Fall TV Watch: Tonight the new season can be said to be truly underway

I haven't watched this official season preview of Season 5 of Homeland, which launches tonight, for fear of of spoilers. I started watching one of the series of preview clips CBS has posted in advance of tonight's Season 7 premiere of The Good Wife, and within about three seconds star Julianna Margulies had revealed more than I wanted to know before watching the show.

by Ken

However bleak the new TV season becomes, it doesn't seem to crap up Sunday night. Tonight we have the season premieres of both The Good Wife and Homeland, and it's a good bet that, however I finally decide to finagle my DVR schedule -- it's complicated by the usual start-time derby CBS puts people who insist on watching The Good Wife through with their goddamn NFL game pushing the schedule back -- I expect I'll have watched both by the time I go to bed.

Plus there's the start of Season 2 of Showtime's The Affair (I had very mixed feelings about Season 1, but I watched the whole thing, and I'll probably stick with it, at least for a while). And a new episode of HBO's Project Greenlight, And of course a new episode of John Oliver's HBO Last Week Tonight.

By the time I go to bed I'll likely also have watched the new episode(s) of the current Masterpiece Classic offering, Indian Summers (at least on my PBS station), about life among the rulers and the ruled in the Raj of the '30s, as the independence movement was only beginning to form. By the end of last week's episode, I would have liked nothing better than to be able to go right into another episode. There were enough characters whose situations had grabbed my interest to the point where I really wanted to see more. And I still do!

Which is sometimes the best test of my relationship to a show. How badly do I want to see more of it?

I've already suggested my answers in the cases of The Good Wife and Homeland. Both shows are such familiar commodities that there seems hardly any point in going into them now, except perhaps to make the basic points:

• In its six seasons to date, The Good Wife seems to me to have cemented its standing as one of the all-time great TV dramas.

• I divine from (a) my enthusiasm carrying over from the end of Season 4 of Homeland and (b) my eagerness for the start of Season 5 that I think it's a substantially better show than most people seem to.

In both cases, the explanation seems to me basically the same: a core cast of characters I'm really interested in and care about -- both people who've been with us the whole way and people who've been brought in at the relevant opportunities -- and stories that make me want to see how they react and what happens to them. Chalk it up to the overriding vision and season-by-season vigilance of the creative overseers, and of course to the teams of writers and actors.

As I mentioned the other day, The Big Bang Theory is another show that involves me in this way -- to such an extent that I usually manage to block out the hideous un-laugh-like noise that disfigures every episode. It doesn't surprise me that this ghastly intrusion may cause many viewers not to realize how good a show this is that's trying to happen while its producers seem to be apologizing for the crap they're fobbing off on us.

I did actually watch the premiere of the show CBS has paired with BBT, Life in Pieces, an extended-family comedy that obviously makes you think of Modern Family, and I thought it wasn't terrible. I thought, this is something I would watch again. And I almost certainly will, but I have a feeling Episode 2 may sit on the DVR for a while until I get around to it.

The same sort of thing happened to me with HBO's Doll and Em. I somehow missed its whole first season, and didn't become aware of it until HBO posted the whole thing on On Demand, obviously in anticipation of the launch of the second season. And via On Demand, I loved the first season. I devoured it.

Em (Emily Mortimer) and Doll (Dolly Wells)

In Season 1, Emily was about to start production on a film that, whatever its problems, has the professional attraction of riding squarely on her shoulders (and in the course of the season -- spoiler alert! -- we got some glimmering of the kind of pressure that puts on an actor) when she was confronted by Doll back in England in crashed-and-burning breakdown mode, and asked her to come to L.A. to work as her assistant on the film, and tensions built into all those years of separate evolution begin to surface.

I congratulated myself on my unintentionally brilliant timing: I would be able to segue right into Season 2.Only it didn't work out that way. I thought the first episode of Season 2 was interesting, as Doll and Em resolved to create a project they can work on, together, as equals. But I noticed that I didn't pounce on Episode 2. And now I seem I'm falling behind, in what is, after all, only a six-episode season. Oh, I'll get to the others eventually. But I'm in no rush. Maybe I'll pick up at a point where the show once again really grabs me, and we'll finish together, the show and I, in a rush.

I'm in sort of the same situation with the CBS drama Limitless, about a guy Jake McDorman) who stumbles into an experimental drug that for a limited time makes his brain work like gangbusters. He winds up in trouble with the law, in the person of an FBI agent played by Jennifer Carpenter, our old friend from Dexter, who was so good as Dexter's succeeding-but-always-fucking-up cop sister Deb. The thing is, the drug -- unbeknownst to the guy -- has devastating side effects, except the other thing is that he appears to be somehow immune, which makes him invaluable as a test subject. If you're not quite believing this, neither am I, quite. But I'd probably have an easier time with it if I was being made to care more about the characters.

In the case of Doll and Em, for example, I wonder if my current less enthusiastic reaction has to do with the fact that, for me at least, Emily Mortimer as an actress usually has strong personal appeal; it's a cinch to care about most of the characters she plays. And Dolly Wells, not so much, and if I have to work to muster emotional support for the emotionally needier Doll character, it's apparently a challenge I'm not rushing into.

As a matter of fact, the show that, before the return of The Good Wife, I've found myself most looking forward to this summer is Showtime's rerun of the whole of its Queer as Folk, its many-season drama, developed for American television by Ron Cowen and Daniel Lipman, about a group of largely LGBT folk in Pittsburgh, but also including a fair number of non-LGBT characters, of which the network has been showing back-to-back episodes Monday nights into Tuesday mornings at 11pm and midnight, at least in my time zone. Earlier on, Showtime was showing whole masses of episodes on a couple of weekend nights, running into the wee or even not-so-wee hours of the morning, and I waa having the TV on, drifting in and out of sleep, watching as much as I could, and wanting more. Since they scaled back to the two episodes per week, I've been feeling majorly deprived, having to wait till late nigh Monday each week for a mere two episodes.


The North American Queer as Folk gang: Standing: Peter Paige (Emmett), Scott Lowell (Ted), Gale Harold (Brian), Robert Gant (Ben), Thea Gill (Lindsay), and Hal Sparks (Michael). Sitting: Randy Harrison (Justin) and Michelle Clunie (Melanie). Unaccountably missing: Sharon Gless (Michael's mother, Debbie).

When I started rewatching the Queer as Folk episodes, I found that the more I watched, the more I became reinvested in the characters, and the more personally I took each succeeding episode. This might be worth talking about at some point, especially in connection with the English Queer as Folk on which the American version was based, especially since almost everything I've heard about the two versions, purporting to "compare" them, seemed to me -- once I finally caught up with the U.K. version -- idiotic. But for now what matters about the American Queer as Folk is that it presents a large and diverse cast of characters I find it ridiculously easy to care about, and scripts and direction that make me want to see what happens next.

I think it's worth noting that when Queer as Folk aired originally, my understanding was that it had a significant core of non-gay fans. I'd like to think this was partly because some people were genuinely curious about what the lives of gay and lesbian folk looked like, but probably even more because the characters and stories made a lot of viewers really wanted to see what happened to these people next.

#

Aaron Schock is packing up his six-pack of steel for the long trip back to Peoria (or maybe someplace gayer?)

A parting peek at the beauteous Aaron?

by Ken

Probably we're spilling way too much virtual ink over the now-presumably-foreshortened political career of Illinois Rep. Aaron Schock, who as you know announced today that he's resigning from Congress in the face of the ever-tightening inquiring into his finances.

