"When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in the flag and carrying the cross."
-- Sinclair Lewis
Sunday, February 03, 2019
"Everyone Needs To Have Something They Can Feel Good About Hating" (Cully Barnaby)
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The Barnaby family: Joyce (Jane Wymark), DCI Tom (John Nettles), and Cully (Laura Howard)
"Witch hunts never are [concluded]. You burn
one, you have to find another. . . .
"Everyone needs to have something they can feel
good about hating." -- Cully Barnaby
by Ken Among the luxuries I've been allowing myself during an already-perhaps-nervously-long period of, er, transition is a slowly ongoing traversal, via Netflix, of the whole of the British mystery series Midsomer Murders (1997-present) -- for my money (in this case literally) the best thing Netflix has to offer, with the whole of the first 19 series already available and Series 20, which just aired in 2018, presumably to follow. (According to Wikipedia, Series 21 is scheduled to begin shooting sometime this year.) While watching the 34th episode (out of 122 to date, including Series 20), I was stopped in my tracks by an exchange near the start of the final scene, which finds the Barnabys -- DCI Tom (John Nettles), his long-suffering wife Joyce (Jane Wymark), and adult daughter Cully (Laura Howard) -- at home in the kitchen, in various stages of sitting down to family dinner. At this point Tom is nearing wit's end over his seemingly stalled investigation of a series of ostensibly witchcraft-related murders-by-fire in the village of Midsomer Parva -- the first in an actual bonfire on the village green, the others custom-created "individual" mini-bonfires.
Passing the torch of hate
I was so taken by Cully's insight that the, um, logic of witch hunts dictates that they don't end, can't end -- "You burn one, you have to find another" -- that I paused the proceedings in order to undertake the ever-so-laborious process of transcription and then the additional labor of trying to do something about the need I hope you'll understand I felt to do something with the result of those labors. For me this all resonates wildly in the Age of Trump, who himself (we need to remember) is less a cause than a symptom of the social malignancy afflicting us here and now in the year 2019, though of course Trump has spent his whole life doing everything in his malignant powers, in the spirit of his mentor Roy Cohn, to accelerate the malignancy. What Cully is describing is a habit of mind generally found in in right-wing movements and autocracies, and positively beloved of both masters and subjects in right-wing autocracies. As the scene began, poor Tom Barnaby -- so restless that he's unable to sit or stand still -- has been poring over some sort of old bound book, clearly not getting the answer(s) he's looking for.
CULLY BARNABY [to her father]: So, how's the witch hunt? DCI TOM BARNABY: The witch hunt is not concluded. CULLY: Witch hunts never are. You burn one, you have to find another. JOYCE BARNABY: That's horrible, Cully! CULLY: It's true! Everyone needs to have something they can feel good about hating. Plus, everyone loves a bonfire.
-- from "The Straw Woman," Episode 6 of
Series 7 (2004) of Midsomer Murders
Judah Halevi-- first name also spelled Yehuda and second named sometimes spelled ha-Levi-- was an 12th Century Jewish philosopher and poet living in Spain. Among those who keep track of such things, he's considered one of the greatest Hebrew poets. There's even a statue of "him," in Toledo, although I suspect that was put up relatively recently. That's the statue next to the poem 'Tis A Fearful Thing.
‘Tis a fearful thing to love what death can touch. A fearful thing to love, to hope, to dream, to be--
to be, And oh, to lose. A thing for fools, this, And a holy thing, a holy thing to love. For your life has lived in me, your laugh once lifted me, your word was gift to me.< To remember this brings painful joy. ‘Tis a human thing, love, a holy thing, to love what death has touched.
Above is the trailer from Scott Frank's new Netflix series, a western called Godless. It's how I heard of Judah Halevi, since a preacher reads a couple of lines in it. I haven't watched it but I may. I just wanted the poem. Vanity Fair included it in their list this week of the best new TV shows of 2017. I don't watch much TV but I did like Game of Thrones, Walking Dead and VEEP (kind of) so maybe I should trust their list enough to watch an episode or two. There are only 7 in total. The other shows they on the list include Alias Grace, American Vandal and The Handmaid's Tale. Here's what Richard Lawson had to say about Godless:
For all of Netflix’s crowing about how this mini-series is a Western centered on women, there sure are a lot of men leading the story. Jack O’Connell-- finally clearly stating his case for stardom to American audiences-- plays an outlaw on the run from his old gang, led by a mean and saturnine Jeff Daniels. That great hangdog Scoot McNairy plays a former sharpshooter sheriff who’s losing his eyesight, while little Thomas Brodie-Sangster, mostly grown up, is his cocksure but sweet deputy. That’s a bunch of guys! But near about everyone else-- including Michelle Dockery as a flinty homesteader and the great Merritt Wever as a lesbian who used to be married to the mayor of her small town-- is a lady. Godless tells the story of a bunch of bad dudes invading a community mostly populated by women (a mining accident killed all the husbands and fathers and sons) and laying waste to it-- until the women stand up to defend themselves in the series’s rousing, bullet-riddled finale. I don’t think Godless-- created by Scott Frank and produced by Steven Soderbergh-- should pat itself on the back too much; despite its telegraphed feminism, it is ultimately the tale of a lone rebel cowboy. But what’s good about Godless is really good: a gorgeously filmed, finely acted tweak on a well-worn genre that also graciously honors many of the form’s classic tropes.
All that does-- my fault, of course-- is take us away from the chilling certitude of Halevi's "'Tis a fearful thing to love what death can touch," which reminds me of why I'm friends with every dog in my neighborhood and buy them the best treats-- human grade-- money can buy but never get a dog of my own. That's one way to put it, I guess.
All four parts of Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, the ten-years-later sequel to the legendary WB series, began streaming today.
by Ken
Okay, I'm not all the way through all four 90-minute episodes of the brand-new Gilmore Girls: A Year in the Life, but heck, it only started streaming on Netflix today -- and I don't even have Netflix, and yet I'm three quarters of the way through it, which is to say "Winter," "Spring," and "Summer," with (you guessed it) "Fall" still to come.
While it's not important what I had to go through to accomplish this, away from home as I am (let's just say that even signing up for Netflix wasn't enough to turn the trick, not even with a slew of additional improvisations, all of which in the end had to yield to hijacking my hosts' living room and Netflix account), under the circumstances I'm right proud of how deep I've gotten into the thing on kickoff day. All the more so since I didn't realize until last night that this GG follow-upL, of which I'd been dimly aware, was launching today.
So I realized it wasn't pure coincidence that I'd stumbled and watched across the final episodes of the original series on cable last night, the climax of a week-long binge scheduling of all 153 original episodes leading up to launch day. Though it wasn't that long since I'd seen those episodes as part of my most recent traversal of the full 153, it was swell to rewatch the four and a half episodes I looked at again. All the more so since I am maybe the only person in creation who thinks that the seventh and final season of the original show, in which creator-showrunner Amy Sherman-Palladino and her husband and creative collaborator were allowed no part, was just as good as Seasons 1-6. I doubt that you'll find anyone else who thinks that Season 7 showrunner David S. Rosenthal did at least as good a job as Amy herself might have in getting young Rory Gilmore (Alexis Bledel) through her college years and ready to face the unknown world -- and setting her mother, Lorelai (Lauren Graham), off into the next chapter of her life.
