know why. And they only get truly interested in the violent or inappropriate content they see on television.

Sound familiar? Yeah. To a certain degree, that's all of us.

Then is their awkwardness and immaturity with the opposite sex. Beavis and Butt-Head know that girls are cool, and that they should be scoring, but haven't the slightest clue as to how to get there.

The premiere episode joins them after they've watched Twilight, going off to become vampires because chicks think that's "cool." Not only does the plan fail, but in typical Beavis and Butt-Head fashion it goes stupidly, badly wrong.

Most episodes from the '90s show had the two watching MTV music videos and making arcane yet somehow unintentionally insightful comments about the mindlessness of it all. Those segments are back, updated here with the two idiots also watching and dissing newer MTV shows like 16 and Pregnant and Jersey Shore.

Butt-Head is still the ringleader of these segments (with Judge doing the voiceover), and they're often the best part, since we're getting moronic criticism on moronic content, and that, of course, is smart. And funny.

Beavis, more clueless than Butt-Head (if that's possible), is back and more extreme than ever, morphing in future episodes into his signature alter-doofus "Cornholio," a nihilistic savant, speaking in over-caffeinated tongues with his T-shirt pulled up over his head like some sacred headdress.

Part of the Beavis and Butt-Head genius (and yes, I just used that term for these two) is that their badly drawn, sketchy world, their washed-out colors, their ill-fitting, too-small shorts and their malnourished body frames all sketch an oddly queer suburbia that is hilarious and cautionary.

Cautionary and Darwinian, since these two self-styled rebels without a clue have survived and returned like cockroaches after a nuclear holocaust.

Which only proves you don't have to be smart to make a successful comeback -- just persistent, and willing to be a bigger dumb-ass than the guy on the couch next to you.

The Brilliant White of 'Enlightened'

October 17, 2011 11:10 AM

By Eric Gould

There are many moments in HBO's new Monday half-hour series Enlightened where the scene dissolves to bright white light, while the main character's thoughts go in and out of meditation. These are the white spaces where the mind might drift smoothly, or in here, run rampantly and disquietly through attempted calm. They're also spaces created by another White -- Mike White -- who is the head writer, sometime director and the show's co-creator and co-star alongside actress Laura Dern.

Enlightened is a deceivingly benign picture of southern California, with roses in bloom and lots of pale yellow, celery green and plum painted interiors where everyday rage and frustration bubble just below the veneer. Dern's character, Amy Jellicoe, is back to work after a busted affair with another department head, an unceremonious sacking out of her own department, and an emotional breakdown that followed.

Amy has worked for Abaddonn, a multinational retailing firm specializing in environmentally conscious health, beauty and household products, for 15 years. And since they can't legally fire her for her public meltdown, the higher-ups have stuck her down in the headquarters basement (shown as Level "H" on the elevator pad, presumably for Hell), on a throwaway data processing project with a bunch of other company outcasts.

The company name (pronounced AH-ba-don) is all too apparently the home for A Bad Don, i.e., corporate culture itself, with all the arm-twisting and self-importance usually wielded by a crime boss.

Except here it's done with the click of a mouse sending out an interoffice memo.

White and Dern have created a simple, difficult world where personal change and growth come in small moments, and there are no cathartic interpersonal earthquakes.

This is part of the immense charm and interest of Enlightened, and it's a bit of risk for any network that wants its comedies quip-tastic and its dramas heated. The small moments in Enlightened provide the biggest payoffs, but perhaps aren't the surefire ones to be expected in something with higher emotional stakes like Six Feet Under.

As such, this is a slice of the real workaday world where we suffer unfairness and general backstabbing we don't deserve -- although there may be something to be learned regarding what we did to get a blade between the shoulder blades in the first place.

The first two episodes of Enlightened have been quiet, quirky, awkward, uncomfortable. And deeply enriching. The second two available for screening not only sustain the mood, but peel away the layers of Amy's backstory; her former assistant Krista (Sarah Burns), who now has her office; and Amy's ex-husband, Levi, well played by Luke Wilson [photo at right].

We'll see Amy struggling with trying to maintain the serenity she found in her Hawaiian rehab retreat, while the indignities of modern city living attempt to swallow her again. She impatiently greets the barking of her emotionally distant mother's precious Cavalier King Charles Spaniel with "Shut up, Ginger," as if she were casually flipping off an irritating sister.

We'll also see her friendship with basement cellmate and co-worker Tyler, played by White. And all indications are that White's character, embedded into the Abaddonn computer system, won't turn out to be as ineffectual or as dense as we are being led to believe he is.

And speaking of peeling layers, the Abaddonn headquarters are a lion's den in sheep's clothing, full of holistically branded, artificially pretty photography. Most notable of these are billboard-sized prints in the main conference room of thin slices of tender cucumbers and onions, perhaps suggestive of the thinness of the talent pool there, or maybe, more emblematic of our being placed under an office microscope on a daily basis. It's scrutiny under which pretty much any of us would wither.

White is a first-rate writer with the memorable Chuck and Buck (2000) behind him, as well as The School of Rock (2003) and TV's Freaks and Geeks (2000).

While he and Dern are leading us through a small web of desperate undercurrents, they also are cleverly using the tough economic times as a smart background refrain. The characters must eventually look at themselves against it and wonder exactly what are they competing for and why are they knocking themselves out to get it? Is the corporate ladder, and the acquisition of things, worth the enormous sacrifice of personal integrity and inner being?

Enlightened also marks another TV musical scoring success for Mark Mothersbaugh, former mastermind behind the 1980s band Devo, which predicted (some would say rightly) the beginning of the "de-evolution" of modern culture.

Who better than Mothersbaugh and White to illuminate the awkward tension and quiet desperation just under the surface of everyday ignominious life?

They're all right there in Enlightened. We just have take a slow breath and look between the little crevices to find them, and heed the lessons to be found.

Masterpiece, Weirder

October 11, 2011 10:32 PM

By Eric Gould

Bravo's Work of Art: The Next Great Artist returns for a second season Wednesday (Oct, 12) at 9 p.m. ET, and it's a bit of a surprise that there was enough interest in a competition show about the art world to make another run. It just seems that TV shows about cakes and plastic surgery addicts would do better.

But, thinking on it -- and given the often combative and (intentional or not) comical aspects of Bravo productions -- it's probably a winning environment to plant artists in. Where better to put those who deal in feelings and interpretations than on a Bravo production set?

After reviewing last year's Season 1 premiere, it was pointed out to me that a competition show might not be the best place on TV to address art and how it is made. But I continue to support shows like WOA, Project Runway and HGTV's Design Star as they air art and design discussions to audiences that might pass on a PBS documentary.

That's a good thing, in the sense that it shows how works of art, and creative ways of looking at the world, pervade daily life much more than we're generally aware of. Shows such as PBS's Art21 might be superior formats for discussing and understanding this kind of work -- but nobody's getting thrown off the next episode there.

Commercial television usually trumps documentaries in dollars and ratings, simply by putting the soap opera appeal first. And Bravo has perfected the formula. From housewives to fashion -- and now, the art world -- they shill the interpersonal drama at least as much as the subject matter.

The irony here is that Bravo was launched in 1980 as a fine arts channel, dedicated to broadcasting indie/foreign films, performing arts, and fine arts programming. Rebranded two decades later by new owner NBC, the network took steady aim on pop culture starting with 2003's Queer Eye for the Straight Guy. That one reached over 3.5 million viewers, and Bravo never looked back.

(The Ovation cable channel has stepped into the "higher arts" breach to fill the seemingly requisite role of a television location for fine arts and design. Relaunched in 2007, Ovation has initiated a multimedia platform with a website that attempts to create a social community for artists of all kinds. But as a commercial venture, Ovation isn't immune to the tides of the marketplace. A glance at programming this week shows reruns of So You Think You Can Dance in heavy rotation, while discussions on photography and painting are left to the web.)

On Work of Art Season 2, the premiere episode takes a fascinating look at the first task, as the 18 artists and one designer are asked to take schlock art and kitsch pieces from junk stores and reuse them to create a new piece.

It's a brilliant challenge, asking the artists -- and us as viewers -- to look at common objects around us in a new way, to create new meaning from banal things we take for granted. (See Young Sun's performance artwork [above], based on the old "Dogs Playing Poker" kitsch art. In this case, it looks like they're playing mah-jongg.)

Would that the show simply stayed there. But after these bright, well-intentioned young artists introduce themselves and their work in a gallery at the Brooklyn Art Museum, and perform well on remaking low-brow art into high-brow, they then descend into a catfight montage spliced from clips of the season's ensuing episodes. It's like watching a very bad weather forecast.

Most disturbing are the short clips of a bespectacled photographer -- Kathryn Parker Almanas, whose work recalls macabre visions of viscera -- disintegrating, not unlike the subject matter of her photos, into gasping, paroxysmal sobs, due to a presumed collision with some other cast member or one of the judges that the network so treasures.

Many elements of Season 1 are still intact here, including the debonair studio critic Simon de Pury, again fulfilling Bravo's requirement of a suited shepherd for these contests, replete with a speech affectation.

We also get the usual young female artists who seemingly never tire of using their naked bodies as subject matter for the artwork. Not a big stretch for material (and not a lot of stretch marks), but certainly good footage for reality video.

Nevertheless, series producer Sarah Jessica Parker and host China Chow often stress that a Work of Art is one that makes you feel, not think. If we stay focused on those feelings, not the drama, and how modern art functions in this way -- we at least get to experience the power and value of creativity.

Not a bad attitude to cultivate, particularly in the tough economic spot in which we find ourselves these days.

Coming Home With the Dogs of War

October 9, 2011 3:32 PM

By Eric Gould

Not a lot of good news comes out of war, and sometimes you have to be lucky to find it. Here's some -- a small, one-hour documentary that plays infrequently on Military Channel, where most will not see it. And it next airs at 9 in the morning, when, again, most will not see it.

But a great story is a great story. So set your DVRs for Tuesday (Oct. 11) at 9 a.m. ET for an astonishing story of loyalty, steadfast determination and, most of all, love. You won't be disappointed.

No Dog Left Behind is a modest and sincerely crafted one-hour film by producer Ellen Goosenberg Kent, recounting how two Marines adopted stray dogs while on base in Iraq. Remarkably, they got them home to the States when their tour was completed, despite enormous logistical obstacles and the small fortunes required to complete the trip.

Premiered in late 2009, No Dog gets its title from the soldier's creed to never leave a fallen soldier behind. And it's fitting of the heroism involved in being loyal to an animal who will surely be doomed to a life of misery without your care.

And doing so when it's against the rules. And, in the meantime, you're being shot at on a daily basis.

Marine Maj. Brian Dennis and his unit found Nubs as a young dog, and found him so full of character, they knew right away there was something special about him. He was also mangy, dirty and sick like the tens of thousands other strays roaming Iraq. There is no spay and neuter program there.

To be clear, culturally, stray dogs to Iraqis are usually not what they are to Americans. They are generally the unintended, uncared for offspring of working dogs, mostly on farms, and have just enough contact with humans that they live wild, although near settlements and towns where they can scavenge.

Dennis says, "Iraq's the wrong place to go if you're a dog lover . . . you see a hundred dogs a day that you want to save."

Nubs [with Maj. Dennis at right] got his name from the outfit because of the way he looked. His ears had been cut off when he was a puppy, and there were just nubs of ears left. He became a treasured mascot, and would greet the soldiers each time he heard their armored vehicles pull in from patrol.

Nubs's full story shouldn't be given away here, but his bond to his soldiers and his ensuing ordeals are something you have to witness to feel the full power of a dog's love and loyalty for his human companions. It's a story full of sorrow -- and surprising joy.

A unit having a pet of any kind is against regulations, and when it became clear that Nubs was likely to be confiscated and euthanized, that was it for Dennis. "I wanted to get this guy home," Dennis says in the documentary. "In a million different ways, on a hundred different days, a moment with the dog could change someone's day . . . Sometimes it's better to ask for forgiveness instead of asking for permission."

He collected donations and found a way (outside the military) to get Nubs transported to his home in California.

Retired Marine Lieutenant Colonel Jay Kopelman fought in the battle of Fallujah, which he describes in the documentary as a "combination nuclear holocaust and zombie movie, with people coming out of buildings and windows trying to kill you."

During his time there as a liaison to the Iraqi army, a dirty puppy was in the abandoned house they were using as headquarters. Back in camp, his unit adopted the 5-month old, now named Lava, who in turn, decided to adopt Lt. Col. Kopelman as his closest friend. [Photo at right.]

Kopelman says in the documentary, "As a Marine you're trained to kill the enemy. It's brutal, it's violent, and makes you wake up in the middle of the night sweating. Lava provided a sense of normalcy and decency at the end of the day. He allowed us to reach down and find our humanity."

Kopelman got Lava home with him at the end of his tour, as did Staff Sergeant Bryan Spears (USMC) with his dog Moody.

Spears says Moody was "spunky and a smart aleck" and stood out. He became a star of the unit, and one day, he disappeared. The soldiers thought he was removed by military contractors to be euthanized, or had taken off.

Shortly after, five soldiers in Spears' unit were killed by a suicide bomber while out on patrol. Moody returned to base that night.

For the devastated young soldiers who had never seen death up close, Moody became a friend they could get close to, and let out their emotions with. "A dog knows when you're hurting," says Staff Sgt. Spears. "We weren't helping the dog. The dog came back to help us."

Spears' mother, Jane Miller, was worried about the psychological effects of the bombing on her son, and asked him if he could, would he want the dog to come home with him? He replied, "Mom, if I only could."

Enter Terri Crisp (right), an animal rescue veteran of Hurricane Katrina and many other disasters, based with the Society for Prevention of Cruelty to Animals International (SPCAI). Jane Miller called her for help.

"I knew from the beginning that we were breaking the rules," says Crisp. "But if the men and women who befriended these animals were willing to take that risk, I was willing to do it, too." She arranged for private security contractors and private charter flights to get her into Iraq to escort the dogs safely out.

Since then, Crisp's operation, now officially known as Operation Baghdad Pups, has rescued over 350 dogs and cats and brought them home to the U.S.

Oh, and one donkey, now living in Omaha as a therapy animal.

I spoke with Crisp earlier this month by telephone on the eve of her 20-city book for No Buddy Left Behind, telling such stories of her rescue work. The donkey, it seems, had such character and was so social, one soldier could not bear to leave him behind.

Crisp, as a civilian was and still is taking enormous risks in going to Iraq. There's not only the risk of gun and mortar fire at any time, there is also the very present danger of kidnapping westerners and journalists.

And there are the military regulations to deal with. She told me, "It is clear that the military has allowed us to operate. If they wanted to stop us, they could. We do send security teams they work with into Iraq to get these animals . . . They are allowed onto base at forward outposts and get the dog loaded up into a crate and drive it to Baghdad airport.

"It's a way to have some dialogue with the military about regulations that forbid you to befriend dogs, or care for animals while you're serving. Hopefully we can come up with some kind of compromise, because I think that we've proven the benefits of this."

It's clear that the dogs adopted in Iraq not only helped the soldiers there, but are instrumental to them after coming home. I spoke with Stephanie Scott of SPCAI, who said that no trooper wants to openly admit he or she has Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. "We do hear from a lot of mothers who say their sons are affected, and this dog is the only thing that gets them up in the morning."

Crisp says, "The number of men and women coming back with PTSD -- the increase in suicides -- so many of these people turn to alcohol or drugs, because they want to feel better. And these dogs do an incredible job of easing that pain. They're hurting and they need something to make them feel better instead of drugs and alcohol."

Rescued Baghdad dogs are different, she says -- they've been through so much that they have a reserve and nobility that other dogs don't have. She's adopted one herself, a female named Victory [photo at right]. "She is so incredibly smart, and that's what I see with all these dogs," who have to be smart to survive.

No Dog Left Behind is not currently available on DVD, so that 9 a.m. ET airing on Military Channel is how to watch this gem. It's a shred of hope and success that's come out of Iraq, and welcome, heartwarming news.

There really is no such thing as a stray dog. Humans have domesticated them to work and provide us companionship. However they come into this world, with purpose or by accident, they're our responsibility.

The Baghdad Pups got lucky. They made it halfway around the world to live out the most normal of lives, in comfort and security, alongside their human friends.

----

See Lt. Col. Kopelman with Lava here:

And Maj. Dennis with Nubs on NBC's Today here:

As They Say, Shut Up and Sing

October 6, 2011 2:00 PM

By Eric Gould

Political commentator Laura Ingraham's 2003 book, Shut Up and Sing: How Elites From Hollywood, Politics and the U.N. Are Subverting America, was critical of stars from the left who went public with political views when their only qualifications were to entertain us.

It seems that same level of scrutiny has just been applied to a star from the right, as ESPN, after a short week of controversy, permanently dropped Hank WIlliams, and his song "All My Rowdy Friends," from the opening of Monday Night Football...

Williams had appeared Monday on Fox's Fox & Friends morning show, and was asked his opinions on, among other topics, the Republican field of potential presidential candidates.

He quickly turned that inquiry into a commentary on Barack Obama, referring to the President's June golf game with Republican Speaker of the House John Boehner to facilitate informal budget discussions -- and calling it the equivalent of Adolf Hitler meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Even the Fox anchors seemed taken aback. When they asked the country singer to clarify his remark, Williams said, "They're the enemy" -- explaining that by "they," he meant President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden.

You can see the whole, bizarre clip here on Youtube:

That was Monday morning. Responding quickly, ESPN pulled the intro from last Monday night's game -- and, on Thursday morning, announced it was ditching the familiar opening permanently.

Readers' posts at various news sites, including ESPN's, argue that Williams never directly compared Obama to Hitler, or called him an "enemy" as such.

Don't believe them. The comparison was direct and intentional.

He was directly put on the spot by Fox & Friends' Gretchen Carlson, and asked to clarify.

"You used the name of one of the most hated people in all of the world to describe the President," Carlson said. Williams replied, "That is true. But I'm telling you like it is."

The screen shot of the Fox folks' reaction pretty much tells the whole story. (See the photo at top.)

And don't be assuaged by the Williams unapologetic apologies released this week by his publicist and posted on his website.

On his website, Williams writes:

"Some of us have strong opinions and are often misunderstood. My analogy was extreme -- but it was to make a point. I was simply trying to explain how stupid it seemed to me -- how ludicrous that pairing was. They're polar opposites and it made no sense. They don't see eye-to-eye and never will. I have always respected the office of the president."

Huh? The President and the Speaker of the House of Representative changing venues, to perhaps alter the dynamic and enhance the discourse on some very combative financial policies, is ludicrous?

Last time I checked, I believe that was called Democracy.

Tuesday, in another statement, Williams added: "The thought of the leaders of both parties jukin' and high fiven' on a golf course, while so many families are struggling to get by, simply made me boil over and make a dumb statement."

Williams also wrote, on Facebook and his website: "I am very sorry if it offended anyone."

Disney, which owns ESPN, probably (and rightly) didn't have the stomach for much more of this backwoods, and backwards, type of sentiment. In yet another statement, Williams said, "Every time the media brings up the Tea Party, it's painted as racist and extremists -- but there's never a backlash -- no outrage to those comparisons."

Which means what?

That because others have made remarks Williams considers inappropriate about the Tea Party, he's entitled to compare the President of the United States to Adolf Hitler?

Good for Disney and ESPN for saying no to that one.

On a more fundamental level, it's been reported that Williams is considering a run for the Senate in his home state of Tennessee.

No need for the network to give away free air time, even if it is just an intro song for a football game, to a presumed politician -- and a crackpot one, at that.

Williams, quick to the counter-punch, is claiming he quit first -- or, as we say, he was "quit-fired." On his website, Williams says it was his call, not ESPN's.

"After reading hundreds of e-mails," he writes. "I have made MY decision... By pulling my opening Oct. 3rd, You [ESPN] stepped on the Toes of The First Amendment Freedom of Speech, so therefore Me, My Song, and All My Rowdy Friends are OUT OF HERE. It's been a great run."

How Williams figures he is guaranteed free political speech by an employer whose revenue may suffer because of his unauthorized comments, is, in terms of general logic, OUT OF HERE.

In pulling Williams from Monday Night Football after his outrageous remarks, ESPN and Disney acted swiftly and responsibly.

And Hank Williams, Jr. now has plenty of time to listen to the songs of his father, who knew how to deliver messages without angering people. Perhaps, in due time, Hank Jr. will have reason to adopt one of those songs as his own new theme song:

"Long Gone Lonesome Blues."

Home Screech Home

October 5, 2011 9:58 AM

By Eric Gould

When I first saw the title for FX's American Horror Story, I thought: "Finally. A show about unaffordable health insurance and upside-down mortgages." Somewhat off the mark -- but it's an equally scary idea that introduces us to the troubled Harmon family as it moves into an L.A. mansion that it bought for a song...

It's not simply a backed-up septic tank that the realtor, obligated by full disclosure laws, must reveal to the Harmons. It's also the recent murder-suicide by the previous owner, who disqualified himself from a feature spread in the "Home of the Week" section by splattering his partner and himself across the basement walls.

Well, who among us hasn't had the albatross of a property around our neck that has driven us to some pretty unstable behavior? I think it was in the vestibule of my last condo building where I started hanging plucked, headless chickens, in part because of paint color choices I couldn't get approved by the condo association.

As Bryan Ferry once sang for Roxy Music: "In every home a heartache." And such is the situation, and new home, in which the Harmons find themselves, replete with the next door daughter, afflicted with Down Syndrome, greeting them on moving-in day with the somewhat non-standard welcome of, "You're going to die in there."

Not exactly the Welcome Wagon and fruit basket.

Or maybe it is. Take away the monsters and creeps in American Horror Story (premiering Wednesday night at 10 ET) and you have a brilliant subtext of weird, nosy neighbors of dubious origin and motivation, and a house full of bad vibes in the walls.

I defy any of us to muse back on our own Haunted Houses and not find our fair share of demons embedded in the walls -- even if they are only in the form of a grim recollection of your little sister swiping your copy of Thriller without asking. (The Michael Jackson album, not the Boris Karloff DVD box set.)

Ben Harmon (fully fleshed out, and fully flawed, by Dylan McDermott,) is an overbearing, self-absorbed psychiatrist, untroubled and dismissive of all the things going bump in the night. Until, that is, he starts to see a few things on his own.

And he has baggage that he's brought with him to, of all places, Fairview Lane. These are in the form of the recent affair he had on the heels of his wife's miscarriage, and also in the form of his cranky teenage daughter Violet (three letters removed from Violence, and played by Taissa Farmiga) -- a sort of living nightmare herself, as every parent knows.

Also in tow is his betrayed wife, Vivian, (another strong character study by Connie Britton) who, despite her inability to find peace with Ben's infidelity and the tragic loss of her child, still sees a dim thread of reconciliation despite her feelings, and is hanging on.

Turns out this haunted house has a Good Wife, too.

It's clear, in a hurry, that the new Harmon home reverberates with the angst of family dramas gone all too wrong with the past occupants.

But we're not totally clear which of these unannounced characters is really there, and which is some kind of apparition visible to only the person seeing them. And even if they are there, are they living?

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It also becomes apparent that, while Ben mucks around in other people's psyches for a living, he's got a pretty kinky one of his own. Much of the terror in American Horror Story delves deeply into gray areas of psychosexual conflict.

It's the one hot-button conduit into most people's fears, and American Horror Story uses it well.

Horror Story easily is at the top of the list for art direction this year, with great title sequences, quick slashing edits, (suggestive of the other kind of cuts committed by former occupants), and washed-out shots littering the TV screen like the pale corpses littering the history of Fairview Lane.

There are flashbacks to things in jars of formaldehyde, bloody clipping shears, and, even more oddly, old photos of children in historic dress, presumably some of the house's former occupants, who never got a decent swing set or hobby horse. For some reason -- perhaps because of the house itself -- there are a lot of birth defects around the story, and the children that do reside there, dead and alive, might be the most frightening of all.

Take that, Mom and Dad.

In keeping with the trend of such shows such as AMC's The Walking Dead and Breaking Bad, there are enough grisly depictions of knife and gunshot wounds and other various pleasantries to keep the realists thoroughly satisfied.

While it may borrow liberally, in tone and noir, from David Lynch's Mulholland Drive, and perhaps M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense (both are dramas bursting with dark domesticity), that's more of a compliment than a criticism. The haunted house, literally or metaphorically, is a very difficult environment to inhabit and sustain credibly. American Horror Story is the skillful architect of a place you'd be lucky to miss on a realtor's tour.

The series features a top-tier supporting cast, including Francis Conroy (Six Feet Under) and Denis O'Hare (True Blood). And then there's Jessica Lange as Constance, perhaps in a warped distant reprisal of her Blanche Dubois from 1996's TV adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire.
While Blanche was tragic, and held fast to society manners in the face of her angst around her fading youth and desirability, Constance is an elegant Virginia society transplant to LA -- but pretty much batsh*t crazy, and dangerous as a polecat surprised by the porch light on the back deck.

The key question about American Horror Story is whether the Haunted Harmon House can provide a rich enough setting for a regular returning audience, since the plot, the Harmons -- and us viewers -- never leave the house each week.

There are enough surprising twists and turns during the first three episodes, ones that move the action along at such a good clip, that I think the writers of American Horror Story are going to be more than a few steps ahead of us.

Or, in the case of the Harmons, a few slashes ahead.

Within George, Without Him

October 4, 2011 2:28 PM

By Eric Gould

When George Harrison passed away in 2001, Brian Wilson, founder of The Beach Boys wrote: "I am horribly saddened by the death of George Harrison. While we were not personal friends, I think that just like everybody in the world, I have always considered all the Beatles to be my friends."

And that's the thing about Harrison and the group: they were so much a part of our world for so long, they were like family. George Harrison: Living in the Material World, Martin Scorsese's new four-hour HBO biography of Harrison, takes an in-depth look at our friend who gave us all the beautiful music a soul could muster, and all the aloofness and coldness only fame could create...

There are so many documentaries, books and plays about The Beatles, especially John Lennon, that the story is almost canon by now. You wonder what new can be brought to the table.