In our earlier "breaking news" post (link above), Howie already gave us Aaron's parting statement to the people of Illinois's 18th CD, and Howie told us who the local GOP is likely to slot into the slot they seemed pretty happy to have Aaron slotted in until he flaked out on them.

Here's what the Washington Post team of Mike DeBonis, Robert Costa and Paul Kane reported earlier this afternoon:

Rep. Aaron Schock (R-Ill.), who in a matter of weeks went from a fast track to national prominence to beset by numerous reports of spending misdeeds, announced his resignation from Congress on Tuesday.

Schock, 33, had endured weeks of headlines about the manner in which he has spent from his taxpayer-funded account for official expenses.

The Office of Congressional Ethics had commenced a review of his spending, The Washington Post reported Monday, after reports that started with a $40,000 tab on decorating his Capitol Hill office in the manner of the PBS show "Downton Abbey" and continued into personal finances and travel expenditures.

An OCE probe is considered a first step in addressing misdeeds. It lacks subpoena power but makes recommendations to the House Ethics Committee, which serves as the formal investigator and can issue punishment to lawmakers.

Schock's office did not respond to a request for comment Tuesday.

The lawmaker had appeared to be preparing to weather the media storm, hiring a new team of legal advisers -- including Don McGahn, a former chairman and member of the Federal Election Commission, and a public relations team of former senior GOP aides -- to review his official taxpayer funds, his political accounts and determine whether any spending or fundraising was amiss.

“As I’ve said before, I take my compliance obligations very seriously,” he told a local news affiliate in Peoria, Ill., on Friday. “I've hired a team of professionals to review all of our filings, including the head of the Federal Election Commission.”

Schock's saga began Feb. 2 when The Washington Post reported about the expansive office redesign modeled after the British TV show with a cult following on PBS. The interior designer offered the services for free, and that prompted liberal watchdog groups to allege that it was an inappropriate gift. Last month, Schock paid  $40,000 from his personal finances to cover the cost.

That incident prompted a flurry of stories about his use of private charter planes that he says are to get around his district, concert ticket purchases, trips overseas and other forms of travel.

IT ALL STARTED WITH THE DOWNTON ABBEY OFFICE


We had a lot of fun here with the bizarre saga of Aaron's Downton Abbey-themed new office (here, for example, and here), but he brought it on himself with behavior that put him in the glare of the searchlights. It's not as if odd behavior is exactly unknown among the denizens of Capitol Hill; it's just that you're supposed to know how to keep it out of the papers. Similarly, while Aaron seems to have made a mess of his financial dealings, does anyone believe that his actual financial extractions were anything but small potatoes by normal congressional holdings. Again, though, he doesn't seem to have grasped the basic lesson that there's a way of doing these things.

I suppose it's possible that who he thought he was went to his head, and he thought he was really somebody, rather than a harmless enough boy who was rendering service to the local Republican elite back home in Peoria, which in exchange provided him with a nice safe seat, which should have been his to hold as long as he wanted it, and the trappings of being a Big Deal, including controlled friendly local media.

Oh yeah, there were people who thought Aaron maybe could be more, that he maybe coulda been a contender, because he was young and personable -- and, oh yes, beautiful. As far as I could see, that's about all he was (for sure, when he opened his mouth, he was in trouble), but are we sure that isn't enough? Haven't major careers been built on less. I don't know why the name of Dan Quayle pops into mind, but let's go with it. He defeated a man of real substance, Birch Bayh, to take a place in the Senate, and got to be vice president, and he wasn't nearly as pretty as Aaron.


COME OUT, COME OUT, WHOEVER YOU ARE

Of course if Aaron might ever have risen higher, eventually something would have had to give with the problem of his sexuality. Not his actual sexual preference, whatever it is, but the clumsy obfuscation. Which is the other reason for attending to the rise and fall of this particular pol. Assuming he's gay, and it's sure hard to shake the assumption, his example suggests that the closet is becoming a less safe place from which to operate a political career.

The Good Wife's Julianna Margulies and David Hyde Pierce --
Sunday night's shocking news was that Frank Prady is not gay!

Which calls to mind the striking disclosure made in Sunday's Good Wife episode by Alicia Florrick's opponent in the race for illinois state's attorney, Frank Prady (a lovely run for David Hyde Pierce), who have tried committing themselves to running a (relatively) honorable campaign. In shocking confidence, Frank revealed to Alicia that -- gasp! -- he's not gay! The candidate, after all, had taken some public punishment over his presumed sexuality. No, said Frank, not gay but Jesuit -- having been married and failed at it, as an unflinching Catholic old-schooler, that road was closed to him.

The startled Alicia naturally asked why he hadn't simply explained. And he explained that the gay rumors hadn't hurt him too much, whereas his people were quite concerned about alienating the gay vote. I liked that.

Of course Peoria is in Illinois, but it can't be said that it is Illinois. Still, it's interesting to think that maybe there are more votes to be had trusting the public to deal with gayness as opposed to quaking in terror of their wrath.

The best outcome for Aaron himself, assuming he is gay, maybe what happened when onetime NJ Gov. Jim McGreevy was forced out of his closet. As he himself was the first to say, it finally freed him to be who he is.

#

TV Watch: It's surely not enough to say that "The Good Wife" is "the smartest drama currently on the air"

In this Season 6 preview, Good Wife cast members talk about the new season.

"Six seasons in, however, I've become weary of evangelizing for [The Good Wife]. Recently, I had lunch with an entirely charming TV maker, who was educated and intelligent about many forms of television but had never watched The Good Wife, because, he admitted with a shrug, he perceived it as being 'for women.' Although he was a fantastic lunch companion, he's dead now."

-- New Yorker TV critic Emily Nussbaum, in "Shedding
Her Skin: The Good Wife's thrilling transformation"

by Ken

When I say in the post title that "It's probably not enough to say that The Good Wife is 'the smartest drama currently on the air,' " in case my meaning isn't obvious, what I mean is that this isn't necessarily saying much, and almost certainly not enough.

One reason I'm grateful for the Emily Nusssbaum piece from which I've quoted above is that, while I'm pretty aware that The Good Wife isn't reaching the audience it should, I tend to forget just how underappreciated it is. Is it really possible to think that just because the show takes seriously the role of women in many areas of society, it's "for women"? Now that Emily has shared this bizarre notion, as I think about it, I'm kind of afraid that the answer is yes, this may be entirely possible to imagine.

(By the way, in the chunk I've quoted above, I assume what Emly means is that the charming TV maker is dead to her now, not that the poor fellow lives no more. When I first read this, I took it to mean that since the lunch in question the man had actually died. Which, even apart from being sort of startling, also wouldn't seem to make any sort of point.)

In approaching Season 6, Emily says, she "felt a twinge of protective nostalgia."

After a great season, the show didn’t even get nominated for best drama at this year’s Emmys (although the snub might be a point of pride: “The Wire” was never nominated for best drama at all). As sharp and as deep and as witty as “The Good Wife” is, it lacks all the Golden Age credentials. The series’ showrunners, Robert and Michelle King, a married couple, don’t have a pugnacious-auteur reputation or Hollywood glamour. They’re collaborative workhorses, producing twenty-two hour-long episodes a year, more than twice as many as their peers on HBO, FX, or AMC. (“True Detective” had eight episodes; “Fargo” ten.) Their series débuts every September, on schedule—no year-and-a-half-long hiatuses for them to brood about artistic aims. And on network there are ads, and pressure for product integration, and the expectations of a mass audience (must be clear, must be exciting, must be familiar, must be appealing), and the strict rules implicit in corporate culture—all of which would be difficult even if CBS didn’t keep bumping “The Good Wife” back by forty minutes for football.

