Last night saw the return of 30 Rock, completing NBC’s comedy Thursday lineup and restoring one of the sole gleaming, award-winning bright spots to the entire NBC primetime schedule. In typical 30 Rock form, much of the focus was on topical issues, ranging from the main plot with Kenneth striking to get overtime for the page program, to Tracy roaming the streets in his attempt to reconnect with the common man. (And of course, to Cheesy Blasters. Thanks, Meat Cat!) The recession is still in the air at Rockefeller Plaza, and Jack Donaghy hoarding his annual bonus has a wryly familiar sense of greed, especially in New York City. At the same time, Jenna’s Tennis Night song managed to be silly and forehead-slappingly pointed.

This page ain't turnin'!

The show’s persistent topicality, and its associated meta layer of reference and inference, is one of the main ways 30 Rock distinguishes itself from the standard sitcom. Unlike The Office, which plays with the conventions and form of the old sitcom, 30 Rock assumes the shell premise of a half-hour workplace comedy and just blasts the whole thing to shreds. Sure, it’s a show about the relatable everywoman and her incompetent co-workers, but because 30 Rock constantly refers back to a real building and a real television network, at times it feels much closer to a news satire show like The Daily Show than it does The Office (or, even farther away down the sitcom spectrum, something like Two and a Half Men).

You've got Cheesy Blasters!

For me, the other main distinguishing factor is the language. The hour-long comedies that have sprung up recently on cable networks are better known for a distinctive linguistic character, but half-hour network comedies are more synonymous with the blandest, slowest, most canned-laughter-ridden dialogue around. 30 Rock, for all its inconsistency and sheer ridiculousness, has an instantly recognizable verbal flair, full of fast dialogue and understated laugh lines punctuated by the wit and wisdom of Liz Lemon. (Aside from the brilliance of Cheesy Blasters this episode, we also got her efforts to lie with Pete: “I’m picking up my new…tritionist…and his elderly…son.”) It may rely frequently on stupid, silly, or crude humor, but 30 Rock expects you to be able to catch your scatological Star Wars joke on the fly. And I totally respect that.

As I’ve been watching most of my television in concert with my sister this week, I thought I’d be lazy and get some help for my blog post today.

read more…

Paul Gross as Geoffrey Tennant in Slings & Arrows

Over the past few days I’ve been rewatching Slings & Arrows, which I have written about previously over here. Other than a renewed sense of its total and complete awesomeness, one thing that strikes me about the show is that it chooses as its material not merely a Shakespearean play, but also the long process of staging that play. The show succeeds because the best dramatic analog for television is not the play itself, which would be much better served by the short concentrated burst of a feature film, but the longer, less structured or predetermined scope of the whole process of rehearsals and production. Of course whatever play they’re putting on informs the thematic content of the show, so in season one we get uncertainty and self-doubt, madness and self-realization at the same time we get Hamlet. At the same time, regardless of the play, Slings & Arrows has the space to examine the messier, artistic, business-oriented, political, ideological side of theater productions. Man I love that show.

Over the weekend, the big TV news was that after examining the DVR ratings, Dollhouse has 50% more viewers. Of course, there has been a lot of question and speculation about what that might mean for Dollhouse’s future, including some tentative hope among fans that the show might be a bit longer-lived than previously supposed. The consensus seems to be that there’s not a lot of hope in that direction. At the most, it might assure that the full season will actually air and not get shelved away in some deep dark recess until a DVD release. For one, 50% more of a small number is still a pretty small number; for another, just the fact that it’s DVR viewers insures that very few of those eyeballs are watching advertisements.

So that’s a shame. Dollhouse is interesting television, far more ambitious than anything else on right now, and I would love nothing more than to keep watching it and see how it develops. At the same time, even a relatively successful episode like last week’s still signals to me that there are problems the show has yet to overcome. The premise of last week’s identity-of-the-week was more complex than in the past – a client pays the Dollhouse to transfer a comatose man’s identity into a new body, but Dollhouse employees realize the man is likely a serial killer and end up waking him up so that they can interrogate him about the location of his victims. In the plot hole of the week, somehow the serial killer’s uncle manages to sneak him out without anyone noticing, but the blip allows for some remote identity wipe snafus and result in the serial killer identity getting swapped into Echo.

