Spring is Angry / OJ Simpson: Made in America

1.

    Spring has been having a final temper tantrum before maturing into full summer of late. Back in May we had a string of 90-degree days that fooled a lot of people, including me, into thinking that summer had come early. Instead it began again to rain, and we all retreated inside, to gaze wistfully out windows at wet streets. It has been a weird, temperamental few weeks, and when the sun does manage to muscle its way through the clouds the air quickly grows hot, so that there’s no way to appropriately dress for the weather — either one swelters in a raincoat, and comes home damp with sweat; or one goes without, and comes home completely drenched. There is no solution.

    Some days I walk along the backstreets of my neighborhood and think how fortunate I am to live in a place of such temperate salubrity, one that smells of trees and mud, where the sun shines all summer and then politely retreats to allow us all to receive the succor of rain again. Were it not for our long, glum winters, with their days so short and gray that they feel like the night has only been temporarily distracted and soon will turn its dark glare on us once more, none of this would be possible. Our green pleasant valleys would run dry and hard in summer, as they have begun to do in California. But then, when spring refuses to go, when it teases me with summer only to throw another thundery fit in June, I think, This might be too much for me.

    But now, like a hungry child who has just been fed, spring’s mood seems to be lifting. They say the sun will come out tomorrow. May it stay for a good long time.

2. 

    Early in my freshman year of high school, health class was interrupted one day when Mr Summerfeld wheeled a television into the classroom on a cart and tuned it to the local news. They were showing the inside of a wood-paneled courtroom, where a handsome, middle-aged man sat with a battery of lawyers. As we watched, the man and his lawyers stood and faced a jury — off-camera, represented only by a somewhat hesitant woman’s voice, reading into a microphone — who declared him not guilty of two murders. The man was OJ Simpson, of course. I wish I could tell you what the broader reaction in the room was like, but given that it was a group of white, Catholic teenagers, probably shock. I do remember my friend Nick saying, I think he was guilty, but I was hoping he would get off. Nick was a libertarian.

    I had half-watched most of the trial with a vague feeling of disgust that would turn out to be the seed of a lot of how I continue to react to celebrity culture, more than two decades later. I’d never seen Simpson play football, I didn’t care about his commercials, I didn’t much like the Naked Gun movies. I found the way my parents were mesmerized by it — in memory, the bulk of every day that summer had been spent with one or the other of them fixed on the TV screen — completely baffling and kind of gross. I had no inkling of the way in which Simpson was a particularly bizarre nexus through which the drama of race and white supremacy in America might play out. Mostly I was annoyed by it.

    That said, I do remember where I was during the famous White Bronco Chase. I had walked over to my friend Sean’s house one afternoon the previous spring, and when we got there, his dad — a balding, overweight man I’d always found a little bit hard to understand — was sitting on a couch in their front room, watching the thing unfold on television. Sean and I stood behind the couch with him, and though we kept meaning to leave, neither one of us quite could. Though I was already heartily sick of the Simpson drama by that point, there was something truly bizarre about a man driving at legal speeds, followed by an armada of police cars. And so it truly is a marker of my life, whether I like it or not.

    Last weekend, without quite realizing I was doing it, I binged on all 8 hours of Ezra Edelman’s OJ Simpson: Made in America, which situates the trial snugly in the context of Simpson’s life and the experience of black Americans, especially in Los Angeles, where it came on the heels of decades of police brutality, militarized law enforcement, and unaccountability for cops — none of which had done much of anything to make the community safer. Only two years earlier, the city had erupted in violence and protest when a group of white officers, who had been videotaped delivering a beat-down to a black man named Rodney King, were acquitted of all charges associated with the attack. This was all stuff that I either (A) didn’t know about or (B) wasn’t quick enough on the uptake enough to draw the lines between, at least not when I was 14 years old. To see it laid out so starkly in Edelman’s film transformed something I’d always found distasteful and dull into something fascinating, a way of looking at race in America that I’d never quite tapped into before.

    Simpson had gone out of his way to ingratiate himself with white people, both in public and in private — early in his athletic career, when black Olympians sought his solidarity in a move to boycott the 1968 Olympic games, he’d told them, “I’m not black, I’m OJ.” The line is repeated several times in the documentary, and for some of the people interviewed in the film, it clearly says something very poignant about his character — both the compromises he made to get the kind of success he wanted, and how blinkered he was about what that success meant. Simpson spent a lot of time shedding the outer markers of his blackness, including the black woman he’d married as a young man (though, interestingly, not necessarily his friends from that period), so that he could feel accepted in a world of wealth, glamour, and fame, which was largely the purview of white people. And once he made it in, he thought he was in forever. It’s clear that OJ became profoundly megalomaniacal and entitled, especially after he retired from sports and became mostly an actor and TV personality. It’s also clear that, by doing so, he was playing with fire in a way that a white counterpart might not have been.

    When he murdered his wife — and let’s be clear here, he murdered his wife, verdicts and conspiracy theories aside — he suddenly became something other than every white person’s favorite black guy. And his defense team ran with that, and more or less convinced a majority-black jury that he was being railroaded by a racist conspiracy direct by a largely white power structure. There were clearly some black people who were uncomfortable with that: some of the people interviewed in the doc (I wish I could remember their names, but I watched it in a huge block six days ago, so a lot of those have faded from my memory now) clearly view Simpson, not only as an imperfect vessel for such a defense, but as the least perfect possible vessel for such a defense. Many, though, were fine with it. Simpson, though he’d made a career in part out of attempting to erase his blackness, was still black, and black people had still been routinely (not to say ritually) abused by Los Angeles police for decades. I have to say, if I try to put myself in the shoes of black folks who didn’t believe OJ was guilty, who believed that he was the victim of a conspiracy of corrupt cops aiming to string up the most famous black man in America the same way they’d been doing to non-famous black people for generations, I would probably have agreed. This is the way that systematic white supremacy gets etched on people’s souls. If you are born with it, and live with it, why should you ever expect it not to function how it always has?

    When OJ was acquitted, he tried to return to Brentwood and live the glamorous he always had — but found that doors that had previously been open to him were slammed shut. On the one hand, one imagines that might have happened to anybody who had so publicly been the beneficiary of a bad verdict. But what happened to OJ was clearly tinged with the ugliest, most-secret racial instincts that people hold. There would never be the benefit of the doubt, and OJ was completely ostracized. The film makes the case that OJ, in some degree, rediscovered his blackness after his acquittal, because he received no quarter from white people.* At a certain point, OJ’s life became a bizarre form of self-parody, as he began to hang around with various leeches and lowlifes who seemed mostly interested in his fame, diminished though it may have been, and wealth, which appears to have survived a civil suit in which he was held liable for the deaths of his wife and her friend, Ronald Goldman, who Simpson also murdered. Then, eventually, it became a bizarre, Kafkaesque tale of a man who gets away with one crime, and so is destroyed for one he didn’t commit — when OJ and a group of flunkies tried to retrieve some memorabilia from a dealer who had more or less stolen the stuff from Simpson, a comedy of errors led to Simpson’s arrest and eventual conviction for kidnapping, among other things. If Simpson weren’t Simpson, it seems highly unlikely he would have been put in prison at all. Instead, he received 33 years, which — given that he’s in his 60s now — is tantamount to a life sentence. It is hard not to read this as white America getting revenge on Simpson for murdering two white people, at least to me.

*This is also an argument for the idea that OJ is a classic sociopath, though of course there’s no way of knowing that without actually knowing the man.

    The most disturbing scenes in the film, at least to me, surround Simpson’s acquittal for murder. We see footage of Simpson and his lawyers embracing; we see black folks jubilant that he is free; we see white people and black people screaming at each other on the street. But really, the images that trouble me are the images of white people weeping at Simpson’s acquittal, as though what happened in the case had anything to do with them — as though this were some kind of team sport. Sure, Simpson’s acquittal was a miscarriage of justice. He murdered two people and got away with it. But miscarriages of justice happen every day, and this one — other than the notoriety of the defendant — was no greater, and was in fact much lesser, than many of them. A guilty man went free. I’m not going to argue that that’s a good thing. But is it worth our tears? Guilty men go free every day. And, worse — far worse — innocent people are put away every day. Do we weep for them? Or do we only cry for beautiful white people killed by famous black people? Yeah, I thought so.

    I suppose some people would accuse me of having “white guilt” over this, but I actually think that I’ve come to feel much less guilt as I’ve come to think harder about a lot of this stuff; instead, what I feel is a clarifying empathy. OJ: Made in America is rife with scenes that filled me with rage, as they showed the ways in which systematic white supremacy is etched on all of us, daily: the overwhelming whiteness of the police force; the condescension of white lawyers for black jurors; the gross way in which Simpson is praised, essentially, for seeming white. I find it unsurprising, but simultaneously somehow astonishing, that so many white Americans are unable to perceive this, to even guess at how they would feel if the tables were turned.

    But now we’re getting close to me just saying, I’m such a good person, why are other people such bad people? And that’s gross. I’m not going to do that. Anyway, you should watch OJ Simpson: Made in America. I saw it on ESPN’s mobile app, Watch ESPN, though I assume you can see it on the intertubes or even — weird — your television.

Some Losses

1. Grief as Paranoia

    I flew down to Bend for my cousin’s wedding over the weekend. Flying to Bend is always a bit of an odd experience — the flight, which only covers 120 miles or so, usually takes about 25 minutes, so that getting to and from the airport is a bigger ordeal than being in the air. When I got down there, nobody was there to pick me up. Not a big deal — the Redmond-Bend airport is not much more than a glorified bus station, so there’s nothing arduous about getting in and out — but I wondered, sort of, if I’d been forgotten, so I called my mom to see if someone was on the way. She said my dad was, but he was running a little late.

    Then a weird thing happened. A couple of minutes later, I was still waiting, and she called me back. When I saw her name on the caller ID, I became convinced that she was calling to tell me that my dad had been in a wreck on the way to pick me up, and was dead. This is a completely ridiculous, irrational fear, but it was so strong that I almost didn’t answer the phone. When I did, she just wanted to say that she’d talked to him and he would be there any minute. Even as she did, I spotted his car pulling up to the curb. Everything was fine. Nobody had died. Of course nobody had died.

    When I was a kid, my dad hated answering the phone, and the explanation given was always that he associated unexpected phone calls with answering the call that informed him that my half-sister, his oldest child, had been killed in a car wreck. I sort of pretended to understand that — it made sense in an abstract way — but I never really did. It wasn’t until I got a similar call a couple of years ago that I started to understand. Now — now, my grief over that event has largely subsided to a background noise, something that’s always there but rarely all-consuming. It has, however, manifested as this very specific form of paranoia. If there’s a way for my brain to line up events in such a way that someone has died, it’ll do it. And though I know it’s ridiculous, I can’t help it. Every phone call is a disaster in the making.

2. Grief as Public Rite

    When David Bowie died, I was as surprised as anybody, I suppose. But what really surprised me, far more than the actual fact of his death, was the response to it. My Facebook feed erupted in a collective cri de coeur, one which roared for a full day but still hasn’t really petered out. Links to his videos, teary-sounding tributes, lots of agreeing, head shaking, and digital hugging went around. The rending of garments was elaborate.

    This surprised me because David Bowie meant exactly nothing to me. I don’t begrudge anybody else their fandom or their grief — God knows, most of them will all be mystified when a small minority of us are totally crushed by the inevitable death of, say, Stephen Fry — I just don’t understand it. I always found Bowie’s music to be a little bland; it always seemed to me that the theatrical aspect of his art rendered the music qua music not very interesting, much of the time. My favorite Bowie record is probably an Iggy Pop record. (The Idiot, btw.) My favorite Bowie song is probably a Queen song. (“Under Pressure”.) The only time I ever saw Bowie live, it was because he was touring with Nine Inch Nails, and I spent most of his set (he was in Thin White Duke mode that night) idly wondering when Trent Reznor was going to come out.