Goodness knows, I've screamed bloody murder often enough about the show's delayed start time during football season. The solution I've finally settled on is to program my DVR for an extra hour of recording beyond the scheduled end time, hoping that that will cover the delay. If it means I can't record something else, well, then I hope the something else is something that can be rescheduled for another time.

I might add that even though I always record The Good Wife, it's one show that I almost always manage to watch the same night. Sometimes I even watch it in real time, commercials and all -- assuming it's a night when I'm able to figure out when the damned thing is going to start.

So right off, kudos to Emily for overcoming that understandable weariness to evangelize for The Good Wife.

My second reason for being happy she has written this piece is that, as usual, she doesn't see the show quite the way I do, and the things she sees are interesting. I know, for example, that I would never have made these observations:

[E]pisode by episode, the Kings [again, showrunners Robert and Michelle] have shown themselves to be unusually flexible and pragmatic TV makers, taking risks, then backpedalling quickly when they fail, as with a repellent “Fifty Shades of Grey”-ish plot about the firm’s investigator, Kalinda Sharma, which was written out when the audience rebelled. The show’s structure is classical, built on the model pioneered by “The X-Files”: there are “case of the week” plots mixed with season-long stories, which in turn echo within the larger arc of Alicia’s transformation—into what, we don’t yet know. But “The Good Wife” resists formula at every step. The Kings go grand, then tiny, staccato to legato, turning necessities into virtues. Pressures that crush other TV shows inspire clever work-arounds. Take, for instance, the S.V.U.-inflected cases that have popped up in recent seasons—plots that could turn sleazy, like lucrative clients a firm takes to bankroll pro-bono work. Instead, the Kings have found fresh angles on pulp and noir, blending such stories with their trademark emphasis on Silicon Valley and technology, often using memorable characters like the creepy wife-killer Colin Sweeney (the great Dylan Baker).

Such broader moments also act as camouflage for the show’s true strength, its sneaky, slow-building subtlety, including a technique in which the Kings plant a story, bit by bit, to the point that viewers have no idea where the plot is going, then expose a pattern. One of the most striking such plots occurred in Season 3, when Peter Florrick, at that time the state’s attorney of Cook County, had a series of run-ins with black employees, none of which seemed like a big deal—only to have their firings suddenly appear, to those outside the office, as evidence of a damning institutional bias. The story was different from other, blunter TV portraits of racism: Peter didn’t think of himself as bigoted, but his enemies weren’t wrong. It was a smart take on the way that organizations can harbor racism without any individual being overtly hateful.

I'm not even sure I agree with every characterization here, but I certainly wouldn't have looked at the show from these angles, and they're interesting. And this take on Season 5 -- up to the shock of the death of Will Gardner (Josh Charles) seems to me quite delicious:

Last season’s even more audacious arc was a timely satire of the N.S.A., Strangelovian in tone. As with the race plot, the idea was planted in advance, in sequences that felt at first like comic side plots. When Alicia’s teen-age son’s girlfriend, whose parents are Somali, weeps on his voice mail after they break up, her recurrent hangups are misinterpreted by the N.S.A. as hints of potential terrorism—which gives the agency an excuse to eavesdrop on everyone linked to the Florricks. The entire fifth season was bracketed by scenes set in the N.S.A.’s blank cubicles, not among bigwigs but among nonentities: two Rosencrantz-and-Guildensternesque geeks who, when not trading viral videos, listen in on every call that Alicia makes. They get so caught up in the Florrick story line that they become, essentially, “Good Wife” fans. And while their spying is insidious, it isn’t some grand conspiracy, as on “Homeland” or “House of Cards.” The first tap simply leads to the second, which leads to a “three-hop” ruling, which leads to absolute surveillance of all things public and private.

Emily writes interestingly about Will's shocking departure later in the season, and about her relief at what she's seen in the first two episodes of Season 6. It's a really good piece, about a really outstanding show that somehow just hasn't gotten the attention that quite a number of significantly less ambitious and less successful shows have.

#

TV Watch: Could the barren wasteland of this TV season be somehow connected to the barren wasteland of our social and political reality?

Bright lights in the void: I haven't watched this official trailer for Season 3 of Homeland, but you may want to. If the season turned out to be good, I didn't want it spoiled by the preview, and if it didn't, well, I didn't want to waste my time. So far, I'm happier than I could have imagined. It's less of a surprise the The Good Wife is off to a great season start -- less of a surprise, but still an enormous relief.

by Ken

Let's just throw this out as an off-the-cuff thought rather than a closely argued sociocultural treatise, but do you suppose there could be a connection between this godforsaken wasteland of a TV season and our present godforsaken wasteland of a sociopolitical reality? Is it possible that in a time of such acute polarization and rancor, the programming geniuses sense that the safest thing to try to put on people's screens is mush? With one side of the political spectrum being hijacked by a gang of brain-deprived hooligans in furious flight from reality, and the other side cowering in fear of them, the last thing you might want to shovel out there onto the TV pile is any programming with content, or any sort of connection to reality except "Fuck it!!!"

Let me qualify that since my last rant, I've seen glints of hope. The new season of The Good Wife so far seems to me crackling. You have to hope the show won't be overwhelmed by the new reality that Alicia is the wife of the governor-elect. But there's plenty going on, with the impending flight from Lockhart Garner of the uppity fourth-years with partner Alicia (Julianna Margulies) in tow, and you know the greedy understandable insistence of the others on delaying in order to collect their buses is going to lead to all kinds of hell -- it didn't take wily David Lee (Zach Grenier) to figure out what's going on. Plus there's this net of government snooping settling around the firm, which seems to be equal parts NSA Big Brother and Keystone Cops, and has the potential for some intense plot heat as well as mirthful irony. Meanwhle, Stockard Channing has already been usefully back as Alicia's free-wheeling mother, and the Florrick offspring, Zach (the alarmingly adorable Graham Phillips) and Grace (Makenzie Vega) are growing productively. CBS contributes its usual share -- nothing or less -- by maintaining the show on its football-buffeted Sunday-night Dare-You-to-Try-to-Watch TV schedule.

The surprise is that I've found the new season of Homeland quite engaging. There's the ready-made plot engine of the aftermath of the CIA blowing up real good, with the apparent frame of Brody (Damian Lewis), an actual as opposed to figurative congressman-terroris, holding well, and a heap of trouble in the embarrassing revelation of the assorted ties, including the sexual kind, between Brody Carrie (Claire Danes). Even while it was happening it was of course imbecilic and preposterous behavior on both their parts, but it's the kind of imbecilic and preposterous behavior that spells "human," especially where sex is concerned. And now that Carrie is really poised on the edge of nuttitude, Danes's tic-o-rama acting is actually quite appropriate. I don't want to try to analyze too deeply; I'm just thrilled to be back to eagerly anticipating new episodes.

The Big Bang Theory also seems to me to be doing just fine, with an especially felicitous story idea in the response of Sheldon (Jim Parsons, with another Emmy on the mantel) to having his beloved Raiders of the Lost Ark destroyed by Amy (Mayim Bialik) pointing out that Indiana Jones is irrelevant to the outcome of the plot. How would Sheldon respond except by making it a personal mission to destroy something that Amy loves. There are signs too that Amy may be about to begin to wake up to Sheldon's all too obvious shortcomings as a boyfriend. Let it roll.

