Last night’s episode was short on revelations, and amply endowed with the trademarked Lost clues/hints/references that probably go nowhere in the long term but which we worry over incessantly and make us hungrier for answers that ultimately won’t matter much. Let’s rack ‘em up.

1)    Who are all those dead people on Hydra island? Were there really that many people on the Ajira flight? (Certainly didn’t look that way to me, but maybe they were all huddled in the back of the plane). More importantly, how did they all die? And how long was Tina Fey’s evil doppelganger hanging out, covered in grime, waiting for someone to show up?

2)    Who is Smokey’s crazy mother? It seems like he and Jacob have been around for a seriously long time, so she has to have been around a looong time ago. My guess now is that Smokey is Grendel. Which would make Jacob…Beowulf? Oh yeah. Mystery solved.

James Ford's highly symbolic reading list; Tina Fey's evil doppelganger

3)    Listen, I know that last item was funny ha-ha, but seriously: this show is now so full of probably meaningless literary references, it’s really not that out of place.  My favorite in recent episodes was Chaim Potok’s The Chosen, which I am nearly certain was picked just for its title and not for any overt connection with Orthodox Judaism. “Recon” gave us a return of James Ford’s love for Watership Down (and Kate subsequently eating a rabbit on the island, DUN DUN DUN), but even more suggestively, Watership Down is stacked on top of a copy of A Wrinkle in Time and a book called Lancelot by Walker Percy. A Wrinkle in Time is an obvious and quite nice shout out to all the time traveling shenanigans this show has indulged in, and if the free will vs. predestination theory of Lost gets any traction, the final showdown of L’Engle’s book speaks quite clearly to what side you should be on. I’ve never read Lancelot, but Wikipedia was quite helpful. Apparently, the plot involves a lawyer who murders his wife after discovering that he’s not the father of one of their children. Hmm, familiar… All of which is to say, Lost’s referential narrative technique tends to be a lot of smoke and not much fire, where all of these shout outs lead you down analytical garden paths and may not ultimately speak to much more than “look how these things are similar!”

4)    I think Michael Landon’s performance in Little House on the Prairie deserves its own item on the list, don’t you?

5)    Who or what is locked inside the padlocked cabin on the submarine? My money’s on Desmond, but that’s largely because I really wish Desmond were playing a bigger role in this season to date. If it were Desmond, at least he has some sea-faring experience, which might help with item number six…

6)    How, how, could it be any easier for Sawyer to pilot a submarine than an airplane? I suppose at least the sub’s in good working order and doesn’t require a maintenance team to get it up and running, but The Hunt for Red October has led me to believe that submarine maneuvers can be quite tricky. I’m now having visions of the submarine sailing into a New England port, with Sawyer perched looking out of the hatch on top, musing on moving to Montana. It’ll be a beautiful series finale.

After yesterday’s absurdly long post, today I’m sticking with brevity.

Did you know that Daylight Saving Time screws with television ratings? It’s true! Maybe!

Or at least, that’s the meme going around the internets today, and I’m inclined to believe. First, evidence: across the board last night, television ratings were down. Data stolen from TV By the Numbers, my go-to source for this sort of stuff, says that viewing numbers were down 4% in the 8pm slot and 2% in the 9pm slot, compared with numbers from a week ago. Sadly, this seems to have been particularly true for Chuck, which dropped 17%.

Second, wild conjecture: when it’s light outside for more of the day, people stay outside longer, or are more likely to go out some place, or are generally less inclined to fall into a snuggly warm stupor in front of the flickering, undemanding TV screen. The discrepancy in the 8pm and 9pm numbers might back this up a little bit, because at least where I live, 8pm is now significantly brighter than it used to be, but by 9pm, it’s fully dark. Weather certainly has some measurable impact on TV ratings, which is why summer television is so dominated by re-runs and low-budget reality projects, so it’s not too crazy to look to DST as a source for changing viewing patterns.

It’s a huge downer for Chuck fans, who have just started to hope they could be getting another season, thanks to NBC’s universally poor performance. I can only cross my fingers that the all-around drop will lessen the blow of the 17% plummet, but even still. Yeesh.

