Maybe the bleak comedy of Buffalo Bill was ahead of its time, but what can I say about Eastbound & Down?

This recap will get you up to speed on HBO's Eastbound & Down.

As this voiceover begins, on-screen Kenny is snorting coke in the locker room of his new team, the Charros:
"Over the course of my career I played on many different teams. Some I liked, some I really fucking hated. I'm not mentioning any names, but let's just say Seattle can kiss my fucking shithole.
"The best way to get a new team on your side is to trash the last team you played for. Talk shit about how their fans suck and their women have pancake titties. And if that doesn't work, then, just like prison, you pick the biggest, baddest dude on the team and you kick him in his fucking teeth."

-- pitcher Kenny Powers (Danny McBride), as he prepares
for his return to baseball with his new Mexican team,
last week on HBO's Eastbound & Down

"Karl, please, if there's anybody in the world who understands the sensitivity of women, it's me, man. You're looking at the man right here. I don't want some stupid broad sitting up there with me shooting her mouth off."

-- talk-show host "Buffalo Bill" Bittinger (Dabney Coleman), told by general manager Karl Shub (Max Wright) that the station's seemingly always warm-weather-vacationing owner, who hates Bill (except for his ratings), has decreed he's to have a female cohost

by Ken

We can cut to the chase, and I can just admit that I don't rightly know why I'm still watching Eastbound & Down, which heads into the third episode of its second season tonight on HBO. I had this idea of writing about this striking evolution in TV programming, where it's now cool to have shows about people who are unsympathetic -- or, in extreme cases, beyond unsympathetic and straight on into the realm of the repellent.

Like Kenny Powers, an utterly useless human being whose life is given fake value by the gift of a spectacular pitching career. Since he's a worthless bum, it's not surprising that him quickly burned himself out of the major leagues, and settled for leeching off people who unaccountably allow him to suck the life out of them. The fact that people continue to allow him to abuse them has a certain curiosity value but in its way, even in a made-up comedy, strikes me as depressing, maybe even enraging.

And yet I haven't stopped watching.

My original plan was to write about how the show got me to thinking about Buffalo Bill. I went so far as to order the DVDs of the 1983-84 sitcom -- all 26 episodes on three DVDs, which it turns out can be had remarkably cheap -- and watch as many episodes as time permitted. (I had it in mind to write something cute about how enjoyable it was to the series' co-creator, writer-producer-actor Jay Tarses, turn up as the crusty old sportswriter on My Boys, a terrific show coproduced by his daughter Jamie. There would have been some kind of crack about how Jamie Tarses used to be known as Jay's daughter, and now he's known as Jamie's father.)

Online you can find this description of Buffalo Bill:

A memorably barbed sitcom about a boorish talk-show host and his shabby treatment of those around him. This unsually tart comedy from Tom Patchett and Jay Tarses was novel in that the title character was thoroughly cynical when he wasn't just unlikable. Which may explain why it didn't go down well with viewers, despite a superb cast that included Geena Davis. Star Dabney Coleman later starred as a similarly arrogant character in "The Slap Maxwell Story," with no better success

Which is accurate as far as it goes, but it doesn't go far enough. Bill isn't just "thoroughly cynical" or even "just unlikable." He's hateful -- utterly and ruthlessly self-absorbed, seemingly incapable of any consideration for anyone but himself.

To bring life to the good quantity of nicely "barbed" writing (done or overseen by Patchett and Tarses) there was a terrific cast: in addition to Dabney Coleman as Bill and Max Wright as the long-suffering station manager, Karl, there were Joanna Cassidy as the show's director, Jo Jo; John Fiedler [above] as the Bill-worshipping stage manager, Woody; and Geena Davis as Wendy, the research assistant forced on the fact-phobic Bill -- not to mention the pre-Designing Women Meshach Taylor as Tony the associate director and pre-Night Court Charles Robinson as Newdell the makeup guy, and at least for a while Claude Earl Jones as Stan the audio guy.

Here's a scene from the episode "Buffalo Bill and the Movies." We join Bill in mid-interview with a sweetly innocent Native American gentleman who's promoting a local crafts fair. Bill, clearly intensely uninterested, has disdainfully held up a pillowcase with an image of . . a buffalo!

