Premium-Cable Premiere Night brings us the return of "Looking" and "Episodes"

HBO's trailer for Season 2 of Looking -- the new season launches tonight.

by Ken

It's Premium-Cable Premiere Night tonight, meaning most importantly the start of the new seasons of HBO's Looking (Season 2) and Showtime's Episodes (Season 4), both of which had simply spectacular seasons last time out. At the same time it's possible to be cautiously optimistic about the return of Showtime's Shameless for Season 5, in which (I see from the promos) the Gallaghers will be grappling with the onset of gentrification in their heretofore lost-and-forgotten slice of Chicago. And HBO has a new series called Togetherness that looks to be worth at least a look.

Then there are HBO's Grrlz and Showtime's House of Lies, which I know will be welcomed back by their devoted fans. And I suppose a case could be made that, because they deal almost exclusively with characters so vile and obnoxious that one could hardly wish enough bad things to happen to them, and not nearly enough do, they are truer representations of real life. However, I had the misfortune, while rewatching the whole of Season 1 of Loving, of being subjected to endless repetitions of the promo for the new season of Grrlz, and it looks even more revolting than when I finally gave up on it despite its creator's obvious talents.

(You know how lately I keep enthusing over shows that dish out spectacular scripts to spectacular writing to spectacular casts and puts the actors in circumstances to produce their best work? Here's one that dumps assaultively cretinous writing on actors who may or may not have talent but here puke up mostly inept, repellent work, in the apparent service of the revenge fantasies of a young person who, although one of the luckier people on the planet, sees herself as one of life's great victims. It's hard not to appreciate the element of fiscal reality captured in the lives of these young people, and it may just be an unreasonable personal reaction that even this is undercut by their creator's personal unfamiliarity with those circumstances. Nevertheless, it's hard to care about characters who for the most part don't seem even to try to grapple meaningfully with the hard questions of life. There's no easy answer to the question of which proposition is truer: that the only thing more appalling than the Grrlz of Grrlz is the Guyz," or that the only thing more appalling than the Guyz is the Grrlz.)

ON A MORE HOPEFUL NOTE --

Season 4 of Episodes (created by David Crane and Jeffrey Klarik) really caught me by surprise. I'd been kind of dutifully following the story of British TV writers Sean and Beverly Lincoln (Stephen Mangan and Tamsan Greig) who come to the U.S. to write what they assume will simply be an adaptation of a hit series of theirs, which turns out to be a total degradation rewritten to the talents, such as they are, of a fictionalized version of Matt LeBlanc. But somehow last season, either I finally really "got it" or the show itself took off -- I thought it was sensational. And since the season ended with Sean and Beverly, determined to haul their battered bodies and souls back to England, being powerfully lured to stay on in Hollywood to work on what they're assured will be a correctly done version of a show they're actually interested in writing, there's plenty of room for fun in the new season.

But the show I'm really looking forward to is Looking. I reallze that it may be of less interest to viewers who aren't interested in gay-male relationships, but the thing about the central characters of Looking, produced by a creative team of a Brit, Andrew, and an American, Michael Lannan -- and the peripheral ones too, for that matter -- is that their sexual orientation is merely a part of who they are, and really doesn't have much to do with the struggles they're going through to make sense of their lives.

It's impossible for me to ignore the mad crush I have on Patrick (Jonathan Groff), both the character and the actor, a San Francisco transplant from Colorado who at 29 has been historically unable to open himself up personally enough to have a shot at a real relationship, until last season he began to do so with a chance-met Mexican hottie named Richie. Late in Season 1 we finally got to meet Jonathan's family, who turn out to be terrific, and refocused our view of the strain his his relationship with his mother (a really spectacular performance by Julia Duffy).

But the second time through I found myself significantly more engaged with his friends Agustin (Frankie J. Alvarez; a college friend and, since then, longtime roommate), a struggling artist, and the turning-40-waiter Dom (Murray Bartlett), an even more personally closed-off type than Patrick. There's an awful lot more, including another really spectacular performance by Scott Bakula as a successful businessman who gets involved in Dom's dream of opening up a restaurant featuring Peruvian peri-peri chicken. One just hopes the team can sustain the level of Season 1 into Season 3.

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TV Non-Watch: What would happen if one of your "major" TV networks was swallowed up by the earth (and a few cable networks with it)?

If I don't have access to CBS programming by the time new episodes of The Good Wife begin airing in the fall, I'll be peeved. Otherwise, I think I'm good.

by Ken

It sounds like science fiction, doesn't it? An entire Big Four TV network simply disappearing? As is known to those of you who also reside in Time Warner Cable Country, and especially those of you who get your CBS programming from CBS Owned-and-Operated stations (meaning in Los Angeles, New York, Dallas-Fort Worth, Boston, Chicago, Denver, Detroit, and Pittsburgh), the CBS stations have gone poof! And with them CBS's cable properties: Showtime, The Movie Channel, Flix, and the Smithsonian Channel -- poof!

I don't know about you, but I really didn't expect it to come to this. I was vaguely aware of the possibility, thanks to what appeared to be a fairly massive CBS promotional campaign demonizing dastardly TWC for daring to threaten to deprive the citizenry of this indispensable programming. It would be, so the ads went, an assault virtually without precedent in the history of mankind.

At least from my perch it appeared that TWC was spending a small fraction of CBS's outlay to fight back, but offered us the interesting claim, unmentioned in the CBS promotional onslaught, that CBS was demanding increases of six (or was it seven?) times in payments for its programming. Even allowing for some fudging in the calculations, that sounds pretty startling, and one wonders how the CBS propagandists could have failed to mention it. If those numbers reflect anything vaguely close to reality, increases of that order, sure to be demanded by other purveyors of programming to cable, would seem to lead inescapably to dramatic increases in my cable bill, which is already astronomical.

What's interesting, though, is how little I'm feeling the loss, now that the great CBS blackout is in place. It's August, of course, so we're still a month or two away from new episodes of The Good Wife. That's something I would really miss should CBS still be MIA come new-season time. Other than that? Well, as I've mentioned, in the last season or two I've become kind of fond of Blue Bloods. I would certainly miss new episodes of The Big Bang Theory and Two and a Half Men, but it's not as if we cable consumers would suffer any great deprivation of either show, which pop up all over the damned cable band.

And you know, as far as I've been able to reckon, that's about it. The CBS ads are careful to include NFL programming among the deprivations TWC was threatening to inflict on us, and I guess for a lot of people the loss of CBS's AFC coverage will be a bitter blow. After all, how is a football fan supposed to survive with nothing but Fox's NFC coverage, and ESPN's Sunday Night Football, and NBC's Monday Night Football? Or whatever it is that the NFL currently licenses networks other than CBS to offer. I guess this would once have mattered to me, but for years now I've noticed that the onset of a new NFL season, which once filled me with anticipation, now fills me with dread. You would probably have to tie me down to get me to watch an NFL game now.

And of course what New York fans are threatened with the loss of is principally Jets games. Jets games? I would think that by now there was some movement to keep them off the air on purely football-friendly grounds.

Do I have to add that I haven't watched 60 Minutes -- something else that once played an important role in my weekly life -- in maybe 15 years? Or that I don't knowingly watch anything else produced by CBS News? All in all, the CBS-TWC dispute (I'll refrain from calling it "the CBS extortion bid," since I really don't know enough to conclude that as a matter of fact) has for me served primarily to underscore just how little CBS programming I watch.

And what of the cable networks? Well, I don't know what Flix is, and while I should probably be watching what is no doubt stimulating and enlightening programming on the Smithsonian Channel, and I don't offhand recall ever tuning to it.

As for Showtime, I think I'm fine till the next season of Nurse Jackie. (There is another season in the works, isn't there?) I was recording episodes of the new season of Dexter, but I have yet to watch any. The last time I watched a movie on any of the Showtime channels was -- well, I don't remember. (Sorry, CBS.)