HBO’s new Band of Brothers-inspired miniseries The Pacific premiered last night, and although I will be watching it, I probably won’t be blogging about it until the end. (This, by the way, is one of the biggest differences between the miniseries and standard American television productions: miniseries are written with an end in mind, and usually, the whole thing is produced at once. Writing about it without seeing the whole thing is like writing a paper about the first half of a novel. In contrast, television series are a piecemeal business, and the final episode mostly likely isn’t even written by the time the first episode is filmed. They’re built over a very long period of time, often with no definite end in sight, so writing about them while in progress makes much more sense.)

Phew, where did that come from? In any event, although I’m pretty sure The Pacific is going to be amazing and make me weep and cover my eyes, I don’t want to think about it critically until the end. I do want to talk a little about its opening credits, though. (Note: this is the director’s cut version, so it is slightly longer than the one on the air. Only slightly, though.)

They’re gorgeous. The dominating images are super close-up sequences of someone drawing with charcoal – so zoomed in that the dust from the charcoal piles up like dirt, and the textures of the pencil, the paper, and the charcoal lines resemble a rocky, uneven landscape. The lines are stark, but occasionally zoom out into soft, shaded images of soldiers’ pensive faces, and restrained red tinting illustrates violence with more emotional nuance than actual gore. As the pencil moves across paper, fragmenting pieces of dust and charcoal are visually linked to images of battle, so that debris from a drawing looks much like shrapnel. It’s a lovely, persuasive sequence.

There’ve been two diverging trends in opening title sequences. For many network shows, they’ve all but disappeared, led no doubt by the influence of shows like Lost, with its minimalist, two second long, slowly spinning black and white title. The once longer version of the Grey’s Anatomy title sequence has been reduced to a clean, brief appearance of the title, and newer shows like The Good Wife , FlashForward, and Castle never even had a longer versions of their very short opening sequences. 24 has always had its succinct timer BEEP….BEEP… title, and even some sitcoms, once the bastion of the TV theme song, have abandoned traditional opening credits for an abbreviated animation and a creator credit (How I Met Your Mother, Community).

The reverse has also been true, largely for high-brow cable and premium cable programming. Over the past decade, it’s become the norm for HBO shows to come stamped with trademark artsy title sequences, sometimes nearly two minutes long. The best of these are completely gorgeous little films that tap into the show’s thematic content and organizing aesthetics – Deadwood, Six Feet Under, Rome and True Blood all have powerful opening sequences that go a long way toward establishing the shows’ tone. True Blood in particular has an opening sequence that does an immense amount of atmospheric work. Those ninety seconds build an entire fantasy world, connect it with the politics, racial history, and cultural battles of our real world, and then anchor it all in a detailed, distinct American South. (The best embedded version I could find has an HBO watermark on it.) Showtime’s Dexter also must go on this list: never, ever have I seen creepier footage of food, and a jaunty, devil-may-care music that accompanies images of coffee beans being pulverized, a knife cutting into a runny egg yolk, and fingers clenched to pull shoelaces tight sells the show’s juxtaposition of quotidian horror as effectively as Michael C. Hall’s performance.

Oddly, these opposing methods of building framing devices for television shows are seeking to address the same realities of TV viewership. The supershort title credit builds a show’s brand while also making it far too short to skip – there’s no point in reaching for the fast-forward button on the TiVo if you know it’ll only be five seconds long. You may not get a whole lot of establishing information about the cast, characters, or tone, but at least you can’t skip over what little there is. On Community, for example, the thirty second sequence often gets clipped into a pithy title bit that blasts you with a brief melodic phrase, one line of a song, and a nice animation of a cootie catcher with funny doodles in it. The word “Community” appears in block, collegiate text, annnnnnd we’re done. You get a hefty dose of COLLEGE, a whiff of snark, and you’re launched into the episode. Conversely, the ultralong HBO-style credits open themselves up to skipping because they are so long, but if you do sit through them, you’re rewarded with a surprisingly rich little meditation on what you’re about to watch.

The ultralong title sequence also serves an important purpose for weekly viewing – certainly this is not always the case, but over the past decade, the cable shows with super long credits have often also been narratively complex, multi-plotted shows. Sitting down to a new episode of The Sopranos a week later, a minute and a half of Tony driving through the Holland tunnel may not remind you of precisely what was happening in the episode last week, but it helps pull your mind back into the show’s aesthetic, its tone, its atmosphere. It also establishes the episode as an event, something that requires some introduction and unpacking. It’s cinematic – this hour of your life is a separate experience, encapsulated from whatever you were just doing, and you need this title sequence as a bridge between the two spaces. Conversely, the long credits have the opposite effect in DVD viewing. I am much more likely to skip one of those long title sequences when watching several episodes at a time (which, ahem, happens not infrequently), because they interrupt the rhythm and immersion of the storytelling. I don’t need a ninety second reminder of what the show’s like if the thing I was doing two minutes ago was watching the show.