Now now, Aunt Sheila, don't run away... (AAAAAHHH!)

Long story short, Echo wakes up and tries keep the killer identity at bay long enough to save his victims, and meanwhile Victor lets loose on the dance floor after getting transplanted with Echo’s naughty student/Wife of Bath personality. The best parts of the episode were the creepiest: the show opened with scenes of the serial killer manipulating his victims, women he stole and paralyzed so he could dress them up, rename them, and play with them. This is the sort of image that sells the show’s underlying eeriness. There’s a man playing with live women as though they were dolls, stuck in life-sized body holders used mannequins or stands to hold up your Barbie. Disgust, revulsion, gross gross gross. And then we cut to the Dollhouse, and we get it. Ugh.

The problem here is that the classic Joss Whedon show is never just that deep, scary serial killer reality. Buffy and Firefly and Dr. Horrible are amazing because they link strong emotional plotlines about death, fear and morality with humor. They use silly quips and goofy nerd humor, and sometimes they don’t take themselves all that seriously. Unlike many previous episodes of Dollhouse, Belle Chose strove to inject that kind of humor several times, primarily through Echo’s professor fantasy subplot. First there’s Paul Ballard waiting while Echo gets all tarted up, then we get the many scenes of good Chaucery sexy fun time, and finally the wacky gender swapping that leads to Victor on the dance floor and Paul Ballard’s defensive “You got a problem?” These scenes are meant to be funny, and several of them were – Tahmoh Penikett’s performance was strong, and sure, I’m always going to find Canterbury Tales jokes funny, because, you know, obviously. Ultimately, though, the humor was never able to puncture the overwhelming sense of creepiness. It’s too uncomfortable watching Echo as Kiki flounce into her dressing room and preen in the mirror to feel anything other than nervous laughter. And maybe I’m just too sensitive about anything that suggests gay bashing, but as soon as Victor walked onto the dance floor in his argyle sweater I just started to cringe.

Not so much funny-haha as funny-queasy

It’s great people are watching the show, be it live or on DVR. I just wish Whedon could figure out how to recreate the required balance of gravity and levity given such a weighty starting point.

Much of Mad Men’s punch has always relied on the juxtaposition of our contemporary perspective with the unflinching portrayal of urban corporate America in the 1960s. We watch Betty down a gimlet and take a puff on her cigarette while she’s nine months pregnant, and we love the frisson of transgression it gives us. Many of the best of those moments go unspoken – one of my favorites from season two happens after Don buys his new Cadillac and he takes Betty and the kids out for a picnic. They lounge on a blanket after lunch, music playing from the open car door, and when they’re done, Betty blithely shakes the trash onto the pristine green grass, folds up the blanket, and walks away. The scene is all the better for its winking silence.

The subtext of “Wee Small House” operates on the same principle, but does so in a far more explicit way. While Don struggles with Conrad Hilton’s demanding requirements and Betty continues to entertain and reject Henry Francis, Sal Romano finally falls victim to the homophobia we’ve all feared since season one. Lee Gardner Jr. comes on to him, Sal exercises his perfect right to work in unmolested peace, and Don’s irritability finally expresses itself by lashing out at someone else’s inability to keep secrets. Thanks to Connie, Don has had to quash his wayward ways (at least professionally), and resents the continuing existence of others’ hidden lives. We saw it recently in Don’s impatience with Peggy’s ambition, and now Don’s previously secret knowledge of Sal’s sexual preference causes him to strike out against Sal.