Although we well know the basic elements of the Harrison story, and they're all here, the brilliance of Scorsese's documentary (shown in two parts, Wednesday and Thursday nights at 9 p.m. ET) is that he takes these familiar bricks -- along with rare photos, postcards, home films made by Harrison himself, and new interviews with Olivia and Dhani Harrison, Eric Clapton, Ringo Starr and Tom Petty -- and makes something new, something we didn't know. (At right, for example, a delightful alternate photo of The Beatles in the zebra crosswalk for the Abbey Road album cover.)

The result is an engrossing portrait, and a definitive new house for the Harrison legacy.

For those born after the Sixties, or too young to remember his solo career, it's also a great opportunity to experience how rock sprang out of post-WWII popular culture, and how it accompanied the tidal changes in society, as traditional family and gender roles fell under their own weight and fragmented into what we have today. Harrison's world view shifted right along with the rest of it.

A large part of the intimacy of Scorsese's work is firmly planted in The Beatles' early time in Hamburg, Germany, where they honed their chops and were photographed in evocative black-and-white by Astrid Kirchherr, who became their close friend, along with bassist Klaus Voorman.

You get a very strong, early indication of George's inner character, which later on became deepened by his practice of Indian meditation and chanting. Voorman says, "George was only seventeen years of age. But he was calm, he looked you straight in the face, he was funny, and he was a catalyst in the band... He would bring a certain peace into this setup."

It's even a bigger tip that George was destined for something beyond what he would eventually deride as the dumb trappings of fame. In a clip from their first American tour when he was in in his early twenties, he says, "We do like the fans, and enjoy reading the publicity about us, but, from time to time... you don't actually think, 'That's me in the paper.' It's funny, you just think it's a different person."

From the earliest brushes with the international press and public, he was keenly aware of the difference between what people thought he was -- presumed he was -- and the person in the world he actually was.

There is riveting old footage of Harrison and The Beatles playing small clubs and function rooms, just like any other struggling garage band. It's all the more striking a backdrop, since it both prefaces and contrasts sharply with Harrison's emergence later in The Beatles, and afterward, as a steadfast songwriter and a relentless perfectionist and craftsman.

For those of us who weren't the Alpha Male or Queen Bee of our particular social circles, Harrison seemed more like he was one of us: a wallflower in the back, waiting for the huckstering and bluster in front of him to blow off and give him his turn to show his stuff.

It just so happened he was in a group with two of the world's greatest rock writers. The Beatles' producer, George Martin, says he was often the odd man out of the McCartney-Lennon collaboration. "George was the solo guy," Martin says. "He had no one to work with."

Perhaps most interesting in Living In The Material World is the detail Scorsese provides about Harrison's interest in Hindu classical music and philosophy, particularly as a student of the sitar master Ravi Shankar. Scorsese takes time and effort to explore the nature and physicality of sound, its connection to the Hindu practice of chanting, and the connection of them both to the ability to experience spirituality and the nature of the cosmos.

Says Shankar, "Sound is God. Music has this power... Our music has been handed down from person to person. It is not written down. Meaning of life, philosophy... everything is passed along with the music."

We get fun lessons in what it was like for Ringo to concoct drum parts for Harrison's "Here Come The Sun," which use bridges that are in 5/7 time, borrowed from his sitar training -- and how funny and frustrating it was for a western drummer just to get it in.

Time also is spent on Harrison's decision to bring Clapton into the studio with The Beatles to record; his infamous break from them; his growth as a solo songwriter; producing new Apple artists such as Badfinger; and launching Handmade Films, teaming up with the comedy group Monty Python to release The Life of Brian in 1979.

(Incidentally, TVWW has been having a great, great laugh this week, thanks to a sketch from Brian which, depending on your point of view, might be the funniest comedy clip ever. See "Biggus Dickus" here:)

It rounds out a very complex portrait of a guy who loved humor, loved the life of the higher mind, and loved to be around people who were the best at what they did.

Harrison also was someone who truly loved collaboration -- with Bob Dylan, the Traveling Wilburys, director Terry Gilliam -- which explains, perhaps, why he was so frustrated at times with the Beatles. Says the late Neil Aspinall, formerly CEO of The Beatles company Apple Corps, of Harrison's relationship with his fellow bandmates:

"It was difficult to get a song onto an album. [The song] 'All Things Must Pass' didn't make it onto Let It Be, and didn't make it onto Abbey Road... He was stockpiling stuff. Stuff was building up."

According to Phil Spector, Harrison's producer on his debut solo album, All Things Must Pass, he had a backlog of hundreds of songs written, but never used by The Beatles.

But beyond the streaking, galactic light and the family spats of The Beatles, the best parts of HBO's Living In The Material World are the intimate moments of impromptu comments caught on home video; postcards being voiced-over by Dhani (who is the haunting likeness of his father); and personal remembrances by McCartney and Starr.

And after all, Harrison's life was about the music. There are wonderful moments that play clips of delicate, rich and complexly layered compositions of "Wah Wah," "Awaiting On You All," and "All Things Must Pass," among many others.

There also are clean, rehearsal versions of songs here, such as "Don't Bother Me," without voice and mixing effects. They are amazingly spare and beautiful -- and extremely evocative of Harrison's raw talent.

Olivia Harrison also recounts the attempt on George's life at his home in Friar Park in 1999 -- a frightening and surreal experience where the very spiritual couple found themselves fighting fiercely for their lives against a psychotic man with a knife. George was stabbed several times, and suffered a partially collapsed lung.

Olivia's father, a baseball fan, always taught her to swing through the ball, and the sobering picture of their attacker, in a plainly lit mug photo with stitches elaborately laced across his entire face, shows all too clearly who got the better of that encounter.

Spiritual or not, she's got a wicked game swing.

Harrison's trademark cynical wit, says Python's Eric Idle, was ever at the ready, even as he was being carried out of the house on a stretcher. According to Idle, Harrison lifted his head to ask two new employees who had just started at the house that week, "So, what do you think of the job so far?"

Living In The Material World finishes with perhaps one of George's most haunting, most original works from his work with the Beatles: the so-called "White Album," where he sings his song "Long, Long, Long."

The song instrumentation -- a warbling mellotron and acoustic guitar -- disintegrates into a few simple phrases at the end, like a child's toy clattering to the floor, and it's just his acoustic guitar and one drum riff left.

Not a guitar gently weeping -- but flickering away, and finishing with an unimportant, incidental chord.

Undramatic.

Final.

Well done.

PBS's 'Prohibition' Presents the Real Boardwalk Empire

October 1, 2011 11:55 PM

By Eric Gould

HBO's Boardwalk Empire is, of course, a visual triumph, with the art direction up front and center as a major character in the series. Wardrobe, interiors, automobiles and product design are done with so much attention to detail, we can palpably sense the time and day of Atlantic City political boss and racketeer Enoch L. "Nucky" Thompson (Steve Buscemi) and his crooked empire.

Turns out, the new Ken Burns documentary for PBS, Prohibition, confirms all that mayhem and corruption, in a sweeping new look at the 1920s law, and what came before -- and after...

As in his previous documentaries, Burns' Prohibition (televised Sunday-Tuesday, Oct. 2-4, at 8 p.m. ET on PBS; check local listings) digs into the story through old news clippings, photographs, and grainy black-and-white film that ground us in the look and language of the day. It's a technique uniquely his, and it doesn't become tired. Time and again, it connects us with a culture and style that was truly American, and is now long gone.

Many of the stills and clips gathered together by co-directors Burns and Lynn Novick and the rest of the Prohibition team are fine-arts-level work by the photographers of the day, and make for a rich, chiaroscuro experience spanning nearly six hours, presented in three parts. Running on consecutive nights, they're entitled "A Nation of Drunkards," "A Nation of Scofflaws" and "A Nation of Hypocrites."

As a body of research, it's a very thorough look at the evolution and dismantling of a law that had urgent origins, but out-of-control consequences. Initially meant to protect women and families from rampant saloon culture and alcoholic violence, Burns, Novick and writer Geoffrey C. Ward make the point that the prohibition laws did indeed reduce alcoholism rates, and kept many women and children from harm and abandonment.

But the practice of the law was rife with uneven application, starting with alcohol being legally dispensed by pharmacies as medication, speakeasy nightclubs regularly ignored and allowed to operate, and individuals legally allowed to ferment wine for their own use at home.

Politicians regularly scorned the use of alcohol in public, but openly drank with cronies behind closed doors. (See also: Boardwalk Empire.) And the federal government grossly under-funded enforcement of the law from the start, often admitting that it was virtually impossible to enforce on a nation-wide basis. Later, though, it did fund a very aggressive prosecution unit, led by Mabel Walker Willebrant, known as "The First Lady of Law."

Perhaps most surprising, in this documentary, is an explanation of how the U.S. Constitution was amended -- not once, but twice -- in a span of 13 years, to enact, then abolish, a federal law. That's all the more startling from the viewpoint of today, considering the current level of political discourse in the U.S. Congress. Virtually nothing today can be agreed on by both parties, much less an amendment to the Constitution.

Prohibition follows the twists and turns of the 13-year run of the law, often framing it most notably as a cultural standoff between the church-going dry country folk and the secular city dwellers full of immigrants.

Many of the more infamous characters from that time are here, with Al Capone appearing in the second half of part two, along with one of the main characters from Boardwalk Empire, the New York City kingpin, Arnold Rothstein. (In the accompanying picture, the real Rothstein is at left; the actor playing him in Empire, Michael Stuhlbarg, is at right.) Rothstein and other national crime bosses controlled not only the flow of booze, but the buyers, police and politicians around it.

However, the leading character of Empire, Buscemi's "Nucky," is nowhere to be found -- perhaps because he's too far down the chain of the real story to get a footnote. (Though the character is given the last name of Thompson in the HBO series, the real "Nucky" was named Johnson -- though both share the same unusual first name of Enoch, from which the nickname "Nucky" derived.) Apparently, he's well below George Remus, a Cincinnati lawyer turned bootlegger and regional dictator.

Remus bought drug companies, defunct breweries, trucking companies and warehouses, and got permits to sell alcohol for legal prescription use. Under the protection of that letter of the law, he became one of the biggest bootleggers in the country, paying off cops and judges in thousand-dollar bills. On a good day, the operation grossed $80,000, an astronomical number for a local operation, even by today's standards.

Although it never states so in any overt terms, Prohibition is quite clever and poignant as an indirect commentary on the legalization of drugs in today's society. The issues are much the same: was alcohol abuse then, like drugs today, a problem of addiction to be treated by the social community, or something to be punished by criminal law?

Prohibition recounts how the re-legalization of alcohol dispensed with the obscene profit of bootlegging, and its attendant corruption and violence. The clogged courts could be cleared of cases of individuals breaking the law because of private use. The government profited by taxing it, and its production could be regulated and made safe. Treatment for alcoholism came to be studied. AA was born.

If Prohibition isn't a direct analog for our current dilemma on drugs and morality, it certainly demands a different look at our time, through the historic lens of a campaign on an illicit substance that lasted 13 years, with more failure than success.

Journalist Pete Hamill, a 30-years-plus recovering alcoholic and author of A Drinking Life, is a central commentator on the show, and he muses on Prohibition's attempt to legislate morality, and its unintended consequences.

If you want to increase the appeal of something, he says, make it forbidden. "If you want kids to brush their teeth," he says, "make toothpaste illegal. It's human nature."

On the Drug Trail With Hank Schrader

September 19, 2011 11:13 PM

By Eric Gould

Even though he's not a cop, he plays one on TV. And that's enough street cred for Dean Norris to dive deep into the history of drugs and their use on the new special The Stoned Ages (premiering Wednesday at 9 p.m. ET on the History channel). From ancient opium use to new medications hatched out of multinational corporations, the two-hour show looks at the roles drugs have played in our lives since humans discovered what plants could do for our health and our consciousness -- good or bad.

Norris is, of course, part of the high-powered acting ensemble on AMC's Breaking Bad, currently in its fourth season from creator Vince Gilligan. Norris plays Hank Schrader, a DEA agent slowly closing in on the Southwestern meth kingpin mysteriously known as "Heisenberg." Just so happens that his target, unbeknownst to him, is also his mild-mannered brother-in-law, Walter White, brilliantly played by three-time Emmy winner Bryan Cranston.

But Norris is a gifted veteran actor in his own right, portraying Hank with great range and nuance, from his blustering presence in the DEA squad room, to his bedroom where he convalesces this season after a failed drug-cartel assassination attempt left him partially paralyzed. I spoke with him by telephone last week about The Stoned Ages and all things Breaking Bad.

The crackling sense of humor he brings to Hank's character is very much a part of his own, and the Harvard grad laughed readily while discussing his History special, which investigates the origins of drug cultivation and repercussions into the modern day.

The History team spent a month on the road, traveling to Mexico, Greece, England, Honduras and other locations, talking to experts and historians. Norris said he had a lot of fun making the special, and it shows. In one segment, he goes on a field trip to Tampa, to hunt for psilocybin mushrooms (the magic kind). He turns to his local guide, who has one in hand to show him, and says, "So, this is the part where I arrest you for possession?"

He told me he was surprised to learn about the regular use of psychedelic drugs early in civilization, particularly when the Greeks used to conduct The Fumigation. "It was when policy makers sat around burning cannabis as a ritual and a way to open up discussions on politics," he said. "No pot, no democracy."

But The Stoned Ages is decidedly not a program about the morality of drug use, nor is it all laughs. Norris said the show prides itself on its journalistic mission. Its balanced approach examines drugs' role in culture and society, the medical and spiritual use of substances, addiction, even the international financial stakes involved in developing new drugs: Are they being developed for healing, or being developed to sell? Whether something has a history of acceptance or stigmatization, he said, "we try and let the viewer come to their own conclusions."

No talk with Norris could be complete without discussing the show now routinely referred to as one of TV's greatest projects -- Breaking Bad. After 25 years working in Hollywood, Norris realizes how special this show experience has been. "It's rare," he said.

How does he think the current Season 4 has stacked up against the others? "I do miss the earlier episodes where the show was freer and a little bit lighter and more able to go into the humorous side with Walt and Jesse," Norris said. "When they started out, they were just finding their way, learning the business. They screwed up. The stakes are much higher now, and there's not as much room for the black comedy. It's absolutely appropriate for where the characters and the story are at, but I do miss that."

Now that Breaking Bad creator Vince Gilligan has announced he'll do one more season, he has talked a little about how it will unfold. "There will be 16 more episodes done after Season 4, but there is talk about how It will probably be released in two 8-show mini-seasons . . . 16 shows is about one-third of what we've shot so far, so that's a quarter of the story yet to be told."

Perhaps the series' finest achievement lies in its art direction, production values and attention to detail, giving it a cinematic look. Norris notes the show "is shot on film. It costs more to do it that way, but all the AMC shows are, and that's something else that sets them apart . . . AMC was a little-known network, and they felt that they had to go very big with the shows they selected and their artistic decisions."

Same goes for his production team. "Vince has picked the right people for the right jobs. We don't go longer than the normal shooting days of 12-14 hours. There's a sense of ease when we're shooting. No one is screaming at each other. It's a pretty well-oiled machine."

Gilligan is on record saying he knows Walt will die at the end of the series, and it's still a question as to whether Hank will turn him in. I told Norris that I've harbored my own preposterous/clever ending for the series: Walt beats his cancer but then is tried for capital murder committed during drug offenses, making it a Federal crime. He receives the death penalty and is executed by lethal injection.

Norris roared with laughter at the suggestion, but said he honestly didn't know where the show will end up. "There are too many possibilities, between all the characters and their relationships . . . Vince has a strong sense of justice, karma and consequences. Walt won't be getting away with anything."

Norris has worked steadily in Hollywood throughout his career, guesting in memorable TV and film projects from The Equalizer to NYPD Blue to The West Wing, while also making movies from Total Recall to Little Miss Sunshine. You might remember him in Total Recall as Tony, one of the mutated Mars rebels [photo at right]. It's an impressive pedigree.

So what comes after Breaking Bad? Norris will be free this time next year, he said, and "the pressure is to follow it up with a more mainstream network show." But if his wife doesn't mind, he'd like to pursue more alternative options like Breaking Bad and "find another 13-episode [per season] cable drama."

For now, he's on a buzzed-about show, with all the attendant benefits. So pardon my curiosity about one last thing. I asked Norris, as one bald guy to another, with his current notoriety, how goes it getting looks from the ladies?

He laughed again. "Better," he said. "Funny how that works."

Louis C.K.'s Winning Year of Losing

August 25, 2011 11:00 AM

By Eric Gould

Louis C.K. Is about to wrap up his second season of -- I'm not sure of the right term -- dramedy? Performance art work? Stand-up documentary? A hybrid of all of them?

Whatever it is, Louie (Thursday nights at 10:30 ET on FX) is something uniquely his. And it deserves credit as a TV milestone, for both its structure and its intent...

Louie is an intentional act of subversion, an anti-sitcom that often is as deliberately unfunny as the comedy genre within which he he is supposedly working. It's a double negative of some sort, and the results are positive. Louie, usually, is smart, daring, and (surprise!) outrageously funny.

Or not.

That's one striking thing about Louie. Its themes -- about suffering the lack of love, acceptance and respect -- often are bleak and serious.

His uber-critical self-examination, in itself, is nothing new. Woody Allen and Larry David pretty much have had the corner on that market, and often do it better. And funnier.

But neither Allen nor David has unmasked himself in such a raw fashion, to such an abject, naked degree. Louie is more about the humor that sneaks in around things, and often the drama is in equal proportion to the laughs.

Louis C.K.-- writer, producer, director and star of his own world -- has the ever-elusive, eternally treasured guarantee of total creative control, with FX executives reportedly out of the loop until he delivers each episode.

He plays the polite schlub, maybe at peace with his powerlessness, and he's nothing if not brutally honest about his shortcomings, and his utterly incorrect social impulses.

We've seen his lover break down in tears during sex with him, and witnessed his unrequited love for a woman who is repulsed by him. As the writer of his own alter ego's adventures, he's had other comics revile him for his success, and his daughter casually remark how she likes Mommy's house better.

He recently had an old fellow comic show up from the old days, just to inform Louie he was off to commit suicide.

The show's dark blend also includes verite clips from his standup act, frequent references to his bodily functions, and one episode dedicated to his particular practice of masturbation.

It's this level of investigating his own truth, and unmasking the ridiculousness implicit in it, that separates Louie from the rest. It's Louis C.K.'s cringing honesty -- and his willingness to go into the bedroom, bathroom, anywhere, to find it.

And while other shows, like Ricky Gervais' original The Office or David's Curb Your Enthusiasm have made similar grist out of equally, personally embarrassing material, Louie's is different.

His cringing reality doesn't burst open. It doesn't feast on the plainly dumb or wildly inappropriate. (Larry David once had a sketch about Holocaust survivors.)

Rather, it benignly grows, almost imperceptibly, until it's too late, and you're over the line, way into territory you didn't bargain for. It's that insidious, and that well-crafted, even if you don't care for some of the subject matter you encounter along the way.

In addition, C.K. as auteur has the absurd flair of a Dadaist artist, dropping in Marx Brothers-like non-sequiturs like quick-hit cabaret side acts. These give his cringe material another level of mood that is disturbing -- and uniquely his.

He's created a seemingly placid, but very strange and alienated New York City. It looks normal, and feels normal, but given what occurs around him, it's waaaaaaay off.

In one episode, there was the homeless man abducted into one side of a limo, and replaced with an exact replica pushed out of the other door. More recently, there was the fat, homeless bag man who stripped and bathed himself on a subway platform next to a performing violinist.

The art direction unifies the thing, usually with single camera scenes, a singular, sonorous cello playing and moody, shadowy key lighting borrowed from European art film interiors or a Vermeer painting (above left, compared with Louie, above right). Odd signatures for a comedy. Which maybe it is, or it isn't...

But it works. All too well.

As such, Louie is a rich, compact, 30-minute meditation of powerlessness in an unjust world, bursting with hard, and hard-earned, truths about our most intimate weaknesses. The series is well played, modest, on the mark, and draws from a deep well from which there is, let's hope, much more to come.

For now, there's tonight's one-hour expanded episode, "Duckling," which mines the comedian's real-life USO trip to Afghanistan for inspiration, and for footage. Then, Sept. 1, is the second-season finale, featuring a visiting, sullen niece. Like all other episodes of Louie, it stars, and is written and directed by, Louis C.K.

He's an artist in his own write.

The Opening's the Thing

August 14, 2011 1:30 PM

By Eric Gould

The Emmy nominations are out, and AMC's Rubicon, the one-season wonder (or blunder, depending on your point of view) got only one nomination -- for title design. It's a small, but important, nod for this cancelled little show that went way outside the lines of conventional TV storytelling. And maybe it's a fitting tribute to one of its best parts -- its tantalizing, cryptic art direction.

It's also an excuse for us to look closely, and appreciatively, at one of TV's most creative elements of all: the opening credits of quality series...

Title design gives us a quickie film -- the cinematic equivalent of an M&M -- where you get the sensibility and, sometimes, the back story of a show. And once it succeeds as a greeting card, it soon becomes a familiar, Pavlovian doorway to the world inside the shows you love each week.

Creating a good one is no small task, and the intro for Rubicon, arguably, ranks up there with the all-time greats.

The Rubicon opening (by the brilliant firm Imaginary Forces) is a slide carousel of surveillance photos marked-up in grease pencil and redacted government documents -- along with a swelling orchestration -- that put us right into the conspiratorial world of the show's fictional post-9/11 counter-intelligence agency, The American Policy Institute. Each week, we were drawn instantly into API's murky world of hidden signs and ciphers.

You can watch the opening credits of Rubicon by clicking HERE.

The good ones go way back. Perhaps the British understood it the best with the opening of The Saint, starring a very young and dashing Roger Moore. Initially syndicated to the States just after the James Bond spy craze first hit theaters, it featured a great '60s jazz-danger theme, a superimposed halo over Moore each week, and then, onto nothing more than a stick figure drawing, the logotype of the show, with that trademark halo. The suave, leading character -- Simon Templar -- couldn't have been branded, or have endured, more simply.

Same thing for the opening from Perry Mason, which ran from 1957-66 on CBS. I don't know any boomer who could not recognize a few bars of that swinging saxophone backbeat and the braying trumpets. Although it wasn't much visually -- just Mason (Raymond Burr) grinning to himself about how he was going to stick it to District Attorney Hamilton Burger (William Talman) yet again.

Since then, there have been some true, memorable greats. The '80s gave us the great Jan Hammer synth-theme for Miami Vice, accompanying the quick-cut montage that put Miami Beach on the world map as a sexy, dangerous playground. This is an example of the first-season opening credits, from the NBC series' launch in 1984:

Soon after, in 1990, ABC's Twin Peaks had fades of gushing waterfalls and bucolic scenes of the Great Northwest scenery of Washington State, coupled with an unforgettably watery, dream-like theme that was in creepy juxtaposition with David Lynch's oddball Killer Bob and the murder of Laura Palmer. The show's beautiful opening credits can be seen below -- after the not-so-beautiful but unavoidable commercial.

More recently, there was the brilliant mash-up of historical clips that began HBO's Carnivale (2003-2005), conveying a setting through old film and collages of tarot symbols. These images, presented by the Los Angeles production firm known as A52, set the table for a metaphysical war between the forces of good and evil, fought out in the depression-era Dust Bowl period.

The close-cropped mortuary scenes that opened the 2001-05 HBO series Six Feet Under (by the design firm of Digital Kitchen, and my favorite opening sequence of all) were wonderful, neutral-toned, sometimes intentionally over-exposed shots that set up the oddball world of a dysfunctional, family-run funeral home. Its tinkling, ticking clock-y theme seemed to mark off time that was running out for all of us.

And currently, we've got some great quick-cuts and black-and-white footage from the dark bayou of barflies, faith healers, civil rights marchers and boys smacking on red jam -- along with some seriously off-putting fast-motion decay -- that start off HBO's True Blood every week. (Again, another very credible mood and sensibility set-up by Digital Kitchen.) Great music, too -- Jace Everett's "Bad Things."

FX's Justified uses similarly grainy, out-of-focus shots and bad edits for a montage set-up of hillbilly noir in the back woods of Kentucky. So does HBO's Real Time with Bill Maher, which uses a black-and-white newsreel montage to whiz through 20th-century politics in under 30 seconds.

Real Time gives a sense of weekly urgency with an urbane hip-hop, pulsing theme that runs along with a time-code counter at the bottom of the screen. FX or its Fox parent corporation, oddly, has policed YouTube postings to keep its Justified opening theme video off the web, but the Maher camp has let one or two sample show openings slip through:

It's plain that the appeal of a show such as AMC's Mad Men is strongly linked to its styling, which is up front as a main feature of the opening credits.

Maybe the winner here -- and yet another wonderful piece by Imaginary Forces -- it brilliantly takes line drawing styles and colors from the early '60s (and, I'd argue, from the product literature of renowned 20th-century furniture maker the Herman Miller company).

Along with its drifting classical theme, the opening sets the table perfectly for Don Draper's house of cards each week. (Anyone notice that Don is always falling in this sequence? Perhaps a foreshadowing of his ultimate downfall for the series finale?) You can see it HERE. And, just for laughs, you can compare it to the equally brilliant Simpsons parody, which you can see HERE.

(The Mad Men original artwork is shown at the top of this column, the Simpsons parody at right.)

Mad Men has created such a buzz with its branding and styling that it has spawned new retro furniture lines, and at least two broadcast TV knockoffs coming this fall: ABC's Pan Am and NBC's unfortunate Playboy Club, which aspires to go no farther than giving us a Don Draper doppelganger, this time as a shadowy lawyer surrounded by Bunnies.

And finally, there's Showtime's Dexter -- one final Digital Kitchen triumph), with its blood spattered drain, creepy closeups of breakfast meat being seared, and its ironic, macabre and playful theme... all with closeups of Michael C. Hall's Dexter, the serial killer's serial killer, chewing his breakfast.

Opening titles never broke a show. But done well, they've forever branded shows in the minds of their faithful audiences. The Six Feet Under and Carnivale clips, from shows that have been off the air for six years now, still make the top ten title lists on most websites.

That's a memorable calling card, and one that has helped memorable shows endure after they're gone. No small feat for a minute of air time.

And it's probably how I'll prefer to remember the conspiracy-laden, alienated New York City of AMC's lost Rubicon.