    And it’s funny, because in many ways Bowie seems to have stood foursquare against a lot of the things I despise: rote fetishization of the authentic; reflexive privileging of emotion over intellect; the idea of perfection in art. Bowie was weird and daring and sometimes sloppy. He took risks that didn’t always pay off. This is the kind of artist I usually love; it’s the kind I try to be. He stands with Neal Stephenson and Richard Linklater and Margaret Atwood in this way. And yet, somehow, I just never locked in with him. My failure to lock in caused me to have a blind spot as to his massive cultural significance.

    It’s weird to be reminded so viscerally of the ways in which you’re out-of-step with the zeitgeist. If Bob Dylan or Mick Jagger had died and this been the response, I would have been as all in as everybody else. But the death of David Bowie, even at the relatively young age of 69, did not rock my world. I kind of wish now that it had. I’m obviously missing out on something.

    The night Bowie died, I was walking up Clinton Street in the dark, and I saw a big crowd gathered around a firetruck and an ambulance. My first instinct was to take out my radio gear and see what was going on. But as I approached, I heard a boombox playing “Under Pressure”, and then “Rebel Rebel”, and I realized something public, important, but not necessarily newsworthy was going on here. It had something to do with David Bowie, though I couldn’t tell what. I never did figure out what the firetruck and ambulance were there for — nobody was hurt — and eventually I moved on. Really, I probably should have taken out my gear anyway and started asking around. I’m sure there was a story there. Maybe, though, I was not the person to tell it.

3. Grief as Public Rite 2: The Re-griefening

    But then Alan Rickman died. Rickman and Bowie were both English, both 69 years old, both died of cancer. I was actually shocked to find that Rickman was the same age as Bowie — his rise to fame came 15 years later, with his iconic performance as Hans Gruber in Die Hard. I think I would have pegged him at about 55, if you’d asked, though I don’t know why you’d ask me how old Alan Rickman was when you could just Google the guy. But it gave me a window into what other people were feeling about Bowie. A reminder, really; I’ve been getting bummed out by celebrity deaths since the suicide of Kurt Cobain at least. I don’t know that I’m gutted, the way some people seemed to be by Bowie’s death. But I’m not happy about it. It scares me — not least because Rickman was younger than my father and not much older than my mother. And it feels completely not real. Like, how is it possible that Alan Fucking Rickman is dead? Hans Gruber sure isn’t dead, even if he is. Severus Snape isn’t dead, even if he is. (Spoiler alert, Potter newbies.) How can the man who brought them to life be dead?

    A few years ago, I was poking through some website looking for an Adventure Time t-shirt, when I ran across something far better: a baseball undershirt with blue sleeves and, positioned smack in the middle, an airbrushed glamour shot of a young Alan Rickman, sandy-haired and, in his weird, beaky way, very handsome. I knew immediately that I had just found the greatest item of clothing ever made. I will admit that some of that was the seriously WTF nature of the person on its front — Rickman was famous (very, after his turn as Snape), and seriously talented, but he wasn’t a celebrity in the way that the people who get their faces on t-shirts usually are. His dalliances didn’t make the pages of People magazine. I have no idea where he lived. I’m actually not entirely sure whether he was straight or gay. Until he took the role of Snape, he had been a slightly-more-handsome-than-average character actor. Even after he took the role of Snape, he was still a character actor — it was just that he was probably the single most famous character actor in the world. Why was he on this shirt?

    But there was more to it for me. Rickman had always been one of those guys that I felt a little bit of ownership of. One of the things I used to do, back when I had a membership to a fabulous brick-and-mortar PDX movie rental shop called Movie Madness, was fall in love with an actor or actress and make a project of plowing through every movie on their IMDB page. The whims that took me could be capricious, weird — I watched every terrible movie that the terrible actress Jennifer Morrison (of the terrible TV show House) made, for instance. But one of the more rewarding ones of these projects was Rickman. I never finished — he’d been in over 40 movies and TV shows by the time I took it up, some of them quite hard to lay hands on (I never managed to find a copy of a BBC miniseries called The Barchester Chronicles, in which Rickman plays a reportedly very minor role, for instance). But you’d find Rickman doing solid work in the weirdest corners of cinema and television — as the title character in an HBO movie called Rasputin: Dark Servant of Destiny, for instance; or as the nasty Outback imperlalist Elliot Marston in the dopey Quigley Down Under. Though he was often typecast as the heavy, he could do just about anything, as attested by his comic turn as The Metatron in Kevin Smith’s Dogma, or his unexpectedly heart-throbbing Colonel Brandon in Sense and Sensibility. When finally he was tapped to play the role that would make him a worldwide icon — Severus Snape in the Harry Potter franchise — it felt like there was no other actor on Earth who could breathe life into JK Rowling’s most complex, dangerous, and magnetic character.

    He was probably too old to play Snape, really; the Severus of the books is still a relatively young man (some rudimentary math would suggest that he’s in his early 30s by the time Harry and the gang show up at Hogwarts), but Rickman was 55 — old enough to be the father of the character he was playing, if you think about it. But still he seemed perfect. Rickman’s specialty was the character who was supercilious, hyper-intelligent, malevolent. Snape was all of those things. He was scary and mean and cruel. The thing is, a lot of people could do that. But the part called for someone who could play all of those things, and then make it convincing when he finally displayed something many never expected him to have — vulnerability. When the moment came, Rickman was more than up to the task. By that point, seven-and-a-half movies in, the Harry Potter franchise was not really featuring the acting skills of its players very much; the books were far too long and complex to be adapted into movies, especially when the movies made the mistake of concentrating on the action at the expense of the things that truly made the books special — the characters and the humor. Rickman was just about the only adult with a big moment to play in either of the final two films. Many other very fine actors — Ralph Fiennes, Helena Bonham Carter, Michael Gambon, etc — were reduced to little more than cackling villains or noble godheads by that point. But Rickman nailed it. Inasmuch as the bloated, overstuffed behemoths that were the last few Harry Potter movies had a heart, Rickman’s Snape was it. He pumped hot blood through a cold franchise almost single-handed.

    I still kind of can’t believe he’s gone. I no longer follow movies as avidly as once I did, but the idea that the upcoming flicks Eye in the Sky (a star-studded techno-thriller in which Rickman stars opposite Helen Mirren) and the certain-to-be-dreadful Alice in Wonderland sequel, in which he’ll voice the Catarpillar, will be his last? That just seems wrong. I re-watched Harry Potter & the Prisoner of Azkaban, and every time he was on the screen, I tried to convince myself that he was really dead. I never got there. Somehow it just doesn’t make sense.

Jessica Jones & the Superhero Problem / The Dirty Secret about Master of None / Man in the High Castle's Great Lie

    It’s been a few weeks — I got discombobulated when the blog’s domain expired. I was told by Hover that I would have the opportunity to buy it back, but I’ve checked almost every day for a month and it seems that somebody, somewhere, has decided that my old website is a domain that they need to have and I don’t. This reminds me, more than anything, of the time I left my bike helmet clipped to my bike outside a supermarket, and some jerk stole it. What’s the point of stealing something with no value to anyone but its owner? To increase global chaos? To teach “society” a lesson? I don’t know.

    I’ve been watching a few shows that have entered the zeitgeist since we last spoke, dear reader. Each, in its own way, strikes me as being less than what its hype would lead one to believe. Two of them hold little interest for me at all.

    The best of these shows is the new Netflix outing, Jessica Jones, in which Krysten Ritter (of Breaking Bad and Veronica Mars almost-fame) plays a hard-bitten private dick doing battle with a creepy English sociopath named Kilgrave. Wait . . . did you notice what got left out of that summary? Two things, one not very interesting, the other more so:

    1. Everybody’s got superpowers.

    2. Kilgrave, played by The Internet’s Boyfriend, David Tennant, once used his superpower (mind control) to subject Ritter’s titular character to a form of sexual slavery.

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Krysten Ritter as Jessica Jones

    The show is based on a little-known-outside-the-comics-world Marvel book called Alias, and its tone is bleak, its affect blank and sarcastic, its cinematography artfully dark. Though the show is nominally a superhero offering, it does most of its stylistic cribbing, not from comics, but from film noir. This is a wise choice for a number of reasons, but chief among them is that the attitude of cynical gloom that infested noir well matches a protagonist who is a fairly recent survivor of sexual assault. The makers of Jessica Jones — possibly the author of the book on which it is based — intuited something: noir ethos is a rendering of PTSD.

    Think about your typical noir hero. He drinks too much, has trouble maintaining meaningful relationships, often works obsessively, is driven by demons that roil beneath the surface but are never coherently exposed. He has usually severed relationships with old partners, and now works alone, conducting most interactions as a form of hostage negotiation. Violence comes easily to him. Much of the time, he wears a trench coat.

    That trench coat might just seem like a tic, but it’s actually key to unlocking the hard-boiled detectives of noir film and dime novels all over the English-speaking world. Why? Because it hints at the big, unspoken Trouble that lurks behind all the small trouble that drives the story: he’s a veteran. Sam Spade, the ur-hard-boiled-detective, the trench-coat-wearer-in-chief, is almost certainly a veteran of the First World War, like his creator. I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that Spade’s literary career began in 1930, when a lot of people had suffered the privations of the First World War, and then blossomed after America joined the Second. For two generations, the world was full of hard-drinking, disjointed men who didn’t feel at home in the America they’d been raised to believe in. Detective fiction and the film noir embody that alienation, and make it beautiful.

    Jessica doesn’t appear to be a veteran of any war, but she is a veteran of sexual assault, which sometimes has very similar psychological impacts.* If one is going to aestheticize her world, especially in the pomo remix culture that dominates the discourse these days, it only makes sense to turn to the language of noir to do so. This is where the show most succeeds.

*I should make it clear here that I’m speaking entirely second-hand here. Though my life has not been untouched by tragedy, it’s been my good fortune never to witness the violence myself. I have known some people and read some books, that’s all.

    It’s less interesting in other areas, frankly. The superhero stuff feels rote and second-hand, very tired and standard. People were experimented on as kids, blah blah blah, they came out the other side with powers and feeling like freaks, blah blah blah. Rinse, repeat. There’s nothing insightful or interesting in most of this backstory, and frankly I found myself wondering about how the show would work if none of it were included — would Jessica Jones be worse if Kilgrave was simply a magnetic sociopath, Jessica a hard-drinking detective, and her various relationships not negotiated through the medium of her being vaguely super? I can’t imagine it would. The show would of course be different, but I’m not sure the difference would be for the worse. Almost all the superhero stuff is cliché by now. I get it, the normals are afraid of the supers. (I saw The Incredibles and X-Men.) Yes, having great power comes with great responsibility. (Superman.) Your powers are a metaphor for trauma. (Like every superhero movie or comic ever.) None of this illuminating or even very fun anymore. Can we move on?

    Of course, Jessica Jones wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for its superhero pedigree. It’s a part of something called the MCU, or Marvel Cinematic Universe, which encompasses several titanically popular movie franchises and a few less-popular TV ones — most notably The Avengers and all its offshoots. Suffice it to say I have a lot of what my friend Isaac would call “feeeeeeelliiiiiiiings” about the MCU, most of them not very positive. I find most of the movies samey and dull. I’m not allergic to a good action sequence, and even the occasional superhero movie can be fun (the Christopher Reeves Superman is a favorite), but the fact of the matter is that the MCU represents, at least to me, the triumph of the corporate over the individual, the engineered over the created, and the glib over the nuanced. The real problem with the MCU, at least at the film level, is that superheroes like Iron Man and Captain America and the Hulk lack specific psychology, almost by necessity: they are the creations of many hands, and can only be made so specific if they’re going to stick to their archetypes: a superhero is almost always basically one thing — RAGE!!! (Hulk), revenge (Batman), technology (Iron Man), etc. There’s only so much of that kind of shit I can take before I start to get bored. Couldn’t we quit blowing stuff up and have a conversation, man? Like, about a specific day in 1993 when a cute girl named Ciara laughed at a joke you made and for 22 years since then you’ve been trying to recapture that, to slip gently into the slippery glow of an adolescent boy who just realized he liked girls because he made a pretty girl laugh, and that’s why 99% of the things that come out of your mouth are meant, in one way or another, to be humorous?