As for the rest? Well, Blue Bloods seems still to be suffering from the realization that every possible cop-show plot has been not just used but overused. I've started watching Parenthood, largely on the strength of my mind-blowing re-encounter with producer Jason Katims's great triumph, Friday Night Lights, but there doesn't seem to be a whole lot going on, and Peter Krause, coming off two of the great series acting performances of our time in Sports Night and Six Feet Under, doesn't seem to have much to do except nag.

Then, ominously, there's the rash of so-called comedies that seem devoted to the proposition that people, but men especially, are hilariously useless slugs. I can't even keep track of them all, but I've sampled a number on the strength of some actors of demonstrated class. I mean, the show with Martin Mull and Peter Riegert as the two fathers whose sons would be that much more conspicuous evolutionary duds if their dads weren't so much worse . . . what's the deal here? It has always seemed as if Mull could make something out of anything, but it turns out that no, he can only make something out of something, and Riegert, well, if he'd been offered a better job, I assume he would have taken it.

Or there's Tony Shalhoub, who has given us such treasurable characterizations as Antonio the fatally insecure taxi driver on Wings and of course as Mr. Monk. Wouldn't you think TV creators would be lining up to lure him into signing on to some really creative projects? Again, if they had, I assume he would have jumped, and we and he would have been spared the embarrassment of this show, whatever the heck it's called. Men, is it? And just to show that lunkish galootdom isn't strictly a male affliction, there's one of our best-loved actors, Allison Janney, mugging her way through, uh, her show, which alarmingly comes to us from Chuck Lorre, who has given us so much better. And now that "sass" has apparently taken the place of actual human qualities, 2 Broke Girls seems to have slipped from borderline promising to barely watchable.

The cable offerings don't seem a whole lot more encouraging. mostly offering a pointy-headed-er version of the same nothingness. The pretentious nothingness of Girls now seems to have been a trailblazer.

It's not just the dismal quality I'm thinking of here, but the quality of that quality. We make no demands on you, viewer, the shows seem to say, we're just there to mark the passing of time and of your lives, which are now either an hour or a half-hour closer to the end.

#

TV Watch: As of now, the message from "Breaking Bad" to non-Blu-ray fans seems to be: Drop dead!

[Click to enlarge -- it gets really big!]

by Ken

I resorted to my Plan C last night and watched the Breaking Bad finale in real time, and then the finale of the final-half-season after-show, Talking Bad. They were fine. No complaints about them. They did what the situation called on them to do.

But I might explain that my Plan A was to schlepp to Astoria to watch the episode live on the movie screen of the Museum of the Moving Image. The series is so meticulously photographed and edited that I bet it would look fabulous in big-screen format. (As I've mentioned, this is how I was introduced to The Sopranos. via an MMI marathon.) And I thought it might be fun to group-watch the episode in a theaterful of BB fanatics. Alas, though I think I RSVP-ed within an hour of receipt of the e-invite, as I found out a couple of days later, that was apparently too late! Oh well. It would have meant about 2½ hours' round-trip travel time.

Plan B was trickier. As long as I was going to be home after all, I thought, maybe I'll catch one of the many Breaking Bad repeat airings and take advantage of the opportunity to watch the Good Wife season premiere in HD. (When I got my first HD TV, I made the decision to leave my DVR on a non-HD TV, so I can't record in HD.) But then it occurred to me that CBS might have its legendary "football shift" on, whereby if it has a late Sunday football game, its whole Sunday primet-time schedule can be pushed back to, well, whenever the hell they feel like running it. I believe the network markets its schedule officially as "Bunch o' Crap Sunday." Which meant that I would be foregoing the Breaking Bad finale, or possibly the new Boardwalk Empire episode or the Homeland season premiere, for a show that would start . . . well, who knew when.

So instead, I set my (non-HD) DVR to record The Good Wife, kicking in an extra hour of recording time "just in case." And I watched Breaking Bad and Talking Bad, and as I said, that was fine. I'll probably have something to say in an upcoming "TV Watch" piece. That's not what I want to talk about now, though.

All through the run of the Breaking Bad after-show, Talking Bad, though the second half of Season 5, host Chris Hardwick -- who, let me say once again, has done a bang-up job -- has been talking up this gonzo complete-series video release that's in the works. During last night's hour-long final Talking Bad outing, series creator Vince Gilligan said how proud he is of the package they've put together, and mentioned that the script for a scene he wrote for the final episode, which for reasons of money and time was never even shot, is included in the package. Yes!

Of course all this time I've been wondering what kind of mixture of genuinely worthwhile supplementary material and ridiculous garbage is being thrown into the package, and what sort of price it's going to carry. As it turns out, I didn't have to worry, as I'll explain in a moment.

As to what's in the package, here's a list that appears in the amazon.com listing, to which, by the way, the Breaking Bad Shop links:

The Complete Series Collector's Set Includes:
• Collectible replica money barrel
• Over 55 hours of special features from all seasons
• All new two-hour documentary
• 16 page booklet with letter from Vince Gilligan
• Commemorative challenge coin designed by Vince Gilligan
• Los Pollos Hermanos apron

I'm certainly on board for the "over 55 hours of special features from all seasons," the "All new two-hour documentary," and (at least in theory) the "16 page booklet with letter from Vince Gilligan" (the obvious question being what's in the booklet). I don't want to be wasting money on the "collectible replica money barrel," the "commemorative challenge coin," or the Los Pollos Hermanos apron. (I have some sympathy for the idea of the apron, but my guess is that the actual object won't be durable enough to be used as an apron, and as a mere tchotchke it's of no interest to me.)

As it turns out, though, it appears to be academic. What's listed on Amazon is exclusively "Breaking Bad: The Complete Series (+UltraViolet Digital Copy) [Blu-ray]." The set isn't due out till November 26, and it's certainly possible that the full marketing plan hasn't been developed, but as of now all that's listed is this Blu-ray edition -- at $299.99 list, $209.99 (30 percent off) Amazon pre-order price. For non-Blu-ray fans, that's a net saving of $209.99 plus tax. Of course it also means no DVDs.

[Click to enlarge -- this gets really big too!]

There is a DVD alternative listed, supposedly comprising "Seasons 1-5," on 18 DVDs, but since this set is apparently already available, I'm guessing that in fact it contains Seasons 1-4 plus the first half of Season 5. Given the dishonest decision made by the network and/or producers to present what were really Seasons 5 and 6 as two halves of Season 5, it seems to me that the Breaking Bad producers and merchandisers have a particular obligtation to be crystal-clear about this. So far, what I'm seeing is murk. At the online Breaking Bad Shop there are separate listings for "Season 5" and "Final Season," the latter currently in pre-order. Apparently the marketing people seem determined to maximize confusion.

To make matters worse, as of this morning there were already 33 reviews up on the Amazon listing for the "Complete Series" package. This is pretty impressive considering that the item is almost two months away from existing. Of course most of the review are babbling on about the show. Anyone who imagines that at this point a review of the show is relevant to potential customers is someone I doubt very much I want to hear from about it. Even more nefariously, there were also 33 reviews -- the most conspicuous of which are the same reviews -- on the listing for the DVDs of "Seasons 1-5."