So let's start a dialogue: What are the opening theme sequences you most remember, and consider the best? And why?

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Summer TV Treats: See 'Suits' 'In Plain Sight,' with 'Rizzoli & Isles' & 'Franklin & Bash'

August 2, 2011 2:30 PM

By Eric Gould

It's clear by now there's a TV recipe out there with quite a bit of traction. Start with a buddy pair of leads, add great hair, glowing skin, toothy grins. Sprinkle with snarky quips and hipster references on the minute. Repeat weekly.

In concept, not my idea of TV Worth Watching, or even TV Worth Folding Laundry By. But a funny thing happened on the way to the reject pile: I found some highbrow humor, more than a few smart scripts, and some fun actors to watch and get to know.

As much as the snob in me wanted to dismiss these shows as interchangeable fluff, color me pleasantly surprised. (And no, this does not apply to the vampiric, unrecognizable CBS buddy reboot of Hawaii Five-0.)

TNT and USA seem to have the touch when it comes to rolling out light dramedies that don't require a lot mental lifting, and that keep the jokes coming. (Although, artistically, TNT erred by recently canceling Men of a Certain Age.)

TNT just renewed Franklin & Bash, a comedy about a pair of prankster lawyers enlisted to shake up a prestigious law firm. The buddy concept is in high gear here, with both Jared Franklin (Breckin Meyer) and Peter Bash (Mark-Paul Gosselaar) as the courtroom jesters.

Malcolm McDowell is getting a new post-Entourage ride here as the puppet master of the firm, a boss who enjoys the duo's antics as if he were some super-villain unleashing anarchy onto the world.

TNT also has built a nice multimedia campaign for the show via the web. If you go to Franklin & Bash's faux website, "weretotallylawyers.com," it links you to a page of tongue-in-cheek commercials for the fictitious firm, starting with them in a hot tub with business suits on (at right).

On to the women.

Angie Harmon and Sasha Alexander do quite well as a female buddy pair -- a street-wise detective (Harmon) and a brainy medical examiner (Alexander) -- in TNT's Rizzoli & Isles. They both have great range, and are continually interesting to watch, even though the scripts' procedural plot points regularly go off the rails. The actresses are enough to carry the show, though, and bring a lot of depth to their characters.

(Harmon recently recounted to TVWW's Bill Brioux how co-star Lee Thompson Young has characterized her as "a combination of Aphrodite and Yosemite Sam." I can see it. She's got the chops both ways.)

USA, building on its Monk legacy, probably has the better concept here: shows with quirky but credible plot lines, whose stars perhaps aren't so shiny, but have their own magnetic charm.

In Plain Sight, created by David Maples, is finishing its fourth season, and features Mary McCormack as kind of a hardened anti-star, law enforcement's answer to Murphy Brown. McCormack's Mary Shannon is a seemingly burned-out Federal Marshal, working a witness protection program in Albuquerque.

(Albuquerque, all of a sudden, is the locale du jour, with McCormack's Mary Shannon feasibly just around the corner from meth manufacturer Walter White of AMC's Breaking Bad.)

McCormack's character is a jaded, sarcastic, been-there, seen-it-all cop -- with the standard-issue tender heart. But her twist is to have quick-draw 1980s and early '90s references at the ready. Very funny stuff, getting dropped down at odd moments.

Her labored family telephone chit-chats with her sister Brandy (Nicole Hiltz) are always moments where she must slow down, and seem sensitive and caring -- much to her impatient, well-played annoyance. Brandy interrupts a case with a cell phone call, claiming, "I'm sorry to bother you, but this is important." Mary replies: "Like 'Mom's in jail for a DUI' important? Or 'Bon Jovi just cancelled their tour' important?"

Once, absentmindedly looking at old family photos, Mary says to Brandy, "Who goes out for Halloween as Gandhi, anyway? Who does that?" Brandy's reply: "Mary, that was Sinead O'Connor."

So Maples and his writing staff are running a good game -- getting the right kind of snark in, with just the right timing.

Other USA writers may be doing their network's best current work on Suits, a new show finishing its first year. Starring Gabriel Macht as Harvey Specter (great name for the character, as he seems to be omniscient), and Patrick J. Adams as Michael Ross, it drew me in for seven consecutive viewings.

The long arc of the series, created by Aaron Korsh, is that Ross is an underachieving pot dealer with a photographic memory. Having memorized all sorts of law books, he passed the bar exam without going to college. Specter is a lone wolf -- smart, arrogant, reckless -- but with the wins to back it up. In his search for a new associate, he stumbles on Ross and his peculiar genius, and hires him. Now he has to conceal Ross' lack of real credentials from the rest of his very competitive, very upscale New York law firm.

Sounds run of the mill, I know. And it seemed even worse when, thirty minutes into the first episode, I realized I was watching another USA boss and protege show called White Collar. Clearly the early, Edsel version of Suits, it's now in its third season.

That changed quickly when I finally got the right show, and found the banter between Macht and Adams to be a fun, well-timed verbal fencing match. Macht is commanding (and yes, with great suits), while Adams is a skilled actor, playing Ross with just the right amount of youthful trepidation coupled with his superior gifts.

Again, the writers do a great job here, not taking us so far out with outrageous procedural plot leaps such as the fantastical forensic pirouettes to be endured, for example, on Bones.

These USA efforts, along with Mark Feuerstein's lightweight Royal Pains vehicle, are pretty well-crafted vanilla. Call it vanilla drizzled with caramel -- and it never feels like you want that last hour back.

Try on Suits, for starters. I'm thinking it will be a good fit.

[Currently, fresh episodes of Rizzoli & Isles run Monday nights at 10 ET on TNT (with repeats Tuesday nights at 8 ET). New White Collar episodes can be seen Tuesday nights at 9 ET on USA; Franklin & Bash, Wednesday nights at 9 ET on TNT; Royal Pains, Wednesday nights at 9 ET on USA; Suits, Thursday nights at 10 ET on USA; and In Plain Sight, Sunday nights at 10 ET on USA.]

AMC's 'Breaking Bad': 'Warning -- Extremely Volatile'

July 15, 2011 9:25 AM

By Eric Gould

The 2011 critics' preview DVDs for AMC's Breaking Bad, which launches Season 4 Sunday night at 10 ET, are subtitled: "Warning: Extremely Volatile." And, as usual with this sly show, it's an understatement...

Since series creator and head writer Vince Gilligan is on record predicting that the story of meek chemistry teacher turned meth-making murderer Walter White probably can sustain itself for one more year, our journey with Walter, at this point, puts him approximately at Dante's seventh circle of hell (out of nine) --the circle known as "Violence," with its unhappy occupants of tyrants, murderers and squanderers.

Not that Gilligan's vision hasn't covered these nightmares before. This season's first three episodes, however, revisit these themes in bigger, broader, more merciless strokes. It's a brilliantly, patiently unfolding tale of a good man gone bad, descending towards metaphysical damnation on the plains of the modern American West.

And, when Walter's Inferno is said and done, Breaking Bad may endure as one of the few shows that has kept the pressure high enough each week that we viewers absolutely must know what happens next.

That's saying a lot -- but Gilligan and crew deliver the goods again, starting Sunday.

The stakes were never higher than at the end of last season's finale. Walter had fallen out with Gus (Giancarlo Esposito), the southwest fried chicken and meth king -- served separately -- and was facing certain execution at the hands of Gus' henchmen, Mike and Victor.

Meanwhile, Jesse (Aaron Paul), Walter's partner in crime and former high-school science student, was racing to pre-emptively eliminate Gus' other meth-lab chemist, Gale, in order to save Walt. (With Gale gone, Walter presumably would be too valuable to kill merely on principle.)

The direction and pace of Breaking Bad has been so pitch-perfect, moving between levels of madness, domestic banality and black comedy, it's difficult to say how, or if, it could improved. It's been that good.

And Season Four does not relax.

Loyal viewers know that Breaking Bad is so compactly written and orchestrated that discussing one plot line gives away the others -- so not much can, or should, be divulged here before it airs.

The show has never pulled punches, and often is a difficult thing to watch, much in the way The Sopranos was. But Gilligan's view often seems more like a scientific study (its central character is a chemist, of course), with these characters packed like molecules in extreme circumstances. It often feels like a sober, anthropological study of bad behavior finding its own worst consequences.

Gilligan is simply, yet superbly, connecting the inevitable descending dots of a life of crime -- and all of those dots, especially the grisly ones, are here. For that reason, the mayhem in Breaking Bad feels honest, inevitable, and never gratuitous.

Broadly, we'll see Walt and Jesse descend more deeply into a hell of their own choosing, and watch as the seriousness of their predicament becomes much harder to maneuver. Walt's wife Skyler (Anna Gunn) continues her mini-"breaking bad," in finding ways to launder Walt's money. The grueling recovery of Hank (Dean Norris) from last year's assassination attempt also grinds forward in all-too-realistic detail.

Also continuing: the show's long story arc that may well end with Hank, a DEA agent, uncovering that the elusive and dangerous "Heisenberg" -- the infamous meth-lab cook flooding the market with his 99-percent-pure "Blue Sky" -- is none other than Hank's mild-mannered brother-in-law, Walter.

Perhaps most disturbing, as this fourth season begins, is Jesse's continued unraveling, given his unavoidable choices. It's a first-rate study, by Aaron Paul, of a dabbling hip-hop "playah," having to now emotionally deal with the all-too-real "gangsta" life for which he never bargained.

The art direction in Breaking Bad remains in the forefront as one of the main characters, and switches back and forth this season from benignly filmed domestic scenes to outlaw ones bathed in saturated jewel tones of red, blue and green.

It's a nice, ironic conceit which the Breaking Bad art direction team makes with the pretty colored lights highlighting the drama's most treacherous circumstances and locations: crack parties, dive bars, meth labs.

Even Walt has an increasing sheen to go along with his new, bad money. He's got a full goatee, more stylishly striped shirts, and is increasingly appearing that he can't ever return to his old self, or his old life. And you often are left wondering, even though he's in great peril much of the time, whether, if given the choice to revert to his benign old ways, he would want to.

The old Walt was an enslaved nebbish, not really alive. The new one, even with a terminal prognosis of lung cancer and sociopathic men surrounding him, has never been more so. Or more dangerous.

Finally, I consider it fair game to discuss a two-second shot from episode three, "Open House," which finds, next to Hank and Marie's bed, a (seemingly) innocuous Hummel figurine of a little village boy chimney sweep riding atop a smiling pig.

Breaking Bad viewers know to pay close attention to such things. It's disturbingly close to the recurrent flash-forwards of the pink teddy bear afloat in Walt's pool throughout Season 2 -- heartbreaking fallout foreshadowing a plane crash Walter indirectly affected in the season finale.

We'll know soon, I suspect, whether the figurine has something to with Marie (Betsy Brandt) and her recurring kleptomania, or perhaps it's a harbinger of Hank's resumption of his epic quest, out of his wheelchair and down the dirty chimney to finally clean Walt out. (Remember that the Mexican cartel sent out a snitch's head on the back of a turtle in Season 2.)

Whatever the meaning, we know it will be worth waiting for, and -- in TV terms -- breaking good.

Morgan Freeman's Doubleheader: Appearing in a 'Wormhole,' Impersonated by a Robot Skeleton

June 29, 2011 8:30 AM

By Eric Gould

There's still plenty of time to catch up on the Science Channel series Through the Wormhole, narrated by and starring Morgan Freeman, and enjoy his guided tour considering some of science's biggest questions. Freeman looks and sounds both authoritative and interested -- and over on CBS's The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, Ferguson's mechanical sidekick, Geoff -- a grinning skull with a mohawk -- pretty much has Freeman's number as an impressive, smart-sounding science guy...

Through the Wormhole, the newest installment of which premieres tonight at 10 ET, is a great way to dwell scientifically on all the metaphysical questions we had when we were children -- and harbor, still, as adults.

On tonight's new episode, the question posed is, "Are there more than three dimensions?" An hour earlier, at 9 p.m. ET, there's a repeat of last week's show, asking, "Does time really exist?"

Other ponderous queries pondered on this series include: Is there other life out there? Is there life after death? Where does the universe end? Does the soul exist? Why is there air? (Okay, that last one was tackled, decades ago, by Bill Cosby, not Morgan Freeman.)

The second-season premiere, "What Happens When We Die," was a wild look into some of the scientific aspects of what constitutes consciousness, and posits a physical explanation of the human soul.

One segment introduces Harvard neurosurgeon Evan Alexander, who survived a lethal form of meningitis, emerging from a week-long coma. His memories and visions of a vast multi-verse -- a realm of multiple universes united by an overarching presence of benevolence -- was captivating.

And all the more so, in context, since its descriptions of beauty and connectedness are recounted soberly, by a man trained in science.

So is a segment, involving quantum mechanics, on whether the soul is a fundamental part of the universe. Wormhole looks at the idea of "entanglement" -- in which particles of matter have been shown to mirror each other, although they're disconnected spatially.

It's a fascinating look at the possibility that brain-matter particles, functioning as quantum microcomputers, are "entangled" with the underlying fabric of the universe -- making us able to become aware, in some way, of the vastness of all things, as our energy begins to disperse upon death.

Dude. Heavy, man.

As the show suggests, our primary essences, our basic particles -- our "souls" -- may be hardwired into the quantum information of the universe, and live on in higher planes of connectedness and consciousness.

As explained by science, that is. So, maybe, it turns out that the Hindus, Buddhists, and Spinoza (shown at right) were correct all along...

The motion graphics in the cosmos of Wormhole are trippy and instructive, and are a triumph for the series' animators and designers.

Freeman, meanwhile, on a visit to The Late, Late Show a couple of weeks back, freely admitted he was just the front man for such things, and science could and should take credit for the fantastic content of the show.

Ferguson's mechanical sidekick, "Geoff Peterson" -- a grinning skeleton with glowing eyes, metal mohawk, and a scrawled "Geoff" name tag pinned to his suit -- is a somewhat affected, kind of clueless foil. He's almost always comically a beat too late with his lines, making him a riot.

Ferguson and his robot are as good a comic pair since Pee-wee Herman and Jambi the Genie, or Senor Wences and his sidekick, which was either a puppet head in a box or Wences' own "talking" hand.

Geoff reminded us that if you want a deep-voiced, credible narrator, you can't do better than Morgan Freeman, even if he's not the science behind the show. And then he showed us exactly how, with a hilarious, spot-on impression of Freeman.

You can watch the brief, brilliant byplay here:

Nothing funnier than a robot skeleton doing Morgan Freeman, I've always said. (Geoff is hysterically voiced over by Josh Robert Thompson. See Thompson in the flesh at right, and hear AND see him performing his impersonations of Freeman, Robert De Niro, Arnold Schwarzenegger and others HERE.)

The exchange continues to show why Ferguson and his writers are at the top of their game, and maybe ahead of all others when it comes to late night comedy that's actually funny.

Upcoming episodes of Through the Wormhole are running through July, and continue to examine such topics as parallel universes, and whether or not we could evolve to live forever.

Have a look at a quantum-related multiverse, absorbing us into its hidden fabric (Episode One), HERE, or on Xfinity On Demand through July.

'S All Right? 'S All Right!

Talking Dogs: Still Funny

June 22, 2011 8:59 PM

By Eric Gould

There are a few comedy standards you can always count on -- a rubber chicken, the spit take, Bugs Bunny in drag, and, of course, a talking dog. The latest competition for Family Guy's unassuming Labrador Retriever and writer, Brian Griffin, comes from the new FX series Wilfred, premiering this Thursday at 10 p.m. ET.

Like Brian, Wilfred is a complex intellectual with problems of his own, way beyond the usual concerns of fetching and scratching. An ordinary dog to everyone else, Wilfred appears to his neighbor Ryan, only, as a guy in a dog suit.

Wilfred is brought to us, of course, from Family Guy veteran David Zuckerman. The show originally debuted in Australia in 2008, co-created by Jason Gann, who also stars here as the dog that introduces and encourages Ryan into all sorts of bad behavior.

Zuckerman, writer of the American premiere episode, has been quoted as describing Wilfred as being "a mixed breed dog who is part Labrador Retriever and part Russell Crowe on a bender."

FX is building a strong sensibility in its comedies of urbane, magic realism that often turns dark and surreal. In this case, Ryan's uber-depressed, to the point of bemusedly drafting a goodbye note, mixing up a suicide cocktail in the blender, and serenely laying out in a suit for a quiet exit. It's a failed attempt, though. And he is interrupted in the next attempt by his attractive next door neighbor (Cindy Waddington), who asks him to dog-sit Wilfred.

Presto, from the get-go, Wilfred is coaching Ryan to stand up to his domineering sister, quit a job he hasn't started yet, and hang out with him doing bong hits and going to the park.

We wonder whether Ryan is deluded, hallucinating or has somehow passed onto a plane where he's conjured up this character as a companion. (Elijah Wood plays the twentysomething slacker, in another nice departure from his "Frodo" days of Lord of the RIngs.)

No matter the reality of Ryan's plight, it's funny, and it works. Wilfred is a conflicted, cynical, sarcastic dog who's unpredictable, and he's now running Ryan's life. The real question is whether he lives up to his forefathers -- Rocky & Bullwinkle's Mr. Peabody, Doug from Up, "The Ultimate Talking Dog" and our reigning king, Brian Griffin.

For the summer, I think, Wilfred will be leader of the pack. Or, as Doug would say, "Squirrel!"

(Wilfred premieres on FX Thursday at 10 p.m. ET, just before Louie, and repeats again at 11 p.m. ET. Louie is also reviewed here this week.)

'Louie's' Intensely Uncomfortable Milestone

June 20, 2011 9:46 PM

By Eric Gould

Louis C.K.'s self-titled Louie is subtitled "misery loves company." And fortunately, we're able to oblige him in his short comedies where life usually gets the upper hand. The second season debuts on FX Thursday at 10:30 p.m. ET.

While everyone knows and loathes Curb Your Enthusiasm's Larry David, Louie's more of a self-made pariah of his own small world. He's undramatically lit on New York sidewalks where the insults and bungles aren't a madcap mis-happenstance (like David's), but simply eye to eye, unspectacular and withering. It's a show that turns the audience into co-conspirators, with Louie happening to lead the way, cameras in tow.

In that sense, Louie does us a real favor. He gives us modern, alienated life as we all know it, walking down crowded streets and attempting to get by with some dignity. His stand-up routines are featured prominently here (in their own segments). They're confessional humor -- touching on raising his kids as a divorced comedian, trying to make a living in New York, dating in middle age.

There's no quippy sitcom dry cleaner here, just a corner grocer who can't be bothered to listen closely to his order. Louie's a non-star of his own life. We just happen to be bystanders.

The genius here is that while the Seinfeld-ian "nothing" is the focus, Louie gets into some truly awful territories, which smartly turn hilarious. His 5-year-old daughter casually lets out that she thinks she loves Mommy more, likes staying at her place more, and the food is better there. He responds in a childish way himself. But to his credit, Louie's nothing if not honest. He's not hiding anything here.

By shamelessly uncovering it all, he gives us his wit as well as his selfish, neurotic worst. (Would that he'd be able to do without the scatological references he wrongly seems to think he needs.)

Louie goes shopping for real estate he can't afford, freely admits not saving for his kids' future, and ungratefully bitches about the comedian's life to Joan Rivers in her hotel room in Episode 4 ("Joan," on July 14).

In Episode 2, "Bummer/Blueberries" (June 30), he delivers one of the most uncomfortable moments in TV history, when he starts a liaison with one of the divorced moms from his kids' school (fearlessly played by Maria Dizzia). It could seem like today's harsher equivalent of Mary Tyler Moore's legendarily endearing "Chuckles the Clown" moment (where she laughs uncontrollably at a funeral) -- but then some, for its utter jaw-dropping sexual inappropriateness. It's arresting and funny, while also tapping into Louie's humanity. And that allows him to darkly embody what most sitcom characters can't -- a fully-fleshed person, ordinary, petty, but with enough compassion intact to gracefully attempt the right things.

FX now has Louie, Archer, The League and this Thursday's debut of the brilliant American remake of Australia's Wilfred. It's a squad of comedies that sets them apart from other cable networks, as a niche stop for quick, 30-minute visits to a brutally smart, weird and comically awkward world.

I'm visiting regularly.

Maybe It's the Time of Year

June 13, 2011 2:07 PM

By Eric Gould

It's summer, and time to go down to Yasgur's farm again -- this August will mark the 42nd anniversary of the Woodstock music festival. There's nothing notable about that milestone except we're still getting older, and Ang Lee's 2009 dramedy Taking Woodstock is running all summer long on HBO.

It's an engaging, historical romp through the counterculture of the '60s, from its core gravitas to its downright silliness. And all the while, it dances around the edges the festival, without ever pushing to the stage and laying eyes on a rock star.

Based on Elliot Tiber's book of the same name, Lee's film (which premiered at the 2009 Cannes Film Festival, and was nominated for the Palm d'Or) has a somewhat maddening, but tantalizing conceit: Most of the film occurs at the Tibers' dilapidated Catskills motel, The El Monaco, near Max Yasgur's dairy farm where the show is.

From there, you can vaguely hear the music start on Aug. 15, 1969, far in the distance, like a mythical beast being born and wailing.

And that's the wonderful thing about it. As Tom Stoppard did in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (about the duo offstage during Macbeth), and like the Broadway hit Wicked (backstory, then offstage reinvention during The Wizard of Oz), Lee has made another play outside the play. It's a place where Tiber (played by Demetri Martin, at right with Liev Schreiber), at the center of his memoir, falls first overwhelmed, then unavoidably charmed, and finally changed by the hippie army of 500,000 that has overrun the town for the festival.

Not only does Elliot finally turn on, and tune in, but comically, so do his Eastern European immigrant parents -- two Russian Jews here named Teichberg who emigrated before the war. They're still considered outsiders, even in the Catskills.

As such, it's a light, shorthand look at second-generation Jews in America, and their drift away from their parents' diaspora -- when freedom gives them the opportunity to find themselves, often to their parents' dismay.

Taking Woodstock steps lightly around the war and its character with PTSD, before there was a name for it. Mostly, you're free to be. Acceptance is the thing, and in that impromptu, idyllic world over three days, everyone gets it. The whole event, with woefully inadequate security by today's standards, happened pretty much incident-free.

Perhaps in part because of Schreiber's fictional character Vilma, a former marine sergeant, turned transvestite in a blond wig and a garter holster under his dress. He's running security at the motel for the family, and becomes somewhat of a mentor for Elliot.

Schreiber's character is a grand analogy for the times -- an oddball mashup of male power, feminine discourse, and Athena, Goddess of War, all rolled into a mighty and fearless entity. As offbeat and maybe as mixed-up as the entire festival itself, he embodies (literally) both sexes and perhaps a whole generation that dared to cross societal boundaries in which they'd thought they were going to be trapped for life.

There are other fun moments here such as when concert promoter Michael Lang (Jonathan Groff) descends into Bethel, N.Y., by helicopter, an Adonis with a flowing mane of pre-Gino Vannelli curls, leather vest and shoulder bag. (The festival actually occurred in Bethel, with Woodstock 43 miles to the northeast.)

As the brains beyond the operation, he's inscrutable, surfing the local obstacles and speaking in indirect visionary quips, leaving Elliot to ponder the true meanings, if they indeed are there at all.

Paul Dano and Kellie Garner [photo at top] also shine as the androgynous VW van couple that help Elliot envision his big step away from his self-made chains in the Catskills. And so does Eugene Levy as conservative Jewish farmer Max Yasgur, who sees something special in the kids and their spirit, where most of the locals see irresponsible, mindless dropouts.

Taking Woodstock is a charming period piece, excavating a convincing mix of the clothing, language and political winds of the time, in all of its well-meaning, non-violent innocence. But it also smartly looks back on the same material through a contemporary lens. We get a sense of these seeds of social change, and how our current cultural fragmentation was born.

Lee's vision of the festival's sea of humanity is finally revealed at night -- a human pool down in the basin of Yasgur's field, glowing in stage light, elliptical, swirling, with cobalt heaven above, a primordial, cosmic birth of transcendence.

It's maybe a mythical place where social revolution finally gathered in one place for a moment, even if it eventually collapsed under its own naivete.

Like most latecomers, via Lee's film, we settle for a seat way, way in the back. But no less the better for it.

[Imminent airings of Taking Woodstock -- Thursday, June 16 at 3:40 a.m. ET on HBO, plus 9:40 a.m. ET on HBO Zone; Saturday, June 18 at 7:40 a.m. ET on HBO Zone; and most conveniently, Tuesday, June 21 at 8 p.m. ET on HBO Signature.]

'Breaking Bad' Breaks Bleeping Great

June 6, 2011 1:38 PM

By Eric Gould

"Unstable, Volatile, Dangerous" is the subtitle for the Season 3 DVD of AMC's Breaking Bad (out here June 7). And believe it or not, it's an understatement. With an epic storyline now clocking almost three dozen episodes over three seasons, this series offers some of the most compelling and well-crafted television of a generation.

We're about to go into the fourth season (July 17 on AMC) with lead character Walter White (Bryan Cranston of Malcolm in the Middle), a once-brilliant chemist in corporate life with unlimited upside, who has somehow ended up as a dull, underachieving high-school chemistry teacher. (We don't have the full details on that yet.) On a routine doctor's visit he discovers he has inoperable lung cancer, with perhaps two years to live if he goes through treatment.

In fear of leaving his family unprovided for, Walt has unleashed the hounds. He "breaks bad" and begins to manufacture Blue Sky, his own brand of extremely pure crystal meth. He solicits the help of a slacker ex-student and low-level drug dealer, Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul), to help him make a giant financial score to leave behind.

It's a grim premise, and over three years, series creator and producer Vince Gilligan has pulled no punches. His is an unblinking look at the preposterously thin line that divides an ordinarily compliant man and his nihilist within. Gilligan, cast and crew have achieved something so rare in TV production, it almost never happens: a series sustaining a remarkably high level of writing and acting that delivers on a weekly basis.

Breaking Bad has leaped over all others with some of the smartest, darkly comic and visually beautiful material in recent memory. So palpable is the work, it's a very short step for us to stand in Walt's shoes -- in a bad position, facing even worse choices -- and become his unwitting, often willing accomplice.