    Jones, I think because the character is obscure, is less subject to the vicissitudes of mass manufacture — Jessica has been wronged in very specific ways, and has committed very specific wrongs of her own. While under Kilgrave’s spell, she punched a woman in the chest so hard that her heart stopped. The ramifications of this act compose some of the central tension of the show, which takes place about a year and a half after it happened: (1) She has allowed an innocent busdriver to take the rap for running over her victim (though he is not held legally responsible, he feels morally tortured), and (2) she grows morbidly obsessed with the dead woman’s widower, who she eventually falls into bed with.** This is pretty good stuff, allowing the show to explore the ways in which lack of culpability does not always lead to a lack of guilty feeling. But then, there’s all the stuff about how the people were experimented on as children, all of which should have been left on the cutting room floor.

** This character, Luke Cage (Mike Colter), is due to get his own Netflix show next year, following in the footsteps of both Jessica Jones and Daredevil, a show that has received outlandish critical praise and generally bored your humble correspondent shitless.

    There’s a lot to recommend Jessica Jones. Chief among these is the performance of Krysten Ritter,*** whose previous work has consisted mostly of comedy (Don’t Trust the B in Apartment 23, Veronica Mars) and minor character work (Breaking Bad). Ritter here combines notes she’s played before (disaffected, sarcastic) with ones she hasn’t: angry, conflicted, smart. Even in her best previous work, which is quite good, Ritter usually plays someting of a ditz or a flibertigibbet, a person who isn’t wholly engaged with the serious and ugly parts of life. Not so here. David Tennant is good, too, though his character eventually devolves into a cackling cliché without much more to say than, I’m gonna geeetttt youuuuu, Jessica Jones! Carrie-Ann Moss is strong as Jeri Hogarth, a high-powered lawyer embroiled in an ugly divorce from her do-gooder doctor wife.

*** I was once in a bar in New York City with a woman I was dating, and Ritter was there. I didn’t talk to her — I wouldn’t have had the nerve, even if she wasn’t famous, because she was, quite simply, the most beautiful human being I had ever been in a room with. It’s kind of hard to explain how beautiful she was. The television certainly doesn’t do her justice. There was just kind of an aura around her, one so powerful that it was hard not to stare in her direction. Other good-looking people looked plain in her presence. My girlfriend at the time had a harder time not staring than I did, and I had a pretty hard time.

    But it’s not without flaws, many of them embodied in the character of Robyn (Colby Minifie), Jessica’s notably weird upstairs neighbor. Through most of the show, Robyn is a sort of formless collection of eccentricities, many of them centered around her twin brother / roommate / possible fuck buddy, Reuben. The character is meant as comic relief, I think, but she’s basically a pain in the ass. And then, for reasons that are never made wholly clear, she becomes irrational, vindictive, and dangerous. The action is not totally unmotivated — Reuben dies, after all — but it’s not well-motivated, and Robyn rapidly becomes more of a cog in the plot than a character. Robyn, in short, sucks, and she’s not wholly unrepresentative of how supporting characters function in Jessica Jones. Luke Cage, for instance, remains kind of featureless and bland, defined mostly by being handsome, noble, and kind of super, powers-wise. The references to the MCU tend to be heavy-handed and silly. And there are, of course, plot holes you could drive a Mack truck through. But then it wouldn’t be a superhero show if there were none of those.

*

    The other, lesser shows I’ve watched — though neither in their entirety — are Master of None and The Man in the High Castle.

    Master of None is Aziz Ansari’s venture in the direction of Louie-like TV auteursim. Ansari co-wrote almost every episode, along with fellow Parks & Rec alum Alan Yang, and directed a few episodes, as well. The show is amusing, and kind of cute. But it’s also very self-congratulatory, and far more interested in making its viewer feel good than think very hard, which is probably the chief difference between it and Louie. Master of None has some Important Things to Say, and I’m glad it’s getting its day in the sun —  the truth is that Hollywood, like many (if not all) American industries, remains dismayingly white, and the world of entertainment has been allowed to get away with quota-ing and type-casting in ways that are insulting and destructive. But I also think the show has a problem: it’s not actually that good. It’s funny sometimes. It’s got some pretty warm vibes. But psychologically incisive it is not. It is, in fact, hopelessly didactic and dull. Though it says some stuff about race and the entertainment industry that needed to be said, in most respects it’s not challenging or complicated at all. And many of the performances are for shit.†

† Yes, I know those are Ansari’s actual parents. So the fuck what?

    The other is The Man in the High Castle, based on Philip K Dick’s 1962 novel about an America conquered and divided by Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany. The show is amusing, but that’s about it, as far as I can tell. Almost all of the principal actors have transparently been cast for looks rather than ability (the only exception being Alexa Davalos, who is also, paradoxically, breathtakingly good-looking), and the formulation of the plot undermines the book’s key strength — a depiction of the many brutalities, large and small, of colonialism. Though the show isn’t terrible by any means, it does Hollywoodize the book in such a way as to turn it into a lie: by adding an American resistance, it injects a plot that is basically about the triumph of the good guys that in fact doesn’t track with the very concept of the show. The point of The Man in the High Castle — I would argue that the point of history — is that the powerful dominate and the efforts of the powerless to dislodge them are almost always fruitless. Power persists in part by creating a state of tactical apathy, a form of pandemic depression that helps the powerless deal, but also prevents uprising most of the time. The TV show, by seeding a resistance through this, perpetuates the lie that the good guys will win in the end. No, they won’t. Look at the world. Seriously. The bad guys almost always win. Love does not overpower fear. Honor does not defeat cynicism. Violence destroys pacifism. All the time.

    Of course, the real reason I’ve quit watching The Man in the High Castle is that it’s on Amazon Prime, which I don’t have, and the picture & sound on my illegal stream were so bad. So maybe there’s more to it that I will never learn about.

On Seeing a Shrink / The Problem of Over-Reading Television, Pt 2: The Leftovers and the Lost Effect

1. On Seeing a Shrink

    The first time I can remember going to a psychiatrist was sometime in my late teens. I had been fighting with my mom a lot, over stuff that now seems so picayune as to be obscure, and my parents (rightly) suspected that there was more to my attitude problems than being a teenager. I, of course, resented it. I don’t really remember what I would have been “right” about in those fights, but I was sure that I was right about whatever I was fighting with my mom about, and it felt to me that my parents were responding to my perfectly reasonable objections to their opinions and actions by trying to get me bunged up in the loony bin.

    I realize now that this wasn’t what was going on at all. Not to blow up anybody’s spot, but mental illness clearly runs in both sides of my family, to varying degrees. The family tree is liberally strewn with little black decorations: people who drank the pain away, others who grew known for being caustic and difficult, still more prone to black moods in which they saw conspiracy in every corner. My parents saw in me what they had seen in other people that they loved. But at the time it just pissed me off. I believe this period was the first time when I had a major depressive episode.

    I’ve always been chronically prone to dissatisfaction, and occasionally given over to dark moods, but it’s only happened two or three times that I became so depressed that I lost touch with reality. When I’m in these periods, they seem all-consuming, and obsessively, totally real. It’s not “sadness” — I can’t think of a less accurate word, actually; I’m very rarely sad — it’s something else. I am, quite literally, disturbed. I sink into paranoia and obsession, I have difficulty sleeping at night and difficulty doing anything else in the day. Total anhedonia is also a problem, which tends to lead to excessive drinking, which doesn’t help with the not-in-touch-with-reality thing. Now, when I’m just run-of-the-mill anxious and restless, I have a hard time getting inside that feeling. I can describe it for you, but it’s so faraway that I can’t conceptualize what it’s like any better than you can, probably.

    Anyway, I’ve covered that territory before. What I was going to say was that, when my parents sent me to that shink, I resented it. (Didn’t help that he was technically a child psychologist.) So I went to the library and looked up the symptoms of a disease I knew I didn’t have, and tricked the psychiatrist into thinking I had it. This was all part of a very shitty, adolescent superiority complex I had (which is in slightly — slightly — better check now), which largely manifested as a need to prove that I was smarter than everybody, mostly as a means of humilating them and making myself feel better. This shrink prescribed me some drugs, which I was smart enough not to take, thank God. Later, I went to another shrink, ostensibly to treat the mental illness I had convinced the first shrink I had, the mental illness which is not the mental illness I do have, and I decided to fool her, too. She was a little wilier, but after a few months I had proved to my own satisfaction that psychiatry was a scam and that these psychiatrists in particular were idiots. I took Zoloft for a while, but I never noticed it did anything other than make my dick malfunction. So I quit that.

    The next shrink I saw was a clinical psychiatrist who practiced in a big old building in one of the fanciest parts of Portland; I seem to remember sessions with him were outrageously expensive. Because I was young and chronically irresponsible, I (A) did not have health insurance, (B) tended to skip sessions, and (C) had a hard time remembering to pay the bills. Combine this with the fact that the guy I was seeing seemed to talk to me about basketball a lot, and my ongoing suspicion that the whole thing was some kind of confidence game, and not a lot got done in those sessions. I was put back on anti-depressants, this time Celexa, and again I didn’t notice much change — I was sweating more, that was basically it. At least he had correctly diagnosed me with clinical depression, instead of an array of things I didn’t have. Shortly after I moved out of town and quit seeing him, he lost his license because he’d been prescribing pills to his patients and then buying them back off of them. I don’t even remember his name. If you look up the archives of Willamette Week from 2003 or ’04, you’ll find a story about him. He was on the cover.

    Since then, I’ve kept psychiatry at arm’s length. When I was in graduate school I had another one of the really serious episodes, the ones where I lost track of reality and quit sleeping for a few months. I went to see a staff psychiatrist at the University of Minnesota. She put me on Zoloft again. Again, I gained weight and my sex life got screwed up. It was either a solution to a problem I didn’t have, or the wrong solution to a problem I did have. I’ve never really figured it out.

    The major difference is that by then I had a stronger sense that there was something wrong with me. I mean, I had always had a faint idea that I didn’t fit in, I wasn’t a real person, I wasn’t functioning how other people did. Things had been developing, however, and I’d come to feel genuinely broken. But when I tangled with the mental health system, it didn’t offer me what I needed — what, probably, those shrinks I had manipulated and fooled back when I was in college had been offering. I didn’t need a pill to stop me feeling bummed out. I needed help changing my habits. I needed to drink less, figure out how to sustain a real relationship, and quit feeling like a fraud at every adult endeavor I undertook. There’s no pill for that.

    So I’ve started seeing a shrink again. I’m hoping that coming at it honestly, really hoping to change some stuff, will make the process work better. Who knows, right?

2. The Problem of Over-Reading TV, pt 2: The Leftovers and the Lost Effect

    The other day I was on some internet forum on which people were talking about Damon Lindelhof & Tom Perotta’s televisual adaptation of Perotta’s Rapture-fest novel, The Leftovers. (See here for part one of this post.) Much of the discussion consisted of one of two things: people complaining about how the show was just going to fail to deliver on its promises, like Lost did; and people dissecting its alleged “mysteries” for clues as to how they would be resolved.

    Far be it from me to tell people how to enjoy the media they consume, but — holy shit, all of these people are watching the show wrong. The Leftovers is a show with some things in common with Lost: a head writer; an ensemble cast; an interesting mix of science fiction and naturalistic drama; a willingness to do weird shit largely for the purpose of fucking with its viewers’ heads. But The Leftovers also illustrates, at least to me, what Lindelhof appears to have learned from the Lost experience — how to use an air of portent and mystery without promising answers that are bound to be disappointing.