Longtime readers may recall that I consider Gilmore Girls one of the monuments of Western culture, for the humanity and range of its exploration of the whole messy business of why we're all here -- what we aspire to and where those aspirations come from and what becomes of them. When I heard that the show was being in some fashion resuscitated, my obvious question was who would be in creative control, and was hugely reassuring to discover that it was in fact Amy and Dan, who between them, in addition to producing and directing, wrote and directed the whole of A Year in the Life. I'm not going to say anything more about the shows themselves, which indeed pick up the lives of the characters featured in those original seven years, now ten years later, except to confirm my hope that Amy and Dan wouldn't have agreed to do the project unless they could do it seriously. I think what I've seen so far is terrific, maybe even spectacular.
The big reason I tried so hard to be able to see at least part of the sequel as soon as possible is that I didn't want the experience to be spoiled by the usual chattering spoilers. I wanted Amy and Dan and their hugely talented team to be able to continue telling their story their way. And now, without guilt, I can invite you to do the same.
AMC's supposed "first look" at Season 3 of "Better Call Saul" doesn't give us much to go on, but it's reassuring to know it's coming
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Better Call Saul exec producers Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould watch Bob Odenkirk being made up as Jimmy McGill during filming for Season 3.
by Ken
Bearing in mind how historically tight-fisted Breaking Bad mastermind Vince Gilligan has always been about over-revealing what's to come, it's not entirely surprising that AMC's heralded first sneak peek at Season 3 of Better Call Saul ("First-Look Photos") is noticeably sneakier than peekier.
Okay, this would be the brothers McGill, Chuck (Michael McKean) and Jimmy (Bob Odenkirk), in Chuck's living room.
And this would be Kim (Rhee Seahorn) and Jimmy in an office -- Kim's, it looks like.
In the interest of disclosure, I should note that I've withheld one of the so-called advance pix, which shows Vince Gilligan and Bob Odenkirk sitting on a bench. Oh, what the hell, just to prove that I wasn't suppressing vital visual information:
So now you've seen all of the "first look" pics. For the record, here's what the AMC folks have to say as they share these breathlessly revealing snaps (links onsite):
Season 2 of Better Call Saul left off with Jimmy McGill in a dark place — even if he didn’t know it. After finally coming clean to Chuck about sabotaging his case, Jimmy was relieved to stop lying to his brother. Unfortunately, Chuck seemed to have other plans when he revealed the tape recorder that now contains every last word of Jimmy’s confession.
So, where do things stand when Season 3 begins? These first-look photos offer a glimpse into Jimmy’s shaky relationships with both Chuck and Kim. Plus: It looks like we’ll be seeing Jimmy/Saul’s alter ego Gene once again as well!
Better Call Saul returns 2017. Be the first to receive show exclusives and updates by signing up for the Better Call Saul Insider’s Club.
I just thought that for anyone who was thinking there's not a whole lot to look forward to in 2017, well, here's something.
National Coming Out Day is a good time for folks to come out of closets of all sorts
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by Ken
I realize that National Coming Out Day was yesterday, but as it didn't fall on one of my blogging days, I'm exercising blogorific license to stretch it to a two-day event. Of course the spirit shouldn't be term-limited -- the time for anyone to come out of whatever closet the person may be dwelling in is as soon as he or she is ready, and the time to help prepare everyone else is now, whenever now happens to be.
One happy byproduct of the delay in celebrating the day is the opportunity to take note of last night's season premiere of ABC's disarmingly wacky sitcom The Real O'Neals, the saga of a family that in its assorted wackinesses is probably closer to all-American than most of the families we see on TV, and certainly way closer than the families imagined as models by the Phony Family Values crowd.
Which is part of the premise of the show, because until the events we witnessed in the 13-episode debut season that began last March, the O'Neals were themselves a model family, as enforced almost fetishistically by Eileen O'Neal (Martha Plimpton, who in the past has usually annoyed me quite a lot, but whom I'm enjoying enormously here). That image of a perfect-in-all-ways Irish-American Catholic family which Eileen worked so hard, even fetishistically, to maintain began to crack when the middle O'Neal offspring, 16-year-old Kenny (Noah Galvin), leapt with great determination and a delightful amount of confusion out of the closet. Once that crack appeared, the stuffing kind of came out of the rest of the model-family image. In short order Eileen and earnestly genial cop Pat (Jay R. Ferguson, fondly remembered as Peggy Olson's Mad Men designer cohort -- doing something utterly different here, but just as wonderful). A divorce is on the family "to do" list. but for the time being the best they could manage was Pat moving into the basement, which is still the situation as Season 2 launched.
All of which has left most of the family members with new identities, and the fun of the show comes from their confused efforts to figure out how they're supposed to fill their new roles -- including Kenny, who is concocting his notion of being gay from media images, which in his mind adds up to a sort of theatrical presentation, as with last night's season-kickoff episode, in which he imagines the LGBT Club he's fighting to start at St. Barklay's, the Catholic school attended by all three O'Neal kids. In his mind he's going to be leading a throng of LGBT and sympathetic straight students to the promised land of liberation; in actuality, his only recruit is poor Allison, who literally -- by her account -- blends into the woodwork.
Kenny, in his role as "Gay Moses," persuades Allison, in the spirit of National Coming Out Day, to come out to her parents, discovering just barely in the nick of time that for Allison the time truly isn't right -- her parents have made it clear to her that if she's gay, she'll be thrown out of the house.
At the same time the show offered a delightful wrinkle of its own on coming out: that there are lots of people living in closets of their own who would benefit from coming ouit. Like the children's Aunt Jodi (Mary Hollis Inboden; the children's ex-aunt, I guess, since if I've got this right she's divorced from Pat's brother), who comes out as a plus size, and Eileen herself, who comes out as a soon-to-be-single mother who has an interest in St. Barklay's fairly creepy-goofy Vice Principal Murray (Matt Oberg, who bears an eerie facial resemblance to Martin Short).
It amazes me that we've arrived at a point where coming out can be a subject for humor, but this episode of The Real O'Neals managed that while still making clear that it's serious business -- and a matter for thought as well. Could we ask for more on National Coming Out Day?
TV Watch: To my surprise I'm liking "The Good Place," but I'm taking a pass (with surprising regret) on "Kevin Can Wait"
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Ted Danson and Kristen Bell talk about their surprisingly appealing new NBC comedy, The Good Place.
by Ken
With the new NBC comedy The Good Place set to advance to Episode 3 tomorrow night in its regular Thursday 8:30pm ET/PT time slot, I thought I might throw out a note of encouragement. I finally looked at the double-episode premiere (the pilot plus "Flying"), which NBC has give multiple airings, and much to my surprise I liked it. Of course you'll still want to watch those first episodes, via the usual sources, like On Demand or online. (NBC is offering it here, provided you disable your ad-blocking software, you bad, bad ad-denying person.) But you'll get the basic premise from these clips:
There's just one more wrinkle: Eleanor doesn't belong in the Good Place, because she's not the heroically altruistic lawyer the records somehow indicate. She is in fact unusually selfish even by the standards of our self-absorbed culture. She finally confides her awkward secret to her "soul mate" (all the Good Place residents have been paired up with a soul mate), Chidi Anagonye (William Jackson Harper), in the hope that he can help her pass for someone good enough to remain there, creating a tough situation for the former professor of ethics and moral values.
