Category: TV

Season one on DVD.

Years ago, I read a review of Steven Spielberg’s A.I. that effusively praised the film for its exploration of the “programming” in our genes that makes us human. The writer argued that the A.I. robot-boy’s love for his mother is just as genuine as any child’s filial love because “love” is just a way of behaving, a way that could be wired into circuitry and flesh alike. I didn’t buy her argument, and I didn’t like the movie, largely because I wasn’t willing to leap past “But he’s a robot!” I didn’t see robot-boy’s behavior as love (certainly not when it was embodied by the creepy Haley Joel Osment), so even though I was intrigued by the notion of breaking down what “love” really is, I didn’t believe A.I. had done so.

But where A.I. failed, the serial killer drama Dexter, of all things, has succeeded brilliantly. That long-forgotten review of A.I. came racing back to me when I started watching the first season of the Showtime series via Netflix. Robot-boy is a poor medium for pondering what it means to be human, but the sociopathic protagonist of Dexter is perfect, and no one could be more surprised and intrigued by that than I.

Season one on DVD. Season two debuts Sunday, March 30, on Showtime (not that I get Showtime, but for the record, there it is).

I always feel vaguely uneasy about historical drama. I feel guilty about not feeling guilty for the way storytellers tweak and compress and misrepresent the substance of real peoples’ lives for the sake of the tale. It seems unfair, for example, that we think of Richard III as a monstrous king when he almost certainly had nothing to do with the deaths of his royal nephews, yet I’d be loath to give up Shakespeare’s deliciously venomous antihero for the sake of rigid historical accuracy. Besides, the story behind the story—how and why Richard became so maligned even before the Bard got involved—is intriguing in its own right. Shifts and reinterpretations are half the fun of history, and dramatic interpretations are particularly entertaining. I just can’t get indignant the way my pedantic side feels I ought.

All this is to say that I know enough about the reign of Henry VIII to recognize that The Tudors is taking liberties. Henry and Katherine of Aragon were not more than a decade apart in age. Cardinal Wolsey did not commit suicide. And Henry’s younger sister was Mary, not Margaret, and she married the king of France, not the king of Portugal, and she certainly didn’t murder him.

But it’s liberties like those that help heighten the drama. The considerable age gap between Henry and Katherine emphasizes how Henry was motivated to divorce her in part because he wanted a younger, potentially more fertile wife to bear his children. Wolsey’s suicide emphasizes just how sudden and extreme the cardinal’s fall from favor was, providing a satisfying climax to one of the season’s principal arcs. And the misrepresentation of Henry’s sister simplifies the narrative (the story hardly needs another Mary, and the intrigues with France are complicated enough as is) and supplies a surprisingly compelling subplot about just how bad a princess’s lot in life was (a pet theme of mine, I admit). In other words, the writers often use falsity to illuminate truth, and to do so with flair.

Of course, I don’t want to overstate the case here. The Tudors is fun, even affecting at points, but it’s certainly not in the same league as Shakespeare. It’s a soap, albeit an unusually lush one, given to melodramatics and overripe dialogue and gratuitous nudity. That said, I have a weakness for melodramatics and overripe dialogue (gratuitous nudity isn’t so bad either), so I forgive the show its sins and delight in the morsels of substance beneath the froth.

Ten episodes into the second season. Appears on CBC television but also (more relevant to me) in many corners of the Internet.

Lying home on the couch, coughing and wheezing and sulking, I ran out of TV shows recorded on the TiVo. I didn’t really have the attention span for a movie, so I started foraging on the Internet for something to entertain me and eventually stumbled across Little Mosque on the Prairie. I’d read about the Canadian sitcom when it made its debut a year ago, so I decided to check it out.

As the name implies, Little Mosque on the Prairie is groundbreaking! daring! and radical! in that it portrays a Muslim community living in small-town Saskatchewan. The little mosque is led by Amaar (Zaib Shaikh), a handsome young lawyer-turned-imam from the big city of Toronto. Amaar’s relatively progressive approach to Islam puts him at odds with the congregation’s former imam, Baber (Manoj Sood), a more traditional character, but Rayyan (Sittara Hewitt), a beautiful young woman who is both devoted to her faith and committed to feminist principles, hopes that Amaar will be the one to lead her small community into modernity.

There are other characters—Rayyan’s more secular father, her convert mother, Baber’s rebellious teenage daughter, to name a few—but that initial sketch should make one thing clear: Despite all the attention about Little Mosque being groundbreaking! daring! and radical!, it’s actually a very conventional sitcom. Would it surprise you to know that Amaar and Rayyan share an unspoken, unacknowledged attraction to each other? Would you be shocked to learn that, despite his gruff, reactionary tendencies, Baber is a devoted father who truly only wants his daughter to be happy? Or that the small-town locals are somewhat suspicious of Amaar’s big-city background?

Wednesdays at 8 p.m. on ABC. Five episodes into the first season.