Gilligan's Breaking Bad certainly takes its rightful place alongside Barry Levinson's Homicide: Life on the Street (1993-99) and Alan Ball's Six Feet Under (2001-05) as work with an unquestionably unique vision. It matches that with similarly intense, economical scripts and production values rivaling those of any film standard.

And while he's been at this character study of Walt, Gilligan has also burrowed into almost every dark corner of suburban life. While BB is part gritty crime show, at its heart it is also about the personal cost of domesticity in our crumbling economy and shifting culture. We find often ugly consequences behind the closed doors of the ranch houses, office parks and chicken joints. Breaking Bad has the White family under a microscope.

Except the Whites, as a family, and their desert environment are already vestigial. The usual green lawn is just an Albuquerque desert stone garden, the pool deck is scorched and faded, and the carpet hasn't been changed in 15 years. Walt's Pontiac is a crap, extinct Aztek -- a misspelling and modern relic now gone, like the natives hundreds of years ago.

And Walt himself is on the way out, too, and so maybe is his way of life -- the vanilla American suburbs and the family unit. The Whites' world in Breaking Bad is one bounded by street and drug culture, strip malls and an elite business world that eluded them years ago. These are two very well-educated, capable people, just making ends meet on one and a half low-scale incomes.

And now, they're unable to afford the treatment outside their HMO plan that would give Walter a better chance with his inoperable lung cancer.

Walt's is a case of a man, maybe the other Walter -- Thurber's Everyman, Walter Mitty -- who's seen his life now behind him. It's a far different one from youthful dreams, and turns him into more Mr. Hyde than Dr. Jekyll. Walt's wife, Skylar (Anna Gunn of Deadwood), seen in a foreshadowing green mask below, is eventually unmasked herself, her moral outrage not enough to overcome some outlaw impulses of her own.

One of the main triumphs of Breaking Bad is the merging of the art direction, design and story. The art direction by Marisa Frantz and Bjarne Sletteland, photography by two-time Emmy nominee Michael Slovis, and production design by Robb WIlson King and Mark S. Freeborn are as good as, or better than, their cinematic equivalents. And it's all been achieved on TV budgets and schedules.

Albuquerque, infamous as the place where Bugs Bunny should have made a left turn, is one of the main characters here: a desert landscape and blinding sun in stark contrast to the parched strip malls, motels and parking lots where much of Walt and Jesse's secret life takes place.

The characters are often silhouetted against this brilliant light, negations of what they once were -- dark masses borne from their new lives outside the law, outside of morality.

Similarly, this decidedly harsh light is let in by Gilligan, quite often through mini-blinds that make bars -- prison bars -- usually across Walt, either in some foreshadowing of how all this will turn out for him, but certainly suggestive of the everyday prison he's made for himself.

Walt and Jesse initially start "cooking" by producing small amounts of crystal meth inside an old RV camper, way out in the New Mexico desert where they're isolated on the vast horizon. In some manner, Breaking Bad is a frontier tale, two-bit criminals homesteading against the physical elements, and in this case, society as well. It's no coincidence that these men, taking what they think is due them, are sort of on the prairie in their "Little House," but in reverse, cooking up their own brand of frontier justice.

It's a perversion, of course, but very American in its underlying theme: You don't have to be right, or moral, but only ruthless enough to go outside the lines and make it happen.

Gilligan has discussed the long arc he's envisioned for BB, and unlike a lot of series characters, these will arrive at a very different place than where they started.

And so it has been with Walt, particularly visually. He's undergone a vivid transformation, losing his hair to chemotherapy, and stylizing himself with a jazz musician's hat for deals and meetings.

There have been three Emmy wins so far for Bryan Cranston, who has created and embodied the character of Walt to such a degree, it's hard to imagine anyone else ever in it. Cranston has a tremendous range, and has absolute command of Walt at his most invisible, most desperate, most vengeful. It's about as deep a character study as you'll find in any Dostoyevsky novel. Most likely deeper, and more complex.

As such, in the first two seasons Walt and Jesse were sometimes surrounded by childish or child-like objects, symbolizing their rise from two-bit meth lab wannabes into matching wits with the drug kings of the American southwest. It's often done to great comic effect, starting with the hose-down in the kiddie pool after a grisly clean-up in Season 1.

But the props in Breaking Bad cut both ways. The fallout from an air collision over Albuquerque (to which Walt was indirectly connected) included a burnt magenta teddy bear that landed in Walt's pool. It was a heartbreaking moment that vividly symbolized the devastating effects of Walt's choices on people around him -- and on his own innocence that is gone forever.

Jesse is also transformed this way, his playful hip-hop wardrobe (below) and juvenile attitude getting stripped away in layers, as he is forced to murder and forever be unable to regain the person he was before he stepped onto the big-league ladder of the Mexican meth cartel.

It's also a very colorful show, to great effect. The art directors and photographers have gone to great detail to shoot the Blue Sky meth in its liquid and crystal state, making something so addictive and destructive into something utterly seductive and blanketing as it slinks into flat glass pans to harden.

The same can also be said of the "super lab" in Season 3, which Gus, the Albuquerque meth overlord and fried chicken king has set up for Walt to cook in. It's an underground bunker, where Walt is tasked with the production of an astronomical 200 pounds of Blue Sky a week, meant to make Gus the undisputed kingpin, free of the Mexican drug cartel from which he's currently buying product.

Walt's finally achieved the state-of-the-art lab that's always eluded him, but with its red floor, he's landed in a true hell of his own making. (Photo at top of article.)

As good as BB has been, the three seasons haven't been without a few warts. Gilligan and the writers have used "The Unflinching Walk" twice (walking away from an explosion, stone cold, without looking back) and "The Sarcastic Confession" in Season 3 (telling the truth sarcastically so it seems like a joke). Then, there was the old "Bald of Evil" with the Salamanca cousins, also in Season 3. So, there isn't -- could never be -- complete freedom from the entirety of TV tradition that has come before the BB team.

But, no matter. The heights are too great. Perhaps unmatched -- or at least only to be equaled, never surpassed -- are images that have come out of Breaking Bad, unforgettable for their originality and, for lack of a better term, their raw surrealistic power.

While these moments in the show have dredged up dream imagery, they're all the more disturbing for the incidental way they just happen to drop in on ordinary circumstances.

I've been trying to think of an opening scene from a pilot episode equal to Walt, at the wheel of his out-of-control RV in his underwear and a gas mask, with two bodies in the back, or, the head of a DEA snitch showing up on a desert stakeout on the back of turtle.

I have to say I can't. And that's the wonder and dark beauty of Breaking Bad. Let's hope there's much more to come.

[AMC is running the first three seasons of Breaking Bad on Monday and Thursday late-nights, at broadcast times listed here. Season 4 debuts July 17 on AMC.]

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What Is the Sound of Two Hands Clapping, Slowly?

May 28, 2011 9:15 PM

By Eric Gould

We've seen it all before: We're at a critical juncture in the story. The main character has just made a courageous or heartfelt speech, and, maybe after being met with Stunned Silence, makes for the exit.

But just as the protagonist appears utterly defeated, one person in the crowd stands and starts to clap alone. Then a smattering of others. And, finally, the entire room of people erupts with crescendos of vindicating applause.

In the hands of gifted writers, directors and actors, it works, no matter how familiar it may seem. In lesser hands (so to speak), it's merely the sound of two hands clapping, slowly...

That commonly utilized, exponentially expanding applause is a drama standard, from classics like Hoosiers to cult favorites like Mystery, Alaska. It's called The Slow Clap, and even George Clooney walked to its rhythmically building accompaniment in Intolerable Cruelty. It's a virtual lock in almost any given teen movie these days, too.

For a clever montage of Slow Clap moments, including Clooney's, watch this YouTube offering:

And, although there's not really an Official Handbook -- although sometimes it feels like there is -- there IS a wiki website, TVtropes.org, which has an amazing and amusing catalog of just about every plot and genre standard imaginable.

You'll find everything from the Dark and Troubled Past (a character's complicated backstory, usually revealed in small bits) to the Sarcastic Confession (telling the truth sarcastically, so no one will take it seriously), and a lot more. They are sorted and organized by genre and type, and will keep you entertained for hours.

Begun in 2004 as a discussion board devoted to Buffy The Vampire Slayer, which had ended the year before, TVTropes evolved into a public wiki -- an encyclopedia -- of any kind of film and TV material. It soon outgrew even that, and expanded to include a variety of media. It now spans graphic novels, anime, music and even the plot lines of video and fantasy role-playing games.

It continues to grow. Anyone can post an idea for the wiki that, in time, could emerge as its own new page, forever listed alongside such proven standards as Hero Tracking Failure (in which, regardless of the setting and situation, the heavily armed bad guys cannot aim and shoot the unarmed hero, the bullets always striking mysteriously just behind him, never leading -- therefore being unable to hit him.)

Not that the standardization of drama, and action techniques, is new. The Greek tragedies had fairly strict narrative forms, and a standard set of dramatic tropes -- patricide, betrayal, seeing ghosts (see List of Transgressions) -- that were recycled even by Shakespeare, and continue to flourish in modern entertainments.

The most well-known modern example of a new trope filtering into our lexicon is The Red Shirt, a plot device from the original TV series Star Trek, when it quickly became clear that the fourth member of the landing party -- the unfamiliar ensign in a red-shirted security detail uniform, beamed down alongside Dr. McCoy, Mr. Spock and Captain Kirk -- was a sure goner, sometimes in the very first scene.

After a year or so of this, whenever we saw a new crewman, we knew he was toast. Says the wiki: "Their only job was to get eaten, shot, stabbed, disrupted, sped up and killed, frozen, desalinated, or turned into a cuboctahedron and crushed. Their death would give William Shatner and DeForest Kelley a corpse to emote over, and Leonard Nimoy a corpse to, well, not emote over."

A lot of the tropes at the site are hilarious and obviously long-honored, like The Air Vent Escape (with Bruce Willis shown below in an early Die Hard film).

This is where heroes, no matter their weight or size, will find the right-sized passage in or out of a tight, otherwise trapped situation. Air vent covers "require little or no effort to remove, openings are always within reach, they're always able to support the weight of a person even though they were only designed to carry air."

And on it goes. There's The Unflinching Walk (in which the character sets an explosion and walks away, stone cold staring ahead, never turning to see the blast, as in the top photo with Tuco's stoic hit-men cousins from Season Three of Breaking Bad.)

And The Shower of Angst (characters so distraught, they numbly crouch in the shower, staring into space, as in the scene from Casino Royale at right.)

And Friends Rent Control (in which, as in the hit sitcom, hip, good looking New Yorkers have generous, affordable and stylish apartments explained away as being affordably cheap and under rent control.)

Perusing TV Tropes, I even found a personal peeve that's teed me off for years (go figure; see author's picture), where evil or deranged characters are almost always bald. It's listed in this wiki as its own trope, The Bald of Evil. (Hmm, come to think of it -- see, yet again, the cousins in the Breaking Bad photo.)

In no time, you'll be a Trope sophisticate, spotting, for example, the Conservation of Competence: "if the minions are smart, the boss must be an idiot. If the boss is smart, then his subordinates are stupid."

And surely, you'll easily be able to spot The Rooftop Confrontation (as seen at right, in the film The Departed), in which our hero usually winds up squaring off against the bad guy on a rooftop. Says the wiki: "It sometimes involves Roof Hopping if it takes place in the middle of a city, but sometimes a single rooftop can be just as badass, since it limits a character's maneuverability."

You've seen them all before. A lot. You'll just be able to mentally file them away a little easier now.

And, perhaps, hold Hollywood's writers to a higher standard...

The Thinking Man's 'F Troop'

May 14, 2011 3:00 PM

By Eric Gould

It's a bit odd to think about the politically incorrect comedies of the '60s, knowing that a show about a Nazi prisoner camp (Hogan's Heroes), or about the American Army fighting the Indians in the Old West (F Troop), couldn't be made today -- but that Jersey Shore and Las Vegas Jailhouse can.

Surely they aren't more distasteful than those deliberately offensive shows are. And consider this Exhibit A: Aside from its dated, shtick-y tone, my current DVD guilty pleasure -- the mild, light-hearted F Troop -- had no lack of wit and ingenuity when subverting hardened stereotypes and sacred cows, all within the bounds of conventional taste and TV standards of the day.

F Troop, which premiered on ABC in 1965, lasted only two seasons, and both are available on DVD. F Troop: The Complete First Season can be purchased HERE, and The Complete Second Season HERE.

The show's premise is as simple, and solid, as a log fort. Slacker Army Troops stationed at Fort Courage, a Kansas outpost, try to wait out the frontier conflicts of American expansionism, alongside the equally passive Hekawi Indian Tribe.

(According to legend, the wandering tribe, constantly lost, got its name, "We're the Hekawi," by a slight mistranslation of its its oft-repeated plea for information, "Where the heck are we?" -- a diluted-for-TV derivative of the otherwise identical old joke about another native American tribe, the Fugawi.)

F Troop is de facto controlled by the ranking Sergeant O'Rourke (Forrest Tucker) and his cowardly sidekick, Corporal Agarn (a great comic and slapstick performance by Larry Storch.) O'Rourke and Agarn conspire to keep as their leader the bungling and unassuming Captain Parmenter (Ken Berry), who's too dim and distracted to interfere with the illicit operation of O'Rourke Enterprises -- the O'Rourke-Agarn souvenir business selling cheap Indian goods manufactured by the mild-mannered Hekawis.

O'Rourke and Agarn are business partners with Hekawi Chief WIld Eagle. Frank De Kova, an Italian-American character actor, known for playing heavies, bronzed up for this role. He gives a great, burlesque-style performance as the harried, grumpy head of the tribe, much a like an out-of-sorts New York garment district owner with indigestion.

(One article cites the Hekawi shtick as based on one myth that the Native Americans are the 13th tribe of Israel, explaining why some of the Hekawis were played by veteran Yiddish actors.)

And so the wacky antics of two years of shows began, first with Agarn teaching the Hekawis how to war dance, and following with a parade of such guest stars as Don Rickles, Milton Berle, Harvey Korman, Vincent Price and Zsa Zsa Gabor.

Series creators Seaman Jacobs, Ed James and Jim Barnett never missed the chance to show the American military as witless and inept (the modern American military, at the time, was fighting in Vietnam) -- the leadership easily fooled in their expansion west, ignorant of local ways. This wasn't a show about an "A Troop", but about soldiers failing all the way, with an F grade.

The Hekawis, as peaceable and conflict-averse as the troopers of Fort Courage, were such precisely because it was good business. When asked if the tribe could stage a mock attack on Fort Courage to keep the higher-ups fooled that F Troop was up to the job, Wild Eagle says they must do the war dance first. Then, after thinking for a moment, adds, "Hekawi don't remember war dance. We very peaceful."

De Kova had many of the funniest moments on the show, particularly with old Indian sayings he cannot remember the meaning of, such as: "Sparrow fly high, but cannot build dam with tail of beaver."

So, while the locals are tripping on the newcomers, and the newcomers are illegitimately led by wartime profiteers, other roles are reversed.

Parmenter's love interest, the beautiful, sharp-shootin' Wrangler Jane (Melody Patterson), literally wears the pants in their relationship, letting Will have the appearance of patriarchal authority, all the while gently steering him in the right direction.

Wild Eagle, concerned mostly with production deadlines, is the driving force of the operation, keeping the entire capitalistic venture on track... another enterprise doing very well, courtesy of the U.S. Treasury. (O'Rourke funnels paychecks for fictitious troopers into the operation.)

After the successful DVD initial release of a few episodes in 2005, the entire complete two seasons of F Troop were released by 2007.

Made in the days when a half-hour comedy produced 30 episodes per season, there are 60 episodes on eight DVDs -- proving the F Troop credo that in 1967, war was, and continues to be, good business, good for the economy and, for those willing to read between the lines, good television comedy.

When Crazy Cat (Wild Eagle's ambitious assistant) tells him he sees smoke signals, Agarn asks, "What does it say?"

Wild Eagle squints and replies, "Crazy Cat, give me my reading glasses."

National Geographic Channel: Thinking Way Outside the (Little Yellow) Box

May 9, 2011 8:55 PM

By Eric Gould

TVWW is dedicated to the best that TV can offer, but it's worthwhile, from time to time, to dredge the bottom of the lake, haul up the darkest muck we can find, and examine it under the cleansing light of our internet glare.

Given National Geographic's new season of the bottom-feeding Taboo, it's clear that the little gold rectangle (their logo), which once symbolized the knowledge of the world, also now stands for a meshugganah Pandora's Box of human behavioral disorders...

The network that, in the past, has explored the secrets of the Egyptian pyramids and the wonders of how giant telescopes are made is back this week with a seventh season of Taboo, the show that begins with teasers such as, "Dave has always felt that his right leg never belonged to him, so one day he decided to amputate it... himself." (Tonight's season premiere -- Monday, 10 p.m. ET -- is devoted to "Addictions.")

Would that I were brave enough, like our new amputee Dave, to comply with the urge to cut my head off before watching Taboo...

We're not exploring the migratory patterns of Arctic penguins here, but how far outside society's cultural norms people will go in their taboo lifestyles or their addictions. Or, as we saw recently, Stanley, the Adult Baby from the episode "Fantasy Lives" (repeated Wednesday, May 11, at 5 p.m. ET), shown at top above, who has paraphilic infantilism -- characterized by the desire to wear diapers and be coddled like a baby.

I guess I wasn't looking, but at some point Nat Geo -- for decades, back to its days on broadcast TV as National Geographic Specials, the de facto portal for the American armchair explorer, and unintentional pornographers to dopey eight-year-old boys during library hour -- turned into a weird fusion of a Goth Ripley's Believe It or Not and the electronic equivalent of a circus side show.

The same "Fantasy Lives" show with Stanley the Adult Baby also included a look at Japan's "maid cafes," where women dressed up as prim, subservient anime waitresses -- and where, at a few even more taboo establishments, men did the same thing.

I'm just wondering who it is who needs an in-depth look at a woman who is a plastic surgery addict, increasing her breast size to a K cup? (From this season's episode on "Beauty," repeated Monday, May 9, at 9 p.m. ET, and again Wednesday, May 11, at 6 p.m. ET)

And is there actually an "L" cup??

This is National Geographic, after all, an encyclopedic touchstone. And we do get the occasional credentialed doctor or psychologist explaining to us -- spoiler alert -- these people have psychological or brain disorders that make them do strange things, like sewing a corset into their backs.

Dave has Body Integrity Identity Disorder (BIID,) a rare condition that involves a person who is mentally and physically normal, but experiences a strong desire to amputate a limb.

Do we need to understand how and why transsexuals live, and come to make the hard decisions they face? No doubt, of course. This is a painfully marginalized part of society, and we do need to understand.

Same for people who prefer inanimate dolls to human companions, as in the "Strange Love" installment (right). But this is a format that marginalizes them even further, and makes questionable entertainment out them.

The Nat Geo press release says, "Taboo will test your boundaries and push beyond your comfort zone. Understand seemingly bizarre and shocking practices from around the world."

The question is, Why? Do we really need a parade of rare behavioral disorders and Indian exterminators that catch and eat rats under one tent?

I suppose we do. Scrolling through the shows from previous seasons, I found pieces on a woman who was having a passionate affair with... The Berlin Wall. (On the National Geographic Channel website, HERE.) And others on autopsies, plates of grilled guinea pig heads, and maggot medical treatments.

Clicking on one season brought me to the Nat Geo online store, and in the recommendation column for the episode offered up titles "I might like," including "Eating With Cannibals" and, yes, "Albino Murderers." (The Albinos are the victims, not the killers.)

Admittedly, this isn't the bulk of Nat Geo programming. But, the day that this particular venerable institution, one that has catalogued the wonders of the world, throws in the electronic towel and says, "Uncle, we give up" -- Tru TV, here we come -- is a dark one.

It's either that, or, they've just plain run out of material.

Nat Geo's fascination with taboo cultural norms, dress-up and inappropriate age relationships should be relegated back where they came from -- a place where prurient interests are free to roam and take as much bandwidth as they desire.

Right after Pretty Little Liars on ABC Family...

One Word: Plastics!

May 2, 2011 8:34 PM

By Eric Gould

Have you ever contemplated a stack of Tupperware and suddenly seen the genius of the modern movement?

No?

Well, the 2010 BBC series The Genius of Design is now out on DVD with five episodes spanning the bulk of the modern movement in design. It's a fun, educational romp through the marketplace, mass production, consumerism -- and yes, the invention of the once revolutionary and now uber-dull plastic Tupperware.

This series (broadcast last year on the Smithsonian Channel and now available on Acorn DVD) takes a broad look at the growth of modern design since the Bauhaus, the venerable inter-arts and design school founded in Germany before the second World War. Purged by the Nazi party in the late 1930s, most of the founders emigrated to America and Britain.

And what a story it is. The beginning is the consumer revolt against Henry Ford and the Model T, when the assembly line titan misjudges the market, thinking everyone remains happy with the same little black car. He's late meeting growing demand for design variety, and after a strong 10-year run, Ford sales begin to dwindle almost overnight.

From there, it's an entertaining kaleidoscope of chairs, telephones, locomotives and teapots that span the war, the colorful optimism of the '50s and '60s, and the elitist designer '80s. Eventually we come to our own particular phase of affordable, flat-packed IKEA items -- mass produced, environmentally conscious consumerism. (Original IKEA line shown here, from around 1950.

In episode four, "Better Living Through Chemistry," we arrive at the genius of mono-block lawn chairs -- the forebears of the trendy Phillipe Starck clear plastic chairs. As the show reminds us, the expanding and then rampaging use of plastic was forward-looking and exciting -- a colorful wake-up from of the ruins of postwar Europe.

And our little friend Tupperware, once a revelation, soon faded into the everyday cultural background with other consumer plastics. As the critic Roland Barthes is quoted, it was the "first magical substance that consented to be banal." And eventually, as the writers point out, the mono-block chair became "the Zelig of the design world . . . wherever you look, there it is, from Buckingham Palace to Baghdad."

There are some great moments in The Genius of Design, where you realize the reach of designers into the most regular corners of our lives, such as the piece on the tabletop telephone by Henry Dreyfuss. Once so pervasive, it was estimated there were over 160 million of them in use. So common, and so well sculpted was this piece, it simply was -- until it fell to the same fate at the Model T, too ubiquitous to maintain its hold.

Director Peter Sweasy and writer Tim Kirby (prior teamed on The Genius of Photography) do a great job weaving all the disparate players and movements into a grand arc, including journeys into the pre-war origins of the Volkswagen Beetle and the postwar Eames plywood chairs. There's also a fascinating segment on another wartime byproduct, Wally Byam's Airstream trailer, "the modern minimalist vision of living it up, in unpainted aluminum."

A plus for architects is a sober look at Le Corbusier's early residential works from the '40s and '50s, restored and looking every bit as shockingly modern as they must have when they were first built.

The Genius of Design is a smart journey through our own mental attics, where old images are stored and modernism -- as a great achievement -- sought to express the best, simplest designs at an economical price for everyone. It shows our greatest, most enduring designs as the ultimate marriage of art, engineering and commerce.

Not a bad legacy for the 20th century, considering.

[At right: Michele De Lucchi with the Memphis Group's Sotsass bookshelf, c. 1981.]

And finally, in the same spirit, GOD leaves us poised for a new achievement: "production processes that actually benefit the environment by either returning benignly into the soil, or get recycled into new products."

The only way there, is by design, of course.

Current TV Succeeds (and Fails) by Pursuing Interactivity, Bar (Karma) None

April 6, 2011 8:10 PM

Bar.Karma.TOP.jpg

-- First in an occasional look at alt-channels with unique missions or content) --

by Eric Gould

Last week, Bill Maher said that finding the Reelz channel, new home of the orphaned Kennedy miniseries, was harder than finding Al Jazeera. With a thousand channels, narrowcasting, or niche broadcasting, has something for everyone. That includes Current TV, which is something Al Gore actually DID invent...

The Current TV cable and satellite network, which launched in 2005, is a mixed bag of original and "acquired" programming that sometimes hits the mark, and sometimes -- well, been there, seen that, seen it done better.

It's a channel with an interactive broadcast mission that you want to love, despite its frustratingly common underachieving. But it's trying, and even its less than fully successful efforts can be interesting.

TV is now seeping into the culture via the internet and wireless, and its methods and content are morphing by nature. You would expect to be rewarded by a channel, such as Current, that is trying to develop a new paradigm: television that integrates the interactivity and social networking of the web.

With its VCAM programming (Viewer Created Ad Messages) indie and amateur filmmakers can get their work accepted and broadcast, with surprisingly refreshing and timely political and environmental messages getting on the air.

With Bar Karma, a new series in the middle of its first season, Current has given us a light-hearted, thirty minute Hindu salad of karmic choices and time-space distortion -- all with a web presence that solicits viewer content to shape the show.

Current claims that, with Bar Karma, the network has one of the first community-developed television series. On the Current website, fans get to select plots and plot threads, and decide in which direction the show will head next.

Co-created by Will Wright, creator of the massively popular video games The Sims and SimCity, the half-hour show utilizes Wrights' software, StoryMaker Engine (available to see on the Bar Karma website HERE.)

The goal of the Karma writers is to tap into the audience's creativity and dedication, and make it part of the show. Successful contributors to the script, soundtrack, etc., get credited.

The titular bar in Bar Karma is a trippy "watering hole at the edge of the universe," where wayward souls in the middle of life's crossroads stumble in, Quantum Leap-style, to sort out their dilemmas.

They're usually stuck between a bad choice and a worse one, and can see possible futures played out on the bar's TV and in its card games.

Polly Draper, formerly of thirtysomething, co-wrote and starred in a recent episode about a U.S. Senator, in the near future, who had to either publicly support birth control laws she was breaking, or somehow change her fate to avoid jail.

Friday's new episode (premiering on Current at 10 p.m. ET) stars Genie Francis, formerly of General Hospital, as a waitress displaying multiple personalities. The episode is directed by Francis' real-life husband, Jonathan Frakes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. A sneak peek is provided here, to give a sense of both the episode and the series:

The regular crew at Bar Karma includes journeyman William Sanderson (of Deadwood and, even more notably, as Larry from Newhart) as the bartender, and newcomers Cassie Howarth and Matthew Humphreys. Together, they help usher customers through some introspection, and to consider there might be -- and there probably is -- a third way they haven't seen.