I assume the complete series will eventually be made available in some form to non-Blu-ray fans of the show, and as I noted, we're still almost two months away from the release date, and plans do evolve. But I have to say, I got a jolt when I went online today to check out the famous complete-series set I've been haring so much about. I thought all I was going to have to decide was whether the price was a budget-buster for me, and that in all likelihood I would be clicking on the "buy now" button.

Oops!

#

For a "Sunday Classics" fix anytime, visit the stand-alone "Sunday Classics with Ken."

Countdown to the season premieres of "The Good Wife," "Homeland," and "Dexter"

Homeland's sensational Damien Lewis

"The advantage that English people have and that I have is that we grow up with so much American television. We're all used to hearing it all the time. And the other advantage is Americans are not used to growing up with television from anywhere else or hearing any other accent, so they assume, they are much more forgiving of someone's bad accent."

-- Dominic West, The Wire's Jimmy McNulty

by Ken

Of course my pleasure in anticipating the premiere of the show in the above group I really love, The Good Wife, is tempered by the traditional CBS Sunday-night scheduling debacle, which as I suggested a few weeks ago all but dares viewers to try to watch its best show in the aftermath of NFL game pushback.

I think I've got it under control for tonight, since as of 8pm ET the schedule seems to be pushed back only a few minutes, and that's without the half-hour network-wide pushback that was supposed to be in effect at least on Sundays when CBS has a late football game, as I think it did today. I guess it's not important that I understand; it just matters that I had time to extend my scheduled Good Wife recording enough to cover the estimated overage and then some.

Of course that means I had to cancel the scheduled Homeland and reschedule that for the later broadcast. And the whole thing has left me drained before the evening even starts. It's just a lucky thing this damned football season is almost over.

At the risk of belaboring the obvious, I cherish The Good Wife because it has a raft of characters -- within lawyer Alicia's family, at her law firm, and at the states attorney's office overseen by her estranged husband Peter (the one she stood loyally by when he was enmeshed in a sex scandal and forced to step down) -- I not only find believable but am able to care about, quite a lot, in fact.

I came late to the first season of Homeland, via On Demand, for which I am once again profoundly grateful. I had bad feelings about the show's terrorist-plot-or-not thriller formula, which smacked of tapping into the cheesy free-floating paranoia that seems (as best I can tell) to fuel a pile of insulting crap like 24. In fact, though, I found the show pretty involving -- quite credibly written within the credibility-stretching boundaries of its spy vs. spy format, and perhaps more importantly blessed with a terrific cast doing lots of fine, believable, involving work.

It was a stroke of genius to cast the amazing Damien Lewis in the central role of the U.S. marine who, in Season 1, might or might not have been "turned" during his long captivity by an Iraqi terrorist chief. Could any actor be more "English" than the Damien Lewis we've seen do such splendid work as his Soames Forsyte in the Forsyte Saga remake? Of course he already showed in Band of Brothers how credible he could be as a true-blue American, and as Homeland's inscrutable Brody, he has been just fantastic.

The trickle has become a flood: British actors enacting more interesting and credible American characters than an awful lot of American actors. Think of Hugh Laurie as House MD, The Wire's Dominic West and Idris Elba, Brothers & Sisters' Matthew Rhys -- all just terrific. West has some seriously interesting things to say about the success his countrymen are achieving on American TV in the BBC News Magazine interview from which I snatched the quote at the top of this post. Not just that the Brits have the obvious advantage to parsimonious U.S. producers of coming cheap, given the limited star power they bring to the negotiating table.

There's a possibility that we are possibly better in an ensemble or less geared to being a huge star or more resigned to not being a huge star. Because in America, it seems to me that everything is "you've got your one shot at the top and you've got to make it there, you've got to get there." In England, I think we're more philosophical about that because there's less chance of it here.

In The Wire, there was no star actor. It was an ensemble serving the writing and maybe in America agents have become more involved in trying to make a star in whoever was acting in it.

There's maybe a readiness to be part of an ensemble which goes slightly against the grain of how the Americans view celebrity and show business.

Interesting. Is it just a coincidence that for a serious discussion of the subject we have to turn to a British source?

I'm not going to say more about Dexter. The idea of involving myself in the doings of a conscienceless serial killer continues to surprise me, but each season I find myself watching again. Maybe it has something to do with Dexter's struggle against his sociopath's lack of normal human emotion and response, and the confusion, bordering on turmoil, he's thrown into as he begins to experience some of the above. The writers do seem to have some serious thoughts about these basic paramaters of humanity, and once again they've got a really terrific regular cast with which to explore it, and a history of bringing in terrific people for each season's weirdos and victims. I don't know that I've seen John Lithgow do anything better than his really chilling super-"straight disciplinarian" serial-killer wacko.

Boardwalk Empire seems to me off to a solid start in its third season -- a noticeably bloody one, with Bobby Canavale doing his increasingly predictably splendid character work as a terrifying thug the viewer can really believe could kill anyone he meets at any time.

As it happens, I've just been watching Cannavale's brilliant turn as Dr. Mike Cruz, the new hospital honcho in last season's Nurse Jackie episodes. Rewatching the complete season via On Demand confirmed just how splendid it was. Via On Demand I've also rewatched the first three seasons of The Sopranos (after which they stopped, alas), and am reworking my way through The Wire, with still-growing amazement and delight.

I suppose it's unrealistic to expect all TV producers to aspire to that standard. (I can't think of a broadcast network show other than The Good Wife aiming that high, but I'll certainly credit AMC's Mad Men and Breaking Bad teams with trying.) But it seems to me that it doesn't get much better than that.


AFTERTHOUGHT: I shouldn't have made it sound like a criticism, pointing out how bloody a start the new Boardwalk Empire season is off to. After all, these Prohibition-era mobsters are a ruthless, bloodthirsty lot, and if the show sugarcoated this, I hope I'd be bitching about that.

#

2011-12 TV wrap-up and 2012-13 preview: It mostly all sucks, and CBS still tries its best to keep viewers from viewing "The Good Wife"

Are The Good Wife's Alicia (Julianna Margulies) and Kalinda (Archie Panjabi) trying to figure out how to get their overseers at CBS to stop working so hard to prevent fans of the network's best show -- not to mention people who would be grabbed by it if they got the hang of it -- from watching?

by Ken

The things I do for you, dear readers. Today I actually watched the last 25 minutes or so of the dreadful Jets-Steelers game, just for the purpose of seeing when exactly the telecast would end and CBS's pushed-back Sunday-night schedule would begin.

As you surely know already, the NFL has pushed its "late"-game start time back from 4:15pm ET to 4:25pm, and CBS has responded by pushing its Sunday-night schedule back from 7 to 7:30 ET. (Fox, the other network affected by NFL late-game starts, has been starting its Sunday-night schedule at 7:30 for some time.)

So tonight I endured that unendurable stretch of Jets-Steelers to confirm just what I suspected: that the 10-minute pushback is totally useless for my purposes. Even in combination with the elimination of any kind of postgame coverage -- except for postgame commercials -- CBS couldn't get 60 Minutes on the air till 7:37.

Now I don't give a damn about the football games. Can people still be watching these dreadful spectacles? Are fans really not noticing that the drawn-out games have become increasingly unendurable? And I'm not blaming the commercial-time inflation. Sure, this is a known (and knowing) drain on viewers' patience, but the generally unspoken reality is that what happens between the commercials has become even more unwatchable. And for me this is just as true of the supposed nail-biters as of a dog like today's Jets-Steelers mess. The only real question in any game seems to me the collective amount by which the lives of the players on the field, not to mention the quality of those lives, has been shortened by the day's orgy of physical punishment. And that won't be known till years and decades afterward, at which point hardly any viewers will be paying attention.

