tv

That’s one way of putting it

Todd Vanderwerff on Hung:

It’s the sweetest show about utter desperation you’ll ever see.

And it really is. The show isn’t perfect. Much like Showtime’s Nurse Jackie, another new half-hour dramedy, the more sitcom-ic elements sometimes threaten to overwhelm the rest. And, much like Dmitry Lipkin’s last show, The Riches, the characters often shine more than the sometimes really contrived plots. But where it works — particularly, surprisingly, with Thomas Jane’s engaging performance each week — the show really works.

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That’s one way of putting it

Joss Whedon on his recent Emmy nomination for Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog:

Yes, it seems the only way I can get in through the door, … to get into the party, is by way of the dumbwaiter. Not even the back door. I’m thinking the dumbwaiter.

I’m actually of two minds about the nomination. While it’s wonderful to see quality work like Dr. Horrible recognized with a nomination, the whole “Outstanding Special Class” category that it’s in seems a little confused about just what it’s supposed to be. Of the five nominees, only the Bruce Springsteen Super Bowl Halftime Show actually appeared on television — which is technically what the Emmys exist to honor — while the other three (webisodes or added content from 30 Rock, Battlestar Galactica and The Daily Show) are extensions of existing television shows. The category is more like “Stuff We Couldn’t Fit Elsewhere…Plus Hey! We’re Cool and Like Stuff on the Web!”

Still, as Whedon says, there’s room for hope:

You know, it absolutely is a step. And it absolutely means a great deal that the Academy went … and recognized that some of the … entertainment that they’re focused on is happening outside of conventional television. And it’s my hope that more people, … that the next time these nominations come up, there will be more than one company listed that is independent.

Oh, the things that I’ve seen (Pt. 2)

Some thoughts on the television I’ve been watching recently…

Torchwood: Children of Earth — It’s almost hard to believe Torchwood used to be a bad show. This miniseries was really just incredible: funny, scary, exciting and tragic — everything that redeemed the show for me in its surprisingly great second season but ramped up, with a tighter focus and even smarter, more effective writing. This was much more the Russell T. Davies of The Second Coming than, say, “Journey’s End,” although the miniseries was also reminiscent of Quatermass and the best of other old British sci-fi horror. It’s not absolutely perfect — the resolution of its fifth, final hour might be a little rushed — but even there it’s heartbreaking and well done. It’s powerful stuff and certainly some of the best television I’ve seen in awhile. However maybe rushed, Day Five left me genuinely shaken.

And then there’s Virtuality, which I didn’t include with yesterday’s movies, because, despite how Fox tried to sell it, this clearly wasn’t a movie. It was surprisingly entertaining pilot, though, despite the lack of resolution — and despite my fears that its VR-laden premise would seem hokey now that it’s not, you know, the 1990s any longer. (Remember VR.5, anyone?) But, that said, I think I can see why Fox has so far decided not to pick the show up. As Abigail Nussbaum writes:

The pilot feels several drafts short of completion–or, to be less charitable, it feels lazy, as though Moore and Taylor didn’t feel any obligation to hook their audience with a coherent story or a discernible direction for their show. Instead, they seem to have written the first chapter of a story, which makes gestures towards several different plotlines and takes it on faith that viewers will tune in next week to see which one of them the writers are actually interested in telling….Virtuality gets so bogged down in establishing each of these stories that it forgets to tell a story in its own right.

I think I’m more forgiving of the pilot’s faults than Nussbaum, if only because I didn’t feel as burned by Moore’s last project, Battlestar Galactica, as she did. (I still haven’t even finished watching BSG‘s final season.) But I think virtuality would have made for a much more compelling miniseries; the pilot leaves open a lot of questions, but I suspect there weren’t enough compelling answers to sustain anything longer-term.

And while I also enjoyed the pilot of Warehouse 13, the show might have difficulty keeping me interested week to week. It’s good companion programming to Syfy’s — yes, that’s their name, dumb as that is — Eureka, but I don’t think it has the same level of cleverness as that show, which is what keeps me coming back to Eureka despite its formulaic nature. (Eureka‘s fourth season premiere was a perfect case in point, perfectly entertaining even when not entirely what you’d call surprising.) I’ll watch at least another episode of Warehouse, but monster-of-the-week shows need to work extra hard to sustain my interest, and I don’t know yet if this one has it in it.

Beyond that, I watched the first two episodes of True Blood…and I think I’m finished with it. Lord knows Anna Paquin is attractive, but I’m not sure it’s worth enduring this show just to see her naked. (That’s not the only thing the show has going for it, but it’s damn close.) I finished watching the first season of The Mentalist, and while it continues to coast by on charm, and it finished well, I worry about its second season just being more of the same. Burn Notice, though, continues to be great fun, and I was really pleasantly surprised by Hung, thanks in large part to a likable performance by Thomas Jane. And while a lot of Top Chef fans have been put off by the lack of behind-the-scenes squabbles and drama in the Masters version, I’ve been finding it a lot of fun, watching chefs rise to the challenge rather than burn out under the pressure. It doesn’t hurt that the elimination challenges have thus far been really inventive and cool: cooking a gourmet meal in a dorm room, or for the writers of Lost, or for Neil Patrick Harris at the Magic Castle. It’s not always as exciting as Top Chef proper, but the next season of that is only as far away as August.