This is the type of plot that usually goes without commentary on Mad Men. We see, understand, and are saddened by the social context that permits and even encourages homophobia. But for whatever reason, “Wee Small House” goes farther. Underneath Sal’s disgrace, we see Don listening to Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a dream” speech early in the morning with his daughter’s teacher, we hear clips from the memorial service for the four girls who died in a church in Birmingham, the neighborhood women discussing the march on Washington, and perhaps most importantly, we see more from the Drapers’ “girl” than we’ve ever seen in the past. While we’re upset when Don fires Sal, the real emotional response to injustice comes out of these scenes, watching Carla and her employers while we hear Martin Luther King Jr. in the background. We feel the weight of cultural memory as Carla listens to “[her] station” on the radio, and we’re certainly not allowed to watch without anger as Betty shakes her head and wonders if civil rights are just “not supposed to happen right now.”

"Do you know how bad it must be, for the negroes to descend on Washington like that, just to be heard?"

The parallel is not subtle, and Betty’s comment about civil rights ensures we catch the drift. The 1960s were the time for civil rights, but it won’t be Sal’s time for decades to come. It’s the first time I can recall Mad Men not only capitalizing on our shock about the past, but also using that shock to rebound with explicit commentary on the current day. With Prop 8 and Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell, it is still an open question for some people about whether gay rights are not supposed to happen right now. Watching Carla stand quietly in the kitchen and listen to the funeral service on the radio, Matthew Weiner’s contemporary answer sounds  clearly from his historical fiction.

Pam and Jim got married last night! I could pretend I found the whole thing unaffecting and spent the episode in deep, emotionless critical thought. I suppose I could also pretend to find Glenn Beck reasonable and insightful; the two exercises would undoubtedly be equally persuasive. Yes, Pam and Jim got married, and I was a little verklempt.

The episode was an hour-long special, and although I’ve never found The Office as funny or well-edited when it’s over half an hour, the momentousness of the occasion did seem to warrant some additional attention. Without the full hour, there may not have been time for Meredith to wonder about appropriate gift return policy, or Kevin to encounter difficulty while picking up his shoes. Some moments did feel fluffier than others, and it was obvious that the entire Meemaw set-up was just an excuse to get Michael to speak at the rehearsal dinner, but by the time major wedding events began taking place, the pace felt appropriate and familiarly snappy.

I love Pam and Jim, have been excited about their relationship for years, and found the wedding deeply satisfying as a narrative ending. NBC even marketed the episode as a conclusion, with slo-mo shots of Pam and Jim looking at each other and title cards that read something like “time for the happy ending.” It makes a great deal of sense – the traditional definition of a comedy is that it ends in a wedding, and if this were an Elizabethan play (The Office; or, Michael Scott the Trickst’r), Michael would give a wry speech at the end and everyone would pair up (Dwight and Angela, Andy and Erin) and dance the night away. But obviously, this is not the end of The Office, and we will return to Dunder Mifflin next week to deal with the repercussions of Michael sleeping with Pam’s mom and probably make some great honeymoon “that’s what she said” jokes.

This is essentially a more specific iteration of my previous comments about why this show is so great, but it’s definitely worth expressing once again. The Office is so great, and it’s partly because it can achieve the emotional high and closure of a wedding and then come back to work the next week. Pam and Jim just got married, but their lives will go on, still happy and funny despite their resolved sexual tension. Shockingly, we might continue to find humor and pleasure out of following their life together, newlyweds with a newborn, and consider this character development rather than jumping the shark. This is a model for what traditional sitcoms could be. Sit up and take notice, How I Met Your Mother.

After last week’s Kristen Chenoweth awesomeness, this week’s episode of Glee was bound to be something of a let down. Only two big musical numbers, heavy emphasis on the pregnancy plotlines, and the consequently dominant presence of the annoying Mrs. Shuester made the episode more predictable and less gripping. Like the Acafellas or Kristen Chenoweth’s appearance, the whole guys versus girls competition was a one-off event, designed to create just enough drama for an hour but nothing that could spill over into next week. Plus, what little plot there is continues to frustrate me. The only ongoing plotline that exists week-to-week and possibility to actually transform one of the characters’ lives is Quinn’s pregnancy, and I can’t figure out why the most interesting place to go with this show is teen motherhood. In other problematic plotting issues, I’m pretty sure I remember the principal making some kind of injunction against any song not on his approved list, but apparently those details really do just disappear into the chasm of Thursday.