Don’t get me wrong, I love a good title sequence. But I wonder if their presence at the beginning of every episode in the DVD format makes the rhythms of the show a little too pat, and the endings and beginnings of each segment super conscious reminders of time passing. A title song that’s familiar quickly becomes canned, and then annoying, and then it breaks you out of the duration of the show when you hit fast forward – the equivalent of skipping that one paragraph that’s repeated in every Nancy Drew novel (oh Bess, you always were a little plump). If nothing else, the title sequences are enduring markers of one way television will always be different than a novel, even when it’s at its most literary. The methods of production are much closer to the surface.

I’m in the middle of a big project where I’m reading and watching a lot of material (a lot) in the hopes of being able to sit in a room and say something coherent about it all. As a part of that process, I’ve been rewatching a lot of television I haven’t seen in a while, and am trying to sort through what makes it a worthwhile item of discussion, how it connects to other shows, and say something cogent about why this particular show is a relevant part of my List of Giant Things I Need to Read and Watch. (Note: you may think that should have read “Giant List of Things,” but indeed, no. It is a requirement to be Giant in order to be on this list.)

As a part of all this, I’ve decided to take Fridays and write about a show on that List of Giant Things. I spend a little time every day sitting down with a word processing document. Might as well use some of that time for the LoGT instead of The Real Housewives of New York City, ya know what I mean? (Note the second: this does not necessarily mean that I haven’t watched The Real Housewives of New York City. I find Bethenny’s cheekbones mesmerizing.)

So, up first on the LoGT project – Twin Peaks, 1990-1991. Largely produced and created by David Lynch and Mark Frost, although some disputes during season two caused David Lynch to leave until returning to work on the final episode.

I first saw the pilot of Twin Peaks in my college dorm room a few years ago, and I remember watching the synthesized strains of the hypnotic opening credits and rocking back in my chair. “What on earth is this?” I wondered, as a machine slowly rotated around the points of a giant buzz saw, blowing sparks everywhere. The pilot introduces the community, the main characters, and what seems like the central focus of the show. Local high school student Laura Palmer has been murdered, and Agent Dale Cooper and Sheriff Harry S. Truman are going to find out who did it. That first, extended-length episode does essentially what you’d expect, outlining the relationships between Laura’s friend Donna, her boyfriend Bobby, her lover James, and all the other minor characters at the diner, the Great Northern Hotel, the gas station, the sheriff’s department. It’s also intensely melodramatic and returns constantly to the overwrought main theme, which never slips quietly into the background noise, but rather slaps you upside the head with its straining, electronic violin and keyboard anguish. read more…

This post is a little departure from my usual TV-related stuff, but I figure if it still involves me staring at a giant brightly colored screen for several hours in a row, it’s probably close enough. I spent a fair chunk of last week playing through the new video game Heavy Rain, and it kinda blew my mind.

The game comes from an almost unknown European company called Quantic Dream, and the general premise is the story of the Origami Killer, a serial murderer who kidnaps and drowns young boys. You play as several characters in the story, switching back and forth between them at various points in the narrative and occasionally watching the different character arcs overlap. The primary character is a guy named Ethan Mars, who suffers a traumatic loss at the beginning of the game and then goes even further off the rails when the Origami Killer kidnaps his son. You also play as Scott Shelby, a private detective investigating the crimes; Madison Paige, a journalist; and Norman Jayden, an FBI agent with a drug problem. There are a lot of familiar tropes involved with laying out the story, but those tropes come largely from television and movies rather than video games. You interrogate witnesses, gather evidence, piece together clues, and experience some disorienting moments with alcohol, drugs, or even panic attacks that threaten your ability to uncover the killer’s identity. Even the visual style takes some hefty cues from television, specifically the multi-screen perspectives from 24. I should probably also mention that unlike Grand Theft Auto’s highly stylized Liberty City or the post-apocalyptic Washington DC in Fallout 3, Heavy Rain takes place in a modern American city that looks much closer to the real world. The year is 2011, which does give them the leeway to make some pretty sweet augmented reality glasses for the FBI agent, but other than that, it’s a purposefully realistic setting.

