Category: Television

May 24, 2013

Save Me

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Save Me is a remarkably strange show, made even stranger by where it airs. There has been much said over the last twelve months – the show was shelved this time last year and remained unscheduled until now – about how Save Me is an obvious refugee from Showtime’s old model, which was established by now NBC head Bob Greenblatt, but I think that’s an oversimplification. Certainly those elements are present here – it’s a cutting high-concept comedy about a middle-aged female anti-hero housewife – but they are tempered with the affectations and animus of a regular Network sitcom, which is what makes the show seem far stranger. Save Me is torn between two worlds: torn apart tonally, conceptually and characteristically which makes it interesting to watch, but only in the way that Vicious was, as an oddity rather than something that stands on merits of its own.

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May 20, 2013

Mad Men – The Crash

Well, huh…

Due both to a debilitating but entirely undramatic injury and the drugs associated with I won’t be writing a proper review of this week’s Mad Men, but I will throw out some assorted thoughts and allow an open floor for discussion. This is both the best and worst week for this to happen because The Crash is an episode that I could write and write about, but its also one that can never be entirely contained by synopsis or criticism and nor should it. Hell, i’m not sure that my mind can much understand it. Its like a dream, a flu-driven dream more lucid and real than you can remember reality ever being, but one that you have to repress in order to go on with the day once you wake up. Lets talk now about The Crash and then forget it ever happened.

(And no, this isn’t an attempt at performance art; though Alan Sepinwall nailed that in his intro.)

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May 14, 2013

The Fall – Pilot

There is something alienated about The Fall, it always feels one step further removed from its events than a traditional British crime drama would – and I use that term intentionally, the show shot and set over the Irish Sea from most of those that you see coming from the BBC. We see this in the plot, which isn’t the simple crime and casework cliche that a synopsis would suggest but is instead a sort of investigation into an investigation; the protagonist brought in by the local police as internal oversight on a high-profile murder case that has stalled. That same synopsis would tell you that the show marks the return of Gillian Anderson to the sharp slacks of a power suit, but interestingly she isn’t actually the lead, at least not yet; here the cop takes a backseat to the killer.

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May 13, 2013

Mad Men – Man With A Plan

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It’s somewhat fitting that an episode built around repetition would borrow so heavily from the thematics of the hour that preceded it, but it doesn’t make it any less of a pain to write this review. Man With A Plan was the kind of episode that showed the screenwriters in the room clearly have one, probably up on a big board somewhere that they would have returned to again and again during the writing of this hour; doing what Ted termed an old fashioned technique, research. To mirror the plots core premise, the overpopulation of the company’s post-merger offices and the repetition and redundancies that come with such, the episode weaved in a number of references to episodes past; scaling from the blunt to the subtle. It’s no coincidence then that this is the episode where Pete’s mother is first shown to have some form of Alzheimer’s; she forgets but the show never does. Matt Weiner is the man with a plan and we best trust in it.

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May 6, 2013

Mad Men – For Immediate Release

Mad Men - For Immediate release

One question likely enters the mind of most who read these reactionary essays of mine: Are episode titles really that important? Should so much attention be paid to them? Well it seems so since this, the sixth episode of season six, was released to certain Australians four days early because of what the writer – Matt Weiner himself – decided to title it. The boffins at Apple’s iTunes headquarters saw the words that Peggy writes in the press release that closes the show and took them as a literal instruction, in much the same way as I oft seem to take them as a metaphorical one. It’s a funny story, mostly because Matt Weiner is such a notorious spoilerphobe – disallowing critics from mentioning most elements of the episodes in advance reviews, from the important to the arbitrary, like the existence of the staircase which proved this worth this week – but also because it, you guessed it, surmises much of what the episode itself was about.

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May 2, 2013

The Americans – The Colonel

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A lot of the shows whose premieres I recently reviewed have had finales over the past few weeks, most of which I intended to write something about but never did. Mostly this was due to me succumbing to time pressures and/or laziness, but I was also inhibited a little by a part of me thinking that such posts were simply inessential. Vikings, Broadchurch and Top of the Lake ran and ended much as they began and so for the most part what I said about their starts stood up just as well in relation to how they finished. The Americans though is a show that no longer resembles itself and so I feel that I now need say a few more words about just what it has become.

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April 29, 2013

Mad Men – The Flood

Mad Men is not necessarily a very nice show, it’s inspired but not so much inspirational, and so when real life historical events intrude upon the show’s storytelling they tend to be the sadder ones, the ‘catastrophes’ as one character puts it or the floods as the title does. Tonight’s catastrophe was of course the assassination of Martin Luther King, his passing the breaking of a wave that would continue to crash and spill through American cities over the following days. A simpler show would have taken this time to show us the way that their colored characters reacted to the tragedy, they would have used it as an obvious jumping off point for a civil rights debate but Mad Men has never been such a show and so it instead took this time to convey a more complicated idea, one that Dr.King famously preached: the identicality and inversions inherent in man, that though we are all different we’re also all the same.

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April 22, 2013

Mad Men – To Have and To Hold

HaveandHld

To Have and to Hold sounds like a simple episode title on the surface, rather rote in its familiarity. Obviously the phrase is a standard sort of declaration, specifically a wedding vow; which is arguably just about as meaningless a string of words as there can be in the Mad Men universe. Step back for a second though, look at it as a sentence, and it swiftly starts to seem like something that should belong to TV’s best Primetime cable drama and not some daytime, network soap. Mad Men is all about having, is all about greed, about holding on to what you have while simultaneously trying to get more, more than you had before, more than the other guy, to have more than you can possibly hold.

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April 18, 2013

Rectify – Always There (Pilot)

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Top of the Lake (Reviewed Here) was a brave, bizarre and rather brilliant show that despite its seemingly formulaic plot stood apart from near anything I had seen before on the small screen. It was also new in another way; for the Sundance network it was their first original drama series and thus is set a tone for them in the same way that Mad Men once did at AMC. It was their debut, their mission statement, their standard and now it’s time to see their follow up – their Breaking Bad, to follow the rather fitting metaphor, fitting since ‘From the producers of Breaking Bad‘ is that show’s tagline.

Rectify is that second show and like Breaking Bad it suffers not from the dreaded sophomore slump. It is both as safe and as strange as its forebear but in very different ways, it is set almost on the other side of the world but plays similarly and so it does for Sundance what AMC couldn’t (given just how disparate its two dramas were) and establishes them as a Network with both strong vision and a consistent voice. The Kid is now a real contender in the future of the cable network business, but enough business banter, what of the show itself?

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April 15, 2013

Mad Men – The Collaborators

Last season slumped dramatically in its second week, with its third hour, Tea Leaves ( an episode that only stands out as weak once you have seen the staggering streak it sets up). It was a bolt out of the blue after the stellar season premiere and flattering finale before that. Many blamed January Jones for the flop, citing the character of blown-up Betty as bad enough to burst even the best of the show’s episodes. Her character is thankfully absent here but the team collaborating behind the scenes remains the same with Weiner writing and Jon Hamm again directing the earliest possible episode for scheduling’s sake and again it is a bit of a drop from the program proceeding it. As much as it pains me to say it I think we may have found the one thing that the man is merely good at.
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