Life is either "a big nothing" (Livia Soprano) or "just random" (crazy Nellie on "The Office") -- with a nutty Brit's take on the American dream

In this week's episode of The Office, "Get the Girl," crazy and incompetent Nellie (Catherine Tate), whom we thought we'd seen the last of in Tallahasse when Sabre CEO Robert California (James Spader) pulled the plug as humiliatingly as possible on her retail-store project, has unaccountably turned up in Scranton -- and literally walked into the absent Andy Bernard's (Ed Helms') job as branch manager.

by Ken

As I've mentioned, HBO is currently working its way, at a glacial pace through the whole saga of The Sopranos on its On Demand channel. Even though I've been checking frantically for a "new" block of episodes to be posted, when I saw the last four episodes, 10-13, of Season 2, I thought I'd somehow missed a block, and went to my VHS edition (yes, I have the first several seasons on VHS -- you wanna make something of it?) to plug the gap.

Gradually, episode by episode, I realized that I had indeed watched Episodes 6-9 during their On Demand cycle, but I watched them again anyway on the videotapes, amazed at how much I either couldn't get enough of or still hadn't registered properly even on such a recent re-viewing. I don't know how many times I've already paid awed tribute to the entire team assembled by creator-mastermind David Chase, both behind and in front of the cameras, but I don't see any way of avoiding doing it once again. The attention to detail in every aspect of the production remains so extraordinary that each viewing overflows with both grand and tiny matters to savor and resavor.

The one sad note is the illness-limited presence in Season 2 of Nancy Marchand as the massively looming Soprano family matriarch, Livia. I don't think it's possible to overestimate the impact she had in her sadly foreshortened presence in the series. The scene I've transcribed here wasn't one I'd forgotten. It strikes me as pretty much unforgettable. But that doesn't make it any less astonishing on each reencounter. One thing I didn't try to transcribe is how, in the course of this diatribe, Livia -- who so often announces her martyrdom by refusing to eat on the ground that she's not hungry (something that's all but unimaginable in this family) -- begins eating the hospital meal on the tray she's previously left untouched. Talk about attention to detail!

LIVIA SOPRANO: "IN THE END, YOU DIE IN
YOUR OWN ARMS. IT'S ALL A BIG NOTHING"

Young Anthony Soprano Jr. (Robert Iler) has, unknown to his parents, come to the hospital to visit his grandmother Livia (Nancy Marchand), who has been banished from her son Tony's life on account of conspiring to have him whacked at the end of Season 1. At the moment, A.J. is suffering an acute case of 13-year-old's angst of life's purposelessness, to the despair of his parents. (Tony, of course, has his own generally violent-toward-others way of experiencing despair.) He's sitting in a chair beside Livia's bed, where she's lying back on the pillow as we intrude here.

A.J.: What's the use? What's the purpose?
LIVIA [sitting up in bed]: Why does everything have to have a purpose? The world is a jungle. And if you want my advice, Anthony, don't expect happiness. You won't get it. People let you down. And I'm not namin' any names, but in the end, you die in your own arms.
A.J.: You mean . . . alone?
LIVIA: It's all a big nothing. What makes you think you're so special?

-- from "D-Girl," Season 2, Episode 7 of The Sopranos,
written by Todd A. Kessler

AFTER TRANSCRIBING THE ABOVE SCENE, I WAS TRYING
TO CLEAN UP THE STORED PROGRAMS ON MY DVR --

And I discovered that for some reason I had paused rather than deleted this week's episode of The Office, which I was pretty sure I'd watched all the way through. So I hit "resume play," and realized why I'd kept it: because I'd meant to do some transcribing here, specifically of the end-of-episode monologue given to crazy Nellie, now apparently safely ensconced in Andy Bernard's Scranton-manager's office.

I know there are a lot of people who can't imagine taking TV writing or acting seriously. And I know that this has been an exceedingly peculiar season for The Office. That said, I don't see how either writing or acting gets any better than this. ("Get the Girl" was written by Charlie Grandy and directed by Rainn Wilson, our Dwight.)