Heavy Rain has two primary innovations – one on the level of storytelling, and the other in respect to the gamer interface. Unlike almost any other game I’ve played, there are no do-overs in Heavy Rain. When you interact with other characters, you make choices and then live with the impact of those decisions. When you fight, or try to escape from danger, or solve a puzzle, maybe you do it successfully and move on. If not, then you die and the story goes on without that character. You don’t get to go back and play the scene over again, you don’t have any particular weapons or skills so there’s no use in waiting to buy a bigger gun or level up. Obviously, this has some significant impact on how the game ends. Based on how well you navigate the game and the decisions you make along the way, you can end with all or none of the major characters surviving to the final scene, and unsurprisingly, this gives the impact of playing through the scary fight scenes an emotional range from teeth-rattling nervousness all the way up through OMGOMGOMGOMG. I’m not going to pretend to be more badass here than I actually am: I freaked out. Often. I had to turn the game off and wait until someone else came home before I could keep playing.

Games with alternate endings and choose-your-own-adventure formats have been around for a while, and although Heavy Rain takes the concept to an impressively persuasive place, the idea of it isn’t all that surprising. The thing I’m still thinking about this game, nearly a week later, is the way you move a character through the story. In some sense, you spend the whole game just trying to follow directions well. As you fight with a bad guy, you respond to the prompts and press X, and then O, and then toggle the joystick up, and if you do it correctly and quickly enough, you don’t die. It’s like if your childhood Bop-It game had life-or-death implications. (“Bop it! Twist it! Pull it! AHHHH! DUN DUN NA NA NA.”) At the same time, many of those fight scenes give you a few different options at once, and you have to pick one and do it quickly. If you say the right thing, remember the correct detail, spend a little more time rifling through somebody’s apartment so that you find the pertinent clue, or pick the right person to call, your chances of survival might be a lot better. (Watch a little of a scene from early in the game over here. I’m not going to embed it because there’s a lot of, um, swearing.)

I can appreciate why this style of game play could be really aggravating, and the frustration of missing one button that causes a failure that you have no chance to fix. More than the gameplay format, though, I was totally entranced by the minutiae of every character’s actions. After a love scene, you stand up and leave the room, but first you move the joystick in a slow rolling motion to carefully pull your arm out from underneath the other character’s body. When you’re playing as Madison Paige and you need to make yourself look sexy to create a diversion, you have to repeatedly jerk the controller to left so that she can rip off the demure hem of her skirt. As Norman Jayden investigates a crime scene and needs to go clambering up a slippery hillside, you press and hold an awkward combination of buttons for each new foothold, and if you release them before Norman’s fully hoisted himself up, he goes tumbling back downwards. Maybe my description of them makes it seem boring. It’s mesmerizing.

There are problems. The voice acting is seriously hit or miss, and some of the face capture work is clearly down in the Uncanny Valley. My friend’s PS3, which I had to borrow to play this game because it’s only available on one system, froze at least once as it tried to load a new character, and I once got stuck trying to run up the stairs. Honestly, though, these clear flaws make the game’s innovations even more striking, because it’s just startling how involved you feel even when your character’s accent sounds like Tony Blair doing a Tony Soprano impression.

If more video games were like this one… I would be playing a lot more video games.

First, a little history lesson from European History, 3rd period:

“And it was on this island that everything changed, that everything finally became clear. Elba is where Napolean faced his greatest test, because exile wasn’t the worst of his fate. What was truly devastating to him was the loss of his power. Sure, they allowed him to keep the title of Emperor, but without any power it was meaningless. He might just as well have been dead.” Oh Lost. I see what you did there.

I seriously enjoyed last night’s episode of Lost, and was thrilled both that it was a Ben-focused episode, and that it broke this season’s on-again-off-again trend. It’s so satisfying to watch Dr. Linus struggle with his desire for power and choose the right course of action, and then even more meaningful to watch him make the same decision back on the island. Who knows whether island Ben is in earnest about joining Team Jacob or whether this is just another one of his deceptions, but Michael Emerson sold Ben’s weeping collapse so well that I want to believe him.

