Category: TV

Sole season on DVD. (At present, all seventeen episodes are also streaming for free on AMCtv.com.)

I love watching TV shows on DVD, partly because of the lack of commercials but mainly because I’ve never been good with delayed gratification, and on DVD, I can watch episode after episode without having to wait a week or more in between.* When it came to The Prisoner, however, one episode at a time was all I could take, not because it’s a bad show—to the contrary, it’s brilliant—but because it’s so weird and trippy, such a relentless mind-fuck, that I always wanted to stew over an episode before jumping directly into the next.

Simply put, The Prisoner is like nothing else I’ve ever seen before. Sure, you can recognize the classic show’s influence—particularly on labyrinthine, long-arced series such as The X-Files and Twin Peaks and Lost—but the audacity and surreality of the 1967–68 original are hard to match. Furthermore, The Prisoner demonstrates a strong singular vision that TV shows, a relatively collaborative medium, rarely possess. It was championed, cocreated, and produced by one man, actor Patrick McGoohan—who also wrote and directed many of the episodes (some under pseudonyms) and, of course, starred as Number 6—and that matters, I think. The Prisoner feels authored, for lack of a better term. It’s as unfiltered and distinct as a good novel, and as challenging as one, too.

Select episodes from first season available online at ABC.com (and soon, I hope, on Hulu). Season two debuts Monday, September 21, on ABC.

I recently read an interview with a short story author who said she enjoys writing short works because she feels more freedom there to explore extremely dark, bleak places—places she would be reluctant to visit, as either a writer or a reader, for the length of a novel. The idea rang true to me (partly because I’m presently in the midst of a provocative but depressing, emotionally draining novel that I wish were a bit shorter), and although I think the notion could easily be taken too far (perhaps it would be better to say that that overwhelmingly dark subject matter is more challenging in a novel than in a story), I find it fun to extrapolate from that notion to other media.

For example, musical devices that might be tiresome in a longer work—gimmicky orchestration; the incessant drill of a single rhythmic pattern; light accompaniment of a guileless melody—can be charming in a short piece (see: Sabre Dance). A movie can use simple, archetypal characters that would become flat and tiresome in an ongoing work like a TV show (see: Pan’s Labyrinth). And a TV show with a charismatic lead character often can get away lackluster storytelling because spending time with the character is the whole point of watching the show.

Such an encapsulation would be a little harsh for Castle, ABC’s one-year-old mystery drama, but not by much. The premise is gimmicky, the policework is standard, and the mysteries vary in quality (to be fair, that’s typical of crime shows), but none of that really matters because Nathan Fillion is the star: Castle is fun and compelling to the extent to that Fillion is fun and compelling, which makes it quite fun and compelling indeed.

Masterpiece Classic miniseries, March 29–April 26.

With Charles Dickens, you expect an innocent saint of a hero, broadly drawn yet charmingly idiosyncratic characters, sensational setbacks and reversals, and, of course, some populist agitation, and Little Dorrit does not disappoint on those fronts: check, check, check, and check. What surprised me, though, is how timely that populist agitation is. We’re inured to the deprivations of “A Christmas Carol,” and Bleak House focuses on arcane nineteenth-century British legalties, but the targets of Little Dorrit come straight from today’s newspapers: ruinous Ponzi schemes, predatory lenders and landlords, a financial system that rewards those who shuffle money about rather than those who actually produce goods. As melodramatic as Little Dorrit is (very), the rage at its core about capitalism gone awry is still all too relevant, and it still burns.

Fridays at 9 p.m. on Fox. Seven episodes into the first season.

The premise of Dollhouse gets creepier and creepier, verging on distasteful, the longer you thing about it. A shadowy company manages a collection of “Dolls”: people whose memories and personalities have been erased, to be replaced with the personas and skill sets demanded by the company’s clients. Want a temporary bodyguard who looks like Eliza Dushku? A master thief who looks like Eliza Dushku? A date guaranteed to put out (i.e., a glorified whore) who looks like Eliza Dushku? Done and done and done. And deeply creepy.

Fortunately, creator Joss Whedon is reflective enough to keep his latest garrulous, genre-bending show from becoming the vacuously salacious T&A extravaganza that the Fox advertising geniuses clearly wish they were selling. If you’re going to play around with themes of selfhood and human trafficking and, frankly, rape, you can’t be superficial about it. You have to take the characters and their predicament seriously, and to his credit, Whedon does, even amid the banter and stunts and all that. Dollhouse still has weird flaws and shortcomings, but seven episodes in, it’s beginning to find its way and develop an intriguing, thought-provoking mythology. I’m interested to see where it goes.

Thursdays at 9:30 p.m. on HBO. Seven episodes into the third season.

As much as I love Arrested Development, I understand why it never found much of an audience. With long, complicated story arcs and dark, pointed humor—not to mention nine principal characters and more than a dozen frequently recurring characters, many of whom aren’t, technically, all that likeable—the daring sitcom is difficult for casual, uninitiated viewers to “get” immediately. But why is 30 Rock heir to the critically-adored-but-low-rated comedy crown? Why aren’t enough people watching it?

