Misfits

New episodes Mondays on Hulu (airs on E4 in the UK). Three episodes into the third season.

The whole "this British TV show could never air in the United States" thing is often kind of overblown, but in the case of Misfits, imported here by Hulu, that's probably a fair assessment. The show's nonchalant treatment of its characters' sex lives is its most obviously un-American trait, but the foreignness goes deeper than that. American TV almost invariably celebrates characters who are wealthy or ambitious or somehow outstanding, the best at whatever they do, and Misfits features characters who, even after they acquire supernatural powers, are doggedly ordinary—underemployed, living in council housing (or a complex so grim and run-down it might as well be), in and out of trouble with the law not because they're outright criminals but because they're aimless and rash and unlucky. And yet the show is as nonchalant about their hapless, mundane existence as it is about the obvious fact that people are sexual creatures.

That breezy freshness spills over into every aspect of the show: the charmingly flippant approach to its supernatural elements, the peculiar plots twists, the engagingly laid-back acting. It's a quirky show that doesn't make a show of its quirkiness. Sometimes the quirks skew wrong (a few plot lines in the first season left a bad taste in my mouth), but they're always compelling: entertaining first and then, once you're finished laughing—whether with humor or in disbelief—oddly thought-provoking. Introducing this brazen oddity to the American audiences is one of the best things Hulu has ever done.

Hugo

In theaters.

For decades, director Martin Scorsese has been a dedicated film preservationist and an enthusiastic cheerleader for early cinema, but Hugo may be the first time he has aimed his pro–silent movie message squarely at children. It's an odd moral for kids (as opposed to film students or cinephiles), and it makes for an odd film: broad in its style and messaging and self-indulgent in its pacing, yet also magnificently cinematic in Scorsese's inimitable way and charmingly earnest about its subject matter. The idiosyncratic result sometimes plods, but more often it takes flight, particularly after it begins its exploration of the extraordinary films of Georges Méliès. I'm not sure whether I would have enjoyed Hugo as a child, but as an adult, I eventually fell under its spell.

Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol

In theaters.

Back in college, a friend of Sean's used a particular phrase to describe mushy emotional subplots that interrupted otherwise comedic or suspenseful movies: "feelings and woman crap." It's completely asinine, but the term nonetheless has become something of a running gag for Sean and me—partly because it's such a parody of stupid offensiveness that it becomes kind of funny and partly because, loath as I am to blame such nonsense on women, the poor storytelling Sean's friend was describing is so widespread that it's useful to have a shorthand way to identify it.

In any case, when Mission: Impossible—Ghost Protocol (that punctuation—kill me now!) came off its awesome action high with ten endless minutes of tell-don't-show melodrama, I left the theater muttering "feelings and woman crap" under my breath despite myself, and Sean grinned knowingly. For the most part, Protocol is a expertly constructed thrill ride, but even virtuoso director Brad Bird can't do anything about the leaden display of feeeeeeeeelings, especially when Tom Cruise's self-satisfied rictus of a smile comes into play.

A Chanticleer Christmas

Chanticleer at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Thursday, December 1.

I'm late getting this post up, and for once, it's not so much that I've been overly busy (though I have) or that I've been trying to smother my stress playing an assassin type in a video game (oh my god, Skyrim is SO FUN!). It's mainly that this was the fourth time I've attended one of Chanticleer's gorgeous Christmas concerts and I've mostly run out of things to say about the program.