GUEST [turning his head to the studio audience and smiling with naive hopefulness]: Of course there will be other exhibits, such as rug-weaving, folk art, crafts, and native dance workshops. We'd like everyone to come down and join in, for what is sure to be a gay old time.
BILL [perking up, grimacing]: Gay? As in homosexual, Grey Wolf? [GUEST's face drops.] Is that what this festival is about? Gay Indian rights?
GUEST [hopefully]: It's a crafts fair.
BILL: And then I guess the whole thing breaks out into a riot, which is what happens every time you people get together and start abusing the old firewater privileges.
GUEST [still hopefully]: It's a crafts fair.
BILL [getting up and walking forward to address the camera direclty]: Right, right, right. I don't know, I don't get this. Call me, uh, alarmist, but, uh, when a bunch of homosexual Indians get together and go berserk and start driving through the streets hitting people [GUEST looks flabbergasted], I just have to ask myself, is this the kind of treatment that Buffalo, or the nation as a whole, deserves from its minorities? I don't think so. We'll be right back.
WOODY THE STAGE MANAGER: And . . . we're clear.
MAX [in the control room]: You know it's funny. If Bill doesn't push a man over, cut his back open, yank his lungs out onto the stage, I figure the show is running pretty smooth.
[Back on the set, where GREY WOLF is gone. NEWDELL the makeup man, who is Afro-American, has come onto the set during the break to fix Bill's makeup.]
NEWDELL: You know, Bill, I'm proud to work for a man who treats all minorities equally.
BILL: Yeah?
NEWDELL: Yeah.
BILL: Tell that to your brothers next time they start looting. Maybe they'll skip my place.
WOODY [rushing onto the set with a bowl of flowers, which he sets down on the table by BILL]: Everything OK?
BILL: Yeah, good. You see the skin on that Indian?
WOODY: Yeah, it wasn't even red, was it? Sort of a russet.
BILL [gesturing toward his face]: All the pockmarks, man. When are we gonna get somebody on the show with some decent skin?
WOODY [handing him cards for the next segment]: Oh, the next guest is an actress. She has good skin. I saw it in the green room. [Loudly, to everyone on the set] And . . . in five!
BILL: How are the legs?
WOODY: They -- Four! -- were -- Three! -- really -- Two! -- nice . . . [exits set]

TV wouldn't see another sitcom title character this repellent until the incandescently brilliant Jackie Thomas Show, whose creators made Jackie, the Tom Arnold character, even more successful and even more gleefully odious. Because the show failed to hold onto the enormous lead-in audience it inherited from the then-high-flying Roseanne, it was quickly deep-sixed by ABC and forgotten -- by everybody except the people who watched it and haven't seen anything like it before or since. Actually, I liked Jackie Thomas a lot better than Buffalo Bill, which i never warmed to when it aired. I'm kind of enjoying the DVDs, and I think the show deserved a better fate, but I still can't say I'm crazy about it. Apparently I wasn't alone.

But I'm less persuaded than when I set out on this quest that there's a serious link between the hateful-central-character comedy of Buffalo Bill and The Jackie Thomas Show and whatever's going on in Eastbound & Down. Because Bill and Jackie were really about the other characters, who deserved better fates than to have their livelihoods depend on their stars, and railed regularly about the injustice of their fates, though rarely to their miserable benefactors' faces. I guess I feel sorry for the people who get sucked into Kenny McBride's life too, but is their really entertainment value in seeing people whose lives are so starved that they feel them improved by contact with Kenny?

And I come back to that fact that, at least as of tonight's episode, I'm still watching.

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TNT's "HawthoRNe" is growing on me, while TBS's "My Boys" and AMC's "Mad Men" continue to shine

On TNT's HawthoRNe, Christina and Camille Hawthorne (Jada Pinkett Smith, Hannah Hodson) are seen here in a happier moment than last week, when widowed Mom finally had to deal with catching daughter and boyfriend in a compromising moment -- the kind of scene you instinctively dread, which turned out to be strikingly powerful.

by Ken

I missed the first season of HawthoRNe, created by John Masius (a writer-producer with an impressive track record; surely he's not the one who thought this would be a clever title), but slipped in at the start of Season 2, with Christina's hospital losing the battle to maintain patient care in the face of economic duress and being closed and merged into a farther-gone but more bottom-line-aware hospital. The show is really growing on me.