The Dr. Linus flash sideways story worked not just because of Michael Emerson’s awesomeness, but because so much of what happened to Ben in this alternate world had enormous meaningful reverberations with his story on the island. It was great to watch Ben get it right with Alex this time, but it was also fascinating to watch him care for his sick father (rather than, you know, murdering him with poison gas), be manipulated by John Locke, manipulate Artz in turn, and especially, be passionate about doing his work as well as he could. Maybe Ben has always been about doing his job to the best of his abilities, but we never had a clear enough sense of what that job actually was to see that side of him. The school setting also proves to be a fertile place to carry out some of these themes outside the special rules of the island. Power grabs and manipulation are believable inside school politics, but there’s also the added humorous twist of rampant pettiness (possibly my favorite bit from “Dr. Linus” is Artz’s demand for a new parking spot – not the one under the maple tree, the one next to it).

Ben’s redemption narrative aside, the flash sideways also contained some clues about the nature of this side of the narrative that went beyond the “hey look, it’s that guy!” techniques of the previous episodes. We already knew that the island does exist in this timeline, but it’s been underwater for a while. Thanks to Ben’s dad, we now also know that the Dharma initiative existed, that Ben and his dad were on the island working for Dharma, and that in this narrative, something made them leave. These hints, combined with some nice clues dropped by Richard Alpert in the Black Rock, made “Dr. Linus” feel like a worthwhile character development story that also got the ball rolling on some answers about the island. Double the pleasure.

And speaking of poor, long-lived Richard, the more we learn about Jacob and the role he plays in people’s lives, the less I am convinced that Team Jacob is the best place to be. If, as has been suggested around teh Internetz, Jacob and Smokey are not good and evil but something more like destiny and free will, my instinct would be to side with the men of science. Ben’s decision to turn away from the leader who made him kill his daughter suggests that there’s something to be said for free will, and Richard is less than pleased with whatever his eternal life has brought him thus far. On the other hand, Smokey was hardly a saint at the temple, and Sayid’s been transformed into his own evil doppelganger. It will be fascinating to see where Charles Widmore falls once he finds a place to dock his submarine, and I can only hope that Desmond and Penny won’t be too far behind.

A great episode, and one that I hope bodes well for the rest of the season. One last question, though, that I do hope will get answered soon: what the heck happened to Sawyer?

While Chuck vs. The Beard might not have been the deepest, darkest, most thought provoking or daring episode of Chuck, it was so undeniably fun that I just found myself grinning throughout the whole thing. Chuck vs. The Beard, in list form:

1)    I think it’s going to be great for the long term Chuck Bartowski character development that Morgan finally knows his secret. The pleasure and challenge of this season has been Chuck’s sudden character shift and all the resulting reverberations in his private life. In the spy world, he’s much more awesome now – he’s intelligent and skilled, and he comes with a sweet instant-Ninja feature (even if it is pretty buggy). It’s entirely reasonable that his relationships outside the spy world would begin to disintegrate now that his identity is aligned in a new way. Still, the audience misses what Chuck once was, and Sarah misses him as well. Morgan is a great way to keep Chuck grounded in both places, and his eternal adoration of Chuck’s abilities make it completely acceptable to him that Chuck would get picked by the CIA. He immediately sympathizes with how tough Chuck’s life has been these past few years, but he also frames Chuck’s life in terms of the same familiar relationship they’ve always had (which is why it’s so nice that Morgan complains about Chuck flashing on Duck Hunt).

This shot made absolutely no sense in the context of the scene. It is a Jeffster! glamor shot, plain and simple, with no explanation or apology. And it is excellent.

2)    Triumphant return of Jeffster!

3)    While the whole Buy More plot was basically a set-up for a series of silly sight gags and then Jeffster!, I do think the continuing allegiance to the Buy Moria nation state has a nice role to play in the whole tone of the show. Aside from the lovely flag tableau, my favorite moment of Buy More patriotism came from this week’s bad guys, excellently played by that one dude from The Drew Carey Show and that other guy from Reno 911. “So that’s the sound of liberty” has to be the best blurb Jeffster! could ever hope to get.

4)    As with almost any time I use a list on this blog, this list is just an excuse to post this, which I saw linked around twitter today, and which made me laugh for a very long time.