And The Movie Channel? You've got to be kidding. If I'm lucky, maybe once a year I find something on it that I want to watch. The only reason I still have it is that the last time I inquired, I wouldn't have saved anything by axing it. And the way things work with me and Time Warner Cable, I wouldn't have been surprised if it wound up costing me more to not get TMC.

In any case, the last communication I had from TWC said that while TMC is kaput, I now have "courtesy access to Encore as replacement programming on a temporary basis," and in fact I should be getting Starz programming as a replacement for Showtime. I once subscribed to Starz and Encore but gave them up in a desperate attempt many years ago to trim my cable bill. I've got a way better shot at finding something to watch on them than on TMC -- or probably even Showtime.

In my experience with TWC everything costs more. Like when I added my phone service to my TWC "package." That would surely save me money, wouldn't it? As far as I can tell, it didn't. And when the installation was done, my kitchen phone no longer rang. I pointed this out to the installer, who insisted that this couldn't possibly be connected to anything he had done in the installation. Except that beforehand that phone rang; suddenly it didn't. The phone works, mind you. It just doesn't ring. Oh well.

And oh yes, starting this month, I get the privilege of paying $5.99 a month (plus the associated taxes and whatnot, no doubt) for the modem that was installed at the time. When I saw this announcement, I suddenly remembered a postcard received many months ago informing me of this upcoming change. I suppose I could have done something about buying the same sort of modem. But I didn't. And now TWC gets to dig deeper into my pocket.

Which is basically how I think of the company -- as an ongoing, protracted drain on my wallet, like via suction or something. It's why for years I've assiduously avoided dealings with the company, except when absolutely necessary. Anytime I contacted them, it seemed to wind up costing me money. I admit I had an easier time this summer when I upgraded one of my boxes to an HD box to accommodate my new TV and when I asked for help with my old DVR box, which turned out to be a museum piece. The replacement box not only is about a third the size but works about 1000 times better. I wonder how many years of substandard service I endured unnecessarily, because I was simply afraid to press TWC on the subject.

So you see, I'm not exactly a TWC enthusiast, and still, in the CBS imbroglio my sympathies are pretty one-sided. I'm not sure I would be any more aggrieved if it had been NBC or CBS (or Fox) that had gone poof! Probably not, which is a reminder of how dramatically my viewing of network TV has declined.

I suppose it will be of some comfort to CBS to know that it's got all those Jets fans on its side.

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

TV Watch: Saying the long goodbye to "Californication," "House of Lies," and "Enlightened"

Steven Bochco's Murder One (1995-96) may not have had the courage of the convictions of its announced premise, but hey, at least it could be watched.

by Ken

Once upon a time we were told, as I understood it, that we were going to get a TV series that answered the question, what's it like to be one of those high-profile defense attorneys we always see defending high-profile scumbag clients everybody knows are guilty as sin. That sounded like it might have been interesting, though I suspect the truth is that such lawyers aren't much different from the rest of the white-collar world engaged in morally dubious activity, which is to say most of the higher rollers of that world.

In the event, however, what we got was something very different. The show was Steven Bochco's Murder One (1995) was indeed built around a high-price lawyer who defended rich, scummy clients, but he wasn't one of those mob-mouthpiece types I assumed we were going to be seeing. Instead we got that terrific actor Daniel Benzali playing a deeply sensitive lawyer, Teddy Hoffman committed to justice who defended clients he believed to be innocent. At least innocent of the accused crime-- (of, you know, murder one. Heaven knows the people Teddy found himself involved with in the Season 1 case were guilty of just about everything you could think of, or rather everything the show's writers could think of, which dug fairly deep into the manure pile of depravity, or as deep into it as the ABC censors would allow.

I actually enjoyed Season 1 of Murder One, but not a lot of viewers seem to have, and Bochco and ABC undertook every sort of rejiggering -- and then performed a near-total makeover for the surprisingly granted Season 2 reprieve. That season substituted Anthony LaPaglia for Daniel Benzali, but still didn't give us anything like the kind of lawyer -- or clients -- I thought we were going to get.

I bring this up because in last week's kickoff TV Watch post I undertook to try to explain why I finally banished a batch of HBO and Showtime series from my DVR automatic-recording list. I talked last week about HBO's Girls, which for all the hoopla, and for all the talent involved and even the potentially promising elements in place, seemed to me, by the time I slogged through four episodes of Season 2 (still unreeling), to have settled into a groove as a deeply obnoxious and profoundly worthless pile of crap.

I've retrieved my memory of Murder One as a prelude to waving bye-bye to two of the Showtime shows: the long-running Californication and second-season House of Lies, both of which, it occurs to me), sort of fulfill what I took to be the original premise of Murder One, or maybe more.

Bye-bye, Californication!

In the case of Californication, I've stuck with the gang the 20 or 30 seasons-to-date in which angry-rebel writer Hank Moody (David Duchovny) showed, season after season, that yes indeed, for all his attractive qualities, and those of his long-suffering girlfriend or ex-girlfriend Karen (Natascha McElone) and their daughter Becca (Madeleine Martin), Hank remains an irredeemable scumbag.

I know I should be giving the producers credit for their real-world honesty. How tempting it must have been, season by season, to allow Hank to "reform," even a little. But no, a vile scumbag he remains, not just wildly self-destructive but destructive to all the people attached to him. True, he is immersed in the glamorous L.A. world of people who are even more loathsome, but somehow that doesn't make it any better for me. As I wrote last week, what it comes down to is that I don't want these people in my living room, ever again. In the end, after half-watching the opener of the new season (Season 21, ist it? or 31?), I decided I just couldn't go back. No more!

Toodle-oo, House of Lies!

As for House of Lies, it indeed goes beyond even my understanding of the premise of Murder One. We're now in the world of wall-to-wall scumbags. Marty Kaan (Don Cheadle) is a star (most of the time) of a high-power firm of so-called management consultants, whose basic job seems to be to hoodwink clients into paying them to "fix" their companies, when all they really seem to offer is delusional scams.

And so here we are, in a world of loathsome, morally repellent people making a living doing loathsome, morally repellent business with (or for, or to) clients who by and large seem to almost deserve what our "heroes" do to them. I've seen the behavior of Marty and his team described as "amoral," but that seems to me just wrong. Their behavior isn't independent of moral considerations; it revels joyfully in blatant im-morality.

What's more, the characters themselves are by and large so repellent that the apparent expectation that I as a viewer involve myself in their existences makes me feel unclean. I have a particular hate for Marty's free-scamming smartypants-scumbag sidekick Clyde (Ben Schwartz), but the idiot-savant cluelessness of the infinitely pathetic Doug (Josh Lawson) isn't much easier to bear. Which leaves th vastly more sympathetic Jeannie (Kristen Bell), who often seems to wish she were a better person. But she isn't.

And these are the "likable" people at their firm. For the others (played by actors in some cases as good as Richard Schiff), I would need a vocabulary that goes beyond "loathsome scumbags." So while I feel sorry for Marty's sexually confused son Roscoe (Donis Leoanrd Jr.), what there really is to feel sorry about is thatmonstrous parents like Marty and his bitch-from-hell ex-wife.

Again, I made a sleep-addled half-effort at watching the Season 2 opener, and then found that I can't, I won't, go back. These people are banished forever from my home. (Naturally Showtime has already announced the go-ahead for a Season 3 of House of Lies.)

Tell your story walking, Enlightened!

Which leaves just HBO's appalling Enlightened. I already wrote last season about my deep misgivings ("HBO's Enlightened makes me cringe almost nonstop, but I'm still watching (or at least recording) it," October 2011), but I did stick it out to the end, hoping some reason would come into focus for continuing to care about the life crisis of airhead Amy (Laura Dern), who seems to think she is reconstructing her life from the ashes of her failed marriage and her lost corporate-stooge existence. And indeed everyone is really, really mean to Amy, including even her mother (played by Laura's real-life mother, the excellent actress Diane Ladd). But it became painfully clear by the end of Season 1 that the origin of all that meanness is Amy herself. Who wouldn't want to be mean to her?