Granted, the premise sounds flimsy, but then, most TV and movie premises do. It's what the show makes of the premise that matters, and this is where those first two episodes got me. Kristen Bell manages to be both charming enough to pass for the saintly Eleanor and her real, insatiably graspy self, and also winning enough to hold onto the viewer's attention as she struggles with her awkward situation. And Ted Danson so far also seems to have found a congenial role -- authoritative enough to pull off Michael's not-quite-explained position of authority but also with a winningly bumbling quality that shows through in a charming lack of self-confidence in his own powers.
It doesn't hurt -- in fact, it helps a whole lot -- that at least those first two episodes of The Good Place came to us without "benefit" of a laugh track. By contrast --
I'VE ALSO WATCHED THE FIRST EPISODE OF
KEVIN JAMES'S NEW SITCOM, KEVIN CAN WAIT
It's another fat-guy-with-an-improbably-hot-young-wife (Erinn Hayes) show, and it goes without saying a set of TV-quirky kids, not one of my Top 500 TV-show premises, and I wasn't much looking forward either to the rest of the premise: that Kevin and three cop buddies who joined the force together are now all retiring together, and do they have plans for their to-be-shared-with-each-other retirements! Only stuff happens. I didn't enjoy it much, but as I tried to puzzle out what was going on, it seemed to that the problem is not the premise, which actually seems quite well developed by the creative team, and it isn't necessarily badly acted.
Gradually, I identified the relentless, inhuman-sounding laugh track as the culprit, creating as it does the feeling that it's just a bunch of lousy jokes stitched together which only a machine could enjoy. In fact, though, as I listened closer, I had the feeling that the jokes aren't so bad, that they really do come out of character and advance the story, and it isn't even that the actors are playing them as laff lines. That insistent, inescapable laff noise (you know it's coming again, just as soon as the next "joke" is unleashed on us) that makes the thing unwatchable, for me at least. I'm surprised again to be saying: too bad.
I'm continuing to stick to my theory that without the "laffter" (and maybe if Chale had been given a more human-sounding name) this scene might actually be watchable. I think Mom's line "Honey, that is not a plan, that is literally every stripper's back story," if it the laff track weren't trying to make it sound like a Big Yuk-line, would actually be a sharp, character-driven response to the news that daughter Kendra (Taylor Spreitler) plans to drop out of school to support Chale (Ryan Cartwright).
So here we are again in the Northeast having another Storm Watch Weekend, this time all mooshed together with Labor Day Weekend -- and never mind that today we've enjoyed an utterly lovely day as poor Hermine, the still steadily approaching storm, keeps dropping down on the charts, from hurricane to tropical storm to "post-tropical cyclone" -- a new one on me. What comes next? "Ba-a-a-d, ba-a-a-d storm"? And the anticipated mayhem has been both pushed back and similarly downgraded, now to tomorrow, with stiff wind gusts and maybe some coastal flooding.
Me, I'd planned a quiet Labor Day Weekend anyway -- a bit of a breather from, well, it's hard to specify what exactly. I'm still not working, so it can't be that. Nevertheless, I seem to be so busy doing this and that that I wasn't at all sorry to see that I hadn't really scheduled any mandatory activities. If I could afford to retire, it would be a swell time. I've taken to suggesting that if I'd had the sense to become independently wealthy, I'd make a splendidly active retired person.
So I've taken advantage of the lull -- along with trying to cobble together my first "TV Watch" post in goodness only knows how long, which was going to take a look, by way of the great 1984 Granada TV miniseries The Jewel in the Crown (just rebroadcast by one of my local public TV stations, Long Island's WLIW), dramatized by Ken Taylor from Paul Scott's tetralogy The Raj Quartet, set in the final years of British rule in India, and the 1988-92 Judd Hirsch NBC sitcom Dear John, at one of my new all-time favorite police procedurals, Inspector George Gently, graced by Martin Shaw's beatific performance in the title role -- by attacking the DVR pile-up. First I took in all four outings in the most recent ITV series of Endeavour, tales of the young future-Inspector Morse. Then, by way of further procrastination, I began attacking the similarly warehoused most recent series ("The Final Season") of Inspector Lewis. Which is to say the pre- and post- extensions (respectively) of the Morse franchise.
Merrick (Tim Piggot-Smith) unleashes his considerable worst on poor Hari Kumar (Art Malik) in The Jewel in the Crown.
A smiling Nicholas Jones
No sooner has the episode, "One for Sorrow," begun than there's Tim Piggot-Smith, who gave perhaps the most amazing performance in the gallery of amazing Jewel in the Crown performances with his portrayal of Ronald Merrick, the despicable British police superintendent in colonial India, and now he's playing an elderly professorial sort -- with clear perv-potential overtones -- giving a lecture on the Victorian fascination with freaks! Then there's another familiar face. As an elderly man apparently newly arrived in some sort of home suffering dementia, yes, it's Nicholas Jones! Best known to me, at least, as the pompous egomaniacal lawyer-twit Jeremy Aldermarten, the dark presence in the chambers of Kavanagh QC in the series of that name, the second-best-remembered series of the late John Thaw, the best-remembered being, of course, Morse. And a short bit later, when DI James Hathaway (Lawrence Fox) -- officially on a week's leave, doing "whatever it is Hathaway does," as Lewis puts it -- arrives at the home, we learn that the old gent is (yes!) his father.
All of which goes to remind me, as if I needed reminding, that time surely does whiz by.
Though it's been ages since I've done a "TV Watch" post, it hasn't been for want of TV-watching. What there has been, perhaps, is a persistent question of whether my TV-watching has any pertinence to anyone else. It's not that I don't watch anything new, but I keep encountering reports of wonders, chiefly in the outer reaches of cable and especially the streaming world, which are wildly at variance with such experience as I've had with them. (I don't streaming. Come on, isn't my cable bill high enough?) So I'm happy to devote a fair amount of my viewing time to TV past.
It doesn't seem to me a bad thing, first, to be reminded how much of that past survives (though also how much doesn't), and, more important, to take advantage of how much good stuff there is now readily available. Even a show like Dear John, which on rewatching turns out to be no better than I remembered, still rewards my attention more than, well, most of the offerings in the imagined (imaginary?) current Golden Age of TV Comedy, and it occurs to me that one reason is that it's a show that couldn't be made today, since it makes no effort to pander to the youth market.
In November 2014, Martin Shaw (DCI George Gently), Lee Ingleby (now-DI John Bacchus), Lisa McGrillis (about-to-be-DS Rachel Coles), and company were on location in the northeast of England filming what's now the most recently aired series of Inspector George Gently. (Various whole episodes are available on YouTube.)
Conan explains, at the start of his Thursday-evening taping, that he's spent the several hours since hearing about Garry trying to process the news. Then he offers this lovely personal reminiscence.
by Ken
Thursday, massive heart attack, 66.
If you want more facts, here's the NYT obit of this "Star of Groundbreaking Sitcoms," as he was headlined. I confess I haven't actually read the obit, but I have watched the above clip sent out by Conan O'Brien's team. And I watched this clip, also sent out by TeamCoco:
I FIND MYSELF WITH NOT MUCH TO SAY
I mean, I have no idea how to explain the brilliance of Garry Shandling, as both writer and performer. So I've assembled some clips, and they maybe help, but I don't think they really do it. Fortunately, both of Garry's NYT-certified "groundbreaking" shows are available complete on DVD. Both involved assembling spectacular teams and what must have been exhausting work, both in conception and in detailing and execution.