Boys vs. Girls - was a winner even declared? Do we care that little about the plot of this show?

Angry because her blender failed to grind bone

Still, the few brighter spots in the episode were ones that made me hopeful again for next week. Some of the most entertaining problems on the show have been those that arise between the Cheerios and the Glee Club, but inter-club drama has been sadly absent in recent weeks. Members of the football team and the Cheerios managed to join the Glee Club with shockingly little conflict, and so far the biggest concern with cross club membership is Finn’s inability to stay awake. Next week, thank goodness, Sue Sylvester will become Glee co-leader, so all I can hope is that it will be a useful, productive conflict and that golden opportunity won’t fall victim to the one-plot-a-week pitfall.

Because for the first time on Glee, my favorite moment this week was not a musical number. No, the stand-out, memorable scene from Glee was without question Sue Sylvester’s journal. I love how frequently she calls her journal “Journal,” as though she’s actually persuading it of her brilliance and frustration. I love her emphatic use of the double underline. I love her look of sheer disgust as she recalls Quinn’s tell-tale knee wobble. Please, please Glee. More Sue Sylvester screen time. Don’t screw this up.

I love mystery novels. My preference is for mysteries of the British 1930s and 40s variety, but I’ve been known to sit down with Maisie Dobbs, or Adam Dalgliesh, or even a few contemporary Americans. There’s obviously a great deal of television that’s derivative of the detective novel – everything from CSI to Law and Order to House follows the same basic format, whether you’re investigating medical or criminal clues. This is not to say that the shows are all the same or that some aren’t significantly better than others. I will always prefer to watch Bones than I will ABC’s new crime procedural show the forgotten. (The show is about a group of concerned citizens investigating cold cases, and I suppose the ridiculous lower case title is supposed to emphasize how sad and abandoned the victims are, but really it just looks like ABC forgotten the Shift key.) For all their similarities, these shows also come in many flavors, running the gamut from serious, heartfelt crime solving (CSI, Cold Case) to out and out silliness (Psych).

Rick Castle and Kate Beckett on Castle

One of my favorite newer iterations of the TV crime genre is ABC’s Castle. It stars Nathan Fillion, which, let’s just get it out of the way, is a big part of why I first watched the show. Fillion plays Rick Castle, uber-famous mystery novelist who has just killed off his money-making franchise detective and is now seeking new inspiration for his main character. After a killer stages murder victims like victims from Castle’s novels in the pilot episode, Castle meets and becomes intrigued by Detective Kate Beckett, who eventually becomes the model for his newest character, Nikki Heat. In order to better write his novels and continue to inspire Nikki Heat novels, Castle hangs out with Detective Beckett and lends his useful novelist eye in the aide of solving real crime. The whole premise is utterly, entirely preposterous.

The absurdity of the set-up is part of the pleasure. Without even trying, the tone of the show instantly shifts from something falsely solemn and is instead more campy, more light-hearted, and funnier. For me, the nature of the show’s built in self-commentary device, a mystery writer who solves crimes, immediately adds to the whole appeal and reminds me of some of my favorite mystery novels, those by Dorothy Sayers. Rick Castle is a light-hearted combination of Sayers’ two main characters, Harriet Vane, who works as a mystery novelist, and Lord Peter Wimsey, whose status as a man of leisure allows him to pursue detection as a hobby. Castle is a cheerful, intelligent, confident, goofy guy with ample resources and a wackadoo but happy home life, who walks onto every crime scene because for him, it’s fun. No sad apartment with sagging mattress and pizza boxes on the floor, no clichéd alcoholism, not even the standard tortured back story that makes him outwardly cynical and inwardly sentimental. Castle’s just a smart, silly guy with attention to detail and a love of campy mystery plot taglines. “I can already see the blurb on my next book jacket. ‘It’s Fashion Week in New York City. And the clothes are…to die for.’”