The upside here is that we have here an inventive, freewheeling romp through variations on the theme of "one door closes and another one opens." The downside is a California-cornucopia of new-agism and supermarket Buddhism. Seems like the operators at the Bar Karma are way into the Socratic method.

The addition of Bar Karma to Current's line up is a good one -- but alas, as it's been said here at TVWW, "If it's on Current, it's not." Their programming is often good, sometimes average, but a lot of it is throwaway.

Perhaps as a sign of budget or ratings worries, the network is loading up on adventure shows such as Hooked on Danger and SWAT: Miami-Dade. Hardly shows you would expect alongside This American Life or Long Way Around -- two of their better offerings, but ones that, again, are "acquired." That is, reruns.

Current TV's investigative reporting series Vanguard, more international in scope, tends to fall short, in tone and gravitas, when compared to PBS's venerable Frontline. And Infomania, their snarky entertainment and culture show, while often smart, suffers mostly from not having the likes of a Joel McHale or Jon Stewart on point.

All in all, not the direction you would have guessed the former Vice President envisioned Current TV going. That all may be changing, however, with the announced addition of a new Keith Olbermann show in late spring. That just might put Current TV on everyone's radar.

Regardless, 2011 may become known as the year our TV screens finally merged with our computers, and the content, format and style of each acknowledged the other and adapted. Somewhere out there, there's a new model, and a new day, for television.

It's just not there yet. Not Current-ly.

HBO's 'Sunset Limited' Soars

March 15, 2011 4:24 PM

By Eric Gould

There is still time to see HBO's adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's 2006 play debating faith and the existence of God. Starring and directed by Tommy Lee Jones, The Sunset Limited is another dark masterwork by McCarthy, and a sterling showcase for Jones and Samuel L. Jackson, two veterans effortlessly at the top of their game in an unforgettable 90 minutes where existential nihilism and devout belief collide.

Bill Maher, interviewing T.C. Boyle a couple of weeks ago, cited him as the writer of our generation, and that's probably true, if only for his intellectual wit and unmatched power to churn out Class A material like rabbits in the spring. With McCarthy, author of All The Pretty Horses, No Country for Old Men and The Road, it's a dead heat, given his unblinking look at the brutality of our world and the darkness that is borne within all of us.

The Sunset Limited starts with two characters at a table in a shabby tenement, introduced to us as Black (Jackson, as an uneducated ex-con, now a janitor) and White (Jones, as an unshaven, downtrodden professor). It soon becomes clear that Black has just intervened in White's attempted suicide on a subway platform, stopping him from hurling himself in front of a transcontinental train called The Sunset Limited. Black has brought him back to his apartment to gather himself. While White attempts to explain his choice, Black tries to shake his belief that killing himself is the only answer.

What becomes increasingly less clear is whether we're actually watching that, or, whether we're in some sort of metaphysical limbo where Black, as God's Bible-toting emissary, has intervened in the split-second of things -- arguing, cajoling, pleading with White to save himself, to seek salvation in his brother man, and find comfort in God. Is this White's moment to hear God speak?

Black's tenement, a dingy room done in careful detail by Merideth Boswell, Wendy Ozols-Barnes and Marisa Frantz, is the third character here. Its basin sink, peeling paint and rotting molding are expressive of the spare, last stop that White has arrived at. It's a nod to great claustrophobic one-room movies such as 12 Angry Men (1957) and Fail-Safe (1964), as the two men deliver McCarthy's stone simple words, slowly, building, and then often blooming with the musicality of the rolling, racking train that may seal White's fate.

In 90 minutes, Black's and White's thoughts unspool as to why God exists, or why He doesn't. In White's case, if He does, why has He abandoned man? In Black's, it's a steadfast trust in the Lord, even though he knows he doesn't understand everything in front of him. (Jackson, in his biblical quotations, tones it down quite a bit from his executioner's moral outrage in Pulp Fiction, but is just as genuine.)

It's in the final 20 minutes where things become critical, and they're well worth waiting for. When White says that he, himself, is "night in day's clothing," and that "Everything you do closes a door somewhere ahead of you. Finally there's only one door left," you believe him -- as much as you trust Black's steadfastness and comfort in the written word of God.

This ghost train will make you a believer. No matter whether you're with Black, or with White.

The Sunset Limited airs twice more on HBO2 -- late Tuesday night, March 22, at 1:05 a.m. ET, plus Wednesday, March 30 at 6:30 p.m. ET.

It's also available to HBO subscribers online via HBOGo.

(McCarthy's print and audio versions are available here.)

Greetings From Toon Town: The Spy, The Savant and A Robot Chicken

March 3, 2011 5:56 PM

By Eric Gould

Back in the day, cartoon characters lived on the wrong side of the tracks -- a noirish, seedy Los Angeles neighborhood called Toon Town (1988's Who Framed Roger Rabbit?).

The idea was that Toons, as they were slurred, were fully formed cartoons living alongside us in the real-action world: hustling, conniving C-level actors and two-bit criminals not to be trusted. Well, so they remain. Most of the Toons living on cable and the net are still on society's fringe. They're bungling secret agents or robot chickens. And as off-target, offensive -- and funny -- as they ever were.

Of course, The Simpsons is, remarkably, still king, as timely and witty as ever. This and other major franchises such as South Park and Family Guy still get the lion's share of viewers, racking up good numbers even as they habitually troll below even the lowest threshold of good taste for a gag.

If it were simply a contest for worst religious insult or scatological reference, I'm not sure there's a clear winner, even as Bart Simpson skateboarded atop Jerusalem's Wailing Wall in last week's episode.

And then there are the shows that create odd plausibilities (Family Guy with its talking dog, Brian) and take them to extremes, with cultural references flying past so fast you have to rewind regularly.

These can be shows having not just great fun but also purpose, the way Jay Ward and Alex Anderson did with Rocky and Bullwinkle on The Bullwinkle Show (1959-64), where all it took was a flying squirrel and a dumb-ass moose to defeat the Soviet empire. More to the point, Moose and Squirrel were all we needed to get a break from the Cold War boogeymen we were being fed.

Today's American operatives are no less clueless, but hipper, more ironic and better drawn -- say, in the realistic style of Jonny Quest (1964-65). Sterling Archer, the star of FX's Archer (Thursday at 10 p.m. ET), is just the latest witless secret agent with his own show.

FX has hit gold with voice artist H. Jon Benjamin as Archer the clueless hipster, who's used to getting all the girls but is handicapped by the emotional maturity of a 12-year-old. Despite his bungling, he somehow backs into accidentally getting the bad guys each week.

Last year's pilot had him spatting with ex-girlfriend and field partner Lana Kane while undercover, where she accuses him of being unable to cut his "35-year-old umbilical cord" with his domineering alcoholic mother. Archer over-shouts her with "I've seen this movie and, spoiler alert, it ends with a closet full of suits on fire!!"

Archer just may be the guiltiest pleasure of today's Toon variety. And it's only for adults, with all its language and sexual territory. The show also begs the issue of such cartoons: Why in hell do we need such a thing when we have satire done in perfect pitch by the likes of Bill Maher, Jon Stewart and Joel McHale?

But there's an instant layer of freedom and narrative speed when things get flattened to 2D. Each week on HBO's The RIcky Gervais Show (Friday at 9 p.m. ET), real-life hosts Gervais and Stephen Merchant with protagonist Karl Pilkington are literally color-washed away into cartoon depictions -- left sitting at a table, to talk, in effect, about nothing except Pilkington's confused yet dead-on musings.

Suddenly, we're free of narrative and physical conventions -- like time and gravity -- as we're thrown into Gervais' blenderized cartoon world. It's a confection of oddball misconceptions and improbabilities possible only in Pilkington's mind.

Literally, that's the entire show . . . Gervais and Merchant barely able to hold their composure when probing Pilkington's crooked ideas, or reading aloud from his diary.

I have to confess, my love for this show is based mainly on Gervais' hysterics. They're completely infectious. Pilkington's humor is winning -- he recently claimed he witnessed a bee have a heart attack -- but it's Gervais, with his monkey-house laughter, that makes the show such a delight.

If Archer and Gervais are intended for mature audiences, then Robot Chicken -- part of Cartoon Network's Adult Swim block -- is so unsuitable for kids, it runs in the middle of the night (new episodes Sunday at 11:45 p.m. ET), or streams online with TV-MA disclaimers.

A stop-motion mash-up of dolls and claymation characters, conceived by Seth Green (Scotty Evil from Austin Powers), among others, the show never met a cultural reference it didn't like, however obscure and putting even Dennis Miller to shame. RC usually starts by lampooning major motion pictures like Star Wars or The Patriot and old-time puppet shows like Davey and Goliath (with dolls similar to those characters working in a sex shop).

From there -- well, who knows? Robot Chicken (a dead chicken reanimated, half cyborg) takes off onto such tangents and multiple ironic plot threads, it's generally impossible to keep up. But you stay just to see where you'll land. A phantom companion viewer repeatedly changes channels on us; with the static of an old-style tube TV set's control knob, we get thrown into a new show, then back and forth to one or two we were watching before.

It's a crazy, color-saturated kaleidoscope, with Green and the writers trying to out-do themselves each week, taboo atop taboo. Paced like a food processor turned up to max, Robot Chicken seems likely to jump the curb at any moment, and you wonder how they keep it all together. (Now in its fifth season, the show has featured Charlize Theron, Ginnifer Goodwin and Dom DeLuise, among many others.)

Do yourself a favor and watch the opening of "Saving Private Gigli" (oddly, no longer on the Adult Swim website, but still on YouTube here). A collision between Saving Private Ryan and Gigli (Episode 508 was "Schindler's Bucket List"), it begins with all the Chicken characters hitting the beach ala Private Ryan and getting massacred -- red clay blood flying everywhere -- with the Humping Robot carrying his own arm off the battlefield.

No, it's not Death of a Salesman, but what do you expect from Toon Town? Hamlet?

'Southland': No Better Cops

February 15, 2011 11:18 AM

By Eric Gould

Forget the high-concept procedural grand dames or the bullets a-flyin' action shows. Southland has everything you need. This Tuesday night TNT hour (10 p.m. ET) stays down to earth, delivering an absorbing cop show worth caring about.

It's a character-driven drama that doesn't tie everything up with a pretty bow. A strong cast of actors works with scripts that have the rhythm and beat of everyday language. They're ordinary people like us, facing extraordinary circumstances -- the difficult choices that must be made between the letter of the law and the application of it on the streets of south L.A., where the gangs seem to be winning.

Southland is shot hand-held, giving it an artful, documentary-like style where the camera is never level and almost always moving. That makes the show a rightful heir to Hill Street Blues (NBC, 1981-87), which pioneered many of these techniques -- the hand-held look, blurry focusing left in, and characters' personal lives as upfront in the drama as crime itself. The series creator is Ann Biderman, an early writer for ABC's 1993-2005 hit NYPD Blue, which amplified the tone and technique of Hill Street by dialing them up to 11.

There's an even earlier antecedent: N.Y.P.D. (ABC, 1967-69) was shot with a grainy, gritty effect, as Jack Warden's Lt. Mike Haines trudged through the concrete metropolis, shoulders slumped in an overcoat, sometimes missing the bad guys, sometimes lingering in the bar too long. (N.Y.P.D. merits consideration as the legitimate granddaddy of police dramas rooted in the real streets. Actually filmed in the city, it tapped guest stars like a pre-fame Al Pacino, pictured right with Warden.)

As with Lt. Haines, Southland takes us walking onto murder scenes with the detectives, seeing it over their shoulders, the same moment they do.

In the Feb. 1 episode "The Winds" (available to Comcast customers On Demand and online at Xfinity; check other cable systems, or watch full episodes at TNT's Southland page) had veteran street cop John Cooper (Michael Cudlitz) facing his past, present and future, in a rush of events over two days that challenged even his Dirty Harry persona.

We saw Cooper, a tough and sometimes obnoxious cop who straddles the gray lines of his job to dispense his own brand of street justice, having to testify against his father in a stirring speech at the father's parole hearing. Now completely at the end of his ability to cope with an addiction to pain killers that may endanger the job he loves, and the pension he needs, Cooper is reduced to eating pills he dropped, out of the dirt.

Perhaps jumping the ever-present shark, last week's episode "Cop Or Not" gave us a glimpse of the divorced Cooper waking up for work, leaving a young man asleep next to him, as if everything given to Cooper so far hasn't been compelling enough.

Southland is in its third year, and second on TNT. The cable channel picked it up from NBC, whose well-documented recent blunders include canceling it after one year with six shows in the can. (Earlier seasons are available on DVD here.)

Luckily, Southland has been able to retain an impressive cast, including Regina King (Jerry Maguire), Shawn Hatosy (Alpha Dog) and Arija Bareikis (The Myth of Fingerprints). And its group of writers, led by Biderman, who can make even boilerplate crime scenarios feel fresh.

They're as heart-breaking as any you will find, in south L.A., or any other city.

Like yours.

A Show About a Show Getting Screwed in Hollywood

February 6, 2011 6:27 PM

By Eric Gould

Those of us waiting for Larry David to return can meanwhile watch a sort of Curb Your Enthusiasm in reverse -- a Seinfeld Bizarro World of kind, well-intentioned leading characters, with everyone else around them being bitter and inappropriate.

That clever episode had Elaine opting out of her usual group of Jerry, George and Kramer for their analog opposites: the attentive and courteous Kevin, Gene and Feldman. And now Showtime's Episodes has British TV writers Sean and Beverly Lincoln (played by Stephen Mangan and Tamsin Greig), a well-meaning couple adrift in a sea of smiling Hollywood backstabbers.

Episodes is a meta show about producing and writing a show within the show. It also gives us the meta Matt LeBlanc, playing Matt LeBlanc, far removed from his clueless Friends character Joey, that character that everyone expects to find. He's an amplified, wily version of himself, a veteran Hollywood actor, not unlike David's amped-up neurotic schmendrick from Curb.

The Lincolns have come to Hollywood to remake their successful British sitcom "Lyman's Boys" for American television. Their show follows a curmudgeonly headmaster in a boys boarding school. But almost immediately upon their arrival, they find their clever comedy of manners hijacked by degrees into a stock sitcom about a hockey coach called "Pucks."

Episodes (Sunday at 9:30 p.m. ET on Showtime) counts down the dissolution of the Lincolns' artistic integrity and perhaps their marriage. Sean, agreeing to the casting of LeBlanc, becomes smitten by the glitz and glamour of the Hollywood lifestyle, while Beverly becomes increasingly unhinged as she watches her creation morph into something she loathes.

At its core, Episodes looks at America through British eyes, showing us both the fakery and crassness of L.A. culture, and the simultaneous allure of all that hype and money.

Among the clever swerves of the plot, the real writers of Episodes seem to have had one basic criterion as to whether material made it into the script: If they couldn't create an "Oh My God" moment by every other scene, they threw it out. As we watch LeBlanc get the upper hand, and the Lincolns suffer all of Hollywood's ignominies, Episodes keeps the discomfort and the wit at their highest levels. It's that well-crafted.

As a send-up of Hollywood, Episodes smartly hits all the right notes of artistic integrity corrupted from all angles. It has all the shallowness and duplicity of Entourage (although Robert Altman's 1992 The Player and Blake Edwards' 1981 S.O.B. versions of Hollywood were perhaps more outrageous and darkly accurate visions).

As for our current tradition of meta subjects within their own subjects, it playfully breaks the fourth wall. But it misses the the opportunity to take LeBlanc to the comic extremes of David in Curb or screenwriter Charlie Kaufman dropping himself directly into his screenplay of Adaptation.

Episodes has a short run of seven half-hours this season, and we're nearing the end of filming the "Pucks" pilot. We will find out if Sean goes totally Hollywood or not, and if Beverly can stick it out. I've seen the the whole run and promise a couple of inventive, unexpected twists that make the whole first season worthwhile and leave us in the middle of some hard choices the Lincolns would have to make in the second season.

There are some great casting choices here, too. John Pankow (Mad About You) plays the smarmy network executive Merc Lapidus, who grinningly promises "not to change a thing" and then sabotages the show by degrees. Merc changes LeBlanc's character from a lacrosse coach to a hockey coach by asking "Is it too lacrossey"? There is also Daisy Haggard (Sense & Sensibility) as head of comedy for the network. She seems continuously stuck between a clueless smile and a cringe, isn't remotely funny at all, and goes utterly blank at a few golden moments -- the kind that make Episodes the delightful unmasking of Hollywood insiderism it is.

Mayhem, Death and Flo

January 23, 2011 8:29 PM

By Eric Gould

Even the most popular characters on weekly shows don't get the saturation some recurring advertising characters get on a daily basis. If exposure equals success, then they are huge.

My current favorite, Allstate's dark angel "Mayhem," is on every night, pretty much hourly. He's serious, menacing and sometimes gleeful as he orchestrates destruction. I only wish he could somehow make a hit on the Geico gecko. One tree branch from above, and the little guy would be green paste.

The odd thing about Geico's TV ad campaigns is that they hit gold with the Twilight Zone mash-ups of Abe Lincoln and The Little Piggy, yet also carry on with the CGI reptile, probably for demographic reasons. He's cute (they think), while the others are ironic. With Geico, Allstate and Progressive paying national ad rates around the clock, 365 days a year, one wonders how, at those prices, there is money left for anything else.

Allstate's Mayhem hits a spooky cultural trope with his personification, perhaps borrowing (but I'm guessing it's a full-fledged rip) from Quentin Tarantino's 1992 film Reservoir Dogs. In a jewel heist featuring some pretty dangerous men, the job goes terribly and gorily wrong, with each character having donned the undertaker's uniform of black suit, black tie, white shirt. In order to remain anonymous among themselves (thereby eluding the chance to rat on each other later), they're assigned code names; Mr. Pink, Mr. Orange, Mr. Brown, and so on. (Reservoir Dogs' all-star cast includes Harvey Keitel, Tim Roth, Michael Madsen and a young Steve Buscemi.)

Today's commercial Mayhem enters in the same black suit, tie and white shirt, as a pretty dark, memorable character, who also serves up hilarious ways to wreck cars while making the case that he can be avoided by buying Allstate insurance. If you've seen Reservoir Dogs, you may be tempted to load up on Allstate, knowing you do not want to cross paths with Mr. Pink's gang under any circumstances -- especially Madsen's Mr. Blonde, who is one of the more memorable sadists in film history. Case made, Allstate. Where can I sign?

Mayhem's funniest moment comes when he assumes the persona of a distressed teen, texting and not keeping her eyes on the road. He warns darkly, "I'm a teenaged girl. My BFF Becky texted [looks at text] and said she kissed Johnny. Well, that's a problem. Because . . . I like Johnny. Now, I'm emotionally compromised. Whoopsies. [Smashes parked car.] I'm all, OMG. Becky's not even hot. And if you've got cut-rate insurance, you could be paying for this yourself." (See it here.)

Mayhem brings to mind other plot-device characters whose names arise from the metaphor they represent. Ingmar Bergman's character "Death" from his bleak, haunting 1957 black-and-white classic The Seventh Seal arrives for his next victim, a knight returning from the crusades (Max Von Sydow), then agrees to a chess match, knowing that if he loses, he must spare the knight's life.

Well, I'm not sure how many of these self-titled nouns are out there, but they do sort of lurk, through the decades, over our shoulders. Having no proper name, like Clint Eastwood's deadly ghost "Preacher" from 1985's Pale RIder, makes them all the more universal, scary and enduring. (If you have examples of others, please do post them here.)

Speaking of other lurking specters, that moves us to Flo, the hyper-happy, overly made-up and surely mentally damaged floor clerk from the Progressive auto insurance commercials.
Flo, eternally lost in the endless void of Progressive's e-commerce showroom, has most likely gone completely off her rocker, marooned among white shelving, white insurance boxes and the white check-out desk, manned by her dog Pickles.

Flo has a name (although no last name), and is as ubiquitous on our screens as she is bat-shit crazy. I'm not sure this campaign has the same echoes of gravitas from Reservoir Dogs, but it does have an odd, chilling effect and the same subtext -- lots of insurance sold to avoid catastrophe and, in this case, to hasten a quick exit from the white cloud of both the Progressive store and Flo's pancake make-up.

In either case, accosted by Mayhem or by Flo, we buy the characters because they subliminally dig deep. And then we buy the goods. Even if the spokespersons are a little whacked. Or looking to do some whacking.

Life is Really Real! ... Except When It's 'Reality'

December 30, 2010 10:31 PM

By Eric Gould

An old TVWW friend, his eyes gone distant for a second, once blurted out, "Life is ... really ... real!" After a few stunned seconds, we hit him with the usual tonnage of mockery. His point being, though (yes, there was one), that real life in general is too odd, surprising and unscripted to ever be considered banal when compared to the literary kind in novels, films and TV. And that your life, however mundane it seemed, was generally pretty entertaining, excluding catastrophes.

Given the continuing appetite for unscripted TV in 2010 -- competitions, talent contests, dating -- these formats showed us why reality is such a tough place to capture.

If we ever wondered the lengths reality show producers will go to get a story, TVWW's Diane Werts posted a piece last fall on some of the surprising items found in a Survivor contract. Once someone makes the cast, they can't sue the show, ever, as a result of what gets aired, and must agree to "fictionalization" and "dramatization" of themselves, if it benefits the storyline.

Jaclyn Santos, a contestant eliminated from Bravo's Work of Art last summer, took things a bit further when she revealed online that members of the cast couldn't use the internet during the whole competition, were miked all day, had limited contact with family, and were consistently prodded by multiple "story editors" or "segment producers" to be quick with comments they might otherwise have prudently held, in the interest of heightened confrontation and dramatic effect.

Not that we should be surprised by that, or by the fireworks on docusoaps such as The Real Housewives of New York. There's an equal amount of maneuvering and editing involved on competition formats like Survivor, and probably to a certain degree on talent shows like American Idol. The documentary-eavesdrop format has become cliched enough to spawn faux documentary or "mockumentary" pieces like This Is Spinal Tap" and, more recently, The Office.

At the bottom, the draw of these shows is watching ordinary folks like us, and wondering whether they are as able (or as smart, of course) to respond as we would in the same situation.

When it comes to drama, the same impulse is in play. Are the characters identifiable enough, believable enough, "real" enough that we want to watch more? Do they respond like we do, say the things we might say?

When writers and directors get this right, it's what TV does best -- get us to believe in stories and characters that make us care, pay attention, and consider the script's deeper themes.

Except that, often, it doesn't make for great ratings.

AMC's message boards this year were filled with the repeated comment that the channel's Rubicon characters -- ordinary people in extraordinary circumstances -- were people so credible that they were worth caring about. (With Rubicon rating only about half the viewership of Mad Men, AMC pulled the plug, perhaps encouraged by better-than-expected numbers from The Walking Dead.)

Same scenario for FX's Terriers, a noir-ish dramedy about a tubby, unshaven, shaggy ex-cop/recovering alcoholic turned unwilling private eye, all the while carrying the torch for his now-married ex-girlfriend. (Hell, I could have starred in that one.) Donal Logue in the lead was more than "real" in his delivery and reactions. He repeatedly screwed up as well as any of us.

Terriers [photo at top] brought in even lower numbers than Rubicon, and Michael Gaston, with regular roles in both series, has the now dubious footnote of starring in two of the smartest, lowest-rated canceled shows of the same season. Both shows slowed their pace closer to everyday life, held the quips and flying bullets to a bare minimum, and relied on stuff like, wow, great writing and acting.

(Terriers did suffer from one of the all-time preposterous story arcs -- a shadowy developer stringing together real estate parcels in a shabby beach area of San Diego, to be bundled into an uber-parcel for a new regional airport. Note to writers: There isn't a shop full of parrots more vocal than a community of real estate insiders. It could never happen.)

Maybe it's just harder to promote shows like Terriers and Rubicon that don't have car wrecks, and do have longer, more complex story arcs and no immediately identifiable heroes. They can't be effectively summarized in a 30-second spot.

Not that we toss them all out. Dramas featuring characters like us -- making mistakes, losing, sometimes winning -- are out there doing just fine, including AMC's Breaking Bad and FX's Louie. We're believing in those, no trouble at all, and they're both renewed for 2011.

On Jan. 4, we'll have an amazing police drama with palpably real characters starting a new season. Southland, cancelled in 2009 by NBC, won a reprieve and got picked up by TNT, and with good reason. It's a real-feeling show, primarily shot in jerky handheld style, with characters on the job suffering the problems of modern life much as we all do. And, at times, not handling it so well.

Catch up to this series if you can; the first season is out on DVD, with both seasons available from Amazon Video on Demand and iTunes. (And hey, TNT, how about a lifeline for Rubicon or Terriers?)

In general, though, American viewers now seem to be so enamored of "reality" that we generally prefer shows starring people we feel are "just like us" -- even though we know they've been primped, directed and edited. We aren't showing as strong an appetite for dramas that look more real, starring actors playing very real-feeling fictional people.

It's a hard fact that TV sets are no longer boxy objects, but thin, glass planes -- making it feel all the more like we're looking through a window into the next room.

So expect to see us get offered more reality of all kinds in 2011. How could we not? It's ... really ... real!

Spend Time in 'Cool Spaces'

December 14, 2010 11:23 PM

By Eric Gould

If you're not in the habit of paying attention to the 21st century city -- the modern architecture around you -- PBS might be cooking up something to help you look at it more closely. The public TV pilot Cool Spaces is looking at modern architecture. It's up to be green lit, pending panel review and viewer interest from folks like you.

This new show idea by Boston architect Stephen Chung is being developed by The Idea Factory in California. The PBS website says Cool Spaces, which looks at the "most provocative architecture of the 21st century," is "the story of people and how their lives have been affected by a great piece of architecture. Each program presents a complex portrait of a diverse group of people and their shared connection through a building."

On the show website, Chung's portrait appears alongside such current masterworks as Frank Gehry's Guggenheim Museum in Spain's Bilbao (shown above), New York's new building for Cooper Union College by L.A.'s Morphosis (photo below), and Steven Holl's Simmons Hall (photo below that) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

The 13-part series was proposed to the PBS Diversity and Innovation Fund, whose annual panel has short-listed Chung's project with 15 other program ideas (out of 200 submitted). Wednesday, Dec. 15, is the last day to send an email of support for modern design, although there are many other worthy choices, too. (Voice your opinion at the DIFund page.)