From my periodic dippings-in, I can vouch that both look simply astonishing now. In fact, It's Garry Shandling's Show, which I hadn't seen since it aired originally at the time I bought the DVDs in the last year, looks more astonishing, with its surreally confounding overlapping layers of reality, than it did way back when. (This is partly owing to the special features, which give much insight into just how the show became what it was.) Together the shows constitute a remarkable legacy, and are also remarkable for the parade of talent, of both the up-and-coming and the established variety, passing through them.
It's Garry Shandling's Show
(four seasons, 1986-90)
A promotional clip from Shout Factory:
The Larry Sanders Show
(six seasons, 1992-98)
Some samples --
Oops! Somehow Bruno Kirby and Steven Wright have both been booked as the evening's "#1 Guest."
Before he was Entourage super-agent Ari Gold, even before he was Ellen's hapless pal Spence, Jeremy Piven put in two seasons (1992-93) as Larry Sanders Show writer Jerry Capen.
At commercial break, guest Robin Williams receives a trademark insta-boost from producer Artie (Rip Torn), then finds himself literally in the middle of tension between Larry and announcer Hank Kingsley (Jeffrey Tambor).
Guest host Dana Carvey gets utterly unsolicited advice from Hank, who turns out not to have such warm feelings toward Dana.
A FEW VISITS WITH DAVE
In 1989, Garry tells Dave about hooking up with President George H.W. Bush.
And First Lady Barbara Bush "introduces" Garry to visiting royalty as "Funny man! Funny man!"
In 1990, Garry and Dave start by reminiscing about it.
In 2007, during Garry's first visit in ten years, Dave says, "I think it's important that we get together once a decade."
TV Watch: "Tio" Salamanca talks! Or, how much are we loving Season 2 of "Better Call Saul"?
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Look who's back! In case you were wondering, no, in the future, which is to say in Breaking Bad times, Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks) and "Tio" (Mark Margolis) never did meet -- or never do meet? (It's hard to get the verb tenses right.)
by Ken
Okay, I'm reminded in the interview we're going to get to with that great character actor Mark Margolis that in Breaking Bad we actually did see Hector "Tio" Salamanca, the onetime cartel-kingpin uncle of the terrifying Tuco Salamanca, talk: in flashback. And I confess that when -- late in last week's Episode 5 of Season 2 of Better Call Saul, "Rebecca" -- a hatted gentleman strolled into the diner and slid into the booth opposite the still-visibly-battered Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks), it took me a moment to recognize the younger self of one of the iconic Breaking Bad characters.
When last we saw "Tio," late in Season 4 of Breaking Bad --
He was still mute and virtually paralyzed in his wheelchair, with only those amazing eyes -- and of course the finger on his goddamned little bell -- to show us that there was something going on, and possibly a whole lot going on, inside his head.
There was a little surprise in store for arch-villain Gus "The Chicken Guy" Fring (played so gorgeously by Giancarlo Esposito), come to dispose of "Tio."
BRINGING "TIO" BACK TO LIFE
Even on second viewing, it wasn't until after "Tio" started talking to Mike that I recognized him. No doubt other Breaking Bad-aware viewers were quicker on the uptake, but whenever the moment of "Tio" recognition came for any particular viewer, how magical that moment was likely to be! Possibly even better than the moment in the series premiere when we suddenly found ourselves face-to-face with none other than the younger Tuco Salamanca, as gamely re-(pre-)created by The Closer and Major Crimes' Det. Julio Sanchez, Raymond Cruz. Cruz, as you probably know, is reported to have found playing the monstrous meth-addled Tuco so stressful ("frighteningly lethal" is how his IMDb bio aptly describes the character) that he implored the Breaking Bad creative team to set him free, leading to the terrifying Tuco's untimely demise.
What was so stressful about playing the terrifying Tuco?
Hey, it's just acting, right? Or --
Um, nobody ever accused Breaking Bad's Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) of being overly bright, but really, going into Tuco's lair alone and expecting to dictate terms to him? How much imagination did it take to see where that was likely to lead?
THE REAL "TIO" TALKS
How can you not love that jaunty hat on the "young" Hector S?
I've made frequent mention of the lovely online features with which AMC backs up its shows, even the many crummy ones. Following the airing of the episode "Rebecca," I was delighted to find an interview with "Tio" himself, Mark Margolis. In case you missed it:
Fall TV Watch: Tonight the new season can be said to be truly underway
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I haven't watched this official season preview of Season 5 of Homeland, which launches tonight, for fear of of spoilers. I started watching one of the series of preview clips CBS has posted in advance of tonight's Season 7 premiere of The Good Wife, and within about three seconds star Julianna Margulies had revealed more than I wanted to know before watching the show.
by Ken
However bleak the new TV season becomes, it doesn't seem to crap up Sunday night. Tonight we have the season premieres of both The Good Wife and Homeland, and it's a good bet that, however I finally decide to finagle my DVR schedule -- it's complicated by the usual start-time derby CBS puts people who insist on watching The Good Wife through with their goddamn NFL game pushing the schedule back -- I expect I'll have watched both by the time I go to bed.
Plus there's the start of Season 2 of Showtime's The Affair (I had very mixed feelings about Season 1, but I watched the whole thing, and I'll probably stick with it, at least for a while). And a new episode of HBO's Project Greenlight, And of course a new episode of John Oliver's HBO Last Week Tonight.
By the time I go to bed I'll likely also have watched the new episode(s) of the current Masterpiece Classic offering, Indian Summers (at least on my PBS station), about life among the rulers and the ruled in the Raj of the '30s, as the independence movement was only beginning to form. By the end of last week's episode, I would have liked nothing better than to be able to go right into another episode. There were enough characters whose situations had grabbed my interest to the point where I really wanted to see more. And I still do!
Which is sometimes the best test of my relationship to a show. How badly do I want to see more of it?
I've already suggested my answers in the cases of The Good Wife and Homeland. Both shows are such familiar commodities that there seems hardly any point in going into them now, except perhaps to make the basic points:
• In its six seasons to date, The Good Wife seems to me to have cemented its standing as one of the all-time great TV dramas.
• I divine from (a) my enthusiasm carrying over from the end of Season 4 of Homeland and (b) my eagerness for the start of Season 5 that I think it's a substantially better show than most people seem to.
In both cases, the explanation seems to me basically the same: a core cast of characters I'm really interested in and care about -- both people who've been with us the whole way and people who've been brought in at the relevant opportunities -- and stories that make me want to see how they react and what happens to them. Chalk it up to the overriding vision and season-by-season vigilance of the creative overseers, and of course to the teams of writers and actors.
As I mentioned the other day, The Big Bang Theory is another show that involves me in this way -- to such an extent that I usually manage to block out the hideous un-laugh-like noise that disfigures every episode. It doesn't surprise me that this ghastly intrusion may cause many viewers not to realize how good a show this is that's trying to happen while its producers seem to be apologizing for the crap they're fobbing off on us.
I did actually watch the premiere of the show CBS has paired with BBT, Life in Pieces, an extended-family comedy that obviously makes you think of Modern Family, and I thought it wasn't terrible. I thought, this is something I would watch again. And I almost certainly will, but I have a feeling Episode 2 may sit on the DVR for a while until I get around to it.