Amy has been through a fiercely expensive rehab treatment in Hawaii, which remains her paradise, but surely we viewers were supposed to notice that her vision of "enlightment" is moronic bullshit. So you might think the idea of the series is to make fun of her bogus New Age-y spirituality. But then what are we to make of her deep revulsion to the evils of the Corportate System, which are all utterly believable, but are still less offensive than the clueless Amy.

As with that other cult favorite Portlandia, mostly I find myself thinking, who exactly is being made fun of? And who is doing the making fun of? Is there any reason to find those people any less repellent than the objects of their "satire"?

The closest thing Enlightened has to a saving grace, for me at least, is Diane Ladd's performance as the put-upon mother. She never sentimentalizes, never tries for cheap sympathy. It's crystal clear that Helen had her life organized in a way that would stultify me but is apparently aces for her -- until she faced her hopeless wreck of a daughter moving back in with her, quite against Helen's wishes. Again, as we got to know them both over the course of Season 1, I came to accept that, while the mother can't be happy about the mess her daughter has made of her life, at some point she has done all she can, and deserves to be left alone.

I can't tell you how relieved I was when I realized I could make the decision to let the whole ragtage crew alone. When I think of shows like Girls and Enlightened, I think of the remark Mad Men creator Matthew Weiner made in response to HBO's summary rejection of his pilot script. Since his days working with David Chase on The Sopranos, Weiner opined, something sure had changed in the network's programming.

Boy, I can't wait till the new season of Mad Men is ready.

(I should note that in response to last week's post, our friend Bil commented that he's richly enjoying both Californication and House of Lies. Perhaps he can offer us some tips on how it's done. Anyway, I freely acknowledge that my response is strictly personal -- the only kind of response I have, after all.)

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TV Watch: Cutting loose from four HBO and Showtime comedies -- I don't want these people in my home!

Now that I've cut the cord, I guess I'll miss Marnie (Allison Williams, right), though not the torture the show puts her through. I won't miss Hannah (series creator-writer-director Lena Dunham, left), and I'm thrilled to be free of the utterly loathsome Jessa (Jemima Kirke).

"You know, I want to like you, but sometimes you make it so hard."

-- Walden (Ashton Kutcher), to Alan (Jon Cryer),
in last week's episode of Two and a Half Men

by Ken

As I mentioned last night, this week I finally took the step of purging a batch of HBO and Showtime comedies from my DVR "Series Manager." They're all shows -- HBO's Girls and Enlightened and Showtimes Californication and House of Lies -- that had ingredients which made me want to like them, and I stuck with them through at least one season (and quite a lot more in the case of Californication).

But after watching the first four episodes of Season 2 of Girls in more or less one fell swoop, and being unable to get through as much as one new episode of Californication or House of Lies, I called it quits. (I couldn't even bear to face another episode of Enlightened.) I'd already started deleting their "scheduled" recordings. Finally I wiped all the already-recorded episodes and purged them from my "Series Manager."

I'm going to start with Girls, and I won't be surprised if that's as much as I can bear to deal with for now. The unifying thread, though, is that whatever appeal the characters of these shows may once have held for me -- and for me TV is without question a character-driven medium -- they have become pretty much repellent to me. I just don't want any of them in my home anymore.

An awful lot has been written about Girls, which is created, co-produced, co-starred and largely written and directed by Lena Dunham, and I've lost most impulse to add to it. Perhaps not surprisingly, women writers have been out in force on the subject, reaching for profundities so stupid, you wonder how the printed pages and/or computer screens don't spontaneously combust -- or perhaps the writers. One piece widely hailed as a landmark in criticism informed us that the large quantity of bad sex depicted is a breakthrough because we hardly ever get to see how much of the world's sex is bad.

It's a basic fact of life that many of us have a certain amount of insight into what's wrong with other people and much, much less about what's wrong with ourselves. In the case of these characters, the first part is there at a low level and the second part drops to near-zero. In one of the HBO bonus features that aired, as I recall, at or near the start of Season 2, Dunham told us that the characters are near the correct versions of themselves." Not that I can tell. By and large these people have lifted cluelessness to an art form. Yes, I understand that "the girls" (and their male friends) are young, but they aren't 12, they're in their mid-20s and up.

There's no question that Dunham has oodles of talent, and there was so much that at first glance was appealing and interesting about the characters that I stuck with the show through Season 1, and then swallowed four episodes of Season 2 in a single gulp. And that was it for me. There's really nothing here.

It would be one thing if Dunham were writing honestly from what she knows at her stage in life. But the whole thing is so blatantly dishonest. She certainly has a viable theme in her preoccupation with her character's (which is to say her own) unspectacular looks; that has to be a significant reality in our culture. Unfortunately she has next to nothing to offer on the subject excep to keep picking at the wound. Similarly, in the Season 2 opener Dunham thought she was fearlessly tackling the unquestionably important subject of race by writing in an African-American boyfriend for Hannah. We know she thought so because she told us so in her video commentary on the episode. But the episode had absolutely nothing to say about the subject, except a half-hearted "Say, what about race?" Race actually seems to me to have been a minor factor in the failure of yet another of Hannah's relationships.

Then there's the matter of Hannah's "calling" -- her burning conviction that she wants to be a writer, but without any indication of what she might want to write or what she might have to say. Considering that Dunham herself has had an almost unbroken streak of stupendous acclaim for everything she has done at her tender age, the reimagining of herself in this would-be writer of no visible claim to literary aspiration seems to me a startling fraud.

And for all the appeal of some of the characters, their creator's obtuseness about who they are, where they're going, and where they think they're going is dumbfounding. How clueless did the "girls" have to be to be in awe of the truly monstrous Jessa (Jemima Kirke), who seems incapable of considering anything in life except her pleasure stretching out over, say, the next half-hour. I suppose it will be argued that we've always had male characters like this in our fiction, but rarely this oblivious to the fact that the people around them are people -- and hardly ever presented to us as free-spirited role models for hero-worshipping peers.

Worse, poor Marnie (Allison Williams), Hannah's longtime best friend, the only one of the regular characters who has made any kind of stab at facing up to the real world, seems to serve mostly as a punching bag for Dunham's frustrations, not least for her obviously winning physical appearance.

It doesn't seem to be Hannah nearly as much as Lena who resents Marnie for her looks, and seems to delight in punishing her for any of her successes. It's not that Marnie doesn't take advantage of her looks. In our culture, it's almost impossible not to (after all, people and opportunities come to attractive people without their even having to do anything), but Marine does so less than you can imagine anyone of her attractiveness doing. The show concedes that she's terrible when she does try it (and this season suffers the indignities, not just of waitressing in a gentlemen's club and having sex with a monstrously horrible sociopathic twit), and what, after all, does she have to show for her looks? Her long experience keeping a pathetically insecure shell of a boyfriend in tow? Toiling away at a not much more than entry-level job at an art gallery, and getting next to nothing except a modest paycheck? And then getting summarily fired by a pretentiously arty monster-bitch (played, queasily, by Dunham's mother).

There was originally some fascination in the relationship between Hannah and Marnie. to establish that Hannah and Marnie have been equally deficient friends to each other. But from what we've been shown, it isn't even close.

Then there are the men. But they're so uniformly appalling -- and again without a clue even where to begin looking for a clue about the real world -- that I can't even see any point in going into it. Again, though, if you wrote female characters like these in a male-centered show, women would be screaming bloody murder (and rightly so!).

As I suspected, this has taken so much out of me that I don't have the heart to proceed to the other three fiascos. But they have some important common threads -- namely their consistent representation of central characters with essentially no redeeming qualities -- that we should probably say something about them. Next week maybe, if I can rally.