Last week's episode, "Final Curtain," had a central plot line in which the hospital's onetime medical director (played by the long-ubiquitous Lawrence Pressman, now looking very old indeed), having nothing closer to a home, returned to the hospital to die. And I was like to overwhelmed by the final scene of this past week's episode, "Hidden Truths," as you might guess an episode in which most everyone is sitting on secrets, in which Christina -- while carrying the weight of the world on her shoulders at work while being paralyzed in her numbed personal life -- had to deal with the situation described in the caption above.

As I noted above, it's a mother-daughter confrontation you just dreaded, knowing how clichéd and melodramatic it's bound to be. Only this wasn't, as poor Christina struggled so hard with her own emotions, doubting that she could make Camille understand what she was trying to communicate about this stage in her young but dramatically changing life. How to make her understand that the fact that Marcus, the boyfriend (who works for Christina at the hospital), is a really good guy and would never want to hurt her really doesn't make it all safe? This line of hers, and Jada Pinkett Smith's halting delivery of it, struck me as unforgettable:

CHRISTINA: The thing is . . . the people who care about us the most have the most power to hurt us.

I was also much moved by the smartly and sensitively handled plot line that had bubbly young nurse Kelly (Vanessa Lengies) rousing the wrath of a patient's parents by extending support -- for reasons you won't have difficulty guessing -- to the teenage daughter tormented by people's reaction to her increasingly unmistakable same-sex attraction.


MEANWHILE, THE MY BOYS AND MAD MEN SEASONS ARE OFF TO FLYING STARTS

As I mentioned in a comment to my season-opener post, it's been astonishing seeing online folk talking about the Mad Men Season 4 offering some sort of "fresh start." In reality, these characters are carrying a world's worth of baggage that there seems to be no way of shedding.

It may be that the secrets Dan Draper (Jon Hamm) is sitting on are too dangerous to let slip to more people than already know them, but Dan still doesn't see the practical perils of his compulsive privacy. And it's certainly been an ugly ride watching Betty Draper (January Jones) deteriorate into Monster Mom -- all utterly understandable humanly in terms of her life experiences, but no less frightening for that.

As for My Boys (of which, I might note, Jamie Tarses, an executive producer of HawthoRNe, is also an executive producer), I just watched all three episodes to date again via On Demand. In addition to worrying about having episode ends possibly clipped off by my DVR, I wanted to make sure I hadn't missed too much in a show that's so tightly written and packed. Actually, I had missed a fair amount, and really enjoyed re-viewing the stuff I hadn't missed. The writing is amazingly alert to the characters' specific realities, and much as I miss the departed-to-China Andy (Jim Gaffigan), his departure has enabled the writers to focus more closely on P.J. (Jordana Spiro) and Bobby (Kyle Howard), the now-coupled Stephanie (Kellee Stewart) and Kenny (Michael Bunin), and uncouplable Brendan (Reid Scott) and Mike (Jamie Kaler), or "Michael," as he insisted on being called when he and Brendan donned suits to pretend to be grown-ups, "classy."

I thought it was exactly right that Kenny saw through the spaced-out, phony-baloney Hollywood producer negotiating to turn Stephanie's best-selling book, You're a Great Guy, But . . ., into a movie. Kenny easily guessed that Josh the scummy producer (a hilariously repulsive performance by Ethan Sandler, who has written for the show) hadn't even read the book he was proposing to make gibberish of. This subsequent dinner-table exchange was as much fun to watch as I expect it was to write and perform:

STEPHANIE: Josh, can I ask you something?
SCUMMY PRODUCER: Yeah.
STEPHANIE: Did you ever read the book?
SCUMMY PRODUCER: I guess I don't, uh . . . I'm not sure what kind of question that is . . . I don't understand the question.