CRAZY NELLIE: "IF YOU ASK ME, THAT'S
THE AMERICAN DREAM RIGHT THERE"

"I grew up poor. I had little formal education, no real skills. I don't work especially hard. And most of my ideas are either unoriginal or total crap. And yet I walked right into a job for which I was ill-prepared, ill-suited, and somebody else already had, and I got it. If you ask me, that's the American dream right there. Anything can happen to anyone. It's just random."

Ah yes, the American dream indeed. Doesn't this help explain, at least in part, how people actually come to cast votes for worthless, dangerous, sociopathic-to-psychopathic scum like Willard Inc., "Man on Dog" Santorum, and the Big Noot?

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Seeing James Spader in top James Spader form is reason enough to watch the current incarnation of "The Office"

The incomparable James Spader dazzled last season as the visionary genius, or perhaps megalomaniacal crackpot, Robert, interviewing for the old job of Michael Scott (Steve Carell) as manager of the Scranton branch of Dunder Mifflin.

by Ken

Since I try really hard to avoid media promotion that will "give away" stuff I plan to watch, I don't know whether James Spader has landed for the season as the new boss of The Office (I think back to Will Ferrell's unexpectedly and amusingly short tenure at the end of last season), and I don't want to know -- I'd rather take it in as it's dished out. What I can say is that so far that the writers are writing for Spader in a way that allows him to do, you know, all that stuff that I've never seen any other actor do, that sense of being powered by an inner power plant that generates power and heat and vision and confidence and . . . well, I have no idea how to describe it. I can't even say whether the writing for him is really that good, or good-for-him, or he's able to animate anything he sees on a page in front of him.

Another thing I can say is that seeing Spader as new Dunder Mifflin Sabre CEO Robert California reminded me with a jolt of the Spader deprivation I've been feeling since the demise of Boston Legal.

Spader was part of the queue of improbable celebrity guests who appeared in last season's "search" episodes as Dunder Mifflin Scranton and parent company Sabre sought a permanent replacement for departed Scranton manager Michael Scott (Steve Carell). There he was as Robert California, with that familiar Spader aura of visionary genius that might possibly be crackpot megalomania, and the obvious assumption was that he was wildly overqualified for such a humble job, which seemed to be his opinion too.

As we learned from Jim Halpert (John Krasinski) in last week's season opener, "The List." Robert was indeed offered the job, but he was already on his way to Florida, where he persuaded Jo, the CEO of Dunder Mifflin parent company Sabre (a hilarious recurring guest role for Kathy Bates, who of course has gone on to a show of her own) to hire him, not as Scranton branch manager of Dunder Mifflin but as CEO of Sabre -- yes, as Jim underscored, he persuaded her to give him her job!

At the moment, two episodes into the new season, Robert has the office in a state of generally terrified anxiety, hanging on his every utterance, and even every hint about his intentions, as with that "list" from last week's episode --

Now the thing about that state of terror among the staff is that it's totally believable. When Robert opens his mouth, I get a little scared too. Hey, he doesn't even have to open his mouth. One look from him -- a look of disapproval, or doubt, or scorn, or whatever -- says more than most actors can say in a five-minute speech.

So it was totally understandable that the staff was on pins and needles following the surreptitious discovery of a list Robert had made of all the employees separated into two groups. And it was, well, very James Spader-ish when, after Robert tried to insist that the list was merely the result of his habit of doodling, that the two columns represented "winners" and "losers"! But then, there was eventually a classicaly Spader-esque twist in terms of Robert's understanding of those designations. Similarly, when Robert finally did his version of an office pep talk, explaining to the staff that really a small paper company like Dunder Mifflin should have no reason to exist at the present time, the actor invested the character's explanation with such calm conviction and far-seeing wisdom that it was easy to believe their overwhelmed reaction.

HEY, NBC, WHY NOT HAVE SOMEBODY COMPETENT RUN
YOUR WEBSITE INSTEAD OF SOMEONE'S IDIOT NEPHEW?