For that matter, I don't give a damn about 60 Minutes either. I can't believe people are still watching that either. A broadcast that once prided itself on punching holes in the status quo has become one of its most ardent defenders. Can anyone care about what's left?

What I do care about is the pushback of the rest of the CBS Sunday-night schedule. And the one thing I care about, as we count down to the start of the fall TV season, is being able to catch the start of The Good Wife, which is close to the only thing on CBS I care about. (Okay, I'm a big fan of The Big Bang Theory, and have managed to continue watching How I Met Your Mother even as it has increasingly run out of steam. And I got through a season of Two Broke Girls, despite the high annoyance level of most of the episodes.)

So let's recap. The NFL think it has solved its late-game start-time problem: that viewers of the early games frequently get their game lopped off because contractually local stations have to switch to the late games of double-headers when they start. Now if they can't get those early games over by 4:25 . . . well, I won't finish that thought. I'm not entirely persuaded that they can. But again, that's not the game-end time which concerns me.

I have a feeling that the CBS programming people are frustrated by the ratings of The Good Wife, feeling that more viewers should care about it. I'm not talkikng about tricking people into watching the show; I'm talking about making sure that all the viewers who would enjoy the show if they got a feel for what it's doing ever find out what' it's doing. But does no one a the network grasp the punishment inflicted on the show by placing it on the Sunday-night schedule? You have to really, really care about the show to put up with what you have to put up with just to be able to watch the show, whether in real time or via DVR.

In the wake of the football-pushback story, I found a blogger who like me was mostly concerned about the impact on DVR-ability of The Good Wife. She (I think it was a she; I couldn't refind the post) pointed out that pushing The Good Wife into a 9:30-to-10:30 slot would complicate the lives of many viewers suffering a DVR jam-up on Sunday nights, since it will make it impossible for most DVR owners to record more than one other show in the 9pm slot.

This struck me as in interesting point. What with NPR's Masterpiece and assorted cable offerings that tend to be squeezed into Sunday nights, there really is a DVR jam-up. But there are ways around that, making use of cable repeats and On Demand. However, when the CBS schedule is pushed back 7 minutes, the only solution I've found to avoid missing the last 7 minutes of The Good Wife is to manually schedule a 90-minute recording from 9:30 to 11.

In other words, I'm exactly where I've been since The Good Wife was moved to Sunday night. The powers-that-be are doing everything in their power to keep me from watching, but I'll be damned if I let them stop me!


MY 2011-12 WRAP-UP AND 2012 FALL PREVIEW

I've written hardly anything about the season past because there didn't seem to me much to write about. And sorry, but I haven't been able to force myself to study the fall schedules as I know I should have. My strategy of recent seasons has been to trust blindly that the new shows can't all be as dreadful as they sound. So once again I'll trust that word of mouth will reach me in time to clue me in if I've been missing anything. If you've got any tips, I'm listening.

I can say that I'm looking forward to the new season of HBO's Boardwalk Empire, which begins tonight. Otherwise, even my cable-show interest has been waning. Oh, on AMC I thought the new Mad Men season was fine and the new Breaking Bad half-season ditto. Better still, Lifetime's Army Wives has an outstanding season, but they seemed to be saying the promos that the final episode of the season was the final episode -- though I can't find any actual announcement to that effect, and the season certainly ended with a heckuva cliffhanger.

What alarmed me was the extend to which I found myself thinking that I didn't really need to watch new episodes of onetime USA Network standards like Burn Notice and Royal Pains and Covert Affairs and Suits and even, perhaps most surprisingly, White Collar. At TNT there's still some life in Rizzoli and Isles, based entirely on the strength of the cast and the interest of the characters, and unfortunately less and less on the quality of the writing. I'm relieved that The Closer has been put out of my misery. (The recycling into Major Crimes is a mixed blessing. It's a relief not to have to endure all that awful stuff Kyra Sedgwick has been doing, but without her, does anyone want to keep watching that bunch?)

I don't know, maybe I'm just old and grumpy. The one bright side I can see is that maybe my Sunday nights won't be so jammed up and I'll have an easier time catching The Good Wife.

#

Should I like "The Good Wife" better than "The Middle" because Josh Charles is a mensch and Patricia Heaton's a jerk? Of course not, but . . .

In this past week's episode of The Good Wife, "After the Fall," Will was actually enjoying his forced leave from Lockhart Gardner until he was descended on by both his sisters, Sara (Nadia Dajani) and Aubrey (Merritt Weaver, so wonderful as Nurse Jackie's Zoey), who promptly decided that he "needs someone," or maybe even already has found someone -- enter Kalinda (Archie Panjabi). Diane (Christine Baranski) is sure happy to see him back in the office.


"We get lumped in with lunatics."

-- actor-director David Hunt, husband of actress Patricia Heaton

by Ken

To minimize likely confusion, let me straightaway answer the question I posed in the post title: No, of course my recently heightened personal feelings about these two actors isn't going to make me like either show more or less. I have a feeling, though, that there will be some spillover in the respective pleasure I get from watching the actors (not to be confused with watching their shows).

We'll come back to that, but first I think a quick word is needed to David Hunt, in response to the above-quoted cry from the heart, quoted yesterday by the uncredited writer of HuffPost Celebrity's "Patricia Heaton Apologizes For Joining Rush Limbaugh's Attack On Georgetown Student Sandra Fluke,"which was an add-on to a declaration of his wife's in a PopEater interview last year, in which she told Rob Shuter "that she has many gay friends and doesn't oppose gay marriage, Patricia gets frustrated being automatically lumped together with other conservatives." And --

"We know for a fact there are some people who have said they wouldn't want to work with us because of our politics," [Heaton] said, with her husband David Hunt adding, "We get lumped in with lunatics."

Gosh, Dave, that must be terrible, getting lumped in with lunatics. Who would want that? But say, as long as we're on the subject, did you read these (now-deleted) tweets of the missus?

"Hey G-Town Gal: Plz let us also pay for your Starbucks, movie theater tickets and your favorite hot wings combo deal at KFC! Anything else?"

"Hey G-Town Gal: If your parents have to pay for your birth control, maybe they should get a say in who you sleep with!" Instant birth control!"

"If every Tweaton sent Georgetown Gal one condom, her parents would have to cancel basic cable, & she would never reproduce -- sound good?"

"Hey GTown Gal: How about only having sex on Wednesday? (Hump day!)."

"Hey G-Town Gal: turn your underwear inside out! Then u only have to do laundry every 2 weeks—saves on detergent & trips to Laundromat!"

The premise, you see, is that the Hunts are victimized because, as the HuffPost Celebrity scribe put it, "Heaton has never hidden her conservative views from typically left-leaning Hollywood." Of course there is some superficial truth to the image of "left-leaning Hollywood," but only superficial truth. The people who yammer about it never, ever look an inch or two below the surface to see an industry that is as deeply and fiercely reactionary as any in the country.

There are no doubt lots of reasons why some people in Hollywood don't want to work with other people in Hollywood. I wonder if it's ever occurred to Patricia and David that maybe people don't want to work with them because they're assholes. That's Just a theory I'm throwing out, but "asshole" might be a kinder description than "lunatic" for the person who sent out all those tweets.