    I mean, the first clue here is right there at the heart of the show. I said in the last post that the premise of Lost was a question: “What is this island, and how did these people come to be on it?” That’s just not true of The Leftovers. The newer show does center around a troubling, mysterious event: one autumn evening, 2% of the world’s population vanishes — not dies, but vanishes, leaving behind no bodies or explanations. The thing is, The Leftovers only rarely asks the question, “Who were those people, and how did they disappear?” It only ever comes up when it’s organic that one of the characters or institutions involved in the show might be asking the quesiton. The show itself does not seem interested in that question. That’s the big difference between Lost and The Leftovers. It’s why The Leftovers is a more finely-crafted show. It may also be why the show lacks a little of its antecedent’s manic inventiveness, but these are the tradeoffs one makes in art.

    Illustrative of this is a character from The Leftovers’ first season: a bald, middle-aged guy who goes around killing dogs (Michael Gaston). The series’ protagonist, Kevin (Justin Thoreaux), keeps encountering him out at night. Sometimes they have offscreen encounters when Kevin is sleepwalking. The character is freaky and weird. There is also never any implication that he knows more or better than the viewer does. He’s somebody who has observed a phenomenon: after the Departure (the series’ name for the Rapture-like event at its start), some dogs appear to have become irretrievably feral. They’re dangerous, they need to be disposed of. Watching whatever happened drove them insane. Maybe most people don’t recognize it, but these dogs need to be gotten rid of. This is the kind of thing that the viewer, if she lived in the world of the show, could deduce for herself, if she had the bravery to.

    And that’s what’s really important: the character matters more as an allegory than as a mystery, and his mystery never really drives the story. He stands in for the understanding that a lot of people share, that it’s sometimes impossible to surpress — that disorder is a flinch away, and the only way to maintain a society and a coherent reality is to battle disorder with disorder. Kevin is a police chief; this man is a vigilante. Kevin has a choice: does he combat disorder with the tools provided to him by the law, or does he do it by any means necessary? This mirrors a choice he has to make about a cult called the Guilty Remnant, a cult which has absorbed his wife and is threatening order in the little town in which he is police chief. That he encounters the dog-killer character while sleepwalking is not a mystery, but instead a profoundly troubling question about the human psyche: are we who we are when we think, and make choices, or are we who we are when living out the unfiltered processes of our brains?

    On Lost, the dog-killer character would probably perform a much different role. The dogs would drive a couple of episodes. We’d worry about his motivations. He would still be functioning as an allegory — part of Lost’s genius was its ability to ask big, sometimes ugly questions about the nature of society — but he’d also be a plot point, in a way that he’s just not in The Leftovers.

    But some people will persist in reading The Leftovers as though it were Lost. I can’t tell you why, but I have some guesses. Probably chief among them is that Lindelhof himself is attached. It’s natural to expect his next show to be similar to his last show. (It is, actually, just not in this specific way.) And it’s true that strange things happen on The Leftovers. But I also think that part of what has happened is that the infinite combination of the internet and science fiction television has destroyed some people’s ability to appreciate TV as anything other than a series of of clues that lead to a solution: not just, What are the whispers in the jungle?, but Will Lorelai choose Christopher or Luke? And I’m just not sure that’s a very good way to watch most shows, even if it’s kinda Damon Lindlhof’s own damn fault that you’re watching The Leftovers in this way.

    So what does it mean that the country of Australia keeps coming up in The Leftovers? (Kevin’s father claims to be interested in moving there; a nutty prophet-type who lives on top of a pillar in the show’s second season appears to be corrosponding with someone there.) I saw a certain amount of dissection of this question on the above-mentioned internet message board. You know what I think it means? I think it means two things:

    (1) Damon Lindelhof is having a little fun with his fans, who remember that Oceanic Flight 815 departed from Sydney, Australia before crashing on the Island.

    (2) There is somewhere very far away, and though it, too, has been affected by the same disaster, it seems like a clean slate to people who have never been there before. It is clean, and unmarked by the memories of the departed here in America. It’s about a common grief fantasy: escape.

    Anyhow, what I’m saying is that reading The Leftovers for clues and mysteries is a boring, and liable to be unrewarding, exercise. It’s a show that really does reward close reading in a different way: the characters and themes that course through it. What does it mean that a woman who lost her whole family might hire a prostitute to shoot her while she wears Kevlar? What happens to teenage culture when its already foreshoretened view of consequences is complicated by an event that emphasizes mass mortality? How do you love after loss? Raise children? Move on? That’s the stuff you should read closely.

    (Note: the first season of The Leftovers is very grim stuff. That’s probably a different post, if I get around to writing it. The second season is brighter and more colorful, in more ways than one.)

Lost, The Leftovers, and the Problem of Over-Reading Television, pt 1: The Beautiful Failure

    In some degree, Damon Lindelof kinda has it coming with The Leftovers. If you don’t recall, Lindelof was one of the minds behind Lost, which appears to be, despite its status as a failure, the most influential TV show of the last many years. In fact, it seems likely that it was Lindelof’s interests that chiefly drove the show’s interests — JJ Abrams directed the pilot and then noped out, the way he would do later with one of Lost’s progeny, Fringe; the other executive producer was Carlton Cuse, a more experienced TV producer whose previous (and subsequent) work lacks the tinge of mad genius that made Lost what it was. When it was announced that Lindelof was teaming up with Tom Perotta (author of Election and Little Children, among other pop-literary bestsellers) to turn Perotta’ s rapture riff, The Leftovers, into a TV show, I was both excited and skeptical. I hadn’t read The Leftovers — still haven’t — but I’d enjoyed some of Perotta’s other books, which tend to be satirical tales about class in white suburbia. They’re a little old-fashioned, but they don’t apologize for that fact. And Lindelof — well. I had loved Lost, and I had hated Lost, as one can only hate something one actually loves at bottom.

    The results have been interesting, if not exactly great all the time. The show has been polarizing; it’s been criticized for being boring, or depressing, or overly focused on upper-middle-class white people, all of which were to some extent true of its first season — but if one assumes good faith and supposes that it’s depressing because it’s about depression, it takes on that tinge of genius that Lost also had, at least sort of. Another criticism of the show that I’ve seen more than once is that it’s too much like Lost, in that there are too many mysteries, and they’ll never get solved in the 30-40 hours of storytelling time the show has. And I think that’s off base — but I also think it’s kinda Lindelof’s fault that he’s receiving this criticsm. Because Lost taught us to watch TV like this. Lost was liberally sprinkled with mystery, and a lot of its MO seemed to be to keep us guessing about what the answers to those mysteries would be. That was its major mistake, if you ask me. It used the mysteries too often as the engines of narrative, leading us to expect answers to questions that were fundamentally unanswerable. While The Leftrovers has done a lot of work to avoid this pitfall, people who followed Lindelof over from Lost are primed to read it the way they read Lost. And that’s fundamentally the wrong way to watch the show. The mysteries here are set-dressing, metaphors — what fantasy enthusiasts call world-building. Leaving aside what Lindelof and Perotta have said publicly about the show, I think the evidence is there in what’s onscreen.

The Beautiful Failure

    Here’s the thing about Lost: not only is it basically a failure, it was also a great TV show. It is, in fact, the only show I can think of wherein this was possible, at least up until the point at which it was released. How can a TV show fail and still be great?

    I can tell you how it failed. After six seasons, Lost fundamentally failed to deliver on a lot of its promises. Not refused, but failed. The fundamental premise of the show is a question: what is this island, and why did these people come to be on it? Waves of portent crashed across the characters, as they are told over and over again things such as “the island wants you to come back”. There’s a foreshortening of free will on the island. Magical things happen there — people go mad, pregnancies end disastrously (except when they don’t!), the dead appear to the living in spectral form, polar bears wander the tropics, people travel through time — the island travels through time! TIME TRAVEL IS KILLING CHARLOTTE! TIME TRAVEL IS KILLING US ALL!!!! The show heavily implies that it’s going to tell us how and / or why this state of affairs came to be, not least by occasionally answering a question about such matters. It told us who the mysterious Others, who haunted the first season, were, even if it did ask several questions in answering one. It solved the riddles in the backstories of secretive characters, like the con-man Sawyer, or the fugitive Kate. And so it was natural, I think, for the viewer to expect answers. And the show just ran out of time to give them. I think on some level it never had answers for some of the questions.

    I think the most emblematic of its failures is the character of Walt. In the first season, Walt is a 10-year-old boy who has the misfortune of being stranded on the island in the care of his estranged father. Like every character, his backstory is rife with complexity and secrecy, mostly centered around the custody battle his mother and father waged over him. But throughout, it’s heavily implied that there is some extremely bad mojo swirling around poor Walt. It appears that animals have a tendency to commit suicide around him. His stepfather gladly releases custody when his mother dies, and it seems that he’s as much spooked by the kid as he is unwilling to take on the burden of single fatherhood. The bad mojo around Walt would appear to be plugged into the bat mojo that is sort of ambient around the island. Walt is, the first couple of seasons heavily imply, Important. He might be The Key to Everything.

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Malcolm David Kelley as Walt

    But the show had a problem: the kid who was playing Walt was aging way faster than the character was. One of Lost’s many innovations was its telescoped timeline: over the course of its first three seasons or so, only a few months pass, as the Lostaways (as we used to call them in the chatty rooms) grapple with the many challenges of being not only marooned, but marooned on an island that may or may not be evil and is certainly populated by malevlolent forces.* That was all fine as long as your actors were adults — a little bit of makeup, a certain suspension of disbelief, and it was always possible to buy the idea that Kate was 25, Hurley was 30, Jack was 40, and Locke was 50, no matter how much real-world time had passed. But Malcolm David Kelley, who played Walt, hit puberty hard, and had visibly grown several inches and become much less cute by the the end of the second season. The idea that he was 10 years old was preposterous on its face. And the show had no answer for this dilemma, really. The only real solution was to write him off, and then pretend that pretty much none of his storyline had ever happened. What do you mean, there was a kid who was supposed to be at the center of this whole narrative? His father remained an intermittent player (until being spectacularly greased), but Walt was shipped off to the mainland to live a fairly normal, bird-suicide-free life.

* This was one of the ways in which the show taught us to watch television. I remember when I was watching early seasons being baffled by the glacial pace at which time seemed to be moving in the narrative. In some measure this was thematic — Lost was always about time and its vicissitudes — but in another it was simply a compression tactic, meant to create claustrophobia. Many shows, notably Breaking Bad, would employ this tactic in ensuing years. Other than stunt productions like 24, TV to that point had usually either existed in a suspended land of no-time (eg any sitcom you ever watched) or generally tracked with real-world time, meaning that there would be an Xmas episode around Xmas, and Buffy’s birthday is in the dead of winter, etc.

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Malcolm David Kelley as Taller Ghost Walt, not that long later.

    But still, the show was addictive, compelling watching, in part because it was doing stuff that no TV show had really dared to do before. I still remember when I was watching the first season — which I did on DVD, back when that was how people binge-watched stuff — and I realized, Hey, this is kind of a sci-fi show. Of course that seems absurd now, as the show really leaned into its sci-fi trappings as it went along, but it was actually possible to miss that for its first several episodes, as it mostly seemed to be a sort of high-class soap opera with arty film-school trappings and a shipwreck narrative. Its genre bending can seem a little bloated in retrospect, that that was part of what was so cool about the show when it started back. Its unusual structure (now so common as to be almost conventional), with present action stitched through with flashback, allowed it to be a slightly different show every week, if it wanted. When Hurley was the focus, it was a delirious dramedy about a man on the edge of sanity. With Sawyer it was often a funny crime story with a certain Butch-and-Sundance flair (with the gifted Josh Holloway playing both Butch and Sundance). Kate’s stories were cat-and-mouse fugitive stuff. Charlie’s were rock-n-roll redemption. Sun and Jin were a mob drama. Claire and Jack — perhaps fittingly, given that they turned out to be siblings — were basically soap opera. In fact, all of them were soap opera, really, but they had spooky, thrilling trappings.