This post is thanks in large part to my sister, whose love of great mystery novels and television shows has always inspired mine, and who reminds me that not all good television has to be depressing, or force us to confront our own inadequacies, or even make a great deal of sense. Some good television is just Castle – well-made, entertaining, and goofy. Thank goodness for that.

Among its many varied uses, fiction often provides us with a means to analyze the world, either in a philosophical, abstract way (The Stranger, Anna Karenina), or in far more concrete, practical ways (think Pride and Prejudice and its useful lessons in conversation etiquette). We can also use it to think about and understand topical issues; it’s hard to think of a more appropriate text for the Madoff scandal than Little Dorrit.

Particularly for current events, though, our accompanying fictional works can sometimes be more effective as visual rather than written stories. This is the case for two shows now on in the primetime slots – CBS’s new program The Good Wife and FOX’s procedural Lie to Me, now entering its sophomore season. The Good Wife follows a fairly standard weekly episodic law firm plotline, where each episode introduces us to a new innocent victim who our heroine tries to defend. The premise and surrounding context of the show, however, is a little more involved. The main character, Alicia Florrick, is married to the former State Attorney of Cook County, who has recently admitted to occasional sexual encounters with young prostitutes and is fighting charges of political corruption. While her imprisoned husband waits for trial, Alicia goes back to work in a law firm after years as a stay-at-home mother, and has uncomfortable encounters with her husbands’ former colleagues.

It’s a fun premise – relatable for women who struggle with work/life balance and there’s a hefty dollop of scandal to keep things exciting. But it works especially well as a television show rather than a novel, because all our cues for interpreting Alicia as a beleaguered political wife are visual ones. In the beginning of the first episode, Alicia and her husband walk out into a crowd of reporters, and while Peter informs the crowd that he has resigned as State’s Attorney, Alicia stands silently off to the side, looking shocked and pale. This is an image we know, television we know. This is Eliot Spitzer’s wife, standing up next to him while he admits to having sex with prostitutes. For most Americans, this is an event that happened visually, something they watched on the news or saw clips of on the internet, and so this fictionalized representation of that event can give us a jolt of visual recognition that text is unlikely to achieve.

On FOX’s Lie to Me, the premise grapples with current events more abstractly, and rather than using jabs of visual reminders, the show provides retroactive interpretation of significant images. Cal Lightman, the show’s protagonist, works as a lie detector, using the examination of physical signs like heart rate, gestures, and most importantly, micro-expressions, to determine whether someone is being deceptive. In the season two premiere, the Lightman Group interviews a possible Supreme Court nominee, attempting to determine whether he has secrets that will hold up his confirmation. After learning that he feels fear and anger about one of his early cases, they uncover a hidden sexual relationship between the nominee and the daughter of a woman he once acquitted. A picture of the judge and the young woman reveals her feelings for him – she looks at him with love and hidden knowledge. As corroboration for the image’s interpretation, the investigator pulls up several other images: Mel Gibson’s mistress looking at him, Hailey Glassman looking at Jon Gosselin, and of course, Monica Lewinsky looking up at President Clinton. Their expressions are the same, and the inference is clear. As in the fictional plot, the expressions of famous and infamous people are available for further interpretation, and the fictional storylines of Lie to Me can act as a decoder ring for real life.

Of course it’s dubious that you could sit watching Lie to Me and then re-watch Dave Letterman’s fumbling attempts to apologize for his indiscretions with new insight. Still, the idea stands: television is uniquely suited as a fictional medium to respond to and provide interpretation for current events in our visual world. That doesn’t mean it happens often, or that it frequently happens thoughtfully, cleverly, or effectively. But The Good Wife and Lie to Me are not bad places to start.