The season finale of this brief, nine-episode season of Big Love was last night, and I cannot remember the last time I’ve seen a bigger disaster lurch its way toward Bethlehem to be born. Let me just try to recap what happens in the last episode, although I know it’s a failed enterprise. Barb tries to sabotage Bill’s campaign by leaking the paternity test of Ana’s baby to the press. Margene confesses to Ana that she wants to get a divorce from Ana’s fiancé Goran, and Ana insists they all stay together. Albie goes mad(der than he already was). Bill fires the two guys who were running the casino, which infuriates Barb, who’s been actually doing the major work there. We discover that JJ, Nikki’s ex-husband and her mother’s new husband, has been carrying out an elaborate incestuous eugenics scheme at his compound in Kansas. JJ has implanted Adaleen, Nikki’s mother, with an embryo that is not hers and tries to implant Nikki with an embryo made from JJ’s sperm and Nikki’s daughter’s egg, but Bill charges in and interrupts everything. Adaleen ties up JJ and his other wife whose name I’ve never caught and burns them alive inside the clinic. At the end, Bill Hendrickson wins a Utah State Senate seat and then uses his victory speech to announce that he is a polygamist.

I think that’s most of it, plus there’s a whole Sissy Spacek plotline that I never did quite understand. Oh, also, Don’s son throws a brick through the Hendricksons’s window? And Nikki doesn’t want to share Bill anymore? And who even knows what happened to that whole bird smuggling business!

A few days ago, FlowTV reprinted some of its most popular or thought-provoking works from the past several years, and included Michael Kackman’s piece about television criticism’s perpetual confusion of “narrative complexity” for “quality.” He points to the academic love affair with The Wire, the weekly Lost hand-wringing, and HBO’s entire brand as a form of elitist aesthetics that ignore “good” television’s underlying roots in melodrama. Kackman pushes the concept of melodrama (historically a female aesthetic) as a crucial player in the development of television shows now considered “good,” and asks critics to remember the gender politics that create the foundation of our aesthetic appreciation for complex narrative. I mention this all because Big Love falls in an interesting place in Kackman’s divide. It is narratively complex, and it proudly owns its relationship with melodrama, so much so that it frequently and cheerfully steps over the line of plausibility. It could be an excellent, daring, experimental leap into a gold mine of televised genius, combining all the complicated fascination of a multi-plot structure with the crazy unreality of a melodramatic romance. On screen, Big Love is a mess. Its characters get buried in the onslaught of plotlines and its themes are muddled inside screaming emotional outbursts and near-weekly murderous rages. Bill Hendrickson is a dolt.

While I will cop to a critical bias toward narrative complexity and should try to recognize the importance of understanding the role of melodrama in our (probably gendered) operational aesthetics, quality can exist independent of those considerations. Good TV can be made using the techniques of what used to be “bad” TV – see Mad Men, which is essentially a soap opera with better production values, and we should make an effort to re-evaluate those (cough cough) low-culture forms that have developed into what now makes up (cough) high-culture television. But I have to thank Big Love for proving so clearly that a narratively complex show can also still be messy, incoherent (bad!) TV.

Last night on The Office, Pam and Jim had a baby. It was an hour-long episode, and although I understand the temptation to allow more time for the special event (and pull a bit more on ad money through a second half-hour), the extra-long episodes of The Office tend to be baggy and uneven. It was the same with “The Delivery” – while the episode up until the baby’s birth was well-paced and funny, after that point, it felt pretty directionless.

I also have some problems with the way Dwight came off, and it’s an issue that rests on how plausible his character can actually be. The Office is at its best when its characters are bizarre and ridiculous just up to the point of believability, but as soon as they become too crazy to be real, the show loses all the awkwardness that makes it work so well. Michael and Meredith and Andy are all pretty good at playing with that line without crossing it, but Dwight is the most consistent offender, and this episode was an interesting showcase for watching him move from one side to the other. For the first half, Dwight was absurd in a way that’s consistent with his character. Of course he’d try to do something stupid in order to increase his sales, and of course Angela would be willing (and find it reasonable) to write up an elaborate contract on child-bearing. And escorting Pam and Jim to this hospital was a brilliant little moment for him, where he got to talk about the time he started an escorting service, he got to pause to tell Michael about that time he saw a deer, and best of all, the cop who pulls him over for impersonating a police officer yells “Don’t make this difficult, Dwight!” on the bullhorn.