    And the show boasted whole, huge characters — an overabundance of them, really, such that one of its main sins was to rob its viewer of time with one character by spending too much time with another. It knew these characters well enough that hilarity could be milked by pairing opposites, as win Korean mobster Jin and Mexican-American lottery winner Hurley end up in a sort of Marx brothers routine after Hurley steps on a sea anenome. It dropped these characters into roles where they would be expected to act strangely, just to see what they would do. Unlike a lot of sci-fi shows, which often feel like they’re struggling to stuff actors into scenarios without coming up with characters first, Lost teemed with compelling stories about interesting people.

    But its failures seemed to be part-and-parcel with its strengths. You couldn’t just divorce the drama from the trappings; part of the show’s genius was the way it used a sort of waxing sense of threat from the past as a way of creating its atmosphere. On some fundamental level, Lost plugged into a force that you would call nostalgic if it weren’t, you know, destructive: existential nuclear angst. Much of the show’s drama takes place in concrete bunkers, buildings that recall 60s suburbs, and quasi-military testing facilities. Once it really engages in its core mythology, there’s always the possibility that some ill-understood force will be unleashed and kill everybody. There is, in fact, a nuclear bomb, which plays a critical role in the show’s best season, its fourth.* The lapse in time between the construction of these structures and the show’s current timeline, which took place mostly in 2004, was also the source of a lot of the mystery. That 20-year lacuna between the show’s Cold War past and its Millenial present is both its most potent weapon, atmospherically speaking, and one of those many mysteries that never quite got solved.

* Not coincidentally, I think, this was also its shortest season, interrupted as it was by the writers’ strike.

    And so Lost was a beautiful failure. But it it also asked us to watch TV in a certain way, a way that was also highly symbiotic with the internet age, when people had a space to come together and obsess over its minutiae.

See this space tomorrow for pt 2, about LIndelof's new show, The Leftovers

Notes Partway through a Friends Rewatch

    In baseball people talk a lot about “adjusting for era”. Baseball has been played professionally for so long, and in so many different places and styles, that there’s a solid argument to be made that, though the rules remained unchanged, the game itself is several different games played under the same name. Segregation, equipment, training techniques, drug use, evolving tactics, the advent of the personal computer, artifical turf, the influx of Latino and Asian players, mallparks — the list of ways in which the game has changed goes on and on. Though the myth of baseball is that it’s immutable and eternal, in truth it’s a game in constant flux.

    Part of adjusting for era is “timelining” — for a variety of reasons, it’s fairly safe to say that the average ballplayer of 2015 is better than the average ballplayer of 1915. It’s a difficult, and therefore controversial, task. A lot of it boils down to questions like: “Just how good would Ty Cobb be if you dropped him in centerfield today?” Some people are really allergic to the notion that a player of Cobb’s caliber might not really be that good by today’s standards, though it seems patently obvious to me. I’m not going to get into a lot of debates about why — this post isn’t really about baseball — but suffice it to say that I keep coming down on the same side. Baseball players, like television shows, are much better than they used to be.

    See, what I really want to write about is not baseball, but television. For reasons that I’m kind of at a loss to enumerate, I’ve been watching Friends in a lot of my idle time over the last week or two, to the point that I’m almost halfway done with a show that lasted way longer than I remembered (ten seasons, per Wikipedia). And I’m tempted to try to timeline the show in the way one might a player like Ty Cobb. Friends was one of the truly titanic hits of the 1990s, the last period before cable channels and low-risk micronetworks like the WB started putting together quality shows that ultimately raised the bar for TV everywhere. The Sopranos began airing in 1999, during Friends’ fifth season. A lot of people see that show as the watershed moment when everything changed, and the path was paved for everything from Breaking Bad to Game of Boobs and all else in between. Friends is a resolutely pre-watershed show, a multi-camera laughtrack sitcom on which serialization is spotty at best, very little changes episode-to-episode, and there are never any gestures toward realism or real stakes for a group of beautiful, wacky twentysomethings. I’ve read some of the early reviews, which now seem strange, as though they’re about a show that was more interesting or daring than Friends was, but I guess that’s because I live in the future. Hindsight and foresight, etc.

    And so I’m tempted to forgive the show’s many foibles, the same way I would look at Ty Cobb and say, “Hey, maybe half of ballplayers these days are faster than him, but he had blazing speed for his time.” A lot of the things that feel artificial and bad about Friends are simply conventions of the sitcom that have largely been exploded in the 20 years since it went on the air: so what if everything’s airbrushed; so what if there’s an audience that laughs when you’re supposed to laugh and goes woooooo when characters they like kiss or gives a big hand when the star of another sitcom wanders onstage;* so what if nothing ever really changes and it takes years for anybody to learn lessons most of us learn in a couple of weeks. That’s just TV, or it was in the 1990s, and had been for decades before. Right?

*This was a common gambit for Friends. In its first season it has Helen Hunt playing her character from Mad About You (I had to think long and hard as to why she was eliciting the canned applause), and features a long run from Tom Selleck, still sporting his Magnum moustache. As the show became a titanic success (it never ranked outside the top 5 in the Neilsens from its 2nd through its 10th seasons), this came almost to be self-parody, as the celebrity guest stars included peripheral members of Britain’s royal family, Aniston’s real-life beau Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts, Jean-Claude van Damme, George Clooney as a doctor in a parody of his role on ER, Robin Williams, Billy Crystal, Bruce Willis, Charlton Heston as Himself, Sean Penn, Susan Sarandon, Jeff Goldblum, Danny DeVito, and a laundry list of others.

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Nice hair, everybody.

    Well, yeah, I guess. But the fact of the matter is that a lot of shows were both bound by these conventions, and vastly better than Friends was. I guess because comedy has always been kind of sneered at by the entertainment industry, it found a home on TV long before there were very good dramas there. Nearly all the shows that anybody still watches from before about 1980 are comedies: Dick van Dyke, Mary Tyler Moore, I Love Lucy, Barney Miller. These shows were attracting the top available talent in the world of comedy, both in the writers’ rooms and onscreen. And though drama began to catch up in the 80s and has since gone rocketing on past, that remained true for a long time. Still does, really. A huge number of sitcoms, even ones that aren’t very good, are going to be overstocked with performers (especially performers) who are hugely talented and hilarious.

    Just to take one show that has been kinda on my mind lately, The Drew Carey Show. Drew Carey was a middling show that had a fair amount of success — it ran 9 seasons, but never cracked the top 10, peaking at #13 for a couple of years in the middle of its run. On this show, this show that I remember almost nothing about other than that its main character was annoying, there were four people who you could probably style as some kind of genius: Ryan Stiles, Dietrich Bader, Christa Miller, and Craig Ferguson. That’s four hilarious performers, probably all powerful enough as presences to anchor their own show, just floating around the edges of Drew Carey’s semihit sitcom. You can perform this kind of trick with almost any sitcom, from a huge hit (all four of Frasier’s main cast members would probably be the funniest person you’ve ever met), to a cult classic (Get a Life starred Chris Elliott and Brian Doyle-Murray, and boasted Bob Odenkirk and Charlie Kaufmann in the writers’ room), to some notable bombs (Buddies starred Dave Chappelle; Cavemen featured Nick Kroll). You know all those people who have Comedy Central shows and hit podcasts and write books and stuff now? For years, they toiled as a sort of comedia dellarte for Hollywood sitcoms.

    Friends just doesn’t have any of that. Other than Lisa Kudrow, who plays the dingbat hippie chick Phoebe, and maybe — maybe — Matthew Perry, who plays the sarcastic wimpy homophobe Chandler, none of the stars of the show are particularly notable for their comic chops. Mostly they’re notable for being cute, white, and stylishly dressed.** Some of them — especially the schlubby Eeyore, David Schwimmer, who plays Ross, on whom more anon — are downright bad. There’s a reason that the show is often at its best when it opens up its world to incorporate the friends’ bosses and families: because then you can rope in some real dynamos, even if the show did remain beholden to stunt casting. (I mean, I know Terri Garr and Elliot Gould are funny, but was it really necessary to go spelunking through the caves of 70s movie stars to find Phoebe’s mom and Monica’s dad?)

** What was accounted “stylish” in the 90s was considerably less offensive than 10 years previously, but still, there are a lot of pleated pants and big ties and floppy haircuts.

    I’m often left with the feeling that Kudrow is battling bad scripts and a lame supporting cast to a sort of pyrrhic victory, landing a few funny punches before being swamped by a wave of mugging, whining, and shouting. It seems weird to me now that the breakout star of the show’s early going was Jennifer Aniston, whose Rachel is so generic that there are still guessing games going on about the character’s ethnic background, when the answer is clearly telegraphed in the dialogue, if not the performance. (Yes, Rachel is Jewish. And yes, she comes from Long Island money. Not that you’d be able to tell from Aniston’s blandly middle-American performance.) Cox is marginally more competent, but the boys — oh, the boys of Friends. Where to begin?

    Really, the huge, ugly, terrible problem with Friends’ early seasons is Ross, and his odious crush on / relationship with Rachel. Ross is a mopey, whiny “nice guy” of the sort who these days seem to spend most of their time threatening to cut women’s heads off on Twitter; maybe this is just a context thing, but his constant mooning and attempts at manipulation seem gross and insincere at the remove of 20 years — maybe, in 1995, nerds were still so downtrodden and pathetic-seeming that we were meant to feel sorry for him; in 2015, he’s the guy with the coolest job (paleontologist sounds awesome), the most steady income, and by far the weirdest relationship to women. Joey (Matt LeBlanc), the promiscuous hunk next door, is often depicted as the pig — but it’s Ross who’s always lying and hiding things in order to get women to like him. Joey just likes sex. And I get it, Ross has a bit of a tough go of it. As the show starts, it’s explained that he married a closeted lesbian straight out of college and has now been rocked deeply by her affair with a woman he thought was merely her friend. He’s 26 (? I think), he doesn’t have a lot of experience, and a girl he had a hopeless crush on in high school suddenly plops right back into his social circle. I think that would throw anybody for a loop. But Jesus, does he have to mope and moan so much about it? Does he have to be secretive about it for so long? Gawd. I found myself muting his scenes.

    And then, of course, the preposterous notion that this approach would actually win over a beautiful and relatively confident young woman like Rachel, who appears to have a lot of money, a lot of time on her hands, and the sexual smorgasbord of New York City at her feet. The instant the show’s writers decided to dump all their eggs in this basket, they made a huge blunder. (I was going to say a costly blunder, but I can’t imagine a scenario in which the show made more money, so maybe it wasn’t costly.) It forced them to write scenes for two characters with no chemistry, and to try to get us to believe that, once all is said and done, Rachel has strong, lingering feelings for the jealous loser who ruined a whole year of her life. It prevented them from sending Ross somewhere far away — Kazakhstan, maybe, or the moon — from whence it would be difficult to return, so that we wouldn’t have to deal with his moping and whining. And after the characters broke up it injected a tone of hostility into the show that really made it hard to watch for quite a while.

    Which is where we get into the stuff where I start wondering about timelining. A lot of the features of the show I find most annoying also seem like maybe they were more common before the advent of the cable prestige show or the online binge watch:

    (1) Is Chandler in a relationship with Janice or not? (Sub-question: does the fact that the show was created and staffed largely by Jews change how we feel about the fact that Janice reads like a broad, anti-Semitic stereotype?) Throughout the show’s third and fourth seasons, sometimes she’s there with him, sometimes she’s not, and it’s hard to tell when or why that's going to happen. They’ll break up in one episode and then be companionably sharing a couch at Central Perk the next, with no comment. It’s baffling.