Architecture is influential "when someone is able to combine art and purpose and make it beautiful," Chung says on the promo video. "We want to meet the owners, the architects, the clients that are behind some of this great stuff."

Chung is also a featured designer for Showtime's "Showtime House," where luxury residences have been inspired by the themes of original Showtime series. Chung has created a provocative suite based on Laura Linney's character from The Big C.

Personally, I'd be happy with a simple assault on all those colonial mongrels now dotting the American suburbs. But Chung would stay firmly in the public realm, accessible to all. Cool Spaces plans to visit new libraries, dormitories, restaurants and hotels -- new works by leading architects taking the most visual and conceptual risks.

It's not as if the viewing audience has an aversion to design. Series like Design Star on HGTV, and other contest shows like Project Runway or Bravo's new Work of Art, are consistent draws.

I've always supported these shows, despite their cringe factor. They bring the conversation of modernism and design to a large audience. PBS would perhaps present the better format, although a show with difficult-looking modern work, discussed in what may turn out to be too rarified a manner, could be doomed to channel-surfing rejection.

We probably shouldn't expect mainstream ratings for Cool Spaces, which is unlikely to showcase the hysterical crying fit, backstabbing or confessional videos.

But if we're ever to escape the cookie-cutter colonial, it might be through a full exploration into abstract design, new materials and open-space living.

Everything around us is changing fast. Our new offices, museums and public places have the power to inspire us and perhaps make us more creative, efficient and productive.

Cool Spaces seems like it could get us comfortable with 21st century living a lot sooner than we thought.

Eric Gould is an architect at Helicon Design.

Eric Gould Is A Little Bit Country - But Even He Thinks Fox's New "American Country Awards" Special Is a Bit Much

December 6, 2010 7:00 AM

By Eric Gould

At a glance, country music artists can get awarded for pretty much anything by anybody, in categories of such graying distinction as Top Vocalist vs. Top Entertainer. (Isn't the Top Vocalist pretty much the most entertaining??) And the shows seem to be spawning. Case in point: Fox's new American Country Awards special, tonight (Monday) at 8 p.m. ET...

Fox says "the two-hour primetime special is the only country music awards show that gives fans the opportunity to vote for their favorite artists not only in traditional categories, but also in previously unrecognized areas of the business such as touring, encompassing the entire spectrum of country music and bestowing honors that no other awards show has."

So, if we've got this right, the fans, sloshed and brainwashed from the half-dozen other awards shows, get to pick the same performers all over again. Except this time, they get categories such as awards for the mental heavy lifting required for putting together an all-star tour, and "Best Music Video by a Breakthrough Artist."

(Such "breakthrough" artists have been in heavy rotation on the glacially advancing playlist of videos on CMT for over a year now.) I believe Easton Corbin's "I'm A Little More Country Than That", a song-writing achievement equivalent to formatting an office holiday memo, began running during the Bronze Age.

Including videos, breakthrough awards and singles, the voters -- so drilled into submission by CMT -- have nominated Corbin for maybe 10-plus awards.

A casual check showed essentially the same lineup of artists from the Academy of Country Music Awards, (which reached almost 17 million viewers last year), The Country Music Association Awards, the CMT (Country Music Television) Awards, as well as cross-over performances on the American Music Awards and Grammys. Same-old same-old.

And it's a shame, too. While Fox is giving us, yet again, the now-standard, but always top-shelf, lineup of Carrie Underwood, Taylor Swift, Brad Paisley, Lady Antebellum (shown at the top), and the other twenty or so usual suspects, they get to kill off these bankable acts a little faster, since all of them will be so saturated in a year or two, no one will really care.

Maybe this is the Grand Ole Opry gone national in some sort of corporate conspiracy: These stars are so talented, so hot right now, the musical powers that be figure anyone will watch them, any time. Just who is pulling the strings in Nashville, when no one can crack this awards lineup, or the playlists on CMT or your local country hits radio station?

Fox has, I think, unintentionally and ghoulishly underlined the whole thing with the advertising for this one. With the colorization techniques they've oddly given everyone, including the barbecue-stoked Zack Brown, the same, odd, healthy tan and freakishly white teeth, it gives the impression we're going to see the Stepford Country Awards instead.

All of this sadly bypasses the genius of Nashville producers who have engineered, over the past ten years, such sounds that Brian Wilson and Phil Spector never dreamed of (and some object, way too mechanically and slickly.)

The work coming out of Nashville these days is remarkable, taking the pedal steel guitar and four-part harmony to spectacular, crystalline heights -- a level of craftsmanship perhaps second to none. And since these awards show are live, it does give us a chance to witness the mastery of the talent and engineering of these live performances, such as those by Tim McGraw and his band, who have been touring for 15 years. They're nuanced, huge and utterly flawless.

As for the rest of the line up out there in the mass media wilderness -- such scruffy second-tier artists as No Justice and Gary Allen -- they have the same rock chops or better, and equally enthusiastic audiences. They just can't crack The Man's two-hour line up of these shows.

As the seldom seen Jamey Johnson cracked at getting the CMA Song of the Year in 2009, "I never even thought y'all would let me me come to stuff like this, but thanks," joking he wasn't glitzy enough to make the broadcast.

Nothing against Taylor and Tim -- they're excellent artists, and I love them. They're just not the only ones. And though you won;t find the others winning a Best Touring Act award, they're out there, on iTunes and other MP3-video sites, only a click away.

Michael Vick: Football Records, Fighting Dogs and, Just Maybe, Redemption

November 21, 2010 4:38 PM

By Eric Gould

If you think it's all art and design here at The Cold Light Reader, get ready for some football. Last week's Monday Night Football telecast brought us gridiron fans an athletic display so amazing, it will probably never be seen again -- and at the same time, reprised a topic so reprehensible, it will never be easily dismissed. Nor should it be.

Those of us who consider football, not baseball, as America's national pastime, watched in utter amazement as Michael Vick, quarterback for the Philadelphia Eagles, ran and passed essentially at will, in the rain, humiliating the supposed professional football team from Washington in ways unthinkable.

Vick -- who can run faster backwards than most defensive players can forward -- is surely one of the greatest ever to step on the field. Now, as he regains the prowess he displayed before prison (some might say he transcends it), Vick continues to bring the ugly, depraved subject of dogfighting along with him.

On this rainy night, the soggy football not mattering much, Vick became the only player in NFL history with at least 300 yards passing and 50 yards rushing in the same game. He passed for four touchdowns, and ran for another two.

Among many team records set Nov. 15, the Eagles scored 45 points in the first half, and had the biggest lead (28 points) after the first quarter for any NFL road team since at least 1950.

This magnificent display of offense left ESPN's Monday Night Football broadcast team of Mike Tirico, Ron Jaworski and former Tampa Bay coach Jon Gruden without sufficient superlatives shortly after the end of the first quarter. There just weren't words left.

But there was, however, another subject.

Tasked with commenting on the full story, the MNF broadcast team soberly recounted Vick's 2007 indictment and incarceration for his participation in the Bad Newz Kennels, which bred pit bulls expressly for the ghoulish so-called sport of dogfighting.

They set out the facts that Vick had served his time, and his debt to society, and also had been bankrupted by his involvement, losing all the riches he had gained as an elite American athlete.

In his book The Lost Dogs: Michael Vick's Dogs and Their Tale of Rescue and Redemption, Jim Gorant followed the fate of the 51 dogs rescued from Bad Newz Kennels. All but four of them made it, either being successfully relocated as pets, or finding refuge in rescue kennels for the rest of their lives. Some were retrained as therapy dogs, where they are close with patients needing loving contact.

Those of us who are ardent dog lovers, to the point of habitually embarrassing ourselves in public by greeting every dog we meet with baby talk and gibberish, find the idea of dogfighting so abhorrent, we. too, are left without words.

The sadism involved in this underground world is just a few clicks away on the internet, where sickening photographs are freely available of dogs who have survived these events.

It's incomprehensible that anyone with the slightest shred of humanity could witness, let alone enjoy, such a thing.

Gorant, writing in Sports Illustrated this October, recounts the debts Vick has paid, the inadvertent spotlight he has thrown on the dogfighting industry, and the raw feelings still out there among the public. (It's worth the extra read, here.)

Again, we crazies who find the world in a dog's eyes had more to celebrate with the engrossing recent NOVA documentary Dogs Decoded. (Premiered Nov. 9 on PBS, it's available at Amazon on DVD or VOD, and also streaming online at Netflix.) This hour examined the thousands of years of history between man and canine, each benefiting the other, with dogs being able to read and respond to human emotions, and humans, in turn, responding to dogs with the same hormones as a mother to her child.

It's with no little irony that the NFL recently started cracking down on defensive players taking cheap shots at offensive receivers and running backs in vulnerable positions carrying or catching the ball. For years, these sickening, sadistic kinds of tackles were considered normal, by some even an essential part of the game. Now, the NFL is levying heavy fines on hits that go beyond a tackle.

As a fan, I somehow was always able to block them out, as part of the strategy and group precision of the sport I love. I assume that same ability to disassociate allows me to watch Vick's athletic feats for a time, without the fate of the Bad Newz dogs coming to mind with every play.

The next sports chapter in the Vick saga finds the 6-3 Eagles colliding with the 6-3 New York Giants this Sunday night at 8:15 ET on NBC. The Philly-Giants rivalry is one of the oldest in the NFL, and second to none.

Surely, after last Monday's performance, all will be watching to see another mind-bending Vick performance, without the degree of savagery that has sullied the game for too many years.

Certainly, the survivors of the Bad Newz Kennels got the lucky break they so deserved. With Vick on the field, we'll be mindful of that for a long time to come.

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Todd Margaret's Uncomfortable Adventure

November 11, 2010 2:32 PM

By Eric Gould

Besides giving us perhaps one of the great literary titles for a TV show, David Cross's The Increasingly Poor Decisions of Todd Margaret has also given us the next great cringe-comedy character, no-holds-barred indie-style, on IFC.

(The six-episode miniseries, which debuted this October on IFC after its original UK run, will rerun starting again this Friday at 10 p.m. ET. You can also download the episodes for $1.99 each at iTunes.)

Cross is a hardened standup comic, co-host and writer of the former HBO cult hit Mr. Show, an alumnus of Arrested Development, and recently played the self-serving producer Ian Hawke trying to corrupt the CGI rodents to his own financial gain in Alvin and the Chipmunks.

In Todd Margaret (which he produced, co-wrote and directed, in addition to playing the lead), he's given us a schlubby office temp and habitual liar who's never been out of Portland, Oregon, yet by accident finds his way into a senior sales position in the London office for a new energy drink called Thunder Muscle. Very quickly, he realizes he is in way, way over his head, and has to go on with it, or admit failure -- worst, to himself.

It's a nightmare of the first degree, equal to showing up in school in underpants.

Todd is next in the line of television pariah royalty, completely unable to succeed because of himself in the style of Seinfeld's self-hating George Costanza (Jason Alexander), boldly going where he shouldn't like Larry David, with delusions of wisdom and power a la that self-important ignoramus with a heart, Michael Scott (Steve Carell).

The twist here is that Todd isn't so far gone he believes anything that comes out of his mouth. As the IFC tag line for the show says, "The world's worst liar. Honest." Like the rest of us, he's just going for what he thinks he's entitled to -- money, domination, sex, success -- and will say anything to get him there.

Co-conspirators Dave (Blake Harrison as his office assistant of dubious motivation) and Alice (well played by Sharon Horgan as Todd's unwilling love-interest) are all too astonished and sometimes pleased to let him continue on. As each preposterous idea builds on another, they watch him twisting uncomfortably in his own self-made wind.

Cross's Arrested Development co-star and ongoing Bromance, Will Arnett, is his antagonist here, in the form of regional sales boss Brent Wilts. True to form, Arnett (Running Wilde) is the pitch-perfect a-hole, spewing what are surely the most inventive sales trash-talking expletives ever devised. (Parents beware.) A blend of inappropriate sales office rants and gutter poetry, the high-octane insults and language are critical to the tone of the show, and Cross did not want to water them down. The stakes in sales are high, and so is the pressure to succeed. Any sanitized version would ring hollow.

But as you might expect, given Todd's circumstances, Thunder Muscle isn't flying off the shelves. What does sell in this show is the odd, uncomfortable world Cross has created for himself and us to think about: who is selling whom, and perhaps why we shouldn't be so eager to buy the dream -- The Thunder, The Muscle-- in the first place. (Especially considering what's behind it.)

Cross's genius as an actor is his humanity despite the bald-faced lies he's spinning. His mix of determination, shame and perversity is complex and hard won. And the story is a Larry David-worthy stew full of plot threads crossing, missing and then colliding unexpectedly. (Cross says his success from the Chipmunks films has allowed him the creative and financial freedom to "lose money" on this project where he had the control to explore material that interested him as a writer, director and actor.)

The one stumbling block Cross has created for himself may be keeping Todd's gaffes always turned up to 11. The guy cannot resist going for the long bomb every play, so there's a dulling to the tone at points where Todd edges on beyond shrill.

Nevertheless, he is a nuanced and complex enough actor to sidestep, hedge and shuffle his way out of almost anything with a minimum of effort -- so perhaps we're just watching an artist dig himself the deepest hole to see if he can plausibly find a way to climb out of it. (He's been quoted as having empathy for Todd, who's not a malicious or mean character, just someone desperate to change his life through a bunch of shortcuts, all the while habitually shooting himself in the foot. The plus here: We get to watch someone else do that, sparing ourselves the humiliation of entertaining the idea of being someone we're not.)

In most cases Cross succeeds, and through his wit and invention keeps things moving from episode to episode.

IFC, however, has a little 'splainin' to do in terms of the shows' format. Each episode is a day, and begins with Todd on trial -- he is coming to an ill end -- and then cuts to a countdown of how many days before the trial begins. We start at "14 days earlier" and end at nine days earlier -- so let's hope the rest of the series has already been shot, and the second mini-season of eight final episodes is to definitely come.

IFC hasn't really addressed this on their website or in press releases, and there are too many channel choices out there to be purposely confusing the audience. The numbers for this funky little show are most certainly small enough already.

Of Spies and Men: AMC Creatively Leads the Way

October 24, 2010 7:00 AM

By Eric Gould

The internet was rife last week with postmortems on the season finales of AMC's Mad Men and Rubicon. And with good reason: These two shows gave us the most to discuss simply because they were better -- and smarter -- than everything else TV had to offer.

No other shows (save HBO's Boardwalk Empire and a few other precious contenders) boasted the compelling writing, directing, acting and art direction that kept us not only coming back week after week, but discussing it all six days in between.

With Breaking Bad and Mad Men already in their arsenal, and this year with Rubicon and the upcoming The Walking Dead (which I've seen in advance), AMC has qualitatively knocked HBO from its long-time Sunday night pedestal, when that night used to be dominated, in terms of quality TV, by HBO.

At the same time, AMC shows are the clear losers quantitatively, with the ratings showing Mad Men losing to Keeping Up With the Kardashians in the same time slot, and Rubicon falling behind Swamp People by almost half in their same-hour competition.

Of course, we shouldn't be surprised by those losses, or discouraged by them. One has to presume AMC is profiting from small audiences (or at least not hemorrhaging because of them), and is getting wide critical acclaim from almost every corner. We'll find out soon enough if they have the stones to re-up Rubicon, which at times suffered from what some (but not I) saw as a lethargic pace and an underwhelming audience body count.

But the real winners here are we viewers: Audiences in search of smart, stylish, dramas that made us think, and then consider more deeply, the complexities and themes we were given each week.

Not that there weren't flaws.

With Mad Men, we were asked at the beginning of the season, "Who is Don Draper?," only to find out by season's end that he was neither simply DIck Whitman nor Don Draper, but perhaps a complex blend of the two -- suddenly topped with a whipped cream dollop of a love-struck schoolgirl skipping off to a hasty engagement in a business suit.

Throwing caution to the wind on a family trip to Disneyland (of course,) he asks his secretary Megan to marry him after a micro-dating period, and fobbing off Faye, the one mature, self-integrated figure he's encountered who has accepted him as he is, completely, without judgment.

It felt eerily like a writer's flea-flicker trick play, with Don so out of character, and perhaps the first sign of shark-jumping that Mad Men may be running out steam.

So be it. Every series faces the moment where new plot lines and characters feel contrived. Mad Men will not be immune to the problem of a great show wondering where to go. The Sopranos managed to avoid it by coming back every other year, and also maintaining longevity through small, quirky shifts in tone that didn't stretch credibility too far, but gave characters fresh environments in which to work. It was an amazing fine line that David Chase designed for himself to walk.

I'll keep watching Mad Men not so much for the various dramatic plot threads, but more for an examination and understanding of the enormous cultural upheavals of the '60s and early '70s that are in store for its characters. Mad Men looks at a the mid-twentieth century so well: a stylish, colorful spree of modernism and hair products that gloss over very troubling and repressive post-war social roles, which the characters are finding out, in various ways, do not suit them all that well. Much of the drama in Mad Men is men and women acting out against roles they've come to realize are life-long binds.

It's what happened to all of us of that era, and it was a time when society as a whole threw off the safe, mass-manufactured conventions of the Eisenhower years -- the ranch house and Ozzie and Harriet. En masse, we went into psychotherapy to examine whether life was just the pursuit of a mortgage and a color TV, or if there weren't something more to the whole thing.

The family unit as the cultural foundation was beginning to fracture, and along with it, the feelings of certainty that once lay ahead. We consciously traded that security for something unknown -- a high-wire act we're still performing. Where it lands, nobody knows, but Mad Men helps us take a piercing look at how we got here.

Rubicon persists in my brain like the speech affectation of Truxton Spangler (Michael Cristofer), his quirky accent perched somewhere between Sir John Gielgud and Stanley Kowalski. It challenged other conventions as well, most significantly with its narrative conceit -- namely, that a story could be told in slowly peeling layers, quietly.

It's a show that will perhaps come to be recognized as the spy-thriller giving us exactly one on-camera gun shot fired during the entire season. (Which is precisely one more than any of us will hear during a life time, and also the equivalent number found every two seconds during an episode of the new Hawaii Five-O.)

It took a hard look, in the alienating style of the film Three Days of the Condor, at Eisenhower's warning that the military-industrial complex would be driving the bus, instead of protecting it. Rubicon revealed some very powerful corporations and men inside the government, prodding along terrorist events to their own financial and political gain, with precious little patriotism to be found.

Rubicon asked that we seriously look at political conflicts conducted silently in the background through the might of information superiority, the manipulation of mass-media, the culture of fear, proxy wars and client states... all through the beleaguered eyes of Will Travers (James Badge Dale) and the others at the fictional American Policy Institute, a counter-intelligence group of analysts higher up than the CIA or NSA.

Not that the show didn't have loose ends and odd plot threads. (I would be committing a grievous reportage failure if I did not acknowledge, and steer you to, Andy Greenwald's hilarious unmasking of various loopholes in the season finale in New York magazine's Vulture website, which you can read HERE -- it's absolutely entertaining, but casually dismissive of the many true triumphs of the series.)

The most obvious irony was Katherine Rhumor's easy elimination by the evil prick of a poisoned-tipped pin in broad daylight in Central Park, as opposed to Donald Bloom's bungled hit that ends with Will being almost choked to death with a bath towel, furniture smashing everywhere, the neighbors undisturbed.

(I immediately thought of Scotty Evil in Austin Powers, International Man of Mystery, who, outraged, asks why Powers just cant be shot immediately, rather than being lowered into a pool of mutated sea bass and left for dead. Scott wails, "I have a gun, in my room, you give me five seconds, I'll get it, I'll come back down here, BOOM, I'll blow their brains out.")

Nevertheless, I don't buy the majority of criticism asserting that Rubicon moved too slow, or under-delivered. That the finale didn't wrap up everything was a smart set-up for a possible second season, but, more important, it asked that viewers participate and think about it for a bit, and fill in the blanks themselves. Become co-authors of our real, unfolding political drama.

Maybe we did learn something after all. And the art-direction of the series -- the unsettling quiet streets, the long city shadows of the di Chirico-styled figures, the odd symbologies -- were all deeply satisfying.

Perhaps our best reward was Arliss Howard's character, Kale Ingram (seen at the top of this column), a Mephistophelian orchestrator of in the background, playing both sides -- Will's supposed protector, and former Black Operative. He revealed a universe of acting with just the slightest wedge of a smile.

As the next AMC offering, its visually stunning zombie thriller, The Walking Dead (beginning Halloween night), will be the next work of art to capture our imaginations.

I've seen the first two shows, and while it sets a questionable high for a grisly mess on standard cable, it also probes the underlying themes of free-floating anxiety and fear in our time, the mindless urban hoard we've found ourselves living amongst, and asks the question, What are the things we truly most want to live for?

As long as AMC will be providing us with smart, provocative dramas like these, consider me a viewer.

And a fan.

Exquisite Corpse

October 13, 2010 11:52 PM

By Eric Gould

For those who find the ordinary and everyday more startling than TV drama, a new Sundance/IFC documentary on the demise and suspended afterlife of Braddock, Pennsylvania, provides TV definitely worth watching.

Portraits of Braddock is part of the documentary series called Ready to Work, sponsored in part by Levi's, and running on Sundance Channel this month. Next airing Thursday at 9 p.m. ET, it debuted Oct. 4, and is also streaming online at IFC.

Braddock is a series of vignettes -- interviews with a cross section of longtime residents still hanging on, and newcomers who have arrived in a place where a fixer-upper can be had for $1,500. All have their own individual motivation to live where there is no tax base, and a reported 90 percent of the structures have been torn down because of abandonment or neglect. The ones still left standing look like they'll be next.

When the steel industry disappeared overseas in the 1980s, most of mill towns on the Monongahela RIver near Pittsburgh lost their entire job base and, with it, their reason for being. Populations dwindled. Property values tumbled, and so did tax revenues. Poverty and drug addiction set in, and so went the downward spiral of abandonment and evaporating hope.

With Braddock and other towns languishing at low-level subsistence, the occupants may be edged out in terms of drama by the dilapidated houses and buildings themselves -- roofs fallen in, windows boarded up, paint peeled off. Rusting signs and weedy lots everywhere, Braddock weathered into an exquisite wreck, wearing the neglect and passage of time like a great piecemeal quilt, which is at times hauntingly beautiful.

Indeed, one of the better parts of director Aaron Rose's Portraits is the photography (by Tobin Yelland). As a subject, the wrecks of Braddock drift by one after another, often filmed from a slow-moving car. As the sad parade goes by, it's hard to think that even with intermittent booms since the early '80s, towns like Braddock couldn't make it back, and are still trying to find a way out. It leaves you wondering whether there is no economic model that makes sense to get these kinds of areas back to work. Are they just doomed to disappear, Darwinian victims of tidal changes in the economy?

Many residents of Braddock grew up there and can't envision themselves living anywhere else. It's home. Others have arrived looking for affordable real estate and the hope of a new start -- to reclaim the town and their own lives. Marshall, a sustainable farmer determined to bring the town fresh food, began Braddock Farms on empty lots virtually in the town center.

Artists, too, as in many communities looking to revitalize, have been encouraged and helped to move in. Inspired by the rust and decay, these new residents are compelling for their youth and their optimism amidst the ruins. It's an engrossing contrast of lives lived with passion and a town in many ways far past hanging on by the fingernails.

Levi's Ready to Work campaign seems to be an authentic case of a large corporation taking its social responsibility seriously, and using that as part of its marketing campaign. Their website goes far beyond their brand and product with current sustainable and green articles, and with this series, they've contributed financially to Braddock reclamation projects.

Instead of models posing as the downtrodden, they hired real Braddock residents for billboard and print ads that claim to explore real people facing real hardships in a tough economy. They're spotlighting those who like newcomers to Braddock are trying to make new opportunities for themselves after the job market left them with no other options.

Well, buyer beware. It's probably unwise to take a corporate responsibility campaign unquestioned, especially directly from that same company's PR department. (I assume Sundance and IFC are our fourth estate in this regard.) There's always the possibility we're simply watching a long-form Levi's commercial couched as a gritty documentary.

But let's assume the best of intentions for now, and say that Portraits of Braddock is indeed what it says it is -- a collaboration between these extremely talented filmmakers, the local government, a socially responsible corporation, and the occupants of this very strange, very rundown, endlessly interesting community.

Do 'Rubicon' Pictures Tell All?

October 1, 2010 6:21 PM

By Eric Gould

It's always clear when a show is at its top; the directing, acting, styling, lighting and film are all going effortlessly in the right direction. It's a true thing of beauty. And sometimes, editors and directors stay on a shot for a few extra seconds for us (and probably them), to take it all in.

In the case of Rubicon (Sunday at 9 p.m. ET on AMC), those extra seconds may also be something more -- just as covert as the intelligence analysts in their offices, poring over hundreds of pages of seemingly disconnected dots.

Should we be taking a cue from Will Travers (James Badge Dale) and the rest of the API team in New York, and start stitching together our own scraps of leads -- in this case, the vision part of television?

As retired analyst (and possible future victim) Ed Bancroft (Roger Robinson) told Will in Episode 5:

"Our job is to find the dots, connect the dots, then understand the dots . . . the dots are out there in the bits and pieces of information of thousands of signs and symbols that we can pull out of raw data. A man waiting for a bus in Caracas; a woman buying vegetables in an Algerian market; teenagers fornicating in a Liverpool basement. What's the connection? What's the narrative?"

Well, fornicating in a basement aside, I'm Jonesing for any little scrap of narrative that will unlock what the Rubicon conspiracy is all about, and whether or not there is a double agent inside the American Policy Institute (API as it's called, so elite it sees information and surveillance that even the CIA or NSA can't get.)

Since Will and the other API teams must put together the smallest of shreds of electronic data and surveillance, trying to make out patterns of world-wide terrorist attacks in the planning stages, I assume the producers are demanding the same of us. Why should Will and the gang do all the work, sifting through mounds of seemingly unrelated newspaper clippings and phone records?

Shouldn't we be doing our share?