I would have liked to show you a clip with Spader's Robert, and it's possible that there is such a thing on the NBC Office webpage, but I gave up trying to find it. The website, which appears to be operated by somebody's idiot nephew, seems to function on the principle that even if you manage to figure out where you'd like to go, it will take you where it feels you might want to go, even if you've managed, against all odds, to figure out where you'd at least like to try to go. The one certainty is that when you get where the website takes you, there will be two commercials to watch. Eventually the combination of exhaustion and futility did me in.

I was at it long enough, though, to notice that the clips I managed to find from this season seemed almost to go out of their way to not include James Spader as Robert. This represents either some transcendent marketing genius or a total lack of awareness at the Nothing But Chumps network what the show's hottest current asset is. Anyway, here's a clip. Based on my admittedly limited perusal, I'm gathering that Office clips can be counted on to include Dwight (Rainn Wilson).


The last candidate interviewed in last season's "Search Committee" double episode for a new manager of the Scranton branch of Dunder Mifflin was this mysteriously camouflaged "mystery" man.

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USA's "Fairly Legal" is off to a strong start. Plus: David Brent meets Michael Scott

This promo sets out the basic premise of USA's new series Fairly Legal, about Kate Reed, a lawyer turned mediator who is surrounded by lawyers: the stepmother she hates (who has taken over direction of their law firm from Kate's just-deceased father), her brother, and her ex-husband, an assistant district attorney. The show airs Thursdays at 10pm ET, following Royal Pains.

"I was an attorney for five years. I quit to become a mediator. You want to know why? In court, somebody wins, but there's always a loser, and it doesn't necessarily have to do with who's right and who's wrong."

-- Kate Reed (Sarah Shahi), in the pilot of USA's Fairly Legal

by Ken

I'm afraid the above promo clip and the various others USA Network has prepared, while informative up to a point and accurate enough as far as they go, do much the same thing I'm about to do: make Fairly Legal seem more schematic and stereotyped than it actually plays, at least in the two episodes aired so far. (The fact that the website clips come freighted with 30-second "sponsored messages" may be reason enough to avoid them.) The premiere considerably exceeded my expectations, and the second episode went a long way toward cementing the show's hold on me.

For one thing, the main plot of the episode presented a provocative situation: A man convicted of robbery and murder at 18 is cleared after 22 years in prison. Kate, the mediator, is engaged by Justin (Michael Trucco), the assistant district attorney to whom she was married, to mediate a settlement between the state and the wrongly incarcerated man, Steve, played terrifically by Paul Schulze, known to some of us as Nurse Jackie's extramarital boyfriend Eddie. It's clear to everyone that Steve deserves compensation; the question is how much?

To Justin, it's clearcut. He wants the lowest-cost settlement the DA's office can get away with while also sparing his office the embarrassment of taking a wrongful-prosecution case to court. Kate, however, is horrified to find out, during the settlement conference, that Steve is so empty, at least outwardly, that she can't even find out from him what he wants, and she can't in good conscience settle the case without knowing what his story is. Eventually she gets him to open up, a little anyway.

STEVE: I had this dream. For 22 years I had this dream. That thing kept me alive. That I was exonerated. I was out. And then it happened. I got my dream. Except now I don't know what I want because everything I want is in the past. And the past is dead.
KATE: Before you were arrested, did you have an idea of what you thought your life would be like?
STEVE [shrugs]: Yeah.
KATE: Did it change? [He shakes his head.] Tell me about it.
STEVE: It's always late. Nighttime. [Pause.] I come home from a job that I don't really hate to a family that I really love. My son . . . wants to grow up to be a pro baseball player. My daughter is someone who I tell every day she's the prettiest girl in the room. And she is. And I have a wife who puts up with me, maybe even who loves me. And, uh, it's never gonna happen. Now, how . . . how do you put a price on that?

The show got at least me to think about what it means to have 22 of your 40 years taken away from you. Maybe I'm susceptible because I really am preoccupied by the whole question of how we use and misuse our time on earth, a question that's highlighted by this instance of someone who had those years taken away from him through no fault of his own.