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"He'll be back, Debs. He always comes back" -- "Shameless"'s Fiona Gallagher to her sister, about their father

He's ba-ack! Frank (William H. Macy) has rewarded the devotion of Debbie (Emma Kenney), his last remaining fan among the Gallagher offspring, just the way you would expect.

"The only way to make money when you're poor is to steal it or scam it."

-- Lip (Phillip) Gallagher (Jeremy Allen White),
in Episode 2 of Season 3 of Shameless

by Ken

It's one of the most dependable plot formulas the people behind Showtime's Shameless having going: the return, yet again, of the utterly useless, parasitic Frank Gallagher (William H. Macy) to what he always points out is his home. And darned if the producers didn't work it yet again for the opening episodes of Season 3.

You have to give them credit. They've already done Frank Being Dumped in Canada, which relatively speaking is a hop, skip, and jump from the Gallagher domicile in Chicago. The operative comparison is Mexico, where Frank ever so torturedly woke up from his customary alcoholic stupor in the season opener -- following a gap of 137 days, as we know because of the virtual shrine assembled by young Debbie, the last of the seven Gallagher offspring to retain her devotion to this waste of a human being. Forget "devotion"; setting aside baby Liam, Debbie is the last of the Gallaghers to retain as much as an impulse to tolerate Frank.

Even if we didn't know that William H. Macy is thought to be one of the show's major attractions, we would have known after two seasons with the Gallaghers that Fiona was unquestionably right: Frank would be back. And so as not to be a total spoiler, I will just say that the eventual working out of the relationship between Frank and Debbie yielded a grand scene that was the subject of a wonderful on-air feature with interview clips from a number of cast members, obviously including young Emma Kenney, who as the heartbreaking Debbie has been one of the show's consistent treasures.

The great strength of the show, for me at least, has been the convincing depiction of the human potential of all of the older-than-infant Gallagher kids (except for the ragingly sociopathic young Carl), potential all but certain to be wasted owing to the circumstances of their barely-making-ends-meet life, attempting to raise themselves with poor Fiona (Emmy Rossum) sadly forced into the role of fill-in mom. So many of the Gallaghers have so many appealing qualities, as do so many members of their circle in their South Side Chicago neighborhood, that it's easy to keep returning and keep rooting, and there's ample room for comedy.

I do worry, though, about the long-term potential for warmth and fuzziness as the Gallaghers' challenging day-to-day realities give way to the long-term crushing kind. For example, the creative team has made such a persuasive case for Lip's brilliance, his unlimited intellectual potential, along with his limitless personableness and resourcefulness, that for all the street-sassiness of his refusal to fall in line for other people's hopes and expectations for him, is there much hope of a future for him that is other than a tragic waste?

That said, now that I've finally caught up with the new season of Shameless, I'm relieved. I had sort of half-watched some of it, then went back via "On Demand" to rewatch the final episode of Season 2, and was much relieved to have quite a good time when I attacked the season opener again.

I also half-watched part of the season openers of Showtime's Californication and House of Lies, and while I've formed some interest in some of the characters (most obviously in the case of the many seasons of Californication), I had a pretty terrible feeling about the general repulsiveness of so many of the characters -- really, all the characters in House of Lies. My feeling going in is that by and large they deserve whatever happens to them. Same deal with HBO's Girls and Enlightened.

I guess I really am too old. There appears to be a whole other ethos among the target audience of today's TV developers. If this is the new face of "hip" TV, I guess I'll be having a lot of free time opening up.

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How come no one told me how spectacular Season 2 of "Episodes" is? (Thanks, On Demand!)

"Okay, fine, I get it!" Matt tells Beverly (Tamsin Greig) and Sean (Stephen Mangan). "You're not supposed to screw your stalker!" (With luck, you may be able to view this brief clip here.)

by Ken

I know there's a new TV season settling in, but so far I seem to be handling my little corner of it and still found myself looking for new worlds to conquer, and in something close to desperation I clicked onto On Demand's offering of Episode 1 of Season 2 of the Showtime-BBC coproduction Episodes. I was astonished. I couldn't believe this was the same show whose first season I'd viewed with such guarded enthusiasm.

In case you're not familiar with the premise of the show, created and written by life partners David Crane (one of the Friends creators) and Jeffrey Klarik (a veteran of the Paul Reiser sitcom Mad About You): Stephen Mangan and Tamsin Greig play Sean and Beverly Lincoln, married British writers who are invited to come to Hollywood to write a U.S. adaptation of their successful Britcom about a beloved old teacher in a boys' school. It turns into a nightmare worse than anything they could have imagined, as they aging teen heartthrob Matt LeBlanc (the actor himself playing this imagined version of himself) forced on them as their wise old teacher.Eventually the character is transformed, a bit more plausibly, into a hockey coach, on a show now called Pucks, rigged out with perpetual ingénue Morning Randolph (Mircea Monroe) as the original show's librarian, not to mention a crew of non-acting Hollywood-style lads as "the boys."

Season 1 wasn't awful. It just all played out pretty predictably, with the Brits coping very differently with the challenges of the assault on their nice little show and the mindless hedonism of the world in which they're now plunged. Sean, for all his sniffiness shows himself eminently temptable, but it's the Hollywood-phobic Beverly who winds up sleeping with Matt, delivering a devastating blow to Sean's ego. There were okay but unremarkable turns by John Pankow (Paul's cousin Ira on Mad About You) as Merc Lapidus, the network programming chief, and Kathleen Rose Perkins as Carol, Merc's second in command and liaison to the real world -- and, oh yes, his mistress.

Season 2 begins with Sean and Beverly officially separated but still working together on a show that, improbably, seems quite possibly poised to succeed. It even has a strong premiere, followed by a steep plunge in its second week, as hordes of opening-episode watchers fail to return. But in Season 2 -- expanded from seven to nine episodes -- everything seems to me to work brilliantly. The thing is hilarious, with all the humor coming out of amazingly believably drawn characters and relationships, starting with Matt's complex relationships with each of the writers, but also including their relationships with everyone at the network and on the show.

The satire is somehow simultaneously sweetly low-key and savage. Carol, the network no. 2 gal, has become a riveting character, with a really terrific friendship in place with Beverly and total myopia about the hopelessness of her relationship with her boss. Matt tries desperately to repair his relationships with Sean and Beverly while coping with his understandably aggrieved ex-wife and his stalker. I don't know how to write about it in a way that doesn't make it sound dopey. I'm still stunned myself by how rivetingly believable and side-splitting I found almost every moment of all nine Season 2 episodes.

I'm thinking I may have to go back and look again at Season 1 to see whether there were things going on that I just hadn't tuned into yet. Meanwhile I see that Stephen Mangan has acknowledged publicly that there will be a Season 3. I'm going to have a tough time waiting.

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As Season 4 of "Nurse Jackie" builds to a close, there's major news about Season 5 (including that there WILL BE a Season 5)

No, I'm sorry to say that can't have you a clip of Jackie (Edie Falco) dealing with 87-year-old Mrs. Zimberg, whom we may remember as the Popsicle Lady (Lynn Cohen).

"We are so thrilled with the series' performance this year, and we know that with the incomparable Edie Falco in front of the camera, the fifth season of Nurse Jackie will be even better."

-- Showtime's David Nevins, announcing Thursday that the show will
have a fifth season, run by former Dexter showrunner Clyde Phillips

by Ken

Why on earth would I be quoting a Showtime suit? Because I've been thrilled with Nurse Jackie's performance this year too, and how often am I on the same wavelength with a suit? Of course the "series' performance" that's thrilling Showtime entertainment president David Nevins is its ratings performance, and while I'm certainly glad to hear that the network is happy with the number of people watching, what I mean by performance is the quality of what they've been showing us these happy Sunday nights.

Which is how I happened to stumble across Thursday's announcement about the fifth season. Normally, as I've mentioned, I try to avoid "TV news," for fear of having show-beans spilled -- stuff about future show content that I would prefer to have unfold on-screen the way the creative team chooses to dish it out. But I just rewatched Sunday night's episode, "Chaud & Froid," and freaked out a bit at the promotional mention of "2 EPISODES LEFT." Just "2 EPISODES LEFT," not "2 EPISODES LEFT THIS SEASON." So when I decided it was time to write again about Nurse Jackie, I went trolling for news.