    (2) Secrecy is a theme. Ross’ crush on Rachel is a secret, which I guess kinda makes sense, though it goes on way too long. Chandler and Monica’s relationship is a secret from everybody, and then a secret from everybody but Joey, then a secret from everybody but Joey and Rachel, and finally only a secret from Ross, for reasons that are never adequately explained. People do insane things to keep these secrets, things with consequences far greater than simply owning up to the truth — as, for instance, when Monica pretends to have had a one-night-stand with Joey, followed by a long-term stalking kind of situation, all in an attempt to keep Ross and Rachel from figuring out that she’s in the midst of a simple, committed relationship with Chandler, a fairly nice, steadily-employed guy who Ross and Rachel already know and like. WHAT?

    (3) “Don’t touch my butt. If you touch my butt, it means we’re gay.” A running theme in the friendship between Joey and Chandler is that various things that might occur between them push some kind of “no homo” button, and must be warded off as though they are spells that will in fact turn them gay. (The unstated thesis being that homosexuality is gross or unpleasant in some way.) It feels like there’s one of these in every episode — the one I remember best is from a football game, in which Chandler requests that Joey not stand directly behind him waiting for the snap of the ball, as that brings Joey’s hands perilously close to Chandler’s butt. This is one of those things where I’m a little lost as to how much we should be timelining this kind of thing. On the one hand, this kind of weird paranoia was a feature of many male friendships back in the 90s, especially for young, insecure men. But I don’t remember it featuring heavily in most shows of the time. Were there a lot of jokes about how Jerry and George were afraid of crossing the line into gayness on Seinfeld? Were Norm and Cliff worried about that stuff on Cheers? If they were, I don’t remember it. I’ve been trying to give this the most charitable reading I can imagine — for instance, that this is a self-conscious mocking of this kind of behavior, and that Joey and Chandler are the butts of these jokes. But it doesn’t feel that way, not to me, and it’s returned to so many times that it begins to feel like an obsession.

    (4) Dating merry-go-round. I guess this is just what the show was about, but seriously, don’t these guys ever think about anything other than dating? Don’t they have thoughts about. . . anything else? I guess that Ross and Joey are notionally sports fans, and Monica is into food, but mostly even their tastes are defined by dating and sex: the boys’ favorite TV show is Baywatch, for instance; Rachel keeps a shitty job because she has a cute client who she might want to date; even Phoebe, who at least appears to have some interests and hobbies, picks and chooses restaurants and workplaces based on the cute guys who are there.

    (5) Backstory, with the American History Guys. When some form of backstory is needed, it’s often simply fabricated, and inserted into the show suddenly, with a sort of, “You remember that guy, don’t you?” speech. Again, if I felt like this were being done knowingly, with a wink to the audience, this might work as a sort of meta-joke. But that’s 21st century TV thinking there. (Or at least, it isn’t Friends TV thinking. Friends resists the meta, the commentarial, the considered, the ironic, the self-aware, and the edgy at all costs.) This is just: we need Chandler to have had a friend who he dropped because he dated Monica and they broke up. Notwithstanding Monica’s “I’m so unlucky in love!” schtick (almost as tired and bad as Ross’ mopey niceguy routine), they just shove it right in there, make two jokes about it, and forget it forever.

    The list goes on and on, obviously. Can you see how I’m thinking about timelining? A lot of this stuff was common practice in TV before the golden age you keep hearing about. TV was a safe world where nothing really mattered and certainly little ever changed, and Friends was not operating out of any desire whatsoever to change any of that. So is it Friends’ fault that it was making what I account “mistakes” but which at the time were just the way things were done? Probably not. Probably I just have unrealistic expectations for a show that only seems current because I’m watching it on Netflix and I’m old enough to remember when it was on the air.***

***I didn’t watch Friends when it was on, by the way, though I’ve been surprised by the amount of ambient Friends knowledge that has leaked into my brain. I came into the show basically knowing who all the characters are — even some of the peripheral ones, like Rachel’s creepy boss Gunther — and have not been particularly surprised by any development. Did I watch a bunch of this show and forget about it? Seems possible.

    And it is, very occasionally, funny. I mean, there’s no moment that equals even a smidge of what Niles gets up to in the early seasons of Frasier, but now and again something happens — as when Joey locks Chandler in a box for Thanksgiving dinner, as a punishment for having kissed Joey’s girlfriend — that is wacky enough to get some laughs. And the show does get a little better in its middle seasons, not least because Cox and Aniston and Matt Leblanc, who plays Joey, become competent, if not brilliant, comedic actors. (Schwimmer, unfortunately, remains a dark cloud on the show’s horizon. Perry and Kudrow were fine from the start.) But it’s not that great.

    So why do I keep watching it? I was gonna make some kind of similitude involving the show’s title, about how, despite its flaws, it offers companionship — I think I’ve read that a lot of people relate to TV characters in that way without even knowing it. But I don’t like these people. If they were my friends, I’d be trying to find new ones. So — I don’t know. I’m at a loss. I should probably quit.

Dos and Don’ts, Week of 21 August 2015

Do

Watch Wet Hot American Summer (both the movie & TV show)

Watch Hurricane of Fun, about the making of Wet Hot American Summer (I’m not kidding about this)

Listen to this spellbinding episode of Love + Radio, “Greetings from Coney Island”

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Walk somewhere you would normally drive to

Read Joan Didion’s The White Album

Read Sarah Hepola’s Blackout

Watch the trailer for the mountain climbing doc Meru:

Vote Deez Nuts in 2016

The only candidate who is taking this election seriously enough.

Don’t

Sleep in and miss the sunlight

Refer to your pet as your “son” or “daughter”, or yourself as its “mom” or “dad”

Foist reggae onto the customers at your coffee shop

Refer to yourself as “a creative” because you write or draw or do macramé

Worry too much about Donald Trump, there’s nothing you can do to change him or it or anything

Dream a Dream with Me

    I cry at TV shows a lot, but always at a weird moment. When they’re actually trying to get you to weep openly — when a character has a slow, drawn out death, most of the time — I’m dry as dirt. But then, sometime later, I lose it for no reason.

    At the end of Six Feet Under there are a few big cry moments, but the first one is the long dream, followed by Nate’s death, which is simultaneously sudden and the most-telegraphed punch in the history of TV. Nate’s had brain troubles since — what, is it the first episode? And he’s spent the whole season talking about how short and precious life is. But they fake you out, send him into the hospital with bleeding in his brain only to have him wake up. I remember the sensation of watching the episode the first time and feeling cheated. Like, were they seriously not going to have the guts to kill of Nate? Or were they gonna make us wait till the finale? It seemed like a cheap move for a show that had never been afraid to put its characters in danger. But then, at the end of “Ecotone”, Nate and his brother David fall asleep next to each other in the hospital, something mystical happens in their dreams, and David awakes to find that Nate’s gone, lying there lifeless with his eyes wide open.

    Maybe it’s the fakeout shock that kept me from crying, but in the very next episode, I lost it at a scene that barely had any content. David has made himself a checklist for the day. A lot of it involves setting up his brother’s funeral. He stands up from the kitchen to put on his tie and go to work — and that’s when I start bawling.

    I could go into a lot of personal shit about why that is, but I suspect I might just be reverse-engineering reasons. I think it’s really this: when people die, it’s not sad for them, because they’re gone. It’s sad for us. It’s those who live on who have to get up the next morning and put on a tie and make a list of things to do in their absence. And David, who is a character who is so often cold and remote, is now doing the thing he does, without the one person he really relied on to do that thing. It’s heartbreaking, even if it isn’t meant to be.

    My read on Six Feet Under’s relationships that the most important one, the one that holds the show together, is that between Nate & David. Maybe that’s because I have brothers and those are the most important relationships in my life. But it feels like the show understands that, too. It’s David who is there when Nate dies. It’s David who washes his body before burial. It’s David who is so overcome that he can’t help put his body in the ground.

    And it’s David who shares that last dream with Nate. I’ve now seen the episode twice, ten years apart, and I’ve watched it a couple of times on YouTube. And I still can’t figure out — I don’t think the show wants you to be able to figure out — who is dreaming in those last moments before Nate goes.

    It seems to me that there are three possibilities: (1) the dream is David’s, as he’s gifted a vision of his brother in the seconds before he moves on; (2) the dream is Nate’s, his mind telling him in his sleep that whatever is happening is happening; and (3) the dream is a shared dream, and something magical happens that allows Nate and David to say goodbye to one another, though neither of them yet knows they have to.

    The dream itself is pretty interesting: Nate wakes up in his old bed at the funeral home, he walks out the door to go jogging, and he meets David — but a different David. He’s a pot-smoking, sandals-wearing surf bum, and he takes Nate on a ride in the old van that they used to carry bodies in. (Michael C Hall’s acting as this otherwordly David is among the uncanniest things I’ve ever seen. He’s almost more natural as this hippie than he is as a straightlaced control freak.) Just as Nate decides that this really is David, that the clean-shaven guy who wears a suit nearly always was some kind of prolonged hallucination, they pull up at the beach, and their father, Nate, Sr, sticks his head back to let them know that they’re lost. They smoke some pot, get out of the van, and Nate decides to go for a swim. Then, suddenly, David is transformed back into the real David, the man in the suit, and he and Nate, Sr, watch Nate, Jr swim off into the Pacific Ocean, crying out, “It’s great! It’s really warm!”

    There’s evidence for every possible interpretation here. The dream starts when Nate falls asleep, and at first it follows him on a surreal dream-journey not unlike the various dream-journeys people have taken on this show. It’s his room, his old life that we start in. And the David we first meet is uncanny and not real. That feels like Nate’s dream.

    But the dream ends with David, as Nate swims away from shore, left alone with the memory of their father. If we’re in Nate’s dream now, why are we hanging around with his little brother, far from the action, with him transformed back into himself? And the dream ends when David wakes up, and hands off to David’s continuing life after Nate’s is over. That must be David’s dream, right?

    I think that the dual nature of the dream is the strongest argument for the “shared reality” interpretation of the dream. Though Six Feet Under often takes people’s behavior to bizarre places, and indulges in a certain amount of magical realism, the fact is that most of the time the show bites back against these things, and we’re left to understand them as fantasies or ephemera. I can’t remember another time when one of these fantasy sequences is left in the hands of more than one person — when any indication is given that it exists outside the mind of a single character, ie, that it actually happens. For a show so concerned with religion and so indulgent of surreal impulses, mysticism usually far from the picture. This time, at probably the series’ most important moment, mysticism seems possible.

    Now, maybe that’s a whimsical reading of what happens, or maybe I just didn’t see it right. But that’s how the dream reads to me. It’s kind of beautiful, isn’t it? And yet it didn’t make me cry.

    Of course, I did cry, both times, when I watched the big montage at the end of the finale, “Everybody’s Waiting”. I mean, I’m not a monster.

Dos and Don’ts, Week of 31 July 2015

Do

Read Station Eleven

Watch the first season of Six Feet Under

Read this Vox piece on the dangers of mob justice

Watch this video of an elephant calf meeting some birds:

Eat Cascadian Farm granola

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Fancy, no?

Listen to conductor Peter Phillips and The Tallis Scholars

Play The Last of Us on PS4

Listen to my friend Audrey Quinn on 99% Invisible, talking about the AIDS Ribbon

Watch the following gif over and over again.

Don’t

Watch the Minions movie (it blows)

Watch the second season of Six Feet Under

Read the comments on any article about Cecil the Lion

Try to talk to Mariners fans about Dustin Ackley

Run the Suncadia Half-Marthon (the course is too long and is mostly around a golf course)

Be a jerk

Her?

    Brenda Chenowith is ruining my Six Feet Under rewatch.