And I guess that just leaves Doctor Who. After finishing up the Peter Davison years (well, except for Snakedance), I tried and failed to really get into Colin Baker’s tenure as the Doctor. (I have it on pretty good authority that this isn’t at all uncommon.) So I doubled back and started watching some more Tom Baker episodes. I’d already seen and enjoyed Genesis of the Daleks, The Face of Evil and City of Death, which are often touted as some of Baker’s best, but I was still surprised by just how good The Ark in Space is. Some of the acting is a little over the top, and some of the effects are less than special, but much less so than for a lot of old-school Doctor Who. It’s quite solid science fiction.

Then for some reason, maybe because they’re available online via Netflix, I started watching the Key to Time story arc. The Ribos Operation and The Pirate Planet were both terrific. The Stones of Blood and The Androids of Tara…well, a little less so. I have two more episodes in the arc left, and then I’ll decide where to jump to next.

Doctor Who can be an acquired taste — it’s tough to look past the rubber suits and rock quarries — but it’s incredibly rewarding once you acquire it.

Wednesday various

  • Sense And Sensibility and Sea Monsters, huh? I worry about diminishing returns, but I’ve heard pretty good things about Pride And Prejudice And Zombies, Quirk’s last book in this sort-of-series. (Seeing as how Pride and Prejudice is the only Jane Austen I’ve ever read, maybe I should also read Seth Grahame-Smith’s parody of it. Then again, I read Austen’s book, along with another for a test, in a single weekend, and I can’t say I remember a lot about it. Some people get married in the end, I think?) I just worry: can The Werewolves of Mansfield ParK or Emma: Vampire Hunter be far behind?
  • I fucking knew it! Cursing may be good for you. Clay Davis must be the healthiest man alive. [via]
  • Toxic Substance Allows Birds to “See” Magnetic Field:

    Cryptochrome is also present in the human eye, but our amount of superoxides is even lower.

    That’s because superoxides reduce longevity, so human evolution has put a premium on longer life spans instead of on better steering.

    In birds, however, evolution has favored a bit of cellular damage in return for the navigational benefits of magnetic vision, the researchers conclude.

    What this seems to suggest, possibly, is that if we increased the amount of superoxides in our system, we could “see” the magnetic field just like birds. Of course, given the trade-off in toxicity, I don’t think we’ll find anyone too eager to test this hypothesis. [via]

  • One should always be scared when George Lucas turns his eye towards “relationships and emotional landscapes.” [via]
  • And finally, I love these fake library ads. More pictures from the Johnson County Library here. [via]

We can’t all be heroes

Because, with that one big exception, DC’s heroes are from a different era. They’re from the era when they were creating gods. And the thing that made Marvel extraordinary was that they created people. Their characters didn’t living in mythical cities, they lived in New York. They absolutely were a part of the world. Peter Parker’s character was a tortured adolescent. DC’s characters, like Wonder Woman and Superman and Green Lantern, were all very much removed from humanity. Batman was the only character they had who was so rooted in pain, that had that same gift that the Marvel characters had, which was that gift of humanity that we can relate to. – Joss Whedon

I’ve been thinking a lot about antiheroes lately, ever since reading Noel Murray’s AV Club post, TV’s Antihero Era Enters Its Second Decade. Murray traces the recent upswing in television antiheroes — flawed characters, some even deeply and irredeemably amoral — to The Sopranos, and he’s actually a little tired of it. Writing of the new Showtime half-hour Nurse Jackie, Murray says:

…I hope the creators don’t feel obliged to make the heroine’s addiction and infidelity the driving dramatic force of the show. I gave up on TNT’s Saving Grace when I realized that no matter how incredible Holly Hunter’s performance may be as a cop on the verge of a breakdown, the show’s combination of rote procedural plots and gratuitous grimness was going to continue to be a turnoff. Complex heroes are fine — appreciated even. But tortured, amoral TV heroes? That’s just about been done to death.

Which is funny, because my one problem with Nurse Jackie, of which I’ve only seen the first two episodes so far, is that it’s maybe not quite tortured enough. It’s a half-hour dramedy, and that format all too often leads it into broad sitcom territory. It’s a problem that recurs to a lesser degree with House, another antihero-driven medical show; no matter how good the writing or acting is — and I think both are usually excellent on both of these shows — things can be a little campy when you too often play an antihero’s transgressions for laughs. (As Stan Lee jokes here, “The world is so crazy that if you present things as they really are, it comes across as broad satire.”)

I’m not a big fan of uncomplicated characters, righteous crusaders who always make the right decisions for the right reasons, characters who are essentially ciphers around which the problem (or monster) of the week happens. As Murray’s fellow AV Club writer Zack Handlen says in his comments to Murray’s post:

We all like watching somebody be impossibly cool and good at his job, but when it comes to the long haul, I’m much more interested in somebody who has to pretend how to be normal.

I like The Mentalist, for instance, but I can easily go weeks or months without seeing an episode, and I often wish they would play up the darker edges of the main character. (As I’ve noted before, they do tend to soft-pedal it at times, and the show gets by mostly on Simon Baker’s charm and a pretty decent supporting cast.) The only sitcom I watch with any regularity is How I Met Your Mother, which, despite its sometimes absurd touches, is firmly grounded in real and honest characters. (In many ways it’s like Friends, if Friends had developed characters instead of just comic types.)

But, like Murray, I don’t need everything dark and gloomy and antihero-y. All I want are stories that are honest and entertaining, characters who are real and reflect the flaws that real human beings actually have. Which is why I prefer antiheroes to superheroes. As another AV Club writer, Todd VanDerWerff, puts it:

All of this just plays up exactly why shows where it seems like it would make just as much sense to make the hero superpowered, like The Mentalist or Psych, choose not to go that route. Any time you give the hero powers, you have to figure out a way to believably limit them, and believable limitations on something like all-encompassing telepathic abilities are hard to come by.