-----

Back in the day, say 17th Century, we got our images in one still shot -- oil paintings. With limited bandwidth, so to speak, artists did a lot of ensemble pieces with separate scenes of action within the frame, needing to pack as much content as possible into one work.

The one here by Nicolas Poussin, "A Dance to the Music of Time" (1640), is recognized for its packed symbols: the four dancers representing the cycle of Poverty, Labor, Industry and Wealth; time running out (the hour glass), the brevity of life (the child's bubble pipe), and the chain of generations (the Janus figure looking forwards and backwards).

(Poussin's "Shepards of Arcadia" (1638) by the way, was conscripted by the Priory of Scion -- the 1950s hoax that inspired The Da Vinci Code -- and that one had a hero symbologist, too, sifting for the slightest hints of meaning.)

So, we fast-forward 450 years to the Rubicon visuals team -- brilliant director of photography Michael Slovis, production designer Tim Grimes, art director Toni Barton. Instead of one shot, we have 10 hours so far of motion pictures. Are they giving us clues, but some only in painterly images, and we're just not seeing them?

Rubicon, if you've been following this enigmatic counter-terrorism drama, tracks Travers as he trips over a conspiracy coded into crossword puzzles published in international newspapers. He begins to suspect that his mentor at API, David Haddas (Peter Gerety), recently killed in a train crash, was murdered. It is revealed that there is a conspiracy at the highest levels of API -- seven childhood boys in a photo that keeps turning up, and two of them have committed suicide after receiving a four-leaf clover, the sight of which triggers some pre-programming in them to make them do it. So much for a lucky clover, and someone's idea of the cruelest irony.

TVWW's Fearless Leader, David Bianculli, recently wrote "it's not paranoia if it's actually happening." And it is happening: the odd, speech-affected Director of API, Truxton Spangler (played superbly by Michael Christopher), is clearly in the now grey-haired group of boys that seems to be involved in some sort of world-wide profiteering based on market swings in politically volatile regions, and their ability to know what's happening in advance. Spangler's a major player, bugging an owl statue in Will's office. (And in case you missed that connection, Will ought to fear the bald character, the night predator.)

Angels appeared regularly in medieval paintings with halos, usually a gold dish of light silhouetting the head. In one recent episode, in the API conference room, Will had a virtual halo (a wall mounted fan) around him. (See at the top of the article.) Maybe it's safe to say that Will's not playing anyone, and he really is only trying to figure out what really happened to his mentor Haddas, and won't turn out to be some sort of double agent.

And speaking of double agents, is Tanya McGaffin (Lauren Hodges) one herself? She has a drug addiction problem, a Russian name, somewhat extremist tendencies, and she might just be troubled enough at ordering predator strikes, and not having the talent of Miles Fiedler (Dallas Roberts), to want to sabotage the whole order of things.

It's been made clear that whoever hacked into API's network would virtually hold the keys to the free world, the information there is so sensitive. By recent episodes, Tanya has wedged herself to the center seat of the conference table, at the center of the map of the world, while Miles and Grant are below the line of the painted wainscot. Is Grant (Christopher Evan Welch) really in the dark? Will Miles (Dallas Roberts) be the one who solves the mystery?

Above is Miles as rabbi with his pupil, Julia (Natalie Gold). Julia appears in this scene with the long curling sideburns of the rabbinical student. This is the second scene where we've seen Miles with one light behind him -- is he the one, true, incorruptible light who will expose the conspiracy?

And what about Will's courtyard Rear Window admirer, Andy (Annie Parisse), the painter in the tank top? Is this a sign that a female -- in a male symbol of brute power -- is somehow involved and against Will? If the double-agent is female (like one of their assassinated suspects, Tanaz, whom they were tracking through the Middle East), maybe it's Tanya. (The character of Maggie seems less likely a threat, although she's been twice seen in "spy wear.")

And what of Kale's live-in partner Walter? Last week we saw them in the bedroom, at the center stage of the opera-drama painting on the wall. (Also, the shape is evocative of a coliseum, a venue for one-on-one combat.) Kale found a bug in a lamp on the roommate's side. Again, Spangler will use all available techniques, and Kale could be sleeping with the enemy, or is Walter being "framed" as when he was shown against the other painting in the room?

Will's immediate boss, the gym-coiled ex-field assassin Kale Ingram (another fantastic performance by Arliss Howard), is clearly playing both sides, not revealing what he knows but trying to steer Will in the right direction. Kale speaks in cryptic puzzle-hints to Will, just giving him enough information to get to the next step.

It's clear he's playing both sides. (He's shown in front of bridges a lot, and once, against snarled barbed wire on the roof of API.) Will his life as a former operative and assassin finally catch up with him, as the decapitating "head shot" taken in Spangler's office shows?

Or, maybe he's a pawn of Spangler's as well, as seen when Will is in Kale's loft, with the Red House artwork, perhaps a clear warning sign that Will's in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Bridges play an important graphic element. Kale's been connected to Will in front of the Brooklyn Bridge, and also with Maggie (Jessica Collins). Last week, we saw Will with Katherine (Miranda Richardson) connected in the same way, so maybe it's safe to say at this point that all of the characters are joined, probably on the side of the moral and good, and we should be looking to the other characters for the real villains.

The secrets of Rubicon are many. Are the "Clover Group" (the Seven Boys) simply war-time profiteers, or is there something more? Has a double agent compromised API? What side is Ingram really on? Where will the next terrorist strike be? Is everything connected somehow?

As his predicament deepens, Will can't presume to trust anyone, and must alone outwit the whole thing. Spangler has warned Ingram that Travers will be dealt with, "as all problems are." (Also clear, just by a wince and a muscle twitch, Ingram really does fear Spangler. An amazing moment.)

-----

All of these characters have been fascinating and well developed, all having "crossed the Rubicon" (point of no return) in some manner because of the nature of their work in counter-intelligence. They've all sacrificed personally and morally to do the work they do.

I will be disappointed if the elders at API are merely going rogue, kicking it Cheney-style, because they are all-powerful, jaded cold-warriors trying to go back to the good old days of the post-war military-industrial complex. I feel like the writers have been too smart and too original for that.

Hopefully, the eventual conclusion will be as timely as the other plot references have been, and we will indeed learn something new from this small, humble piece of fiction.

It's hard to imagine where Rubicon will go from here if it returns, the scope and depth of its inaugural year being so finely crafted. (The ratings have been low, and there is an email campaign being devised to get the attention of AMC decision-makers.)

Season 1 is going to be a tough act to follow. The best part of Rubicon is that it doesn't rely on explosions, grisly murders or stock Hollywood psychos stalking the female leads. It simply takes ordinary daily life, and turns it into something steeped in danger, which is quite an analogy for times wrapped in terror and economic upheaval.

My sense is this season of Rubicon will have gravitas as lasting as such venerable TV works as Homicide, Six Feet Under, Pennies From Heaven (Dennis Potter's 1978 version) and others. It's just too well written, too well acted, too well directed not to get the true consideration it deserves. Let's hope so, even though the Emmys are light years away next summer. When people are working this well, they deserve recognition.

And what about the four-leaf clover? Will's clues from the crossword puzzles say it symbolizes a secret, fourth branch of Government. I leave nothing uncovered, including the old song I learned in grade school.

Yes, conspiracy friends, I learned the first clue as a young boy, just like the Gang of Seven in the photo by the lake. Now, is it someone that Will adores? Kale? Truxton?

It's still a mystery.

I'm looking over a four-leaf clover
That I overlooked before
One leaf is sunshine, the second is rain
Third is the roses that grow in the lane

No need explaining, the one remaining
Is somebody I adore
I'm looking over a four-leaf clover
That I overlooked before

-----

For more clues, visit AMC's Rubicon site.

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He's Bleeping Kenny Powers!

September 24, 2010 12:18 PM

By Eric Gould

Eastbound & Down returns this Sunday (10:30 p.m. ET on HBO) with Danny McBride taking another turn as the obnoxious, washed-up major league pitcher who looks like he's getting another chance at pro ball in the Mexican league.

Last year, Kenny Powers returned home to North Carolina to teach gym at his old high school after washing out of baseball, getting traded from team to team, his fastball disappearing, and his time in the big leagues along with it.

Those who follow Eastbound know that the Powers character was loosely modeled on real-life Atlanta Braves flame-throwing relief pitcher John Rocker, who suffered multiple episodes of politically incorrect foot-in-mouth interviews -- and who, too, washed out of the majors shortly after his own fastball-disappearing act.

The show is co-written by McBride, and co-produced by Will Ferrell and Adam McKay, the masterminds of seriously dumb-ass characters in Step Brothers, Talladega Nights, and the gold standard for all clueless morons, Anchorman.

Like HBO's pariah for the metropolitan set, Larry David in Curb Your Enthusiasm, Powers is the foul-mouthed, inappropriate anti-hero for suburbia. He's the W.C. Fields of his day, cursing in front of children, fixating on sports, too fat, too drunk, wearing too-tight black jeans, and boasting an ego to match his ridiculous mullet.

After last year's first episode, I wondered why on earth HBO was wasting time and money on such a jerky character. It was tough to stay with him. But then again, they (and we) have been squarely behind Larry David for years, and Ricky Gervais, too. Seems the cringe-fests hit the mark.

And with good reason. Kenny Powers is just about everything we shouldn't be, and is monumentally inappropriate doing it. The laugh is definitely on him, and maybe we're the better off for it, since most of us would be too polite to act this way in real life. TV gives us the opportunity to watch a real dip-s#*!, and freely have the last laugh on all the dumb jock stuff, without getting thrown against the lockers and having our lunch money stolen. (Maybe the sports hogs are watching, too, and learning a thing or two from this doppelganger.)

McBride is a smart actor with good comedy instincts, as seen in Pineapple Express and particularly, with depth, in The Heartbreak Kid with Ben Stiller. He's accompanied by the ever chameleon-like Jonathan Hawkes (as Kenny's brother, Dustin), who has had amazing turns in Me and You and Everyone We Know, Deadwood, The Perfect Storm and Taken.

There aren't a lot of "aww" moments in Eastbound & Down; Kenny makes some half-hearted attempts at being a better person, living with lost fortune and lost fame without bitterness. But it doesn't last for long; his worst instincts take over, his taste for making his way back to the Alpha Male high-life is too strong. If there's anything to guarantee the failures of Kenny Powers, it's Kenny Powers.

Turning this moron around would take a lot of sitcom tricks. Somehow, I think between McBride and Ferrell, we'll eventually get an original -- and extremely cringe-inducing -- outcome. Kenny certainly deserves it.

"The Fountainhead": Man's Right to Free Modernism

September 13, 2010 7:15 AM

By Eric Gould

The Fountainhead, the 1949 film adaptation of Ayn Rand's 1943 novel about modern architecture on trial, is televised tonight at 9 ET by TCM. At one time, it was every architecture student's introduction to the profession -- and moral compass, and crack-cocaine equivalent.

Principled protagonist Howard Roark, played in the movie by Gary Cooper, swelled the heads of most impressionable college students beyond all recognition -- and, in many, set standards so impossibly high, he generally doomed generations of career architects to therapists' offices within 10 years. (Not that I have any personal knowledge of that...)

OK, perhaps that's a bit dramatic. But so was The Fountainhead. Rand's right-ish creed of "objectivism" -- a concoction of heroic individualism, unbridled capitalism and free will -- is in full force here. It's a drama about a New York architect with little means, toiling in obscurity, but remaining hard and true to his artistic vision of the modern future, no matter the consequences, battling with owners, financiers, and the public.

The film follows Roark through his struggles in post-war New York, where he must make hard choices of remaining honest to his work or giving it all up. It's up to the visionary to find like-minded clients who see the value of remaking of the city through architectural modernism.

The stuff of superheroes -- if they wore white shirts and carried a T-square. But for its time, Rand's The Fountainhead was perhaps the first to feature a lone artist pitted against the mediocrity of popular taste -- before many films such as those to follow about Van Gogh, Rodin and Camille Claudel.

True to mid-century melodrama, Roark is forced into drastic action to save his architectural creations -- and his integrity. He must then face judge and jury, where he, as his own lawyer, gives one of the great courtroom speeches on film. (And I write that having seen a LOT of courtroom speeches on film.)

For architecture students, the special treats here are the architectural renderings of Roark's works -- wonderful ink drawings of modern dynamism as envisioned by Hollywood artists, shown just for a few seconds here and there, but very much conveying the mood of Roark's supposedly unique vision. Gorgeous scale models, too.

Rand, a devotee of Frank Lloyd Wright (he designed a house for her, never built), modeled the brash architect after him, finding his arrogance, talent and self-aggrandizing the perfect frame around which to wrap the Roark character.

The Fountainhead was shot in very compelling, oftentimes moody black-and-white, where the buildings soar and take center stage as characters of their own. and features great performances by Raymond Massey and Patricia Neal. She was 22 at the time, and reportedly immediately became involved with Cooper once filming started, making their on-screen heat no small acting accident.

It's all here: unapologetic personal gain, artistic passion, romance and selfless sacrifice... hot off the drawing board in the drafting room.

Enigmas Inside of Riddles: Who's Pulling 'De Schtrings'?

September 5, 2010 6:30 PM

By Eric Gould

NBC is premiering The Event this month -- specifically, Sept. 20 at 9 p.m. ET. Gauging from the pilot, it promises to be the next series to cryptically bind seemingly unrelated threads into a larger conspiracy, where we won't know who is on what side, or who is exactly doing what to whom, for quite a while.

In the tradition of X-Files and Lost, The Event should be a brain twister, but, we all hope, will deliver at a faster pace without requiring years of mind-numbing persistence to find out that, um, (you poor Lost victims) everyone was dead in the first place. (The producers of The Event already have promised a speedier delivery of pertinent clues.)

The pilot episode of The Event is a well-written, fast-paced ensemble mystery involving a) the President; b) a group of scientists held at a dark, icy base in Alaska; c) some ordinary citizens who have stumbled upon things they shouldn't have; and d) the now standard-issue sketchy Presidential aides who know things the President does not.

We'll see if The Event has the mojo of series like Lost, The X Files and before those, the granddaddy of all Gardens of Discontent, The Prisoner (the original series, the one adapted by and starring the late Patrick McGoohan, and first shown in the States in the summer of 1968).

The Prisoner (shown in photo at the top of this column) followed an ex-government agent held against his will in a deceptively pleasant resort-like setting by an unknown authority determined to break his will and spirit. McGoohan's character, referred to as Number Six ("I am not a number! I am a free man!"), outwitted and subverted the system weekly, but without knowing why he was being held, or by whom.

Mysteries such as Fox's Millennium (1996-99, created by Chris Carter of X-Files) followed a secret government group -- or a legit group gone rogue -- sometimes swerving into weird paranormal territory, and always stocked with plenty of deviant behavior.

Honestly, during the last year of that series, my fatigue trumped my curiosity, and I never got resolution. And neither did Millennium. After injections of supernaturalism, and exploring the Millennium Group at higher levels, the series was cancelled, and never made it to the real millennium.

Both Millennium and its oddball uncle, 1990-91's ABC classic Twin Peaks (the latter co-created by David Lynch), had hauntingly styled but time-sucking story arcs with a lot of misdirection, identity switches and such, and basically demanded rigorous loyalty if weekly clarity were to be had. We always came back, though, because... well, there's something out there, as X-Files always warned us. Exactly was IT was took years to discover, and often without much of a payoff.

These shows, and others, seemed like things were being improvised as the writers went along, becoming snarled in shark-jumping plot twists (remember when Killer BOB arrived in Twin Peaks?) until they exited prematurely, either cancelled abruptly or going out more or less Sopranos-style -- with few clues to a supposed end, and leaving behind more questions than they answered.

To be sure, the world of conspiracy, unexplained events and free-floating paranoia is intriguing stuff. (We're videotaped dozens of times a day by security cameras, everywhere. You may be being watched right now. Look around. Or maybe you shouldn't.)

Currently, I'm hooked on the richly detailed quietude and disturbing alienation created in AMC's Rubicon. There are characters alone in rooms a lot -- as are we all -- and the shots often are held a few uncomfortable extra seconds, to give that extra space for the mind to wander through all the possible threads of the story.

No explosions, no machine guns... but perhaps more of a real dystopia than all of the Area 51s put together in The X Files. And that fully acknowledges how twisted up in its own plot Rubicon is, because I finished the first episode not knowing who these people were, what they were doing or why they were doing it. After the fifth episode, some answers are coming (the series continues Sunday nights at 9 p.m. ET), but it's so intelligently done, I'm happily in the dark.

Writers of Rubicon and The Event know they must owe Franz Kafka's 1925 novel The Trial big-time. Persecuted Joseph K. had no idea why he'd been singled out for punishment, or the supposed crime he had committed, or who, for real, was the Puppet Master orchestrating the whole thing, and what HIS agenda was. For my money, there is no better Puppet Master than Martin Landau as Bela Lugosi in the 1994 Tim Burton movie Ed Wood. See "Bela" Pull De Schtring! here:

My sense is that these series appeal to the conspiracy theorist deep within us all. With world-wide financial collapse, private security squads and the Kardashians, it all feels like somebody MUST be behind all of the madness. Someone MUST be in control of this stuff, because it couldn't possibly just exist on its own. It's too weird.

At a deeper level, while The Prisoner was a Cold War piece positing no difference between the two military-industrial complexes, it also reflected on being bound at a more basic level in Number Six's Village... by school, career, family -- society.

Its moral was that we were pretty much voluntarily imprisoned on our own, and that it was up to the individual to define and find his or her real freedom. Rubicon further blurs the lines by placing the enemy (terrorist extremism) oceans away from everyday life in the U.S., witnessed only in grainy surveillance video. Yet we're no less trapped, and obsessed and oppressed, by the threat of it.

Cable series have to move a little faster now, with many in the ten-episode season format. For paranoia fans, that's good. For those of us not particularly thrilled by having to invest years in sorting out Killer BOB, The Millennium Group and others, let's hope The Event really will evolve -- swiftly -- into a TV event Worth Watching.

I'd Like to Thank the Academy... And a Few Others...

August 30, 2010 8:54 AM

By Eric Gould

The Emmys for 2010 are over. They began brilliantly -- with an homage to Glee in a hilarious ensemble number, with Jimmy Fallon, Tina Fey, Jon Hamm, Jane Lynch, Jorge Garcia, Tim Gunn and my hero, Joel McHale. Then came some surprise wins (Jim Parsons, CBS's The Big Bang Theory), and the inevitable, endless list of Thank You's to people we really have no idea who they are...

Agents, directors, mothers, friends, other actors. Most, I'm sure, Very Important. But, for most of us, a telephone list of Who Isn't.

It's always wonderful to enjoy a surprise moment with someone who never expected to be on the stage, such as Parsons. But even then, soon we're onto The List. A rundown of those, without whom, the winner would not be there.

Would all of these List People -- and I am sure they were utterly vital to that actor's winning this particular award -- really mind all that much if they weren't acknowledged? I know I wouldn't. I'd happily sacrifice the mention of my name in a panicked fluster to millions of people who have no idea who I am, in exchange for perhaps a few words on that person's particular acting experience, or by what miracle the show got green-lighted, or what risks were taken artistically and how they paid off.

Maybe not a reasonable request in this sort of show, especially with a high pulse rate, in front of all your peers, in front of an audience of millions. But I can dream. I can dream of a memo going out to all the nominees with something like, "Look, just a few words how you experienced the character or the story, and forget all the family credits. They're your family. They're used to you ignoring them." (David Strathairn gave us something genuine, from the heart, as did Al Pacino and a minority of others. I'm guessing Pacino's mom was pretty good with it.)

But, why fight it? The audience loves those moments, where maybe someone's name comes up, and after, a heartfelt tangent on what that person meant.

Besides, it's a company town, and if you're in the business and get mentioned, it's as good as a free ad in the trades.

So, in the spirit of the awards shows, and since I have the stage here once in a while on TV WORTH WATCHING, I just want to thank all of those who helped me get to where I am... a licensed professional, and a part-time writer on an internet TV website...

I'd like to thank Mr. Diaz, the sixth grade teacher who mistakenly knew me as George all the time, thereby making me popular with other fourth graders at Hollywood Central Elementary School, for being singled out by a sixth grade teacher and made cool. Also to Mr. Williams, in sixth grade, for mispronouncing my name as "Goo," thereby, again, singling me out for recognition from my classmates.

I also want to thank the medical team at the University of Florida health clinic back in the day for their fast, professional action in flushing out an ear blockage the size of Manhattan, and allowing me to continue and complete finals that semester.

To the guy who held the door at the grocery store yesterday when I had two bags in my arms, I never would have gotten out of the door without you.

I'd like to thank the people at Sony, Samsung and Comcast for giving me the opportunity to have up to date, high-definition electronic entertainment in my apartment. Thank you so very much, even though I paid for it myself.

Um, let's see, yes, yes, "wrap it up" -- I know. I know. I know I'm going to forget someone. Everyone at Toyota, Michelin, National Tire and Battery: I wouldn't be going anywhere without you. You know who you are. The people at Macy's and Men's Wearhouse, you're amazing! Your stuff is always on sale!

And of course, my girlfriend, Agnes, and her kids, Christina, Jessica and Jon... who keep me in plenty of reality TV to review.

Oh, oh! ... And, of COURSE, David Bianculli, for tossing me a writing spot at TV WORTH WATCHING... I wouldn't be here without you!!

Cue the music.

On "Mad Men," And Current Clever Commercials

August 14, 2010 7:00 AM

The Real "Mad Men,"
And the Best Ads They're Making

By Eric Gould

Mad Men is back -- the latest episode airs Sunday night at 10 ET on AMC -- and every week as I watch, I think about one of my real guilty pleasures: the art of smart commercials...

Since American television is commercial -- the most viewers equals the most dollars -- it makes our shows competitive at the highest level, but hardly guarantees quality. Best-selling ad time revolves around something like the Super Bowl, or a D-List Celebrity Turkey Shoot. Hardly the Shakespeare of our time.

I worked with an advertising firm once, and was giddy at the thought of working with quick, talented and creative minds... the kind that made a living cutting through the dross and making a witty case in the time it took you to sneeze. Surely, these were the smartest kids in the sandbox, poets of our modern age, able to sell unnecessary things to people who didn't know they needed them. And through guile and intelligence, the buyers never suspected the sale.

Maybe it wasn't a representative sample, but my group was a fairly dull, humorless crew, eager to cover their A's, without a lot of risk-taking or imagination.

So much for my image of Don Draper, the philosopher poet, lording over Madison Avenue -- and our most intimate unconsciousness -- with piercing insight into why and what we need.

And all that magic conjured up at the vaporous intersection of mass consumerism, corporate finance and desire.

What appeals to me about the ad world (even more than Don's Brylcreem) is that if you do it well, it might well be the perfect job. Thirty seconds of comedy that if successful, makes a lot of money, and is relatively light lifting as compared to say, writing sixty minutes of stand-up. (Yes, yes, I know... those of you in the ad business... it's surely misery: deadlines, budgets, squirrelly clients.)

If done well, a short spot not only is smart, but also can be damn literary, in a few short moments. A few lines, a couple of images, and we associate with much larger themes that can remain unsaid: our future, our health, our self-image, what's right, what’s wrong -- the absurdities we shoulder as we conform to society. Those are big fish to fry, and maybe it's the hardest writing job of all. (Being brief and spot-on always makes me think of Hemingway's alleged six-word story: "For sale, baby shoes, never worn.")

I don't know if these are TV ads racking up sales, but here are my five examples of the smartest -- and funniest -- of the current crop:

"Was Abe Lincoln Honest?" -- Geico's odd mash-up of a Rod Serling-type host and the bear in the woods punch line, asking if switching to Geico will really save you 15 percent or more on car insurance.

The faux film grain and tinny sound pops really set this one up so well. See it HERE.

KIA Soul, "You can go with this, you can go with that" -- Not terribly side-splitting, but you do look up and think, "Were those hip-hop hamsters shilling a car?"

And they were.

See it HERE.

Old Spice uber-sexy male spokesmodel -- He's a douche, and we know it, but then, maybe he is as suave as he thinks he is.

See it HERE. (Old Spice, in its Internet campaign, posts some of his responses to viewer email, a great way to take its advertising interactive.

You can see one of those HERE.

And perhaps, though the series of Old Spice commercials is hilarious, the online responses to viewer email may be even funnier than the actual ads.

Orbit Gum -- "More dirty mouths clean up with Orbit," and your dirty mind follows right along, HERE.

Finally, "It's time for Daddy to make some funny" -- This Walmart ad is a spit-shot funny look at Dad's birthday clown routine gone horribly wrong.

You won't be sorry you took the 30 seconds for this one, and as I always say, except for a well-timed rubber chicken, there's nothing funnier than an inappropriate clown. Watch HERE.

Those are my current examples of TV ads that Don Draper might have liked, if not made. So I'm wondering: What are yours?

GUEST BLOG #108: Eric Gould Takes on Video Bad Gurls: Miley, Christina, Katy

July 27, 2010 8:45 AM

By Eric Gould

Dearest TV Worth Watching Readers:

Since I (unintentionally) opened the Pandora's Box topic of the female psyche in current music videos two weeks ago, out sprang the multi-headed Hydra of Miley Cyrus, Christina Aguilera and Katy Perry. Our Fearless Leader of this website, and my long-time mentor, had clearly lost part of his towering mind -- the Smothers Brothers book having taking such a toll on him, he threw these women onto my lap for some kind of understanding and critique.

Not that I ever shrank from a tough project, but this time I considered it. How we arrived at the utmost authority of the female sexual psyche, a middle-aged Jewish man, I'm still trying to absorb.

Here's what I saw: Christina as The Dominatrix, the diamond-gagged Submissive, 70's Disco Chick, Bi-Curious Tourist, and Group Sex Partner.

We had Miley, gone all Tina Turner trapped in Thunderdome, snarling her way out with dance partners writhing behind her.

Finally, there was Katy's supposed sexual ingenue (once as a Girl Scout with a thinly disguised phallus cookie), in multi-flavored Barbie wigs, her dance troupe dolled up as a box of candy-coated confections with creme-puff brassieres, with cherries topped as the nipples.

Oh, yes, and there was a monocle in there somewhere, too.

Such is the state of video culture in the 21st century: nanosecond bursts of id-borne images that are designed to penetrate, divert, and sell.