    I actually remember this sensation from when the show was on — the unfolding sense in the show’s second season that its main female character has become a nasty, destructive force, not only for the other characters on the show, but for the show itself. It’s not just that she’s serially unfaithful to the show’s original protagonist, Nate Fisher. It’s not just that she spends most of the season sour and depressed. It’s that the show doesn’t seem invested in realistically making her more than her bad acts. She’s allegedly got a genius-level IQ, but the only real evidence we have of her genius is that she talks down to everybody all the time. And what really happens, long before her dastardly deeds are outed and everyone has a reason to be mad at her, is that all of the other characters on the show spend all their time lecturing her on how awful she is. Nate: “You’re depressed and you won’t have sex with me!” Her mother: “You’re a drama queen and this isn’t about you!” Brother Billy: “Our relationship is toxic and I never want to see you again!” That last one is particularly rich, given that Billy spends 70% of the season absent, hospitalized after violent manic episode in which he tried to attack Brenda with a knife. He then shows back up, hair cut, beard trimmed, talking calmly about how it’s Brenda’s fault that he’s a psycho. He doesn’t even know all the stuff that the viewer knows, the stuff that really makes the character distasteful. It’s like the show can sense that its viewer is going to hate her, so it tries to give the viewer the pleasure of seeing her told off as often as possible, long before it makes any narrative sense.

    I quit watching Six Feet Under during its second season, way back when it was actually on the air. This was why. I eventually got caught up through the magic of binge-watching (back when we used to do that on DVD), but man. What a foul, ugly turn the show took in its second season. I’m wondering if I’m going to be able to stick it out, because my memory is that, while Brenda does stage a minor comeback in the likability department, everybody else takes a nosedive. And Lili Taylor’s clichéd nagging earth mother shows up. UGH. On a show that did originally did something most shows don’t even try — present whole, complex female characters (who aren’t superheroes) — it becomes a real shitfest of shrewish women who are constantly on the cases of the men in their lives.

    Anyway, enough about the seasons of my discontent: I meant to get to a related subject: the obnoxious show-ruiner. Many shows have had them. Brenda Chenowith is not the first hot mess to make a good show hard to take. I’m just gonna do some hot takes on a few, and I want it kept in mind that a lot of these are characters from shows I love. Most of them I managed to endure until they were written off, though the show didn’t always recover. (Or, in the case of Smallville, it never really finds its feet.)

I wish I could take credit for making this, but I didn't. I found it somewhere on the internet long ago.

    Cordelia, Angel. Cordelia was originally my favorite character on Angel, a sharp-witted, somewhat obnoxious party girl who grew up entitled enough that she’s willing to say exactly the thing that will puncture someone’s self-image. Though Charisma Carpenter was never really a masterful actor, she got hold of Cordelia’s comedy and could really fire home the punchlines. But the character slowly mutated into Saint Cordelia, a listeny-huggy-super-girl that the real Cordelia would have laughed out of Angel Investigations in the show's early seasons. Her vicious barbs became smarmy tough-love horseshitisms. But it wasn’t until she got kidnapped into the afterlife and then returned as a zomboid version of Cordelia that she became truly unsufferable — officious, obnoxious, disgusting (the incest vibe of Angel’s 4th season was almost too much for me) — and ultimately, the character wanders away from the actor’s strengths. Fred Burkle could be reborn as an imperious goddess because Amy Acker could play forbidding and icy with some skill. Cordelia just becomes flat and awful, not least because Carpenter can’t do what Acker would a season later.

    Kristina Braverman, Parenthood. This is one where it felt to me like the show just lost control of the character. Yeah, she was always self-righteous and entitled, but when she got cancer it just became a total shitfest of mopey whining and “what-about-me”-ism. Doesn’t help that she spends the whole show demanding special treatment for her autistic son at every turn, a move that the show clearly endorses as good parenting. This was another case of a show whose characters talked about a character in one way — Kristina is allegedly smart and competent and brave — when that character unfailingly acts otherwise — in truth, Kristina is just a shitty narcissist, like everybody else on the show. On a show that was always about pointlessly secretive, selfish assholes, Kristina’s plotline somehow managed to stand out. I gave up on Parenthood before its sixth season, because I found myself wishing she would have a relapse of her cancer and die. Did she? I hope so.

    Logan Huntzberger, Gilmore Girls. Gilmore Girls started coming off the rails in its last few seasons, especially as its grumpy love interest, Luke Daines, is transformed for no explicable reason into a total moron after he becomes engaged to the show’s protagonist, Lorelai. But it was Logan, a smug, smarmy rich kid who slots in as Rory’s college boyfriend who made the show insufferable to me. I suspect that this can mostly be laid at the feet of actor Matt Czuchry, whose chops seem to include smiling, smiling smugly, smiling in a shit-eating way, smiling disingenuously, and smiling with all his teeth. The character is glib and cruel, and despite the show’s attempts to rescue him, he never leaves the ghetto of “assholes that Rory is attracted to”, making every second dedicated to their romance feel like a gut-churning exercise in repelling the viewer.

    Andy Bernard, The Office. Maybe this wasn’t so much Andy’s fault — Ed Helms is certainly a better performer than any of the other actors on this list — as it is the show’s. The Office (US) had one season of finding its feet, two very strong seasons of workplace comedy and sweet romance, and then rapidly flanderized and lost momentum once Jim & Pam got together. Andy was introduced during its third season, but became an increasingly loud presence through the fourth, during which his cartoonish fits of rage and weird need to sing yanked the show farther and farther away from the cutting wit of its early seasons and turned it into just another wacky cartoon sitcom. Like I said, it’s possible that Andy wasn’t the driving source of the show’s failures. It’s more like he was emblamatic of a show that had no idea how to soldier on once its main plotline was wrapped up, but was forced to anyway by its status as anchor of a major network’s sitcom lineup. By halfway throug the fifth season, what had once been appointment viewing for me started piling up on the DVR. I still haven’t seen a second of the show from after that point, because it became such a gross self-parody during the Andy Bernard years.

    Lana Lang, Smallville. Clark Kent’s first girlfriend and the character who totally ruined what could have been a pretty good show (if you were willing to ignore its reactionary politics). Lana was boring, selfish, and dumb, and actor Kirsten Kreuk’s main move in the role was to whisper a lot when things got serious. Meanwhile, all the characters on the show talk about her as though she’s a lovely, outgoing, hilarious genius, in a mismatch even more glaring than the one on Parenthood. As it became clear that the show had no interest in treating Lana realistically, I lost interest in Smallville. Now and again I’ll catch an episode of its early seasons and think, This show was never any good in the first place, was it? So maybe Lana didn’t sink Smallville, but she was biggest hole in its hull from the start.

Short and Stupid: Half-Marathon Edition

1. I knew the course was going to be too long by the second mile. My GPS device was already registering mile markers well ahead of the course.

2. If I never run another race around a golf course — no matter how beautiful the surroundings — I’ll be fine. I don’t live in the Pacific Northwest so that I can spend all my time jogging through manicured stands of pine trees scattered between mowed lawns that happen to be close to some mountains.

3. I almost threw up at the end. I was worried some people who I’d passed several miles back were trying to run me down, so I attempted to sprint the last 200 meters. Then I thought I was going to die; then I noticed they weren’t back there; then it took everything in my power to keep from ejecting the little food I had in my stomach.

4. We did veer out of the golf course and run through Roslyn, WA, where the exteriors of Northern Exposure were shot. Northern Exposure was probably the first adult TV show I ever got into, when I was early in high school and the show was late in its run. I remember I used to flip back and forth between it and an MTV soap opera called Catwalk, which was about a band of some sort.

5. A quick glance at Wikipedia tells me that Neve Campbell may have got her first big break in Catwalk, so maybe I wasn’t being as silly as it sometimes seems in memory.

6. Here’s a picture of the medal, in case you’re a cynic:

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I never know what to do with these things.

7. It was, far and away, the worse race I’ve ever run in. Worse, even, than the Crater Lake Rim Run, which was a marathon run at 7000 feet through the southern Cascades, which had a two-mile-long hill at the 22 mile mark. It probably didn’t help that my GPS was telling me that I was over half a mile past where I should have stopped. I was fantasizing about shouting at the person at the finish line who handed me the medal, but luckily for him I felt like I was going to barf and I didn’t think barfing on him was a proportional response.

8. Dumb Idea #1: Staying in a hotel 35 miles away from the finish line.

9. Dumb Idea #2: Not booking a second night at that hotel, so that I could lie around eating Ritz crackers all day, which is what I wanted to do.

10. Dumb Idea #3: Driving five hours to Bend that afternoon.

11. At least I got some fish & chips out of the deal.

Haircut / Weight / Station Eleven / Six Feet Under

Haircut

    I was trying to grow my hair out, really, I was. There was a brief period when I was in my early 20s when I let my hair grow out to nearly shoulder length. It was darker then, and redder, and it was just about the only thing about me that I thought looked good in those days. It’s now become distinctly salt-and-pepper in quality, and it sometimes seems to me that all the red has washed out, though medical science assures me that all hair colors turn gray equally, so who knows. Anyway, I wanted to know what I looked like with what I thought might be a distinguished gray mane, especially given that I probably have a limited time left with a reasonably full head of hair. But God damn if it didn’t just end up looking like a mullet. I know that’s the famous “awkward phase” that all out-growing hair goes through, and I had resolved to wait it out, but I just couldn’t. I went into the barber about an hour ago and had her shave it off. What length? she said. I dunno, short. A three? I don’t know numbers, short. So she did it. As the clippers slid across my head and my graying hair was prised away from my scalp, I had a momentary flash of regret — that’s my hair! Give it back! But it was too late. When she finished, I put my glasses back on and looked at myself in the mirror. A crazy side-effect of going gray is that it makes you look balder than you are when your hair is really short, I guess because gray hair is in fact somewhat translucent, and the light filters down to your scalp and renders it visible. Is that still me in the mirror there? When did I come over all angular and gray? Who is that guy?

Weight

    Last Wednesday I came back from running and weighed myself and passed a happy milestone — I was back under 200 pounds for the first time in almost two years. It’s a meaningless thing, really, but I still think of 175 as my “fighting weight” — I’ve been 15 pounds lighter and don’t feel too gross at 5 pounds heavier — and getting under 200, after having been as high as 214, felt important. So I was unprepared for what happened when I got on the scale today. I went through my regular ritual of bracing myself for the worst — 205, surely, would be the worst, now that I’d got back below two bills — and then the number came up: 206.6. I had somehow managed to gain 6.6 pounds in just six days! Six days during which I went running three times, including once 12 miles! I know that it has to be almost entirely water weight, which will probably slough off over the next couple of days as my body chemistry fluctuates, but holy shit. I literally yelled, “What?!” Nobody there to hear me, just me howling into the void because I’m fat. I swear to God, every other human on Earth could die and I would go around feeling shitty about the birds and insects seeing me overweight.

Station Eleven

    That’s a reasonable transition to Station Eleven, the post-apocalyptic book I’ve been reading. Does it seem to you that we’re overrun with these books anymore? The Road, The Bone Clocks, Seveneves, The Leftovers, Station Eleven. That’s not even to mention the ones I haven’t read (or don’t remember reading), or the horde of mostly zombie-themed movies and video games that take place in a poetically empty post-human space. I think there are probably a lot of reasons for this, but the one that interests me is the idea of story-as-periapt: by writing these books, we believe we can prevent their events from coming to pass. Nearly every subsection of Western culture has an eschatology that seems to be on the wax, be it the bomb, global warming, or literal, religious apocalypse. I guess it’s an old thing, naming the thing you fear in hopes of preventing it from coming to pass. Maybe it’s a product of too much information, and the fact that people who live in media-producing societies have no practical receptacle for the primal fear that we evolved in order to keep from being eaten by lions. THE WORLD IS ENDING, we’re thinking. And so we write stories about it to ward off this end.