As noted, the tweets have been deleted -- not because our tweetybird sees anything wrong with the substance, but because she now sees them as "disrespectful."

After feeling the backlash, on March 3, both Limbaugh and Heaton issued their own apologies. Heaton deleted the tweets and apologized to Fluke for her comments .

"re @SandraFluke Mea culpa Sandra! Wasn't being respectful 2 u re my tweets as I hope people wd b w/me. Don't like you being dissed -so sorry," she wrote and again on March 5th she reiterated the apology to her followers. "I apologized to Ms Fluke last week. I may not agree with her views but I didn’t treat her with respect and I'm sorry. I was wrong. Mea Culpa."

Well, good for her for apologizing. It does seem kind of a shame, though, that it took the shitload of grief dumped on her to awaken her to her unfortunate disrespectfulness. Apparently in the course of all that tweeting -- and tweeting and tweeting and tweeting and tweeting -- it never once occurred to her that, well, what actually happened might happen.

I loved the lead on that Huffpost Celebrity post, by the way:

Yet another publicist is likely cursing the invention of Twitter after The Middle star Patricia Heaton joined Rush Limbaugh's attack on Georgetown Law student Sandra Fluke.

By contrast, this tweet -- quite brilliant, I think -- was sent out by actor Josh Charles in response to the appalling homophobic blithering of onetime Growing Pains teen throb Kirk Cameron, whose parents were played by Alan Thicke and Joanna Kerns.


I guess Pat was trying to be witty in her rants tweets. Josh managed without visible effort to be not only funny but charming as well as blunt. Smartly done, Mr. C!

I was already a huge Josh Charles fan, dating back to his spectacular work on Sports Night, the lamentably short-lived (damn that gutless ABC -- oh wait, that's Ms. Heaton's network, isn't it?) comedy written by Aaron Sorkin. One happy result of this episode is that I'm seeing other fans of Sports Night crawling out of the woodwork. Which is only fair. That show was so good for its two seasons that if you were to make a short list of the greatest series in TV history, no matter how short the list got, you couldn't leave off that show about a nightly sports-news show produced by Isaac Jaffe (Robert Guillaume) and Dana Whitaker (Felicity Huffman) and anchored by Casey McCall (Peter Krause) and Dan Rydell (Josh C).

Nobody writes better for actors than Sorkin, and the cast assembled for the show was all but unimaginably brilliant. Given the caliber of the company he was keeping, it says something that Josh C may have done, week in, week out, the most memorable work on the show. To focus on only one of Dan's plot lines, his pursuit of, then winning of, and then loss of Rebecca (an absolutely radiant, mesmerizing Teri Polo) was one of the most beautifully imagined fictional relationships I've ever encountered -- and this on a show that itself included as well the altogether extraordinary relationships between Casey and Dana and between Sports Night staffers Natalie (Sabrina Lloyd) and Jeremy (Joshua Malina).

Sports Night's ill-fated Dan and Rebecca (Teri Polo)

Even the best actors are dependent on their material, and while Josh has worked a lot since Sports Night, and I've never seen him do anything that wasn't first-rate, I haven't seen him do anything that made comparable use of his talents -- except maybe for his season of HBO's In Treatment -- until The Good Wife, another show with an amazing ensemble cast, and writers (overseen by creators Michelle King and Robert King) who know how to write for good actors.

I've made no secret of my fondness for The Good Wife, most recently (I think) here. I notice that I early on I wrote that the show --

has passed some of my toughest tests: Not only do I look forward to it each week, but I'm now pretty regularly watching it in real time rather than trusting to the DVR for time-shifting, and so far I've been really sorry as each episode ended.

Three seasons in, that's even more true.

I like The Middle too. But I notice that this is a show I almost always entrust to the DVR, and I don't usually pounce on recorded episodes. I know I've still got the last new February sweeps episode sitting unwatched. When I get to it, I'll probably wonder why I stalled, but the fact will remain that I did. It's not because of Pat Heaton's politics. It's Frankie Heck I"m watching, after all, not Patricia Heaton. Just as on The Good Wife it's not Josh Charles but Will Gardner (along with all the other characters, of course) that I'm watching.

At the same time, I'll probably get even more of an extra kick out of being able to watch Josh Charles, who gives evidence of being a mensch as well as a terrific actor.

#

The Good Wife shows the kind of health care fight the president could have fought -- if he'd been interested in actual reform

Once we get past the commercial: On last night's The Good Wife, a desperate Will Gardner (Josh Charles) takes the awkward first step toward playing his only remaining card against the insurance company: the friendship between Alicia Florrick's (Julianna Margulies) husband Peter (Chris Noth), the disgraced former state's attorney, and the state insurance commissioner. (You can see how it works out, and get an eyeful of Martha Plimpton's frightful appearance as the insurance-company lawyer, here.)

by Ken

I keep thinking of the kickoff of President Obama's current campaign for heath care revision, ever since he decided to take the gloves off and fight for the crappy insurance-revision package of his choice. Remember how he quipped so wittily that everything there is to be said about health care reform has been said, and now it's time to do it? I'm sure I wasn't the only one who was thinking that in fact many, maybe most, of the most important things not only hadn't been said but had been pointedly ignored, at least in the official discussion -- like what exactly about our health care system needs reforming and why and how, and what a better system might look like, and how we could get there from here.

I realize this isn't exactly a blazing insight, but at this point in the process, I think we can safely say that it didn't happen because the president and his people didn't want it to happen. I don't know what he thinks the problem with U.S. health care is, beyond the large number of uninsured people, but at this point I have a pretty good idea what part of the problem he believes the government should be involving itself in.

This is very different from, for example, Howard Dean's idea of what's wrong with U.S. health care and how he thinks the government can genuinely reform the system. And that means taking on two of the principal problems: Big Pharma and the insurance companies, who have made our "health care" system about their profits, and really very little about health.

This is one of the things that was never part of the official "debate" on health care, on either the Democratic or Republican side, and now I think we can say conclusively that this was no accident. If we were truly concerned about incorporating some concern about health into our system, we would have to be discussing these issues, because our system as it exists includes no incentive to healthful living. You might think, as I once naively did, that the insurance companies have an interest in "wellness" education, but the reality is that their relationship to individual humans is typically too short-lived for them to see any financial benefit.

Early on in the "debate," Paul Krugman wrote some terrific columns extolling the virtues of the V.A. system, one of whose great strengths is precisely continuity of care -- patients see the same doctors, or other doctors within the system who have access to their medical records, which not only increases the likelihood of effective treatment but creates a shared interest in maximizing good-health habits. Of course this is possible in good part because nobody is making money on the deal. Somehow this never became part of the official discussion -- in the same way that a single-payer system was never allowed to. Again, not an accident. We can see now that too many of the players were beginning with the assumption that the interests of the big-money players, the insurance and drug companies, had to be protected as zealously as those of America's patients.

Remember how badly the whole case for health care reform was clobbered by the insurance companies and their Republican allies hewing closely to the famous Frank Luntz memo and plastering the air waves with "stories" -- moving human-interest stories about how horrible all those dastardly foreign systems like Canada's and the U.K.'s are? And nothing was heard from our side, when we all know that the reality is that our side is the one with all the real health care human-interest stories, about people abused or allowed to die by the health care profiteers. Now we can see that this wasn't an accident either. The president and his people, and for that matter most of the Democrats in Congress, couldn't answer back, because they're fundamentally in agreement with the position staked out by Luntz.