After several episodes with multiple plotlines and hefty thematic weight, “Souvenir” felt much like a television version of a short but sweet jaunt to Rome – memorable, intense, and uncomplicated. (At least, as uncomplicated as an episode of Mad Man can be.) It was also more directly about the visual, which happens often on the show but particularly when the plotline moves its characters out of their familiar settings, as in last season’s The Jet Set. So much storytelling happened here on a visual rather than verbal level – Betty looking out the hotel window, Pete Campbell slumped on the couch oblivious to time passing, Sally watching her mother looking in the mirror.

Perpetually throughout “Souvenir,” I found myself distracted by clothing. The (rape?) subplot involving Pete and the German au pair used a ruined party dress as a classic Macguffin, where the dress itself had no meaning other than its use as an object to introduce the two characters and allow the au pair to feel beholden to Pete. (It also allowed us to see Joan in her new job, but that could have been arranged without the elaborate stained dress plotline). That it was a dress mattered very little – the au pair could easily have broken a vase or stained a rug and the result would have been the same, which is how a Macguffin works. But while the fluffy dress held little meaning other than as a plot instigator for Pete Campbell, its presence in the episode acted as a key for other characters and other plotlines, a sort of self-annotated item that floated through scenes with its own footnote – “Hey, look at that giant dress! What’s going on with clothing in this episode?”

Enter Betty, three times. In the first third of the episode, she wears a white dress with a pleated skirt and a blue patterned scarf tied around her throat, her naval-inspired Junior League outfit. It allows her to slip readily from her city council meeting, to her developing affair with Henry Francis in a dark car, and then back into her kitchen, where she chats with her husband about city politics. It’s sharp and attractive, but it’s not overtly sexy, which is in accord with the way we understand Mr. Francis’s attraction to Betty. He first met her, after all, when she was nine months pregnant, and the maternal housewife is clearly part of her appeal. Next we move to Rome, where Betty makes an appointment at the beauty parlor in fluent Italian and then strolls out onto the darkened streets like a figure straight off the runway. The camera gives her a full body pan-up, beginning with her feet and moving up to her black fringed hem, oversized beaded necklace, multi-stranded cleavage-bearing neckline, giant pearl earrings, and finally, her dramatic, impeccable beehive. She wears heavy, shadowy eye makeup, carries a tiny black clutch, and is fully high fashion, sexy, educated and sassy. The game she plays with Don at the table underlines the point – this is Betty without marriage or children or the Junior League. She loves it, and is good at it.

Finally, we return to Betty at home, after beehives at the beauty salon and sex in the shower with her husband. From the first season of Mad Men, set in 1960, Betty has been dressed as the perfect fifties housewife, with wide, tea-length skirts, and short coiffed hair. As season two progressed, Betty began to shift toward more modern fashions, with narrower skirts and bright floral patterns, but always a recognizable Betty Draper. Suddenly, after returning from Rome, Betty wears an outfit that makes her look like the fifties are a distant memory. Her floor length color block patterned dress is almost shocking, a sharp departure from tailored suits and Junior League scarves. It is – dare I say – casual, a tone further emphasized by her practical, embroidered headband.

The narrative here is not hard to follow. All along, Mad Men has been right at the edge of major cultural change, shifting slowly but noticeably away from the fifties and into the sixties. With a trip to Rome and a return home, it seems as though Betty Draper is the first character to really make the leap, internally and externally. She begins with her almost fussy white Junior League dress, rediscovers that she has sex appeal and value, and ends the episode in a casual sixties dress, frustrated with her limited options in life. The dress Pete Campbell replaces for the au pair is like Betty’s old dresses – it has a large, fluffy ballerina skirt and tight bodice. It is also, as we learn at the department store, “last season.” Before everyone else on the show, Betty has begun to move forward. I doubt she’ll ever go for full-on hippie status, but the seeds of discontent and self-awareness may have finally been sown. Bring on the sixties.