Naturally I was delighted to learn that the end is not nigh. At the same time I'm more than apprehensive about the previously announced departure, which of course I hadn't heard about, of co-creators (with Evan Dunsky) and co-showrunners Linda Wallem and Liz Brixius, who I assume have to take a large part of the credit for the show's careful nurturing over these four seasons. After all, what I had planned to write about was how much I've come to really love the show and how much this has to do with the brilliant care and feeding of the remarkable set of characters they created and have shepherded so faithfully and creatively, at the same time shepherding the sensational cast they assembled to play those characters.

Nurse Jackie co-creators and Season 1-4
co-showrunners Linda Wallem and Liz Brixius

And now Linda and Liz are gone.

There is, it seems, some geographical symmetry at work here. Nellie Andreeva writes for Deadline.com:

what was a major reason for Los Angeles-based Wallem and Brixius to depart Nurse Jackie -- the fact that it films in New York -- was key to getting Phillips on board. Like Wallem and Brixius, Phillips too left Dexter after four years of a cross-country commute between Connecticut, where he lives with his family, and Los Angeles, where the Showtime drama is shot. To be close to his family, he made working on East Coast-based shows a condition in his 2010 overall deal with Lionsgate TV, which co-produces Nurse Jackie with Showtime. Phillips will serve as an executive producer on Nurse Jackie alongside Falco, Richie Jackson and Caryn Mandabach. Production on Season 5 will begin in late 2012.

The second time I watched last week's episode's Popsicle scene, it occurred to me: How many creative teams could create a great dramatic scene out of a Popsicle? Meaning the one that Jackie offers 87-year-old ER patient Mrs. Zimberg (Lynn Cohen, frequent Law & Order judge Elizabeth Mizener -- and also Miranda's strange maid Magda on Sex and the City), for whom a tonsil biopsy has been ordered. I only just read in Wikipedia:

Soon after Nurse Jackie premiered, the New York State Nurses Association decried the unethical behavior of the title character, and the detrimental impression regarding nurses that such a portrayal could have on the public, stating, "In the first episode, Nurse Jackie is introduced as a substance abuser who trades sex with a pharmacist for prescription drugs ... She has no qualms about repeatedly violating the nursing Code of Ethics."

Oh, for goodness' sake! (This is, by the way, why I try hard to avoid reading stuff like this.) I suppose Patrolmen's Benevolent Associations across the country were heard from about The Wire, and possibly Drug Dealers' Assocations as well. The only reply I can think of is, "And could we hear from someone who isn't a moron?"

Consider too that we have witnessed the whole of the relationship between Jackie the veteran nurse (Edie Falco) and Zoey the newbie (Merritt Wever), to the point where the worshipful Zoey has wound up as Jackie's roommate in the wake of the latter's marital breakdown. Wasn't that an amazing scene when Zoey told Jackie that she, Zoey, needed to move out because Jackie was going to "like me less" for having breeched her privacy? And Jackie took the heroic (for her) step of sharing some of what was going on with her and asking her to stay? Meanwhile we've been with Zoey as she first acquired and then dumped a boyfriend, leading to her patented-Zoey project of now becoming "awesome exes" with Lenny.

We've also been drawn into the deep friendship between Jackie and Dr. Eleanor O'Hara (Eve Best), now coping with her single-mother pregnancy and finally, inevitably but touchingly, accepting -- however grudgingly -- the sincerely offered assistance of the not-entirely-buffoonish Dr. "Coop" Cooper (Peter Facinelli). It's been fascinating to experience the even starker change in perception of former hospital administrator Gloria Akulaitis (Anna Deavere Smith), nowhere more so than in last week's summary firing.

I really hate to leave anyone out, because everyone has been given the opportunity to make major contributions. For example, you're really reaping what you've sown when you can write such a tiny but wonderful scene as the one in which nurse Thor (Stephen Wallem) so painfully turned down O'Hara's request to accompany her to her sonogram, and she understood completely the priority of his precious Book of Mormon tickets. And how can I not mention Season 4 newcomer Bobby Cannavale, doing maybe the most interesting role I've seen him do, and doing it spectacularly, as the new hospital administrator, Dr. Mike Cruz, the hard-line apostle of order whose life is so filled with disorder. (In a charming Showtime extra he explains how his son Jake came to audition for the role of Cruz's son Charlie, with the senior Cannavale asking nothing more of the producers than that he be treated politely. He got the role of the addicted teen, and has been sensational.) In many hands Cruz might have been "the bad guy," but that's just too simple for the fascinatingly complex character that the writers created and that Bobby C has been acting.

Now I realize that however much credit Linda Wallem and Liz Brixius deserve, they didn't do it on their own, and indeed the Season 5 the team of exec producers will still includes Caryn Mandabach, Richie Jackson, and of course Edie Falco. I can't say that Clyde Phillips's credits inspire the ultimate degree of confidence. This terrific set of characters is being entrusted to the man behind such comedy triumphs as Parker Lewis and Suddenly Susan, and comedy-drama Get Real. Even Dexter he didn't join until midway through Season 1, and didn't become the showrunner until Season 4, his last as an executive producer. Still, it's worlds different creating a show as against carrying on a successfully created one. And

What can we do except hope for the best? I'm already thinking about the long wait, once the two remaining episodes of Series 4 have been shown, for the start of Season 5.

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That's Entertainment Dept.: (1) Right-wing Prop 8 nitwittitude, (2) Waiting for the "Big C" season finale

Sorry, the Big C clip seems to be iffy from the Showtime website. (Heavy pre-show use tonight, perhaps? I'm getting it OK in Firefox, but not in Safari.) But then, I wasn't going to watch it anyway! -- Ken


Showtime's preview for tonight's Season 2 finale of The Big C -- I'm not going to watch it till after I've seen the show, but you may be less fussy about the risk of having elements of the show spoiled for you.

by Ken

(1) REVISITING THE MODERN-DAY POLITICAL QUESTION:
ARE ALL RIGHT-WINGERS MENTAL DEFFECTIVES?

The New Yorker's Michael Schulman has a "Talk of the Town" piece in the new (October 3) issue, "Do-over," about a play that screenwriter Dustin Lance Black (Milk and the upcoming J. Edgar) has fashioned out of the transcripts of the San Francisco trial in which lawyers David Boies and Theodore Olson successfully pressed their case that California's Prop 8 same-sex marriage ban is unconstitutional. The play is called 8, and a star-studded reading was held last Monday in New York, with Morgan Freeman as Boies, John Lithgow as Olson, Bradley Whitford as hapless defense attorney Charles Cooper, Bob Balaban as Judge Vaughn Walker, Christine Lahti and Ellen Barkin as plaintiffs Kris Perry and Sandy Stier, Jayne Houdyshell as Maggie Gallagher, and the likes of Anthony Edwards, Rob Reiner, and Yeardley Smith as witnesses.

Schulman tells us that Black was present for 10 of the trial's 12 days of testimony (missing the others because of movie-project prep work), and his task in reimagining the proceedings in dramatic form --

was to shave down three weeks of material, some of it mired in legalese. "It's incredibly dense, and you have to communicate it in a way that is clear to an audience that hasn't gone through law school."

It's an entertaining piece, well worth your attention (and for once we've got a New Yorker item that's actually available free online). We learn, for example, that David Boies considered it "a real thrill to have Morgan Freeman play me," though he acknowledged that Ed Begley Jr., who played him in the HBO film Recount, looks more like him.

But the reason I bring this all up is for the sake of this exchange that Schulman reproduces.