Last night's Good Wife episode had an insurance-company plot line: Alicia's firm is reperesenting a young couple whose baby will die without emergency in utero heart surgery, which the insurance company is refusing to pay for on the ground that it's experimental. Every time one of its arguments is knocked down, it comes up with a fallback legal obfuscation. As lawyer Will Gardner (Josh Charles) keeps pointing out to the judge who's hearing the emergency appeal, the insurance company's lawyer is simply playing a delaying game. Three more days, the last possible time for the surgery, and the case becomes irrelevant, so all they have to do is delay until then. Eventually, having lost all other arguments, the insurance company comes up with an astonishing but legal ground for rescinding the couple's insurance altogether.

Yes, a network TV drama dealing with the real-world issue of rescission! Will wonders never cease.

The show had you frothing, at both the insurance company and the monstrous lawyer, a really hateful (I mean this in a good way) performance by Martha Plimpton. It was a shock to switch to an episode of HBO's How to Make It in America -- a fairly watchable but kind of pointless show, or maybe you have to be 20-something to appreciate it -- and see Plimpton portraying a merely annoying, as opposed to murder-worthy, human.

The president can't fight this fight for the simplest of reasons. He doesn't believe in it.

SPEAKING OF THE GOOD WIFE . . .

Since my preliminary favorable report, I've become a really big fan of the show. All the characters are humming: Alicia Florrick (Juliana Margulies), the "good wife" who discovers that her husband has been consorting actively with a hooker; her seasoned-pol husband Peter (Chris Noth), the partners in the law firm where she finds work (Josh Charles [right] and Christine Baranski), Alicia's rival junior associate (Matt Czuchry), Alicia and Peter's kids (Makenzie Vega and Graham Phillips). The stories of Alicia's personal and professional lives have been kept individually powerful and beautifully balanced. I usually watch it in real time rather than via DVR, and I hate it when each episode ends.

When my friend Peter and I talked about The Good Wife, he figured I'd found my way to the show because of Josh Charles, knowing how much I'd loved his work in Aaron Sorkin's great Sports Night, a series in which you had not only some of the best writing ever done for a TV comedy but a cast in which 10 or 12 people were doing some of the best acting ever done in a TV comedy, and on a week-in, week-out basis Charles did, for me, the most memorable work as the vaguely-Dan Patrick-like cable-sports-show co-host opposite Peter Krause's vaguely-Keith Olbermann-like one.

Actually, since I haven't seen Charles's special qualities as an actor used as well since Sports Night (have I maybe missed something?), the prospect of his involvement in The Good Wife didn't set off any alarm bells for me. In fact, he has been simply terrific.

YOU CAN WATCH EPISODES ONLINE

Note: CBS has Good Wife episodes viewable online. You can find last night's, titled "Heart," here.

#

Sorry, I should have written this BEFORE last night's episode of "The Good Wife"

I hadn't seen this promotional trailer for The Good Wife until last night, however-many episodes into the show's run. I wonder what I would have made of it if I'd never seen the show. Now, however, it not only seems to me to give an excellent idea of what the show is about, but carries the unmistakable suggestion that the people who make it know just what they're doing!

by Ken

Now is your chance to make me feel bad. OK, to make me feel worse. All it would take is for one person to claim that if the piece that follows had appeared in last night's 6pm PT time slot, he or she would have given even the most fleeting consideration to watching The Good Wife. (Of course you could still watch it online.) I had absolute power over that time slot yesterday, and let myself get sidetracked into more fulminating about those lying liars of the Right. Which only goes to show that if only by distracting us from what should be our real business, the shitheads win.

I really, really like The Good Wife. I paid less attention than I've ever paid to the Big Announcements of the TV networks' fall season plans. I've really taken to trusting, I guess, that if there's something worthwhile, it will eventually catch up with me, or I with it, whichever. I don't think I was much inspired by the premise of The Good Wife (which again is what makes me wonder if I would have taken the above preview as seriously without having seen the show as I do having seen all the episodes to date). I don't know that I was familiar with the creative people behind the show -- the sort of thing that can count for a lot more than the premise, if you know you're dealing withpeople who have a history of doing good work.

In the end, I'm guessing maybe it was more than anything Julianna Margulies who got me to take a look. Which is kind of funny, because I wasn't that crazy about her at first on ER. There's something offputting about her prettiness, which is unquestionably pretty but really unconventionally so, and to me it read as a kind of self-satisfaction or smugness. Now this isn't real, mind you, but it's a perception that seems perhaps to be not just mine, since the creators of The Good Wife, Michelle King and Robert King, seem to have counted on it.

All sorts of aftershocks emanate from the earthquake that took place before the first episode: the fall of powerful Chicago state's attorney (apparently Illinois talk for district attorney) Peter Florrick (played in guest appearances by Chris Noth), who was not only caught in flagrante -- and in graphic, publicly shown video -- with a hooker, but was indicted and convicted for financial finagling, which he resolutely denies. (

On the most obvious level, Alicia Florrick is that "good wife" we always see standing by her man at those humiliating press conferences. Hurled out of her familiar, comfortable suburban lifestyle, she keeps bumping up against pieces of her husband's (and of course her) life that are totally unfamiliar to her, and of course none of the pieces of her life fit together anymore. The new reality of her life is that wherever she goes, whoever she meets, they know who she is, and know intimate details of her life, and have opinions about her, not usually generous ones.

Alicia doesn't even have the luxury of going down for the count, because she still has an incredibly bright and aware -- undoubtedly too aware for their parents' taste -- 14-year-old son and 13-year-old daughter. With their father in prison, Alicia has to see that they're housed and fed and schooled. A lovely plot resonance: Without any other help to turn to, Alicia has to depend on her mother-in-law for help watching the kids while she's working. In the best relationships between daughter-in-law and mother-in-law there are bound to be major differences in perspective on every aspect of their lives and of course of the children's lives. And this is a long way from the best such relationship.

Of course Alicia still has connections, and is able to wangle a job as a junior associate at a prestigious law firm, one of whose senior partners, Will Gardner (Josh Charles) was a law-school classmate of hers. Alicia, however, hasn't set foot in a courtroom in 13 years, and there are all sorts of tensions and frissons associated with her, at this point in her life, stepping into a bottom-rung job. Worse still, she discovers that she doesn't so much have a job as have a shot at a job -- she's in competition with a young Harvard Law hot shot (luscious blond wink Matt Czuchry_, and isn't viewed at all favorably by the firm's other visible senior partner, Diane Lockhart (Christine Baranski). The politics of the law firm have become one of the most interesting plotlines, and again the casting is cunning, because Josh Charles is personally so easily likable and Christine Baranski so easily dislikable.

Hmm, I don't seem to have mentioned the firm's crack young investigator, the incredibly hot Kalinda (Archie Panjabi), whose acceptance Alicia thinks at first she can't ever win. She's terrific too -- it is, all in all, one of the really good TV ensemble casts.

It's a world in which, pleasantly for a jaded viewer, nothing is easy or uncomplex, except the uncanny way Alicia manages in less than 44 minutes to find a trick to prove the innocence of the client she's been assigned. One hopes this isn't going to continue indefinitely.

But the show itself, that I hope will continue indefinitely. It has passed some of my toughest tests: Not only do I look forward to it each week, but I'm now pretty regularly watching it in real time rather than trusting to the DVR for time-shifting, and so far I've been really sorry as each episode ended.

#