Which was probably an uncommon moment of candor for the scummy Josh. It's not really that complex a question, did he read the damned book? But he really and truly doesn't understand the question. And why should he? He's only proposing to make a movie of the damned thing.

My Boys' Mike (or is it Michael?), Kenny, P.J.,

Brendan, Bobby, and Stephanie

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TBS's "My Boys," one of TV's funnier and most endearing comedies, kicks off Season 4 tonight

In last season's "Private Eyes" episode, while Mike (Jamie Kaler) recounts the, er, wonders of his moustache -- the last holdover from the guys' moustache-growing contest -- Kenny (Michael Bunin) interrogates P.J. (Jordana Spiro) and Bobby (Kyle Howard) about their whereabouts last night, not suspecting, though, that they're concealing a romantic relationship; meanwhile Brendan (Reid Scott) pores over the blueprints for his new bar. Season 4 kicks off tonight with a pair of new episodes on TBS.

by Ken

TBS's My Boys is another show I came to late, and even with periodic repeats, there are still episodes, especially in Season 1, I still haven't seen, which I regret, because I've come to really treasure the show.

P.J. (Jordana Spiro) is a Chicago sportswriter, on the Cubs' beat, and for obvious reasons attracts plenty of men, but none who fit into the surprisingly rigid confines of her sports-beat professional and hanging-with-the-guys private lives. She gets plenty of support but remarkably little actual help from her best friend from college, Stephanie (Kellee Stewart), and not even much support from her big brother Andy (Jim Gaffigan), a corporate lawyer who spends as much of his free time as he can avoiding his wife and children, to pursue the closest thing he has to a hobby: drinking.

P.J. has had crushes on longtime pal Brendan and Bobby -- another sportswriter, who was a newcomer to the little group in Season 1 -- and managed to both botch, until somehow last season she and Bobby found themselves a secret couple. I have a feeling Spiro isn't what show creator Betsy Thomas had in mind for the role, and the show might have worked with a less captivating presence, but she really is breathtaking. At the same time, the specificity and depth with which the other characters have been created gives the writers all manner of possibilities to work with. You can think of it as a sort of regular folks' Sex and the City, with a mostly male group of friends and a Second City pulse.

What that still doesn't tell you is how funny the show is, and how touching, and in general how surprising as well as believable. I have no idea where Season 4 will take our friends, but I'm just glad that the wait to find out is finally ending.


AND DON'T FORGET TONIGHT'S
SEASON 4 PREMIERE OF MAD MEN

Three guys we've learned a lot about in three seasons, who really don't like one another: Can Pete (Vincent Kartheiser), Don (Jon Hamm), and Roger (John Slattery) make the new agency work?

With a heroic final-days push, i've knocked off the action-packed final episodes of Season 3, and now face a shorter delay than most Mad Men viewers to see what happens with now with the breakup of Don and Betty Draper and the implosion of Sterling Cooper. Although creator-producer Matt Weiner is telling a great story, he has always been serious about the times (the early '60s) the series passes through, and tonight's Season 4 has already drawn column-opening comment from Frank Rich. -- Ken

The glittering young blonde in a low-cut gown is sipping champagne in a swank Manhattan restaurant back in the day when things were still swank. She is on a first date with an advertising man as dashing as his name, Don Draper. So you don't really expect her to break the ice by talking about bad news. "The world is so dark right now," she says. "One of the boys killed in Mississippi, Andrew Goodman -- he's from here. A girlfriend of mine knew him from summer camp." Her date is too busy studying her décolletage, so she fills in the dead air. "Is that what it takes to change things?" she asks. He ventures no answer.

This is just one arresting moment -- no others will be mentioned here -- in the first episode of the new "Mad Men" season premiering tonight. Like much in this landmark television series, the scene haunts you in part because of what people don't say and can't say. "Mad Men" is about placid postwar America before it went smash. We know from the young woman's reference to Goodman -- one of the three civil rights activists murdered in Philadelphia, Miss., in June 1964 -- that the crackup is on its way. But the characters can't imagine the full brunt of what's to come, and so a viewer in 2010 is left to contemplate how none of us, then or now, can see around the corner and know what history will bring.

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