David Blankenthorn, a marriage "expert" who was the defense's only witness, served as comic foil, as in this Abbott and Costello-like exchange, drawn from the cross-examination by the plaintiffs' attorney, David Boies:

Let me stress again that in broaching this question of whether all right-wingers are mentally defective, I am of course excluding those who who are unabashedly serving their personal economic or power-gathering interests, notably our beloved economic predators and powermongers and their associated stooges. For the rest, the evidence continues to pile up.


(2) COUNTING DOWN TO THE EVERYTHING-CHANGES
SEASON 2 FINALE OF THE BIG C, "CROSSING THE LINE"

The relationship between fellow clinical-trial subjects Lee (Hugh Dancy) and Cathy (Laura Linney) got off to a rocky start, to put it mildly.

Probably a good rule of thumb for folks in the trenches pitching new TV shows: If you're looking for something with the possibility of a long run and a profitable syndication package, you probably don't want to build your project around a terminally ill person.

This was obviously a problem, or at any rate a feature, built into The Big C (created by Darlene Hunt, who has written or co-written all 26 episodes to date). Considering how strong a bond the show's producers and writers and of course actress Laura Linney created between viewers and their Stage IV melanoma sufferer Cathy Jamison, it was good news that Showtime ordered a second season, but considering the show's basic premise, it is kind of term-limited. Sure, medical miracles happen, and we all hope that the clinical trial Cathy managed to get into this season will buy her some more time, still, this is supposed to be a show about a woman getting on with her life in the knowledge that the end is in sight. (Not in Season 2, though, since a Season 3 has been announced. So I guess that's not part of thehuge-surprise, everything-changes-type events Showtime has been promoting for the season finale, "Crossing the Line." I wish they wouldn't do that, or feel the need to do that. Let the show team do their damned show the way they want, and then have the network people market that to people who might enjoy it. )

For Cathy and husband Paul (Oliver Platt) and son Adam (Gabriel Basso) and Cathy's bipolar brother Sean (John Benjamin Hickey) and the assorted people woven into their lives, it's been another strong season of getting on with those lives, with more humor than one might think possible given the basic situation. But I thought last week's next-to-last episode of the season, "The Darkest Day," was especially strong in bringing us back to that central reality, and I doubt that I was alone in being overwhelmed by the death of Lee (Hugh Dancy), the "soul mate" Cathy discovered in the clinical trial being run by Dr. Sherman (Alan Alda).

As a side note, it's a tribute to the human dimension of the show that the two characters who have sent to meet their maker -- Cathy's eccentric neighbor Marlene (Phyllis Somerville) and now Lee, both of whom were introduced with decidedly hard-to-crack exteriors -- became so dear to at least this viewer.

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It's not too late to catch up with "The Big C" -- now if Showtime would just stop running its own spoilers!

The great Dr. Sherman finally made his appearance last week on Episode 2 of Season 2 -- what a shame the surprise was spoiled by the previous week's preview. Episode 3 airs tonight at 10:30pm ET/PT, and whenever else Showtime chooses to run it. (The "Doogie Howser" Dr. Sherman refers to is Cathy's first oncologist, Todd Mauer, played by Reid Scott, familiar to Our Boys fans as the incurably charming and incurably irresponsible Brendan.)

by Ken

One of these weeks I'll write properly about The Big C, but I wanted to get a few words down in advance of tonight's episode, the third of Season 2, in case there are any potential viewers out there who've been scared off by the idea of a half-hour comedy (well, it comes closer to being a comedy than anything else genre-wise). I recorded all of the first-season episodes, but somehow just couldn't bring myself to watch a show about, well, the Big C. But eventually thanks to the miracle of "On Demand," I buckled up and got with the program. And it's terrific.

Laura Linney has never had a better vehicle for her explosive talents, not to mention that irresistible personal appeal -- though I don't mean to suggest that Cathy is a pushover. In good health she was, well, well-programmed for orderliness in her life and that of her family' -- husband Paul (Oliver Platt) and typically bratty (or perhaps "of an age") Adam (Gabriel Basso), or her bipolar brother Sean (John Benjamin Hickey). "Prickly" might be a good word for her. And so it was perhaps not surprising that, confronted with Stage IV melanoma, she didn't even tell her family until . . . well, she didn't tell them, it kind of came out. And the person to whom she finally blurted it out was Sean's . . . um, the mother of Sean's unborn child, Cathy's old friend Rebecca (Cynthia Nixon).

But enough plot. If you're coming fresh to the show, there's some helpful background material on the show webpage. Here's their basic blurb about our heroine:

WHO IS CATHY JAMISON?

Conservative Minneapolis wife and mother Cathy Jamison let her freak flag fly when she got her cancer diagnosis. She also decided against treatment, at least until her loved ones learned the truth. But now she’s opting to face cancer head on. Her family and friends can have their problems, she’s got a life to live… and fight for.

Let me just complain now about the "coming attractions" preview following Episode 1. After the writers seemed to go to inordinate pains to avoid showing us the Great Cancer Doctor Cathy's trying so desperately to see, even showing her mistake a man who turns out to be a nurse for him, couldn't Showtime just have let us wait and see him when we're finally introduced?

Well, I suppose the thinking was that everybody already knew who the actor was. Well, I didn't. And I wasn't able to shut off the preview in time to avoid finding out, thereby spoiling the moment . . . well, the moment in the above clip.

Small gripe, though -- it's a special show.

I don't plan to watch this preview of tonight's episode of The Big C before actually watching the episode, but you can if you like.

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I'm loving the new season of "Nurse Jackie" and rewatching "Shameless," but I've got a bad feeling about "The Borgias"

A preview of tonight's new episode of Showtime's Nurse Jackie, which airs at 10pm ET/PT

"Don't take this the wrong way, sweetheart, but you are an amazing fucking liar. World-class, genius."

-- Eddie (Paul Schulze), to Jackie (Edie Falco),
on last week's episode of Nurse Jackie

"Every now and then a child comes along who makes me believe in the existence of Satan."

-- the principal or assistant principal (depending who you believe),
about 9-year-old Carl Gallagher, in Shameless Episode 6, "Killer Carl"

"No getting around it, the Borgias are hot. They've even got their own series coming up on Showtime, debuting April 3, with Jeremy Irons playing the patriarch of the clan, that sweetheart Rodrigo Borgia, better known to us by his later professional name, Pope Alexander VI. Always ahead of his time, Will Cuppy here offers a characteristically affectionate portrait of the apple of Rodrigo's . . . er, Pope Alex's eye, his cutie pie of a daughter, Lucrezia. It's in this piece, by the way, that Will describes the Italian Renaissance as "that great flowering of this and that."

-- me, in a "Will Cuppy Tonight" post, presenting his Decline
and Fall of Practically Everybody profile of Lucrezia Borgia

by Ken

As I mentioned last night, I had planned to do this post then, before the airing of the second episode of Showtime's new "dramatic" serires The Borgias, but decided it would be more productive to hold off till I had another episode under my belt. On the whole I find my apprehensions tending to be confirmed, even though I can't say I watched the episode all that carefully. Is it possible to watch the show carefully? Despite its pretensions to be grappling with major historical and dramatic issues, it's so insubstantial, when it's not being downright silly, that it really isn't easy to focus on. I have to do some serious reckoning as to whether I want to try to watch the episode again, and then some more reckoning as to whether I want to even record another episode.

So let's talk about something else, namely the Showtime shows I like. I've been continuing to rewatch the Season 1 episodes of Shameless, and not only am I picking up all sorts of stuff that went over me the first time through, I'm appreciating the show even more -- although I have to say I'm not finding it as exhilarating as I did the first time through. Even though there is that surface crackle and pop, the realities for which all of these characters are forced to settle seem to me so monstrous that I find myself increasingly in despair for them.

The more I watch William H. Macy as pater familias Frank Gallagher, the more appalled I am -- all the highfalutin self-justifying bullshit that comes out of his mouth becomes just about unbearable. There are other factors, of course (there always are in life), but his life is what it is because he's lazy and shiftless and hasn't a clue about personal responsibility, and for all the beatings he takes (and I mean not just psychological but just plain physical beatings, which he earns regularly), he's having a way better time living life as a leech than he ought to.