30 Rock is so easy to enjoy. The “plots” are generally a bit beside the point (if you miss an episode, no harm done), the humor is less caustic and more zany, and the small ensemble features riotously funny Alec Baldwin embracing his reincarnation as a comedic character actor as well as the show’s creator, beloved comedy goddess Tina Fey. I know not everyone is as enamored with the neurotic, geeky brunette archetype as, say, Sean is (to my very good fortune—I love you, baby!), but even so, other than Sarah Palin enthusiasts, who doesn’t love Tina Fey?

Sundays at 9 p.m. on HBO. Five episodes into the first season.

When it rained on Sunday night a couple of weeks ago, our satellite reception went staticky and I wasn’t able to watch the new episode of True Blood. (Why the hell is cable not available on our street? We live in New York, a huge metropolitan area, the media capital of the nation! Arrgh.) I sighed and scheduled the DVR to record a rerun of the episode later in the week. It rained that night, too, so I found another middle-of-the-night reshowing and, on the third attempt, finally got a complete recording. Yay!

But through this whole satellite fiasco, with all my cursing at DirecTV, I was sort of embarrassed for myself. This was a lot of effort to watch a TV show that I know in my heart to be pretty mediocre. The stereotyping of the small-town South is inappropriate. The allegorical treatment of vampirism manages to be both heavy-handed and wildly inconsistent. Much of the “drama” is laughable and way too reminiscent of late-night softcore fare, which it already kind of resembles in other ways (ahem). And yet, and yet, and yet … I kind of like it.

Season one on DVD and Hulu. Season two debuts Monday, September 29, on NBC.

The concept of Life is darkly high-concept (a cop framed for murder and exonerated and freed after twelve years rejoins the police force, despite the fact that he won a huge financial settlement against the city), but it rarely feels as pat and over-constructed as its premise suggests. Similarly, a rough sketch of the cop (he loves fruit! he’s into Zen! he speaks in a weird, elliptical manner that drives his partner crazy!) belies the complexity of the character and the way those oh-so-quirky details begin to feel organic rather than contrived.

So what looks like an unpromising drama—yet another cop show trying way too hard to separate itself from the pack—somehow coalesces into something genuinely compelling, at times even moving. I’m not sure who to credit—creator Rand Ravich for doing far more with his hook than I would guessed or actors Damian Lewis and Sarah Shahi for making everything come alive in prickly but spirited fashion—but in its strike-abbreviated first season, Life captured my attention. It has real potential, which makes its coming banishment to the wasteland of Friday nights a real shame. (Not that I ever watch TV shows when they actually air, but still.)

Burn Notice, Kitchen Confidential, and House.

I hardly ever watch TV on TV anymore. Even with a digital video recorder, sitting down in front of the TV to watch something seems so inflexible and archaic. If it’s not available online—either on Hulu or some other site—keeping up with it is too much bother. (I stopped watching Gossip Girl when it was no longer available on the Internet, and the ratings would suggest that I wasn’t the only one. Poor move, CW.) Besides, the Internet provides so much more variety, plus instant gratification. Here are another few shows I never would have seen were it not for the glories of the World Wide Web.

New Amsterdam, Murder One, and Medium.

I’ve been using Hulu, the best one-stop TV-on-the-Internet site, since it was in beta. In combination with my laptop and wireless DSL, it’s impossible to resist: No more shall I be bored when blowing my hair dry or washing dishes or sorting bills! A portable, ever-expanding library of TV-on-demand is here to entertain me.

Revisiting shows I know and love has been a trip (Hulu features Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Arrested Development, NewsRadio, and Firefly), but it’s been even more fun to check out shows I haven’t seen before. For example …

Tuesdays at 10 p.m. on FX. Three episodes into the second season.

Suburbs and gated communities are a terribly clichéd subject of satire in American pop culture, and some elements of The Riches suggest that its take on the well-worn material will be a shallow one. The setting, for example, is Eden Falls, Louisiana—almost as hilariously on-the-nose as Icarus, the name of the doomed sun-bound spaceship in Danny Boyle’s creepy Sunshine.

But intriguingly, beguilingly, The Riches goes beyond such cheap gags. The convoluted storyline relies on a number of extraordinary coincidences, but suspending disbelief is worth the effort. This is drama that understands what most of its satiric cousins don’t: the suburbs are fertile ground for satire not because they offer the opportunity to lampoon a certain class of people—that isn’t what The Riches does—but because they offer the opportunity to appraise people in general, the human condition: the substance of our dreams, what we’re willing to sacrifice to achieve them, and whether those dreams make us happy.

I realize that might sound ponderous, but The Riches is anything but because—in a brilliant stroke—the lens through with creator Dmitry Lipkin chooses to examine all that dreaming is a family of grifters, and grifters—deceptive and loyal, meticulous and quick-thinking—are inherently interesting, especially when they’re played by Eddie Izzard, Minnie Driver, and a trio of top-notch young actors.