Things take a turn for the worse, though, as soon as Dwight breaks into Pam and Jim’s house. Even for Dwight, the idea that he would completely destroy and then re-install their entire kitchen is beyond reasonable. Dwight is a guy who talks about doing crazy things, but whenever he tries them, they go awry. See: trying to pull a coup on Michael, leading Ryan out into the beetfields to frighten him, his relationship with Angela, etc., etc., etc. His character is built on the ludicrous plan (for example, the baby contract with Angela) that gets foiled. So watching him actually taking a sledgehammer to the kitchen is silly, but then watching him actually re-install all of their cabinets makes the whole thing preposterous.

Dwight’s outrageous behavior is not going to be the straw that breaks the camel’s back for The Office, but I do hope this season starts heading in a more focused direction. I have been relying on this show to demonstrate a new way of building characters and relationships, and in its six seasons, it’s been so good about punching through the will-they-won’t-they wall, playing with and then overcoming all sorts of classic jump-the-shark situations. I’ve been confident that the baby will be another one of those interesting obstacles that it figures out how to hurdle, but it will require creative work for everyone in the office, Dwight included. The show needs some strong, long-term stories for Michael and others in the office, it needs some outside pressure that hangs around for awhile rather than just dissipating (which Sabre certainly has), and it probably needs to find something other than just adorable missteps for Andy and Erin. I know that The Office can do all these things. I’m holding out hope that it will.

In the inevitable Wednesday morning flurry and hand-gripping that follows each new episode of Lost this season, the fact that NBC debuted a new hour-long drama as part of its fill-the-10pm-void programming got buried in the shuffle for me. Parenthood is about four adult siblings and their families, which range the familiar gamut from distant and wistful career mom, to struggling single mom, to delayed adolescent boyfriend who turns out to have a five-year-old son. The freshest and most emotionally effective story here is the plot belonging to the oldest brother, who realizes in the pilot that his son has Asperger’s. Autism spectrum disorders have just begun to seep into popular television, whether blatantly named (as in HBO’s Temple Grandin or Mary McDonnell’s character on Grey’s Anatomy) or unnamed (Sheldon in The Big Bang Theory). These stories have mostly centered on adults with Asperger’s, and Parenthood is notable in its decision to depict a child with the disorder and the parents’ struggle to cope.

The family home in Berkeley, California

Maybe as the show develops, the plotlines will feel less canned and more original, but right now, the strangest thing about Parenthood is its setting. California is the home of so much television that to be set in Orange County, San Diego, Los Angeles or even San Francisco is hardly worth batting an eye over, but Parenthood proudly takes place in Berkeley. The show’s four adult siblings have wacky ex-hippie parents who live in an astoundingly large, rambling house in Berkeley. There are tables outdoors surrounded by mismatched brightly painted chairs, old sheds with giant bureaus full of knickknacks, vintage lampshades, and condoms, and a general sense of a freewheeling counterculture youth that’s now older and wealthier. It would seem like an inconsequential aspect of the show, except that one of the major points of the pilot is that Lauren Graham’s character, the struggling single mom, is moving back in with her parents because she’s out of money. Her extended family is concerned that her children are rebellious and out of control, but their misdeeds fit into the classic Berkeley atmosphere more seamlessly than anyone else’s – they smoke, they get arrested, they run away. The show’s musical cues add to the dislocation. Twice, the pilot uses Bob Dylan’s “Forever Young,” a song that comes from a soundtrack more appropriate to a Berkeley several decades in the past.

I can’t figure out exactly why it’s so odd to see these characters in Berkeley, except perhaps for the Lauren Graham/Lorelai Gilmore effect. Like Gilmore Girls’ Stars Hollow, the setting has been boiled down to pure charm, totally distinct from the proud grittiness of major urban areas or dry remoteness of Midwest America. There’s no sting in this Berkeley, there’s nothing about political activism or rampant pot use, or even overt liberalism. It’s just a fairy land where you can always eat outside and your parents wear tunics with Asian-inspired collars and chunky necklaces. Parenthood is striving for a balanced drama, something between comedy and bleakness, but it’s set in a world of wacky houseboats and overflowing flower pots. Worse than that, the setting adds to the distinct impression that Parenthood is a show about the problems of rich white people who live in a gorgeous paradise. Don’t get me wrong – much of Berkeley is a gorgeous paradise, but it’s not all like that, and there may be a reason shows aren’t usually set there. Either you’re a hippie cliché, or you’re complaining about problems some people would kill to have. The show’s concept is more thoughtful than that, but I’m not sure its location helps sell the universal appeal.