My recent look at the Lady Gaga video "Alejandro," by comparison, was easy pickings -- dumb, political misappropriations of kick-turning storm troopers and all.

Like a ball of snarled Christmas lights, the human sexual psyche has been unraveled by better than I. But when Miley spreads her black raven wings (at top above), well, yes, I get it. Don't even go there.

My general impulse is to slog the whole thing off as Art Directors Gone Wild. (And perhaps the artists themselves, too, including Miley's mom and Billy Ray, trying to one-up the other star, with no particular message other than "watch out, folks, she can be a sexy brat, too." )

But maybe there's more than just style. Artists, video artists in particular, rightly feel they have about three seconds to get through and separate themselves from the herd. In media culture, if you're not fresh, you're over. Understandably, drastic measures are needed.

So, like millions of teenagers standing in front of their closets on date night -- the question becomes, who do you want to be tonight? Good "Gurl"? Bad "Gurl"? Or, better, both, and keep them guessing? It's just not that hard to hit a large part of the demographic you're after with your choice, and the dollars will roll in until the Next Big Thing. Which should be along in about five minutes.

My only nagging suspicion here is that artists who slave to the quick-change routine won't have that many bullets in the barrel -- or, in Katy's case, whipped cream in the can -- to maintain a run as long as David Bowie or Madonna did, always seemingly one step ahead of their fans and the press.

Of course, back in the dark ages of the '80s and '90s, there were only a few video channels, and no Internet, so constant reinvention wasn't nearly as difficult -- or as crucial -- as it is now. It also occurs to me that The Chameleon isn't always the most healthy choice for a young woman's identity.

Aguilera, who hardly needs more in her bag of tricks beyond her remarkable, endlessly riffing voice, seems never to tire of playing the vamp and the femme fatale. It's still true in her latest, "Not Myself Tonight." (Boy, is she ever not.)

She -- like Cyrus, Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears and others -- is a Disney product, and seems to be determined to pay back Mickey and the gang with bad behavior ever since. Perhaps it illustrates how confining management and handlers can be for young stars: once they become adults, there's nothing left to do but show 'em who you really are... a grinding, angry, sexual connoisseur with a vinyl Oreo for a hat.

Wasn't it just 2009 when we had Miley, a symbol of youthful wholesomeness, tinged with a cute rocker's edge? No more.

Perhaps last year's movie, Hannah Montana: Best of Both Worlds didn't mean so much that there was a Miley behind Hannah Montana, but that Hannah was pretty much a dull bore, and there was a raven-winged archangel inside, with pretty wicked eye make-up, in the wings. And with them.

The true poster child of all this is Perry -- a former gospel singer, raised strictly in a Christian tradition -- who has charmed all of us with her irreverence.

With "California Gurls," she's maybe set the height of the current backlash bar. There's no snarl, no sneer, no platinum blond pelvic assault. Instead, she projects bubbly, gum-snapping winks, while virtually naked on a cloud of cotton candy and shooting whipped cream.

Perhaps here we're now well into the "sex-positive" sub-genre of feminism, where sex is naughty play, fun, out in the open. I'd say that's an improvement over where we were when I was young, and it was hidden, and you were left to your own bad, first impressions of it for life. Blessings to those who can teach their children such things in the electronic cultural minefield in which we now live.

I am pretty sure, though, it's probably better not left up to those such as Snoop Dogg: Grandmaster Pimp of Candyland, former Internet pornographer himself, and current co-star of Perry's video, whose main contribution to the piece is rhyming "bikini, zucchini, martini." (Honestly, I wept.)

After all, we know full well the target audience for MTV, and I am pretty certain it ain't the gray hairs here at TV Worth Watching.

Personally (guilty pleasure here), in the end, I find the dedicated rocker girls like Avril Lavigne and Pink -- both remarkable vocal talents -- more interesting to watch and having more lasting power. Yes, they get into sketchy territory, but that's not the sole focus of their shows, or their personas.

But hey, Gurls, by all means, make hay while the sun is shining. Who among us, given the opportunity, would not?

We just have to realize that the particular package we're buying -- The Madonna, or The Whore -- is pretty much the same thing. They're both crafted PR products to achieve the best cash flow possible. It's not necessarily art or poetry. But it does sell, and make the marketplace go round.

Oh, and the monocle? A meta-reversal of the artist watching us, perhaps?

GUEST BLOG #103: Eric Gould Doesn't Go Gaga Over Latest Lady Gaga Video

July 9, 2010 9:30 PM

[Bianculli here: Eric Gould, architect by day and new TV WORTH WATCHING contributor by night, has decided to weigh in on the imagery and messages contained within the latest Lady Gaga video. And what a hoot: Who else, I ask you, would look at one of Lady Gaga's costumes and think of -- a building?...]

By Eric Gould

Included and examined, in today's column, are all of four-and-a-half minutes of TV Worth Watching -- if not for the cultural temperature they take, but also for the mishmosh of mixed metaphors, missed metaphors, and random inanities they deliver. In the brief time it takes to watch this one, you'll most likely drop your jaw, scratch your head, and then mostly likely just shake it, disappointed and amused, as if your kid has just shown up in an O.J. Simpson mask for Halloween.

I give you the Iconoclast of the Moment: Lady Gaga and her latest music video, "Alejandro," a mash-up of shock-art retreads, including that old favorite triad: a corpse-nun eating her rosary, some simulated sex, and leather-clad storm troopers, shimmying furiously like there was no tomorrow.

Hopefully, in video art, and video music, there will be one. A tomorrow, that is.

But for now, we are stuck with Lady G -- Madonna 2.0 -- at the forefront for the moment. I freely hand it to her: She's got the dance chops, and she certainly has the fashion swagger to feed the media machine that has not tired of her yet. You simply have to admire designs that seem to suggest an apparent collision between her and one of Frank Gehry's buildings.

And style is the better part of "Alejandro," before it (intentionally) goes off the rails. It begins with Lady Gaga as a corpse-white pixie masked by some sort of binocular apparatus, looking like two soup cans with lace over the lenses. This is after the intro -- a grimy black sky, a back-lit group of men stomping in militaristic time, followed by a funeral led by Lady G with a bloody Sacred Heart on silk pillow, and then a slow zoom to a solemn-looking guy in a Speedo and a spiky Kaiser helmet.

Fair enough. You have to at least agree that Ms. Gaga and her photographer/videographer Steven Klein (veteran of Calvin Klein, Nike and Madonna shoots) have given us a consistent, dark vision. However, all this is is a visual accompaniment to some sprightly electro-pop (channeling, some say, my beloved ABBA), with lyrics about a woman who seems to not want to be the lover of Alejandro, and then not Fernando, and then not Roberto either, seemingly swearing off all men with names ending in the letter "O."

Turns out this is a piece about lost love's agony. I think. God knows how awful that is, and I could think of a few dark images for that metaphor...

Then it's on to her wicked-ripped entourage, again backlit on the cold concrete, each dancer with a black, bowl-cut haircut -- seemingly the unfortunate offspring of Michael Phelps' mother and Moe from the Three Stooges. These Gaga disciples seem to like to throw each other down on the aforementioned hard, wet concrete.

Then we're off to a sort of abstract barracks -- steel cots, with the Moe-platoon writhing around, and then all over Lady G, in bra and panties, a la Sally Bowles in Cabaret. I think there was a whip in there, too, somewhere.

Quick cuts to the red vinyl-clad corpse-nun, ruby lips, swallowing the rosary, and then even quicker to back outside (one assumes outside the dampened, concrete bunker), where we again find the furiously shimmying, leather-clad S.S., in formation with Gaga herself, adorned in a machine-gun-tipped brassiere.

That's the main part of it, but there's also a Joan of Arc cloak with a sword-cross on the sleeve; a bare crucifix-like wood piece (or maybe it was a coat rack); a kind of nighttime Kristallnacht riot with the city burning; lots of Moes running in panic; another grim looking S.S. guy, this time with full leather tie, coat and hat' and finally, Lady Gaga, stripping herself naked out of her holy robe with the bare troops again, throwing her around faux-violently, like a Busby Berkeley show gone horribly, horribly wrong.

I'm not entirely clear on what was left out. But I'm guessing Jesus should have been in there, and maybe Lot's wife, just for a pinch of salt.

I am sure the Catholics and Jews have their hands full on this one, with perhaps the Catholics edging out the Hebrews by a lash, so to speak. The Catholic League already has come out against Gaga and her director for her use of blasphemy, despite Klein's claim that the scene in question (the swallowing of the rosary beads) was Gaga's "desire to take in the Holy."

Not that I had a lot of questions about the video. It shocked me -- not for the imagery, but for the lazy appropriation of the images.

I did read a little more on it. Gaga maintains it was inspired by her love for her gay friends and admiration of gay love -- "her envy of the courage and bravery they require to be together." And Klein is on record as explaining that "the religious symbolism is not meant to denote anything negative, but represents the character's battle between the dark forces of this world and the spiritual salvation of the soul."

Artists' points taken -- although someone has to convince us this isn't just a case of pop culture eating itself in a Madonna rehash of her Catholic Blasphemer's Playground in "Like A Prayer." (Come to think of it, Klein and Gaga forgot the burning cross.) Perhaps we're seeing something amounting to fighting anti-gay extremism with similar fire. Fair enough. But why dance about it, then?

The piece is just dripping with irony anyway, intended or not, and it's better to think it was unintentional. James Montgomery from MTV commented, "Gaga has created a world that, while oppressive, also looks great." And Anthony Benigno from the New York Daily News wrote that it is "the softcore answer to The Matrix."

On its website, MTV hosts the video (which you can watch by clicking HERE) with the banner headline, "Has Lady Gaga Gone Too Far With Her 'Alejandro' Video?" Too far off course, maybe. But not too far into the realm of the truly relevant or truly shocking. (For my money, Trent Reznor's 1994 "Closer" video -- now in the Museum of Modern Art's permanent collection -- is the real standard for clear use of nightmare imagery.)

I don't know. There's no question the gay community should be fighting fiercely for its rights. Always. But wasn't it truly more shocking when Mel Brooks' character of director Roger De Bris, rapt with the prospect of the new play Springtime For Hitler, envisions "gorgeous showgirls in gooey gowns," and stages grinning, S.S. tap dancers, with the showgirls in headdresses of bratwurst and beer elegantly cascading down the white-stepped stage risers?

Here was Brooks, in 1968 -- a Jew, only 25 years out from the Holocaust -- meta-staging a musical comedy within The Producers, with Goebbels, Himmler and Hitler as the leads. It was an outrageous, comic, and heroic risk, an effort to deal with the unspeakable through the Jews' long-wielded secret weapon: humor.

After "Alejandro," I'm not laughing, and I haven't learned anything. But I AM writing about it, aren't I? And, after all is said and done, isn't THAT the point?

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GUEST BLOG #98: Eric Gould on Whether Bravo's "Work of Art" IS One

June 23, 2010 10:32 AM

[Bianculli here: Contributing critic Eric Gould, who's also an architect and this site's designer, is attracted to TV shows built around the elusive art of creativity. Today, after watching two episodes of Bravo's Work of Art: The Next Great Artist, he weighs in...]

By Eric Gould

The third installment of Bravo's Work Of Art: The Next Great Artist is coming up tonight (Wednesday) at 10 ET, and those of us left wanting to know more about the artistic process of designers on Project Runway haven't been left wondering too long. Help is on the way in the virtual carbon copy of the show, but this time with fine artists.

Same format, same challenges, and even a clone of Tim Gunn, marshalling the artists through the studio into the gallery for the judging. It's rewarding: we get to see real workings of modern art, maybe how to read it, find the ideas, judge whether or not they're worth a look. And, as a bonus, how a work is pulled together well, into a compelling work, or, at the other extreme, into a dead-earnest belly flop.

Work Of Art is co-produced by Sarah Jessica Parker, the second surprise from her this summer. The first, an extremely unpleasant uber-shark-jumping Sex and the City 2, is still lodged in my head. It's been weeks later, and that experience is possibly gestating into some sort of cinematic post-traumatic stress disorder I may have to deal with for years to come.

The irony here isn't in vain. Here's a little show on going deep into the soul and making a work of art, and over there a gargantuan, soulless, money-making factory. A sobering comparison on the split of art and commerce, as some of the artists reveal they sometimes don't have money for materials to work.

WOA has sixteen contestants, mostly painters, but these include an installation artist, a performance artist, a photographer, one obsessive-compulsive disorder, and one architect-turned-painter. There's a good spread of demographics here, even including a contestant over sixty, rather than the usual complement of twentysomethings.

The show is hosted by China Chow -- who, during the first show's judging sequence, wore a flattened gold flower applied to her upper forehead that led me to mistake her for Lord Marshall from The Chronicles of Riddick.

She is joined by the Tim Gunn doppelganger, Simon de Pury, the former modern art expert for Sotheby's now running his own high-end auction house. (This fulfills Bravo's apparent requirement of the suave mentor in a suit, with just the slightest affectation of speech.) Despite the obvious replication, de Pury is an excellent and knowledgeable studio critic, and there is plenty for the audience to learn from him.

The winner of WOA gets a solo show at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, and $100,000 (which is usually several years income for the majority of struggling artists, so this is not an insignificant reward for subjecting oneself to the reality format).

The first two episodes have given us a quick look into the cast under the high-pressure challenges that are vintage Runway roadblocks: first asking contestants to team up and do portraits of each other (misery for the non-painters), and the next week, requiring a found object sculpture to be made from electronic junk (misery for the painters).

Similarly -- and this is reality TV, after all -- the villains in the cast are being established early. The installation artist Nao Bustamante scolds the judges -- "I'm not responsible for your experience of my work!" -- and Miles Mendenhall, the brash enfant terrible and obviously gifted multimedia artist (recently referred to in The LA Times as "the emo-hipster backstabber") calling out Week Two loser Trong Nguyen during his studio crit and blurting, "This piece is distractingly boring!"

It was in the second episode, after Mendenhall's outburst, that Work Of Art went all squirrely, and took a jaw-dropping swerve during the judging-- which was the most compelling and worthwhile part of Runway.

Jerry Saltz, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and Senior Art Critic for New York magazine, is rapt with Mendenhall's gallery performance: sleeping on a bed between two (and there's no way around this) concrete assholes set on the floor. Swoons Saltz, "I loved that there was someone asleep in the art gallery; that adds just yet another layer of vulnerability that I found pretty exciting." Countered panelist Bill Powers, "You know, the fact that there were two anuses to each side, I thought that was overkill."

And presto, we are left no longer wondering why modern art is shrugged off by the public, considered incomprehensible, arcane, silly.

The only bright spot here (and it's not the orange one over Miles' bed) is that maybe, just maybe, the producers secretly mean to unmask this sort of art-world emptiness for what it is" status quo insider-ism in New York.

And are these New York heavyweights, familiar as they are with such top shelf multimedia artists as Gerhard Richter, really that taken with the kids work?? He made it plain he was exhausted and stumped by the challenge, and could only manage a piece about how tired he was... hardly visionary commentary exhumed from a pile of debris.

Well, maybe we shouldn't be turning to reality TV for real substance on art. We have Robert Hughes' seminal 1980 documentary Shock of the New, or Art: 21, a documentary series on modern artists, both having run on PBS. My main hope for Work Of Art, since it has the larger Bravo audience and it is entertaining, is that it can help disseminate serious insight into the making of art for a wider audience.

As we're told each show before the judging, "It's been said that good art is not what the work looks like, it's how it makes you feel."

We shall see how it plays out. I hope, by the end of the season, we'll get to a higher level of discourse, and not be stuck just with Miles, snuggled with carefully coiffed bed-head, asleep between two monumental assholes.

GUEST BLOG #96: Eric Gould Embraces Chelsea Handler... And Who Can Blame Him?

June 4, 2010 9:05 AM

[Bianculli here: Our newest contributor, Eric Gould, is a Chelsea Come Lately -- a recent, but very enthusiastic, discoverer of the comic charms of E! Chelsea Lately talk-show host Chelsea Handler...]

By Eric Gould

One night a few months back, I got lucky and found Chelsea Lately, Chelsea Handler's weeknight talk show at 11 ET on the E! network. It took just a minute to get hooked by her jaded, world-weary, no-time-for-it-all shtick that was high on smarts, and extremely low on patience.

(OK, acknowledged: Maybe I have been living under a rock to have missed a New York Times number one best-selling author. You don't know the half of it.)

Handler, an addictive personality disorder and youngest child of a Jewish father and Mormon mother, is from the wrong side of the tracks of well-to-do Livingston, New Jersey -- a unique coincidence of location and parenting where perhaps she had a wealth of material early on, and out sprang the nanosecond timing she wields so easily today.

But since she sometimes trails even TBS's George Lopez in the ratings, perhaps I can be cut some slack for not finding her right away. (That's right, she's trailing a show perhaps even rivaling Arsenio Hall for Worst Talk Show Ever. I can't explain a test pattern losing to him, but there it is.)

My cultural illiteracy aside, Handler's resume is long and impressive, with stints on the Oxygen network, her own sketch comedy show (for two years on E!,) numerous stand-up tours, and three books behind her. I'm currently reading the second, Are You There, Vodka? It's Me, Chelsea, and the third, Chelsea Chelsea Bang Bang. Both are sharp, semi-autobiographical essays on her life, friends and love in Los Angeles. (At least I hope she's making some of it up...)

The Chelsea Lately thirty-minute format is perfect for her, which crams two short segments of her behind a desk dishing entertainment news with panelists of fellow comedians, followed by one short interview segment. (She's a generous interviewer, even cutting the cast of The Jersey Shore due respect as legitimate TV stars.) Recent interview guests have been Ed Asner, Justin Bieber and Crispin Glover... as eclectic and interesting a selection as you'll find anywhere.

The show is bracketed by Handler's monologues: sassy fits, liberally peppered with funnier adjectives, and all delivered at a pitch-perfect, rapid-fire pace. The woman's ability to get it all out, flub-free, is impressive. She also has perfectly awkward moments of most certainly scripted repartee with her shrunk-in-a-dryer Ed McMahon, a dwarf and reputed former porn-star, Chuy Bravo.

As in her books, she's a wordsmith of the highest order. For example, she observed recently that "the disparate pieces of my life are coming together like an origami duck," and described Morgan Freeman as "the world-renowned narrator and black-freckled actor."

She's also made her own additions to the Urban Dictionary, such as her female zone now known as the "coslopus," or the presents her dog Chunk leaves on the lawn as "shadoobies."

Perhaps the only thing funnier than the writing on the show is Chelsea herself. From her jaded take to the camera at the opening monologue, where she seemingly endures ill-selected clothes and inappropriate hairdos, to trading insult for funnier insult with the LA comics on her panel, she's impossible to one-up -- no matter which corner she's backed into.

Like the best of them (Jon Stewart and Bill Maher come to mind), ordinary life and real events are funny enough for Handler. She just reads the topics off the cards, and usually the weary glance to the camera is enough to get the laugh. It's simply the choice of subject that's critical.

Recently, commenting on whether Elin Woods would try to put her marriage back together, she cited the new video game, "Tiger Woods Affair Tour 2010." Handler noted, "I think you pretty much can say the marriage has come to an end if they're making video games about your cheating husband's sex life."

Even better, often, are some of the pre-recorded sketches, most notably the "Employee Reviews," in which she revives her character "The Inappropriate Boss" and scatter-shoots employees with numerous, indelicate questions and comments about their personal and sexual lives, and attempts to set them straight. (She's obviously got experience in this area, and can tear through these without a hitch.)

Other repeating sketches are "Judge Lately," where she parodies Judge Judy, but with rulings of extreme prejudice and irrelevance, and "Staff Book Club," where the staff gathers to discuss a book, but goes wildly off topic.

Handler often brings to mind the early days of Dave Letterman's show, where the out-of-bounds was regular territory and the wit had the sting and insight of the smartest writers. She's got a lot of admirers, mainly her guests, who all sincerely seem to genuinely like her (unlike Letterman now), and it's a credit to her love for people's natural defects and foibles that keeps her lovable, and definitely not mean.

(Although, yes, she does have some favorite targets. OK, forgiven. It's Hollywood. How could you not comment? It's a requisite for being on E!)

Last week in the New Yorker, Nancy Franklin quoted Robert Morton, former producer of the Letterman show, as saying, "When there is a decision to be made about replacing somebody on a big network show, I guarantee Chelsea will be up there on the list." A great job reference from someone who would know better than most.

Let's hope the right people are listening.

GUEST BLOG #89: Eric Gould on the Triumph, and Terror, of "Project Runway"

April 30, 2010 9:20 AM

[Bianculli here: Eric Gould, architect of this website and an actual architect to boot, was so tickled by the responses to his first post, on the applicable business improvement lessons of Gordon Ramsay, that he's written another. Go ahead and continue to spoil him. I love Eric's writing...]

By Eric Gould

(Spoiler Alert: if you haven't watched the finale, episode 14, it can still be seen online HERE.)

The seventh season of Lifetime's Project Runway just finished up, and here's another show that has a lot of rewards for artists, designers and creative types beneath the catty cloak of its reality show format. (And yes, this comes from a middle-aged, male heterosexual who is fascinated with the show. Not that there's anything wrong with that.)

Everything that gives fashion a bad name is, of course found here in abundance in Project Runway: plenty of back-stabbing, air kisses, and two-faced compliments to satisfy the reality viewer. Where else would you find more ultra-touchy feelings than in a workroom full of fashion designers? It's a perfect pattern for clashes and, um, cutting remarks.

Thankfully, that's not the total focus of Runway, which is, and always has been, one part competition, one part reality antics, and most important, one part focus on the inner creative struggle. The show starts out with sixteen contestants (including some obvious lower-level-talent fodder plants,) three of whom survive the judging to create and show a collection at Bryant Park in New York during the annual fashion week.

Contestants each week are given a new design challenge that tests their mettle. My favorite this season was episode seven, "Hard Wear," in which they were given one hour to shop in a hardware store for materials to make their next outfit. The results were surprising, ingenious creations.

Other episodes included such challenging inspirations as the circus, the four elements, designing for children, etc. -- with designers stretching to interpret a theme without being too literal about it.

(And I wish I could, in type, phonetically characterize Tim Gunn's concerned pronunciation when he furrows his brow and says, "De-sig-ners... You have ten minutes to get your models out on the runway." Those familiar with Gunn, former chair of fashion design at Parsons School of Design and Chief Creative Officer of Liz Claiborne, will know what I mean.)

Gunn leads the contestants through the challenges, the New York fabric store Mood and the work room, while Heidi Klum, the co-host of the show, leads the judging and critiques of the work, most usually along with designer Michael Kors and Nina Garcia, Fashion Director at Marie Claire magazine.

The best parts of Project Runway are the critiques offered by Klum, Kors and Garcia about the contestants' work, especially when those contestants are backstage, out of earshot. Usually the judges' concerns are not only the quality of the clothes, but also a larger question: Is the designer capable of a full, compelling line of work? And, more important, can they grow beyond their usual comfort zone?

These were hot topics in the final episode, which saw Seth Aaron Henderson take the winning spot over a closely contested showdown with Mila Hermanovski (my pick for the winner) and Emilio Sosa. Again, it wasn't just the spark of what they saw onstage, but the depth of artist within -- their ability to leap beyond where they had been -- perhaps not embodied in the clothes they saw that day, but in the days to come.

I have to confess: These discussions are, at their heart, interchangeable with critiques found in architecture or art studios, and therein lies their fascination for me. How well is the concept translated into an actual work? Is there clarity, maturity, expertise? Is there a new take on a standard?

(Double confession: I couldn't even watch the 2008 Sundance reality show Architecture School: waaaay to close to home.)

Runway judges talk a lot about "fashion forward," eschewing simple throwbacks to other designers, decades, styles, and often demanding that designers go where they haven't before. Those in any creative field will know the cold terror behind this sort of challenge, when you can't go back to your usual, comfortable bag of tricks... even tricks you do very well.

One of the great things about this kind of critique on the show is that, even if a designer has blown a particular challenge, they are given a pass -- as Sosa was given on the "Hard Wear" episode, when he choked up a fur ball of a swimsuit made out of washers and pink cord, because the dress he had devised was too complicated and could not be finished in the allotted time. His was clearly the losing design, but another designer was voted out instead, for being deemed incapable, most likely, of going further creatively than they had already.

But, after all, this is reality television, and commercial television at that. So an hour-long discussion about why a particular angle of a cut is made, or why a certain taper or fit is chosen over another, isn't possible.

This is what Project Runway misses, and maybe could use more of: going deeper into the artistic choices the designers actually have to make, often within minutes. And exploring why they made them.

In this sense, if there were more discussion about the actual art and design of the work -- why some colors work, what different textures can convey -- perhaps there might be a deeper understanding and appreciation of the field as the real blend of art and commerce that it is.

(To be accurate, there are "Tim Gunn's Workroom" and extended judging clips on the web site, but those only emphasize the point that, on the TV series itself, they're not deemed worthy of the final cut.)

Henderson, this year's winner, in the middle of his six-month production effort for his competing line for the final event, was told by Gunn, kill-shot direct: "Although this is the excellent work we would expect from a Seth Aaron piece, I can tell you now, that if you go in this direction and present it at Bryant Park, you will lose the competition."

Unbelievably cold, direct, hard stuff to hear in the middle of generating work that you think is halfway finished. Henderson went on to expand and revamp the entire line, and emerged the winner of Season 7. Only by going deeper into the art -- alone with it -- was a win possible.

If we don't think fashion matters, that the art of it can't matter, think of that great moment in The Devil Wears Prada. Meryl Streep's Miranda Priestley scolds her assistant (Anne Hathaway) for her anti-fashion sense, exposing it as a pose in itself.

"You think this (the fashion world) has nothing to do with you," the editor tells her. "You go to your closet and you select out -- oh, I don't know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance -- because you're trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back.

"But what you don't know is that that sweater is not just blue, it's not turquoise, it's not lapis. It's actually cerulean. You're also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar De La Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves St Laurent, wasn't it, who showed cerulean military jackets?

"...And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. Then it filtered down through the department stores, and then trickled on down into some tragic casual corner, where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin.

"However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs, and so it's sort of comical, how you think that you've made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you're wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room."