The same sort of thing happened to me with HBO's Doll and Em. I somehow missed its whole first season, and didn't become aware of it until HBO posted the whole thing on On Demand, obviously in anticipation of the launch of the second season. And via On Demand, I loved the first season. I devoured it.
Em (Emily Mortimer) and Doll (Dolly Wells)
In Season 1, Emily was about to start production on a film that, whatever its problems, has the professional attraction of riding squarely on her shoulders (and in the course of the season -- spoiler alert! -- we got some glimmering of the kind of pressure that puts on an actor) when she was confronted by Doll back in England in crashed-and-burning breakdown mode, and asked her to come to L.A. to work as her assistant on the film, and tensions built into all those years of separate evolution begin to surface.
I congratulated myself on my unintentionally brilliant timing: I would be able to segue right into Season 2.Only it didn't work out that way. I thought the first episode of Season 2 was interesting, as Doll and Em resolved to create a project they can work on, together, as equals. But I noticed that I didn't pounce on Episode 2. And now I seem I'm falling behind, in what is, after all, only a six-episode season. Oh, I'll get to the others eventually. But I'm in no rush. Maybe I'll pick up at a point where the show once again really grabs me, and we'll finish together, the show and I, in a rush.
I'm in sort of the same situation with the CBS drama Limitless, about a guy Jake McDorman) who stumbles into an experimental drug that for a limited time makes his brain work like gangbusters. He winds up in trouble with the law, in the person of an FBI agent played by Jennifer Carpenter, our old friend from Dexter, who was so good as Dexter's succeeding-but-always-fucking-up cop sister Deb. The thing is, the drug -- unbeknownst to the guy -- has devastating side effects, except the other thing is that he appears to be somehow immune, which makes him invaluable as a test subject. If you're not quite believing this, neither am I, quite. But I'd probably have an easier time with it if I was being made to care more about the characters.
In the case of Doll and Em, for example, I wonder if my current less enthusiastic reaction has to do with the fact that, for me at least, Emily Mortimer as an actress usually has strong personal appeal; it's a cinch to care about most of the characters she plays. And Dolly Wells, not so much, and if I have to work to muster emotional support for the emotionally needier Doll character, it's apparently a challenge I'm not rushing into.
As a matter of fact, the show that, before the return of The Good Wife, I've found myself most looking forward to this summer is Showtime's rerun of the whole of its Queer as Folk, its many-season drama, developed for American television by Ron Cowen and Daniel Lipman, about a group of largely LGBT folk in Pittsburgh, but also including a fair number of non-LGBT characters, of which the network has been showing back-to-back episodes Monday nights into Tuesday mornings at 11pm and midnight, at least in my time zone. Earlier on, Showtime was showing whole masses of episodes on a couple of weekend nights, running into the wee or even not-so-wee hours of the morning, and I waa having the TV on, drifting in and out of sleep, watching as much as I could, and wanting more. Since they scaled back to the two episodes per week, I've been feeling majorly deprived, having to wait till late nigh Monday each week for a mere two episodes.
The North American Queer as Folk gang: Standing: Peter Paige (Emmett), Scott Lowell (Ted), Gale Harold (Brian), Robert Gant (Ben), Thea Gill (Lindsay), and Hal Sparks (Michael). Sitting: Randy Harrison (Justin) and Michelle Clunie (Melanie). Unaccountably missing: Sharon Gless (Michael's mother, Debbie).
When I started rewatching the Queer as Folk episodes, I found that the more I watched, the more I became reinvested in the characters, and the more personally I took each succeeding episode. This might be worth talking about at some point, especially in connection with the English Queer as Folk on which the American version was based, especially since almost everything I've heard about the two versions, purporting to "compare" them, seemed to me -- once I finally caught up with the U.K. version -- idiotic. But for now what matters about the American Queer as Folk is that it presents a large and diverse cast of characters I find it ridiculously easy to care about, and scripts and direction that make me want to see what happens next.
I think it's worth noting that when Queer as Folk aired originally, my understanding was that it had a significant core of non-gay fans. I'd like to think this was partly because some people were genuinely curious about what the lives of gay and lesbian folk looked like, but probably even more because the characters and stories made a lot of viewers really wanted to see what happened to these people next.
TV Watch: "The Big Bang Theory" comes roaring out of the gate at the start of Season 9
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For a limited time you can watch last night's Big Bang Theory season premiere, "The Matrimonial Momentum," free online. Even more exciting, you can watch this entire "half-hour" show in a mere 20:26. (This must be that "miniaturization" fad we hear so much about.)
by Ken
As the new TV season officially launches, it's never been clear where the medium is headed, though there seems widespread agreement that it's going to very different from what we have no. I'm less optimistic than a lot of people -- mostly, I guess, because these days most of the programming that's celebrated as the cream of our crop seems to me so awful. (Emmys for Game of Throw-Up and the ghastly Veep? Maybe it's time to revisit The San Pedro Beach Bums.
I know no one is expecting a new creative path to be blazed by the TV networks, and I certainly don't. Once again I paid no attention to the new-season announcements, and from what I've managed to glean from a couple of "Fall Preview" features, it looks grim. Which leaves me not much to look forward to except the return of a few shows that may have some creative life left in them.
Which is why I couldn't have been happier with last night's Big Bang Theory season premiere. In terms of plot capital the show's overseers have been so frugal that even in Season 9 they've got plenty of material still available. Movement in the Penny-Leonard and Amy-Sheldon relationships has been so slow that they're really still mostly to come; there should still be a lot of stories left in the still-evolving marriage of Howard and Bernadette; Raj's future is still unmapped; and so is that of Stuart the comic-book guy. (The team is getting some earned yuks out of his super-doofusdom, but it might be nice if they remembered that he doesn't have to be that completely hopeless -- one of the early things we learned about him was that he has artistic talent as well as training.)
On some of these fronts, of course, last season's finale made it clear the team was preparing to make decisive moves forward. We last saw Penny (Kaley Cuoco-Sweeting) and Leonard (Johnny Galecki) headed to Las Vegas on the spur of the moment to get married. And when we last saw Amy (Mayim Bialik) and Sheldon (Jim Parsons), Amy was announcing that she needed time to evaluate where that "relationship" was going, which to Sheldon meant "break-up" -- and if Amy has any sesne, to her too.
As I've mentioned, I do have a problem with those gales of not-very-laugh-like noise that repeated disfigure Big Bang Theory episodes, but sometimes I can ignore them better than others, and last night I was hardly noticing them. What I want to pay tribute to here is the ongoing vitality of the writing -- and I mean specifically the writing for these characters (and of course these actors), who have been nurtured so carefully over the previous eight seasons.
So I laboriously transcribed this scene from the episodes' pre-credits opening, where we find Penny and Leonard in a Vegas wedding chapel. Let's just slip in quietly and join them . . . .
No, we're not yet at the point depicted in the above screen grab -- I think you'll recognize it when we get there. As our scene starts, LEONARD and PENNY are in Las Vegas, perusing wedding-chapel packages, when LEONARD's mobile phone rings.