And to have brought six children into the world? With a woman, poor Monica (Chloe Webb), who at least meant well and might not have been such a crap mother if she hadn't been chained to such a piece of human garbage. The older kids -- 21-year-old Fiona (Emmy Rossum), 17-year-old Lip (Jeremy Allen White), and 16-year-old Ian (Cameron Monaghan) are at least well-socialized human beings, for all the waste and destruction of their lives -- notwithstanding Fiona's complete package of brains and beauty and loyalty and compassion; or Lip's genius-level brilliance, which makes him so smart that he can't see any payoff for the path to academic legitimacy suddenly offered the the University of Chicago professor (played by that spectacular actor Dennis Boutsoukaris), who in his moonlighting job as an investigator for the Education Evaluation Service catches Lip in his SAT-taking scam; or Ian's unique brand of smarts and capacity for focus and discipline (as with his ROTC commitment).

But what about the younger kids? At one point Fiona, left with the burden of makeshift motherhood by Monica's abandonment, voices an obviously deeply felt dread that she's failed her younger siblings. Well, it's not her fault, but my goodness, what can we hope for 10-year-old Debbie, so bright and sweet and sensitive and also so whacked-out that she lives in her own world and kidnaps a two-year-old boy? (Why? Because there wasn't a girl available. So she dressed and made up the little kidnap victim as a girl.) And 9-year-old Carl? That quote from the principal (or assistant principal, as executive producer John Wells refers to him in one of Showtime's promotional videos) is no exaggeration. This poor child shows no signs of mental activity or desire that isn't directed at inflicting pain. Is it possible for a child to be beyond redemption by such a tender age? Carl makes a good case.



And all this while I'm totally grabbed by these characters, who've been created with such believability and texture and depth that I find it all but impossible not to care about them. I begin to wonder, though, whether a second season, if done as relatively honestly as the first, will be such a treat.

The level of desperation is of course much less intense in Nurse Jackie, but beyond the enormous personal appeal of Edie Falco's Jackie, these characters too have been created by the writers and actors with almost unbelievable grabbingness. Incredibly, after all of Jackie's lies seemed to blow up on her at the end of Season 2, she seems to be trying to just pick things up where they left off, though her husband, Kevin (Dominic Fumusa), remains so distrustful that he's taken over parental responsibility for their two girls' schooling.

It's been fascinating to discover in recent episodes that all the time Jackie was having her affair, or whatever it was, with Eddie the pharmacist (Paul Schulze), neither he nor anyone else at All Saints had any idea that she was married. (Wow, is that fascinating or what?) Again, it's hard to resist the appeal of the characters -- Jackie's not-really-prot&eacuteg´e Zoey (Merritt Wever); her once and no doubt future friend Dr. O'Hara (Eve Best), even hospital administrator Akalitus (Anna Deavere Smith), with her current fixation on taking advantage of the (real-world) demise of St. Vincent's Medical Center, offering the possibility of wangling its promised visit from First Lady Michelle Obama, over the wily opposition of her ruthless counterpart at Bellevue, and even not-so-lovable clod Dr. Cooper (Peter Facinelli).

As much as I'm filled with dread by the unreachable darkness of Jackie and Kevin's older daughter, I really love the show. I guess what it comes down to is that for all the characters' troubles, I really enjoy their company.

And then there's what now appears to be a program "categor": Showtime pseudohistorical drama, where character names and identities drawn from real history are set loose in a mounting potpourri of silliness. Jeremy Irons as that ultimate conniver Rodrigo Borgia, who managed to get himself elected Pope Alexander VI in the first episode, chews every rug in sight. For one episode it seemed as if there might be something going on, or worth waiting for. After a casual semi-viewing, the pattern is looking familiar. I actually made it through a whole season of Showtime's The Tudors before bailing out.

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Some further thoughts on Showtime's "Shameless" in anticipation of tonight's season finale

At the end of last week's episode Lip and Ian Gallagher were arrested in a stolen Porsche. In this preview of tonight's season finale, we see some chickens coming home to roost. But are they the right chickens, and is it the right roost?

"People ask, 'Why did Monica leave?' And I say, 'Have you seen the show and watched Frank? [Laughs.]'"

-- Shameless show runner John Wells,
in a clip we saw with last week's post

by Ken

In my piece last week about Shameless, the American adaptation of Paul Abbott's apparently in good part autobiographical British series about a working-class family without any working parents -- Monica Gallagher having flown the coop nearly two years ago (but returned for a couple of recent years in the person of that singularly lovely actress Chloe Webb), leaving the six Gallagher kids in the "care" of Frank Gallagher (William H. Macy) -- "care" in quotes because it's hard to think of anything Frank contributes to the family's upkeep (the money he scams from assorted government programs all goes to his own bar and other expenses) or well-being of anyone but himself, and he in fact requires a fairly high level of care, more probably than any of the children except baby Liam.

As I wrote, I've become a growing fan of the show, produced and in good part written by John Wells. It's by turns raucous (what the Gallaghers and their friends do for day-to-day survival rarely falls strictly, or even generally, within the law, or even socially acceptable behavior. But then, for how many seasons did we watch Tony Soprano and his associates, of course thoroughly disapproving of his criminal enterprises, and yet cheer them on in their conflicts with mobsters we told ourselves were even worse?

But what I want to go back to is some things the master of Shameless said in that clip we had last week about the return of Monica Gallagher, successfully lured by a scam of Frank's with the promise of some quick cash. (He needed her to cosign a settlement that actually would yield cash.) Now I love the quote I put up top on this post. But then Wells went on to say:

Her argument for it is that she was being emotionally smothered by Frank. That's a perfectly legitimate Oprah, Dr. Phil response to leave, this kind of pop-psychology thing. The truth is, you left a family with a bunch of children in it. But Frank, for all of his many faults, has never deserted them.

Now I'm hardly an expert on Dr. Phil, but it's my impression that he's not big on people justifying bad behavior, but never mind. It's pretty cheeky of me to question the guy responsible for the show about what one of his characters said on it, and it's possible that going by the words in the script he's right, that Monica said this, but it sure isn't the impression I got of what explanation she manages to provide for her flight -- into the arms of a butch lesbian truckdriver, with whom she's formed the daft scheme of expropriating baby Liam so they can have their own family.

Was it really not clear that Monica wasn't talking about being emotionally smothered? She was talking about fleeing for her life. Think back to Wells's crack about Frank? The show is real enough in its depiction of the family to give us a pretty strong whiff of what it would be like to be married to Frank and trying to raise six children. (And it's still possible that as many as five of them could be Frank's; we've got two definite yeses, Liam and Lip, and only one definite no, Ian.) It was an inspired stroke hiring as gentle and sympathetic an actress as Chloe Webb for this difficult role, and she was wonderful -- including the grim reality that Monica, for all her good intentions, just isn't very good at mothering.

Certainly she got her crack at it under pretty rotten circumstances, with Frank contributing neither financial nor any other kind of support either to his wife or to his children, and with his constant whining and moaning about how he's always victimized, what he mostly does is suck the life out of people. Would it not have been reasonable for Monica to be scared silly

And what's this business about Frank not deserting the family? Except in the physical sense of being under the same roof, when was he ever there? He has everyone taking care of him, and does no taking care of. What would there be for him to desert? And it isn't even literally true. Did we not early in the season see him run away from home?

My point in raising the issue isn't to duke it out with Wells, but to credit him having created and maintained the show at a high enough level of honest that we can actually debate such questions. Not much in the world of Shameless is black and white, cut and dried. It's been, I think, a heck of a season. I'm looking forward to continuing to work my way through the episodes a second time (I'm amazed at how much I'm filling in, and how much I'm simply enjoying the shows, more even than the first time now that I have so much more context for the characters), and then I'm looking forward to a second season (which our commenter last week confirmed for us is now a done deal) as good as the first.