I also tend to respond well to shows that treat their characters with basic respect. It's not hard to understand, for example, why Kate thinks of her stepmother, Lauren (Virginia Williams), as a monster, but at the same time the show makes clear that she isn't. Similarly, ex-husband Justin, far from being the pretty-boy stuffed shirt one might have expected, really believes in his job as a prosecutor: upholding the justice system in order to protect society from bad guys despite the considerable difficulties and obstacles. Kate, meanwhile, prizes actual justice above the orderliness of the justice system. This obviously puts them at odds over Steve's case.

Okay, it's a TV show, so it's hardly surprising that Kate and Justin (who turns out, when we see him shirtless, to be stuffing quite a lot in his shirt) are wildly hot, but both Sarah Shahi and Michael Trucco have a lot more going for them than their considerable physical attractiveness. Sensibly, the writing doesn't shy away from their sexual sizzle, acknowledging the attraction between the characters, which actually is far from just physical, while finding ways to make it clear why they're ex-spouses. Can't live without 'em, can't live with 'em, the way it happens so often happens in real life.

As usual with USA dramatic series there's a strong supporting cast, including Baron Vaughn as Kate's assistant, Leo, and Ethan Embry as Kate's brother, Spencer. Presumably Gerald McRaney will be back as the hard-assed judge who takes badly to Kate's disrespect for the law. And I've barely touched on the issues arising from the death of Kate's and Spencer's father, which shows signs of becoming steadily more rather than less complicated.

Gosh, I know the way I write about Fairly Legal makes it sound frightfully tedious, which again is a shame, because the show, created and produced by Michael Sardo, seems headed in promising directions, and confident about where it's going.


GREAT MOMENTS IN TV HISTORY: ON THE OFFICE,
DAVID BRENT MEETS ALTER-EGO MICHAEL SCOTT


The opening scene of this week's episode of The Office

And an impromptu dialogue on the nature of comedy ensues. Left unanswered is the question of what the hell David is doing in Scranton. (Scranton???) He does seem eerily alert to even the humblest possible employment opportunities, though.

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Welcome to The Office's Cecilia Marie Halpert

"What are the odds of this?" Yes, Michael, what so do you suppose the odds are of visiting the hospital room of a brand-new mother and finding her mother there? (Who ever heard of such a thing?) While we're on a numbers kick, how many ways does Michael find in just these two minutes to embarrass and inconvenience everyone except the person who ought to be ashamed? (My vote for Neatest Michael Trick: applying the hand sanitizer and wiping it off on his pants.)

by Ken

Newborns have not traditionally been boons to sitcoms. Oh, they get a certain amount of mileage out of the pregnancy, and sometimes even a certain amount of humor, and producers and networks always seem to think it's just the shot in the arm their aging series needs but there just isn't much humor to be mined in life with a newborn. Let's just hope the people behind The Office have a plan.

I've held back writing much about The Office because it's not so easy to explain why I like the U.S. version very much and its U.K. forebear not very much. The British Office attracted a strange sort of cult following, of a sort whereby if you pointed out to them that the show isn't funny, they would tell you that that's the joke! And isn't it brilliant?

I've even bought the DVDs of the British series, intending to look at them someday just to see if there was something there that I missed.

The American Office seems to me to have been adapted (by Greg Daniels) with remarkable skill. As Dunder MIfflin's Scranton boss, MIchael Scott (Steve Carell) has many of the same qualities of personal cluelessness, and I mean particularly about himself of Wernham Hogg's Slough boss David Brent (Ricky Gervais, co-creator of the series with Stephen Merchant) -- they both think they're exemplary bosses who understand and identify with their underlings. The American series pushes the cluelessness farther, to the point where Michael actually becomes funny, where Britain's David seemed to me primarily abject and pathetic.