LEONARD: Excuse me. [Looking at phone] Sheldon. [Into phone] Hey! SHELDON [in his and LEONARD's apartment]: Leonard, have you gotten married yet? LEONARD: Uh, no, why? SHELDON: Good! Don't do it! LEONARD: Why not? SHELDON: Some important information has come to light. Women are the worst. I thought it was paper cuts, but I was wrong. No piece of paper ever cut me this deep. LEONARD [wearily]: What happened now? SHELDON [sighing, sort of]: Amy has ended our relationship. LEONARD: Oh no! Seriously? PENNY: What's going on? SHELDON: Amy broke up with Sheldon! PENNY: She did? SHELDON: Is Penny crying? LEONARD: No . . . SHELDON: No! Of course not. They thrive on our suffering. LEONARD: Buddy, I'm so sorry. Is there anything I can do? SHELDON: Yes! If I ever talk about going out with a girl again, roll your eyes at me like I do to you when you say dumb things. LEONARD: O-O-Okay. Just because you're going through this with Amy doesn't mean that all women are bad. SHELDON [rolling his eyes]: Whatever. PENNY [having gotten her mobile phone out and placed a call]: Hey, I just heard about you and Sheldon. Are you okay? AMY [sitting on the couch in her apartment, in a bathrobe]: Not really. Can you come over? PENNY: Uh, actually, I'm in Vegas. Leonard and I are about to get married! AMY [indignant]: Hold on! You're getting married and you didn't invite me? PENNY: It was kind of a spur-of-the-moment thing. AMY [sarcastic]: Wow! Hope I can catch the bouquet from here! PENNY: Amy, don't be like that! SHELDON: Why'd I just hear Amy's name? LEONARD: Penny's on the phone with her. SHELDON: Did she say anything about me? [Shaking his head and spitting it out] N-n-never mind, I don't care. Well, if you care, you could find out and tell me. Just don't be shocked when you find out that I don't care. PENNY: Will you relax? You're not missing anything special. LEONARD [moving phone away from his ear, looks at her]: Hey! PENNY: She's upset. It's gonna be a great wedding! Look at you in your little suit! SHELDON: Amy's upset. Is it about me? LEONARD: I think it's because we're eloping. SHELDON: Your marriage is causing her pain? [Perking up] Yeah, great! I take it back! Go ahead and do it! Yay for love!
[Cut to opening credits.]
WEEK 1 Tuesday, Sept. 8: Actor George Clooney; Jeb Bush; house band Jon Batiste and Stay Human Wednesday, Sept. 9: Actress Scarlett Johansson; SpaceX and Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk; rapper Kendrick Lamar Thursday, Sept. 10: Vice President Joe Biden; Uber CEO Travis Kalanick; country singer Toby Keith Friday, Sept. 11: Comedian Amy Schumer; author Stephen King; Paul Simon tribute band Troubled Waters
WEEK 2 Monday, Sept. 14: Actress Emily Blunt; Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer; Jack White’s rock band the Dead Weather Tuesday, Sept. 15: Actor Jake Gyllenhaal; hip-hop duo Run the Jewels with indie band TV on the Radio Wednesday, Sept. 16: Actor Kevin Spacey; actress Carol Burnett with comedians Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer; country singer Willie Nelson Thursday, Sept. 17: Actress Naomi Watts; United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon Friday, Sept. 18: Actress Lupita Nyong’o; Senator Bernie Sanders; “An American in Paris” director Christopher Wheeldon with stars Robert Fairchild and Leanne Cope
As Emily says in the lead to her post: "You can tell a lot about a late-night host by his guests." And now you have that information. So, good night and good news!
KIDDING! I WOULDN'T LEAVE
YOU HANGING LIKE THAT!
Now I can't tell all that much from this list. Fortunately, Emily "decided to parse the list for clues about what direction [Stephen] might be taking 'The Late Show.' " And as long as she's looking in her crystal ball, it seems foolhardy for us not to watch over her shoulder. And here's what she has gleaned:
* Colbert will have substantive interviews with non-celebrities.
You would think this would go without saying, but, well… have you tuned in to “The Tonight Show” lately? For those worried Colbert would go the lip-syncing route, that probably won’t be the case given his inclusion of guests like United Nations Secretary General Ban Ki-moon. Two high-powered tech CEOs will also make an appearance: Both Tesla Motors’ Elon Musk and Uber’s Travis Kalanick are slated to sit on the couch this week. Both could yield fascinating conversations, and Colbert doesn’t seem like the type to ignore Tesla controversies or Uber’s recent slew of bad press.
* The “Colbert Report” habits will be hard to shake.
Colbert already has a heavy dose of politicians lined up, from Republican presidential candidate Jeb Bush to Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). Now with his new broadcast platform, he was able to book Vice President Joe Biden, whom CBS recently announced will stop by on Sept. 10. He also landed an interview with Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, with whom there’s no shortage of polarizing subjects to discuss.
Just like on his old show, Colbert isn’t afraid of insulting politicians: He’s already publicly slammed Bush for using his “Late Show” appearance as a political fundraiser, raffling off a ticket to be in the audience.
* He won’t forget the lesser-known performers.
Of course Colbert has an impressive line-up of A-listers scheduled for the first two weeks: George Clooney, Scarlett Johansson, Kevin Spacey, Lupita Nyong’o and Carol Burnett along with this summer’s red-hot comedian Amy Schumer.
But he’ll also host Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer, stars of “Broad City,” the comedy from Colbert’s former network home. While beloved among the YouTube set, they’re far from household names – so Colbert isn’t forgetting his cable roots. That goes for musicians, too. In addition to names like Kendrick Lamar and Willie Nelson, Colbert will host Troubled Waters, a little-known Paul Simon tribute band.
* New York City will still have an important role.
David Letterman’s “Late Show” was frequently a love letter to New York City and it seems like Colbert could keep the same tradition: Colbert will interview Broadway’s “American in Paris” director Christopher Wheeldon, and stars Robert Fairchild and Leanne Cope will both perform. It helps that Colbert – a singer himself – is a big fan of theater and performed on the Tony Awards.
One thing for sure: That concern Stephen voices in the clip about Donald Trump disappearing on him, for these couple of weeks, at least, I don't think he has to worry.
TV Watch: An enthusiastic thumbs-up for the just-completed Season 3 of "Last Tango in Halifax"
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The preview for tonight's highly satisfying Season 3 finale of Last Tango in Halifax
by Ken
This illustrates the problem with having no writers about TV I can turn to for guidance. All through the six-episode Season 3 of Last Tango in Halifax, which aired tonight on many PBS stations, I kept thinking, somebody shoulda told me about this. I know that probably there are people who tried, but since I don't listen to them about anything else, why would I have listened to them about this?
So while I was aware through the previous seasons that a show of this name had popped up and gone away again, I mostly figured, well, they've gone and dragged Derek Jacobi to Nova Scotia for some sort of country-bumpkin shenanigans. Well, no. It's not even that Halifax. It's the original one, in West Yorkshire (so everyone gets to do appropriate accents.)
I guess with a show like this, either the characters command your attention or they don't, and coming in late, I was agreeably surprised to find that these characters did. In which case, it's a challenge but a good sort of challenge to get caught up on their lives -- at least enough to keep up with the new season's developments. There's still a fair amount about the first two seasons' goings-on that's blurry or even totally mysterious to me, and I imagine I'll need to plug that gap at some point.
But I enjoyed the company of the families that were sort of joined when -- 60 years after their teenage love went astray -- Alan (Derek J) and Celia (Anne Reid) refound each other and now, a lifetime later, decided to give it a go together. All manner of plotlines and complications are spun around their families, even though their own immediate offspring are limited to a daughter apiece, Alan's Gillian (Nicola Walker) and Celia's Caroline (Sarah Lancashire) -- or at least that's the way it was until this season, when, through the magic of TV writing, a "new" sibling was added -- the always-working Rupert Graves as Gary, a son Alan never knew existed.