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It says something about Showtime's "Shameless" that it's made me want to watch the earlier episodes again

Shameless producer-writer John Wells talks about the impact of the return of the Gallagher kids' mother, Monica (Chloe Webb), in the episode "But at Last Came a Knock," which aired two weeks ago. A new episode airs tonight at 10pm and again at 11pm ET, with repeats all over the Showtime schedule.

by Ken

There was never any question that I was grabbed enough to continue watching Showtime's Shameless, adapted by John Wells from the British series of the same name created, produced, and (apparently more or less autobiographically) written by Paul Abbott, who's also listed as an executive producer of the American series. But there were so many characters to get to know that it's taken me all these episodes -- tonight's is no. 11 of (I believe) an initial 12 -- to build to my present level of enthusiasm, which is pretty considerable.

Now that I've developed a relationship of sorts for all six of the barely-scraping-by Gallagher kids, ranging in age from over-18 Fiona (Emmy Rossum) to baby Liam, not to mention their extravangant drunkard father Frank (William H. Macy) and even, in the last couple of episodes, the mother who abandoned them nearly two years ago, not to mention the assorted other neighborhood characters who are woven into the plot, I've found myself impelled to begin rewatching the earlier episodes via On Demand (they can also be watched online). Sure enough, I'm picking up all sorts of stuff that went over, under, or around my head the first time through.

I expect that viewers will respond differently to different characters. I think Fiona's double bind was obvious and immediately compelling. She's bright and beautiful and ought to have the world at her feet, and yet in her family's day-to-day struggle just to keep a roof over their heads and keep everybody fed, she can't see a path to daylight open for her in any direction, on top of which, since the departure of her mother, she has the added burden of keeping her five younger brothers and sisters above water. Of course the truth is that the kids didn't have a mother even when they had a mother. I think it was Lip (i.e., Phillip) who observed after their mother's return that as useless as their father is, he turns out to be the good parent.

So Fiona, as I say, is easy for the audience, I think, and it was fairly easy to take in the confusion in a possible relationship with the newly appeared Steve (Justin Chatwin). As it happens, her wariness about Steve is altogether appropriate, though not for any of the reasons she imagines -- not lack of sensitivity to her (he really is crazy mad for her) and not because he's a rich kid who thinks of her as casual entertainment or a laboratory specimen. No, for better or worse -- and as often happens with Shameless, that "better or worse" question isn't easily puzzled out -- what she doesn't know about him is really different.

I'm sure the ready accessibility of Fiona's -- and, by extension, the whole family's -- plight has been part of the immediate appeal that kept me coming back. The characters, not just individually but even more as a pair, who really reached me on a deeper level, and made me look deeper into the show, are the next-oldest Gallaghers, the infinitely resourceful Lip (Jeremy Allen White) and the oddly focused Ian (Cameron Monaghan). I don't know that we've been given actual ages, but they're presumably barely a year apart, and as we learned in the pilot, it's been at least Lip's perception that there have never been secrets between them, a pretty remarkable thing if you think about it.

Perhaps it's not surprising that this came out when Lip discovered that Ian had in fact been keeping a secret from him, and a huge one: that he's gay. And rewatching those first couple of episodes, I was even more fascinated watching this plot line develop. For Lip too there's a double whammy: Given where he comes from, dealing with this new fact about Ian is tough enough, but he seems if anything more disoriented from learning that there's this whole part of his brother's life that's been kept from him. Again, it may just be my particular focus, but this relationship has seemed to me continuously fascinating.

As producer Wells points out in another interview Showtime has posted, the Gallaghers and their friends engage in some mightily unacceptable behavior, but as he also points out, life is different when you're living day-to-day, as they are -- different for the people and different for the writers. As episodes have unfolded, the American Shameless has seemed to me increasingly different from at least what I recall of the British original, but it's all to the show's credit that it has established its own environment, its own tone, its own outlook. The writing and acting are all pulling in a productive direction, and everyone involved is producing a terrific product. I'm really looking forward to the season's remaining episodes, to re-viewing the whole first season, and of course seeing what's to come in upcoming seasons.


In this preview of tonight's episode, Lip and Ian get a shock when they track down an uncle, one of Frank's brothers, they've never met. (POST-EPISODE UPDATE: It turns out that the Gallagher kids have never met any of their father's brothers. The trip they take out to visit their grandmother for info on their uncles is priceless.)

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Speaking of shows that work despite thin-sounding premises, how can you not love Nurse Jackie?

In this memorable scene, Jackie (Edie Falco) expresses her boundless admiration for the medical skills of Dr. "Call Me Coop" Cooper (Peter Facinelli).

by Ken

From the way Showtime sneaked Nurse Jackie into the schedule Monday nights at 10:30, you get the feeling the network doesn't think much of the comedy created by Liz Brixius, Evan Dunsky, and Linda Wallem, starring Edie Falco as a seen-it-all nurse surviving in an uneasy truce with the forces of chaos closing in on her both at work and at home.

It's a bad time for me, conflicting with TNT's Crossing the Bar (vastly improved over a first season so dreadful, I was startled to find that there is a second) and the Long Island PBS station's airing of reruns of MI-5 (aka Spooks in its native U.K.), only this time uncut, unlike the earlier A&E showings, which had to accommodate commercials. So the DVR has been even more indispensable than with HBO's Hung.

Jackie has what look like a standard array of sitcom accoutrements. At home she has her adorable and adoring if kind of dim husband, Kevin (Dominic Fumusa), and her two young daughters. At the hospital, she has her friendly pharmacist-and-more, Eddie (Paul Schulze), who's indispensable for the relief he provides what appears to be near-crippling back pain, as well as for certain other physical needs; her snooty doctor friend Eleanor (Eve Best), who behaves quite monstrously toward everone in Jackie's circle except Jackie herself (I'm no authority, but the very idea of a friendship-of-equals between a doctor and a nurse seems to me decidedly unusual, and intriguing); her stodgy, hovering, and distinctly strange supervisor, Mrs. Akalitis (Anna Deavere Smith); the always supportive and dependable young nurse Mo-Mo (Haaz Sleiman); and an awkward and intimidated (by everyone and everything) young trainee, Zoey (Merritt Wever), who dropped into Jackie's life in the first episode and began disrupting her routines.

Those routines are important to Jackie. She takes all the confusions and complications of her life more or less in stride, through a combination of structures in her life, those established routines, and when necessary a veteran's improvisations. Like most of us, she has made her accommodations to Life as We Know It, and to most observers probably utterly imperturbable.

Of course she's not, and sometimes one of the other characters, having failed to grasp that in her carefully laid-out life she has invisible lines it's dangerous to cross, sets off an outburst like the one we see in the above clip, prompted by the unnecessary death of a patient for whom she was powerless to get proper care. (It's for scenes like this that it's really useful to have an actress of Edie Falco's caliber rather than a network-favored "comedienne.")

For all the frustrations, improbabilities, and downright impossibilities (after all, there's an awful lot in a hospital that you can't control), she really does care about her job. As Dr. O'Hara points out, caring about patients is for nurses; she herself has no interest, except in so far as they present interesting medical challenges. (In a hilarious plot line, she found herself helpless in the face of undying gratitude from the mother and twin brother of a child whose life she saves.)

And then there are the curves thrown by life itself. Jackie and Kevin are thrown by the realization, thrust on them by their older daughter's teachers, that the otherwise confident and self-possessed Grace (Ruby Jerins) -- who's what, about 10? -- has an unremittingly bleak and terrified view of the world. Jackie has so far resisted making the obvious connection, probably because it's so scary. What may be bearable for an adult who's made her adjustments to whatever life throws her way is literally a nightmare for a child.

So far the show has been both funny, sometimes wildly so, and serious, all in all looking an awful lot like that Life as We Know It I was mentioning earlier. With really outstanding writing and acting, the show has me well hooked.

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