Six Feet Under

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    I’ve been rewatching the first season of  HBO’s sex-and-death drama Six Feet Under, and a few things have struck me about it. First among these is how cheap it looks. Six Feet Under premiered in 2001, when this “golden age of television” we’ve all been talking about for a while was just dawning — The West Wing was duking it out with The Sopranos for the title of #1 prestige drama on TV; many people trace this era’s roots to those two shows, though of course the harbingers of this era, shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and The Larry Sanders Show, debuted before that. I remember at the time being impressed by Six Feet Under’s production values, but watching it now you can see the liberal use of green screen, the weakness of the picture, and the absence of big-name stars. These things stand out when you’re used to seeing Vince Vaughan stalking mopily through artfully composed location shots as he mealy-mouth mumbles lines of shitty dialogue in a second-tier prestige show like True Detective. (That’s to say nothing of the outdoor fuck-romps in the public spaces of Malta and Croatia and other outposts of the ancient and beautiful that you see in Game of Thrones.) Does the show suffer for it? Not really. Its cast is stocked with highly able stage vets like Richard Jenkins and Frances Conroy. Like Breaking Bad many years after, it understood that actors often considered comedians often possess more than enough power to hold a drama together, and found Peter Krause and Jeremy Sisto hanging out in that ghetto. It even pioneered the import of Antipodean accent experts with Rachel Griffiths. These days, at least one of these roles would be played by John Malkovich. Not back then.

    Another thing that’s obvious is just how different the sexual politics were when the show was released, a mere 14 years ago. Peter Krause’s character, Nate, is one I can identify with — a highly intelligent, self-involved, 35-year-old chronic fuckup from a big coastal city — but when his younger brother, David (a highly intelligent, self-involved, 31-year-old goody-two-shoes from a big coastal city), starts getting ready to come out of the closet, there’s a lot of anxiety about how Nate will take it. Nate’s largely mellow response, one which would be pretty much assumed in any person of similar background these days, is played with a weird tension that reads mostly as uncomfortable humor. He spends a lot of the first season assuring David that yes, really, it truly is cool with him if he’s gay. Not that the element of anxiety has been removed from the life of even affluent, educated, white gays these days, but the storyline feels very of its time. If it weren’t for the fact that David is devoutly Catholic, a similar character remaining in the closet into his 30s would read as a total anachronism in 2015. Jesus, David’s sex-and-gender life is fairly vanilla, by modern standards: he’s uncomplicatedly male, spends most of the show in a committed (if not always monogamous) relationship, and on the whole lives a conservative life that qualifies him as one of those “establishment gays” I was reading about the other day.*

*Writing these sentences, it suddenly dawns on me that Six Feet Under was probably a huge influence on my own writing, as the main character of my novel is very much a personally conservative “establishment gay” who mostly seeks to live a life that’s conventional outside the gender of his partner: he wants commitment, security, and stability, and is embarrassed by people who exaggerate or flaunt their difference. Hrm.

    What was the last thing? I spent more time on the first two things than I thought I was going to. I guess I could say some stuff about its portrayal of bipolar disorder (Jeremy Sisto’s character is bipolar, and later a character played by James Cromwell displays several symptoms of the disorder as well), but I’m not sure that I know enough about it — despite a fair amount of direct experience — to have anything that worthwhile to say. The Jeremy Sisto character, Billy, is simultaneously true to my experience of the disease, and a bit of a wild cliché: oh, yes, the disease of creativity, the disease of van Gogh and Hemingway; Billy is a bit of a van Gogh, a self-destructive visual artist who mutilates himself with a knife. The depiction of the paranoia, the fits of hypergraphia and creativity, and the long periods of tenuous stability, usually mediated through meds: this, Six Feet Under gets right. But the idea that every manic-depressive is a creative genius? That’s a myth. My foster brother, who was bipolar and committed suicide a little more than a year ago, was a man of parts, but his artistic impulses distinctly lacked in genius: when he was running a million miles a minute, firing off new ideas with a speed and obsessiveness that could be shocking and bizarre, he was also at his most trite and predictable: the alleged genius of the bipolar mind came out mostly as incoherent rantings about God and physics, tempered with bad poetry and terrifying glimpses of his impending death.

    I guess I’m objecting to this portrayal (tentatively) for a couple of reasons, one altruistic, and one totally selfish. The altruistic one: the myth of bipolar-as-medium-of-genius is what feeds a lot of bipolar people and their enablers, allows them to remain ill, because people insist that this is how they find their highest expression, this is how they touch the supernatural, this is where Starry Night and “Hills like White Elephants” come from. The selfish one: making art is fucking work, and you don’t just get to be a great artist because you’re mentally ill. This feels weak and venal and gross to say, but it’s also true. Van Gogh and Hemingway weren’t geniuses because they were bipolar, or at least not only. These were people whose fires were stoked with hours upon hours of careful study and practice. That never shows up on the screen, not in Six Feet Under.

Pawnee: First in Friendship, Fourth in Obesity

1.    The other day a friend of mine posted a question on Facebook: what TV show would you most like to live in? I invested it with way too much thought. There were easy ones to cross off: The Wire, Breaking Bad, Lost. I suppose it says something about who you are — and who you aren’t — when you pick one. My friend picked The West Wing, which sounds terrible to me: I couldn’t handle the pressure of knowing my decisions actually mattered. I can imagine someone who treasured adventure might go with Firefly; the quirky might take Northern Exposure; Quantum Leap probably satisfies some nostalgic itch in some people. I thought about The Americans, but that’s mostly because I’d like to be married to Keri Russell (if not necessarily Elizabeth Jennings). I finally settled on Parks & Recreation. Everybody on that show is happy and friendly and loves one another. I can imagine no better shangri-la.

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I had to catch this screencap without pausing, otherwise Netflix wouldn't have included the "triumphant music" closed caption. The sacrifices I make for my art.

2.    P&R’s evolution was strange and magnificent. I think I’d put it like this:

    Growing pains: Season one, and maybe a little bit of the start of season two, during which the show was still operating in the shadow of — and with the sensibility of — its parent show, The Office. Leslie was too much like Michael Scott, and the jokes came from that show’s signature wince moments too often.

    Early peak: What’s the female version of “bromance”? Most of the second season is about the friendship between Leslie and Ann. There’s a lot of other stuff, but this is where the show sloughs off The Office and becomes something much better: an earnest, funny show with three powerful comic engines in Amy Poehler, Chris Pratt, and Nick Offerman.

    Ben & Leslie & Ann & Chris: So often the introduction of a love interest for an established character is a terrible disaster. Somehow, the people behind Parks & Rec made the show better as its main character found love. It helps that the new additions — Chris and Ben — are unique, and powerfully funny characters all their own. This is probably the best version of the show.

    Small Town Hero: The show slips off its peak a little bit once Leslie wins election to city council, but it also transforms itself into something slightly different: a subtly wicked satire of politics and media. Glancing off media events like the Murdoch phone tapping scandal and birtherism, the show follows Leslie’s rise and fall as a small time pol attempting to fulfill her dream. That Leslie remains Leslie— bright, hilarious, optimistic, a bit nutty —  through what turns out to be a pretty crushing ordeal is a minor miracle.

    Post-peak wish fulfillment: The show’s last two seasons weren’t deeply urgent, but they remained funny. This was when the show became so warm and smiley that I started wishing I could live in it. Leslie becomes Queen of All Parks, Ben becomes a Congressman, everybody has babies! There’s not a lot going on here — other than pretty consistent laughs. And I maintain that making people laugh is as high a purpose as any.

3.    I have never seen a sitcom whose finale managed pull off happy/sappy so beautifully. Borrowing liberally from maybe the greatest finale of all time — Six Feet Under’s “Everybody’s Waiting” — we follow even minor characters to the ends — or close — of their universally rewarding and successful lives. It's all fairly preposterous, but goddamn if watching Ron Swanson paddling a canoe into a big lake, knowing that the rest of his life is going to be exactly that, exactly what he has always wanted and been best at, didn’t make me cry.

4.    A friend asked me this afternoon, “Who do you identify with on that show?” The answer is nobody. I guess the closest any character comes on that show to me is Ron, but I’m not particularly macho or handy — I’m just introverted and grumpy. The people on P&R are much happier and more satisfied than I am. I wish I identified with Andy, who is like a human labradoodle. But I don't.

5.    If I could come back as any animal, it would be as a labradoodle who belonged to some family that lived out in the country.

6.    Is Chris Pratt a ginger? Inquiring minds want to know.

7.    This blog entry will probably be illegible if you haven’t seen the show a whole bunch of times. How many times have I seen the show? It’s hard to say, but it’s somewhere in the neighborhood of 6, front to back. Other things I have seen or read as many times: Alien, Casablanca, Star Wars, The English Patient (the movie — I’ve only read the book twice), all seven Harry Potters (the books — the movies blow), and Buffy. Maybe Close Encounters. Close: Fringe and Scrubs.

8.    JEAN-RALPHIO! DANCE UP ON ME!

9.    From the “a little goes a long way” file: Jean-Ralphio & Mona Lisa; Tammy 2; the Eagleton clones (other than Kristen Bell); Jeremy Jamm; Dennis Feinstein; the Gergich Girls; the Animal Control guys; Crazy Ira & the Douche; Ken Hotate; Derry Murbles.

10.    From the "failure" file: Andy Samberg’s one-off; anything and everything to do with Fred Armisen (the sister city episode is the only one I’ve only watched once); Mark Brendanawicz (his best moment, tellingly, is when Leslie calls him “Mark Brendanaquits”).

11.    From the “coulda used more” file: Duke Silver; Leslie’s boyfriend Dave; Perd Hapley; Bobby Newport; Lord Eddie Covington; Detlef Schrempf; and, of course, Lil’ Sebastian.

12.    Okay, I’m done. I could go on about this show basically forever. Look forward to a list of favorite quotations from the show on one of those days when I have nothing to say.

The problem with "Dollhouse", years later.

So, I’m a pretty big “Buffy” fan, in the sense that I’ve seen every episode of the show at least four times, several more than ten. I liked “Angel” pretty well, too. I enjoy “Firefly” as well, though I do think it gets fetishized because it was cancelled — the show was enjoyable but the concept, even compared to “Buffy”, was pretty hokey, and sometimes I find the stylized dialogue a little embarrassing.

ANYHOOZY. Suffice it to say that I was mad stoked when it turned out there was another Joss Whedon show coming down the pike. Not only that, it starred Eliza Duckshoot, who played Faith on “Buffy”. I watched the first episode, and didn’t think much of it. But I was willing to give it time: the pilots of “Buffy” and “Firefly” were kinda sucky, too. Shows take time to grow into themselves.

So it was with an unfolding sense of disbelief that I followed “Dollhouse” and came to realize that it was just going to be like this. The whole show was going to be weirdly chilly and hard to get invested in. I couldn’t really figure out what I didn’t like about it, other than that Eliza Duckshoot has pretty much two speeds: Faith, and plastic; e.g., when she was inhabiting the body of someone bitchy and badass, she was a lot of fun, but when she was inhabiting the body of anybody else, it was totally impossible to buy into her character’s reality.

Anyway, I’ve finally got around to watching the whole thing, and I think I’ve figured out what the biggest problem with the show really is: the central character, by design, has no personality. I realize that this is sort of the plot arc of the first two seasons, but the upshot is that the viewer is relieved when the alleged protagonist is offscreen: everything she does is dead air. It’s impossible to care about her, because she doesn’t exist.

One of the standard things one teaches to beginning creative writing students is that their characters have to want something: that’s how you make them active, keep them interesting, move the plot along. But Echo is pretty much not capable of wanting anything, which ultimately neuters the character and renders the show kind of boring. I realize Joss Whedon’s not a beginning creative writing student, but I think that basically he missed this native flaw when thinking about how much fun it would be to write a show that could be a spy show one week and a cop show the next week and a doctor show the week after that. And because he’s Joss Whedon, he got it on the air.

The show eventually sort of solves this problem by pushing Echo ever more to the periphery: by the end of the first season, Tamoh Pinikett’s FBI agent is as much the protagonist as Echo is, and in fact, at least one whole episode takes place without the character onscreen at all. ALL of the supporting characters are more interesting than the protagonist, so the show feels like it wants to be about them.

It puts me in mind of a scene from “Real Genius”: When we meet Val Kilmer, he fires off some kind of helicopter that careens around the room and ultimately crashes. He pops up and asks, “Would you classify that as a design flaw or a launch problem?” Well, “Dollhouse” kind of has both.