Tim and Dawn in the original U.K. Office

There was nothing funny at all about the British series' most interesting character, poor Tim (Martin Freeman), who was so painfully aware of how all his life's hopes and ambitions had been dead-ended there at Wernham Hogg. The bleakness of his outlook was neatly seconded in his hopeless infatuation with the charming receptionist Dawn (Lucy Davis). Not surprisingly, the American version carefully crafted a counterpart couple in Jim (John Krasinski) and Pam (Jenna Fischer), complete with Pam's thug-fiancé Roy, a man who never once stopped to consider how this relationship was supposed to be supporting her.

Oh sure, our Jim is a softened version of their Tim, but in compensation he was given an utterly charming relaxed ease and sense of humor (a quality very much shared by Pam; it's one of the things that brings them together). And of course since Gervais and Merchant in the end relented and allowed Tim and Dawn to come together, I think we always knew that it would happen for Jim and Pam as well. Still, it's been a wonderful plot line in a show that has overflowed with wonderfully written and acted plot lines.

[AFTERTHOUGHT: It's been awhile since I've seen any of the British shows, and I haven't been much moved to look at the DVDs yet, but since I wrote this I recalled that it was wrong of me to say that there's nothing funny about Tim, who had quite a lively sense of humor too, I've been recalling. In this regard as well the American Jim is an excellent analog. But as the helplessness and desperation took over with Tim, they obscured -- at least in my memory -- his keen sense of irony.]

Now if they can just figure out how to handle the baby . . .

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30 Rock: with The Office and Burn Notice, two hours of terrifically written and acted TV

"They're all former investment bankers who were laid off in the economic crash that Nancy Pelosi caused. [Smiling affectionately.] They've got zero real-world skills, but God, they work hard!"

-- GE-NBC exec Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin) to producer Liz Lemon (Tina Fey), about the snide, hypercompetitive new pages assigned to her show ("a little old," she has observed, "and overdressed"), in last week's 30 Rock episode

by Ken

And Jack would know how hard his over-age-frat-boy pages work. He asks them "to run out and pick up some flowers, a collection of bath soaps, and some Spanish-language gossip magazines," and they make a mad, elbows-flying dash for the elevators. (It turned out that Jack was trying desperately to win over the grandmother of Elisa, the Puerto Rican nurse he's fallen in love with, played by the lovely Salma Hayek. He's under the impression that the old woman doesn't like him -- perhaps because, as we saw in a flashback, she's told him that she hates him.)

I've been trying for a week to think of something remotely as smart as this dazzling bit of dialogue to say about 30 Rock. In the erratic but irresistible first season most of the fun came from ultra-corporatist Jack Donaghy (Alec Baldwin) and his underclass counterpart, ultra-loyal (and ultra-bizarre) page Kenneth (Jack McBrayer). By the show's second season, though, all the wacky elements had hit their stride, and the momentum has carried through brilliantly to this, the third season.

To her credit, show creator Tina Fey didn't demand the spotlight, and her own character, producer Liz Lemon has grown into one of TV's most cherishable (albeit near-hopeless) characters -- her show seeming week by week less under her control, and her personal life in even worse shape. The show functions just this side, or maybe a bit over the edge, of insanity.

And NBC has paired it brilliantly with its other great sitcom, the astonishing American version of The Office. (There must be some weird schedule-balancing principle at work in plunking the hour comprising The Office and 30 Rock right after an hour filled with the flesh-crawling My Name Is Earl and Kath and Kim. Is there anybody who watches both hours?) And now with USA's Burn Notice at 10pm ET/PT as gripping and amusing as ever in its third season, we've got as solid a two-hour TV block as I can remember: smart and funny, terrifically written and acted.

(At that same hour, according to NBC promos ER continues to be shown for what is claimed to be a final season. Surely this is just a cunning cost-cutting measure, though. Didn't ER go off the air, like, 10 years ago? Surely nobody has watched it since then. My theory is that the scam goes like this: NBC simply continues to list it on the schedule and, since no one is watching, saves money by not running any actual program. Must be tough on the ad salesfolks, but it can't be much tougher than a lot of the crap they have to sell where there is an actual program.)

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