Obviously these folks and their partners (past, present, and future) and kids (Gillian has one son; Caroline, two) had been through a lot grappling with life goals and romantic relationships, before I made their acquaintance -- some of which I've had sketched out, and some of which I haven't. I realize this isn't much for you to go on, especially with the "new" season now in the books. At the same time, previously aired shows have never been more accessible, and while I haven't yet tried to track down those Season 1 and 2 episodes, I know that the six of Season 3 can be found easily online.
People getting on with their lives, in the face of assorted obstacles -- it's not something today's TV programmers go out of their way to put on the air. Perhaps because it means you really have to create people and situations that really engage the interest and concerns of an audience. It's a challenge that doesn't seem to have fazed Sally Wainwright, who created Last Tango and has written all 18 episodes to date.
In the Season 3 finale I thought she did a masterful job of pressing ahead with current business (notably Gillian's wedding and major tensions between Alan and recovered son Gary) while tying up and advancing plot threads from the season and sending many of the characters off into off-season business I assume we'll learn more about come Season 4. I'm really looking forward to it.
TV Watch: Stephen Colbert continues the countdown to September 8
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Since we haven't seen much of each other since December, Stephen asks, "What've you guys been doing?" ("Me, I've been busy," he says.) Here he shaves off the beard he adopted after finding it by the highway, which helped earn him the cover of Homeless Sea Captain Monthly. The beard had to come off, he explains, because on CBS, it turns out, "Tom Selleck's moustache has a noncompete clause."
by Ken
I know I just saw a post somewhere by someone who couldn't believe he'd only just discovered that Stephen has started a podcast. But I lost the link, and in trying to refind it, I stumbled across this nytimes.com "ArtsBeat" post by Dave Itzkoff. I know it's 7½ weeks old, but it turned out that what I had thought was a third-party link, and hence free, wasn't, and I had unthinkingly used the 9th of my 10 free NYT clicks for the month (really? this doesn't sound right -- how sure are we that we can we really trust their counting gizmo? can we demand a recount?), and it's only the 12th, so what the hell, here's the whole damned thing. Note that even though you should now be able to get to the page for free using my link, I have painstaking re-created all the links. At least I think I have, and even if they're not quite right, it's the thought that counts, right? (It's part of the service, and tips are appreciated but not requireed.)
What we could do here is to pretend that it's still June 3. If it helps, you can probably find an online weather report for where you live, to help set the mood. (I'm just going to make something up.)
As he prepares to take over CBS’s “Late Show” on Sept. 8, Stephen Colbert now has a beefed-up online and social media presence – but he no longer has a beard.
On Wednesday, Mr. Colbert, who bid farewell to Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report” in December, made a long-awaited return to the Internet by announcing various new online offerings for his new CBS late-night program, and saying goodbye to the shaggy salt-and-pepper facial fuzz he had grown during his television hiatus, which had come to be known as “The Colbeard.”
In a video comedy bit, Mr. Colbert gives us some sense of how life will continue without the fatuous Stephen Colbert pundit character he played on Comedy Central. While the beard allowed him to go incognito, Mr. Colbert says, “Now that we’re gearing up for the beginning of the ‘Late Show,’ I need to be more cognito.” He adds, “Plus, CBS is making me shave it off because Tom Selleck’s mustache has a non-compete clause.”
In the video, Mr. Colbert tries out a few other looks before shaving off the beard altogether. (You’ll have to watch until the end to learn its final fate.)
In a statement, Mr. Colbert said: “Say what you will about the Internet, I think it’s here to stay! Launching ColbertLateShow.com puts me in the same league as Google.com, Facebook.com and ferretfancier.blogspot.com!”
MEANWHILE, HERE'S STEPHEN BEING A GOOD NEIGHBOR
Angelo's Pizza is used to nestling under the protective
shelter of the marquee of the Ed Sullivan Theater. . . .
Shark Watch: This year, according to Discovery Channel, some of its "Shark Week" programming may actually have been TRUE!
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npr.org caption: "This photo from Discovery Channel shows a great hammerhead, one of the largest sharks in the world, during an episode of Shark Week."
"Megalodon: The Monster Shark Lives was the highest-rated program in 'Shark Week' history. Even though the network ran a disclaimer saying it was fake, experts like [the University of Miami's David] Shiffman were unimpressed.
" 'It was presented in such a way that you could very easily watch it and not know it was fictional,' he says."
-- from Neda Ulaby's NPR report on Discovery Channel's "Shark Week"
"No one in this world, so far as I know -- and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me -- has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people. Nor has anyone ever lost public office thereby."
-- H. L. Mencken, in a column, "Notes on Journalism,"
in the Chicago Daily Tribune, Sept. 19, 1926
"This year we're focusing quite a bit on research and science, more so probably than we have in the past."
-- Howard Swartz, Discovery's new head of development and production
While fake documentaries turn out to be almost the least of the factuality problems with "Shark Week," Discovery Channel has indeed gone the fake-documentary route, as Neda was reminded by all the shark experts she talked to for her report. It was two years ago, and "Shark Week" fans rewarded the network with the highest ratings in "Shark Week" history -- for an extravaganza about the spine-tingling terror of the Megalodon, a creature that has been extinct for more than a million years.
I see that "Shark Week" ends tonight. I confess that I pay as little attention as possible to it, but alas, each year it becomes harder to evade the promotional bombardement. What I didn't know until I heard Neda Ubaly's report Monday is that in the 28-year history of "Shark Week," factuality doesn't seem to have been much of a consideration. It has been more like a "Shark Horror" theme park, the programmers have learned that what aficionados crave is to be driven wild with spine-tingling shark-themed terror. The assumption has been that they don't much care whether what they see is true. Especially if they don't know that much of it isn't.
If you haven't already listened to Neda's report above, here's her written account:
It has been called the "Super Bowl of the ocean."
Shark Week is a ratings bonanza for the Discovery Channel with more than 40 million people tuning in last year. Shark Week kicked off this weekend with the most hours of programming ever in its 28-year history But many scientists think the huge audiences — and the hype — have come at the expense of real science.
A generation of shark scientists cut their teeth on Shark Week.
"I've loved sharks since I was a little kid," says 29-year-old marine biologist Jonathan Davis.
"I've always dreamed of being on Shark Week," he says. "It was my ultimate goal when I was a kid. I always watched it, and it was extremely informative when I was younger."
So imagine Davis' joy when Shark Week producers called him two years ago to make a documentary, which they said would be about his research on bull sharks in Louisiana's Lake Pontchartrain. As a graduate student at the University of New Orleans, Davis was thrilled when they paid for a day of tracking and tagging sharks.
The producers interviewed Davis about his work and at the end, he says, they casually asked if he ever heard of a legendary shark of the bayous called the Rooken.
"And I said, 'No, of course not. That sounds like a ridiculous fisherman story,' " Davis says.
You can guess what happened next. To his horror, Davis found himself featured on a "documentary" that had little to do with his research. Voodoo Shark strongly suggested that Davis believed in the Rooken.
"There's no way I could've known they were going to portray it like that," he says.
Voodoo Shark shows Davis and his team doing real research, pulling sharks out of the water and tagging them on the deck. Davis says he did not see any unusual sharks. What was unusual was a producer's reaction when they hooked a big one.
"One of the guys was like, "Oh, maybe you should just let it bite you, that would be so exciting.' And I was just thinking to myself, 'Are you kidding me? You really think I wanna let the shark bite me just for ratings? Are you serious?' "
Ellen Prager, a marine scientist who has taught at the University of Miami and writes books for children about sharks, says she and her colleagues have a list of things that drive them crazy about Shark Week, such as the emphasis on sharks attacking people and feeding frenzies.
"That's not what you typically see in nature," Prager says. "And in fact, some of the shark researchers I know have hardly ever even seen sharks feeding in the wild."
Then there's the frenzy of factual errors. David Shiffman, who studies sharks at the University of Miami, has spent the past few years calling out Shark Week in public.
"Shark Week two years ago did not appreciate it when I recommended an 8-year-old neighbor to fact check the scripts for them," he says. "Because that 8-year-old knew more about sharks than whoever was writing those scripts did."
All these scientists agree that Shark Week hit bottom two years ago with an infamous, fictionalized "documentary" about a 100-foot, 80-ton shark they called "the serial killer of the seas."
It was presented in such a way that you could very easily watch it and not know it was fictional.
That shark, named Megalodon, also happens to be extinct — and has been for more than a million years. But Discovery resurrected Megalodon, with made-up stories of sightings and attacks. The narrator even threw in some exciting Nazi connections.
"If the shark that's in the Nazi U-boat photo is in fact the same shark that's in the shark iPhoto that was taken just after the boat attack, then that means there's been a 50-ton monster in these waters for over 70 years," said one character in the movie.
Megalodon: The Monster Shark Lives was the highest-rated program in Shark Week history. Even though the network ran a disclaimer saying it was fake, experts like Shiffman were unimpressed.
"It was presented in such a way that you could very easily watch it and not know it was fictional," he says.
But Discovery says it's turning over a new leaf — or a new fin — when it comes to Shark week, says Howard Swartz, who recently took over as head of development and production.
"This year we're focusing quite a bit on research and science, more so probably than we have in the past," Swartz says.
The Discovery Channel has promised it will produce no more fake documentaries.
"We've toyed with a lot of different types of storytelling over the years," Swartz says. "And I just think now in a forward-looking direction, I think we wanna focus more on the research angle."
But how do you make anything as sexy as a 50-ton Nazi-affiliated shark? Swartz says you go to Cuba, where there are stories about a monster great white roaming the coasts.
"Allegedly, a 21-foot, 7,000-pound great white," Swartz says. "So the question was, you know was that the biggest great white ever caught? And if it was, was there something unique to these Cuban waters that these animals are growing so big or attracting animals so big?"
This year, Shark Week sent some of its shows in advance to some critics, including Shiffman. He says sharks need the Discovery Channel to not demonize them.
"When I say one out of every four species of sharks, skates and rays are threatened with extinction, there are some people that say, 'Good it should be more of them going extinct. Sharks are bad! Sharks are scary!' But they're not!"
Shiffman says sharks are beautiful and wild. He hopes this year Shark Week will make them reality stars.
ABOUT THE FAMOUS MENCKEN QUOTE
Yes, I know it's normally given as "No one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public." But Robert Deis (aka "SubtropicBob"), a writer with a passion for righting wrong quotes, has already set the record straight, in a This Day in Quotes post for Sept. 19, 2012. He went so far as to reproduce the first and last paragraphs of the actual Chicago Daily Tribune column.
[Click to enlarge.]
Robert not only sets the quote right but sets it in context -- and concludes, "Looking around at the media and political landscape today, Mencken’s opinion might be deemed more prescient than ever."
Three views of success -- from Dilbert's Wally, Tyrell Wellick (of "Mr. Robot"), and the great Robert Benchley
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DILBERT by Scott Adams July 9: "Hard Work Is Necessary For Success"
[Click to enlarge.]
"I take Life as it comes, and although I grouse a great deal and sometimes lie on the floor and kick and scream and refuse to eat my supper, I find that taking Life as it comes is the only way to meet it. It isn't a very satisfactory way, but it is the only way. (I should be very glad to try any other way that anyone can suggest. I certainly am sick of this one.)"
As suggested, it didn't come quite out of nowhere. Thursday's strip came out of Wednesday's, with poor clueless Asok demonstrating his cluelessness by listening to Wally on . . . well, on pretty much anything.
If there's any consolation, it's that poor Asok would be paralyzingly unlikely to be able to take any real advantage of advice way better than this.
(2) TYRELL WELLICK FROM MR. ROBOT
Our second authority on success is Tyrell Wellick (Swedish actor Martin Wallström) from USA Network's Mr. Robot, who as suspected (see my Tuesday "TV Watch" post, "Mr. Robot brings us yet another of those fiendishly world-conquering villains from Scandinavia") came into his own in Wednesday's Episode 3. Tyrell himself describes the mot I've quoted at the top of this post as "a bit of a sillly expression," a bit "reductive." Even so, he likes it.
To me it means that power belongs to the people that take it. Nothing to do with their hard work, strong ambitions, or rightful qualifications, no. The actual will to take is often the only thing that's necessary.
Noted, Tyrell, noted.
AND FINALLY: (3) THE GREAT ROBERT BENCHLEY
Some time ago I did a fairly long-running nightly series devoted to great American comic writing, which grew out of an extensive "Thurber Tonight" project. The "Thurber (et al.) Tonight" series eventually came to include Woody Allen, Robert Benchley, Bob and Ray, Will Cuppy, Wolcott Gibbs, Ring Lardner, S. J. Perelman, Jean Shepherd, and E. B. White, and I wish I had figured some way of enabling it to live, because a serious chunk of my soul went into those pieces (the index is here) -- and nothing in the series more than the pieces by the great Robert Benchley.
Following our initial foray last night into the, shall we say, singularly dimensioned world of Robert Benchley, "The Five (or Maybe Six) Year Plan," we have now his -- and perhaps, I think, anyone's -- definitive statement on the subject of success, or rather Success, and even disposing (as you can see in the bit I've extracted above) of Life. This is another of those pieces I've spent ages trying to cherry-pick or synopsize or paraphrase. It just doesn't work, though. The piece really needs to be, as it were, swallowed whole.
Again, you can read the whole piece here. For our purposes, though, I can say that eventually our Bob spins one of literature's most peculiar fables, concerning "a very, very brave Knight who had a very, very definite yen for a beautiful Princess who lived in a far-away castle (very, very far away, i mean" and "a Magician who could do wonders with a rabbit" -- and also, eventually, the Princess's not-previously-mentioned husband ("who, it must be admitted, was a little disappointed at the way things had turned out").
Beyond that, you'll have to read the thing for yourself, and I can't encourage you heartily enoough to do so. The point is . . . well, let's let Master Robert explain it:
Now, this little fable shows us that Success may be one of two things: first, getting what we want; and, second, not getting what we want. [Emphasis added. -- Ed.]
It was Voltaire who is reported to have said: "Plus ça change -- plus ça reste," meaning, "There isn't much sense in doing anything these days." Perhaps it wasn't Voltaire, and perhaps that isn't what the French means; but the angle is right.
Can you say the same of yourself?
I don't know about you folks, but I sure can't, Bob (if I may).