One person’s charmingly sweet whimsy is another’s nauseatingly twee kitsch, and I expected Pushing Daisies would be the latter for me. The convoluted premise, the supersaturated Technicolor visuals, the morbid subject matter, the interminably chaste romance—I wasn’t interested. But our Tivo recorded the pilot on its own, and I thought, what the hell, and despite myself, I fell for the extravagantly quirky drama. It has a genuinely warm heart underneath all the baroque eccentricities, and those baroque eccentricities have grown on me, too. If nothing else, Pushing Daisies is truly distinctive: a unique little gem in a landscape of cop shows, melodramatic soaps, tired sitcoms, and reality TV.

Dirty Sexy Money, Wednesdays at 10 p.m. on ABC. Five episodes into the first season.

Gossip Girl, Wednesdays at 9 p.m. on CW. Six episodes into the first season.

As Susan Sontag famously defined it, enjoyment of camp is detached, experienced in air quotes. True camp is gloriously, extravagantly, guilelessly superficial, which is what makes it such a delicious guilty pleasure.

Dirty Sexy Money and Gossip Girl have their moments, but neither reaches that level of glorious superficiality. I watch them, but I know in my heart that both are often merely stupid, rather than transcendently stupid, so, ironically, l end up feeling sheepish for enjoying such mediocre guilty pleasures. I’m doubly guilty, and not in a good way.

Thursdays at 10 p.m. on AMC. Nine episodes into the first season.

Mad Men is like a girl whose beauty distracts people from her intelligence. Or maybe it’s like a girl whose charm and good looks mislead people into thinking she’s smarter than she truly is. I’m not sure, to be honest, but the look of Mad Men is undeniably ravishing, and the analogy amuses me: insidious, condescending sexism is one of the principal threads of the show.

But it’s not the only one. Quietly provocative and sumptuously textured, Mad Men does not lack for ambition. Set in a midlevel New York ad agency during the early 1960s, it delves into sexism, classism, racism, anti-Semitism, and homosexuality without ever feeling like a movie-of-the-week. It’s too luxuriantly filmed for that and occasionally too opaque, presenting a striking tableau without necessarily spelling out what it means.

Season two debuts Friday, October 5, at 9 on NBC.

I know next to nothing about football—little more than a vague awareness of what the quarterback does and the number of points a touchdown earns—and I’ve never cared enough to learn. But somehow, that ignorance and indifference toward America’s pastime (or is that baseball? I couldn’t care less about it either) is no obstacle to enjoying Friday Night Lights.

Based (only thematically, I’m sure) on Buzz Bissinger’s revered nonfiction account of high school football in a small Texas town, the drama depends on the game for some of its climaxes, but at heart it’s about the community, not the sport. Following the lives of a few of the players, the coach, and their friends and families, Friday is not only surprisingly thoughtful—fleshing out stock characters and grappling with provocative issues—but also persuasively heartfelt. Friday made me care about the emotional well-being of high school jocks! Not having been known for my team spirit when I was high school (to put it mildly), I’m still disoriented by that.

On DVD.

Contemporary culture often views a drama’s moral complexity as an indicator of its quality. The Sopranos is, I think, one of the best examples of that. We point to how Tony was sympathetic and recognizably human despite the fact that he was a murderous mobster as evidence of the show’s sophistication. Ethical shades of gray have become shorthand for artistic merit, and that’s reasonable, I guess, to a point. Progressing beyond cookie-cutter characters and recognizing the fallibility of heroes require some degree of maturity.

But that line of thinking can easily be oversimplified and perverted. Merely trying to turn an villain into a hero isn’t in and of itself a marker of quality, and using patently archetypal characters doesn’t necessarily indicate a lack of depth or value. I thought about that latter point, in particular, as I watched the 2005 BBC adaptation of Bleak House by Charles Dickens. Dickens is so broad by today’s standards—with saintly, self-effacing protagonists and vile, duplicitous antagonists—and yet Bleak House is a skillfully told, thoroughly absorbing tale. I sped through eight hours’ worth of Victorian melodrama as quickly as Netflix would send me the next DVD.

Aired Sunday, June 10.

Did Sopranos creator David Chase panic when he went to write the final episode of his critically revered mafia series? If the show ended with Tony caving, flipping on the New York crew, and wasting miserably away in the witness protection program, everyone would point out the resemblance to GoodFellas. If the show ended with the violent death of Meadow or A.J.—the sins of the father visited upon the children—everyone would point out the resemblance to The Godfather III. If the show ended quietly with 
Tony isolated and damned—Godfather II. If the show ended loudly with Tony in a hail of bullets—Scarface. Did Chase simply throw up his hands at the impossible expectations and decide to class up a non-ending instead? Because, if so: sorry, David, but that’s been done, too—and better—by John Sayles in Limbo.

Mondays through Thursdays at 11 p.m. on Comedy Central.

Were it not for Jon Stewart, I think I might simply have disengaged from the news years ago. The Daily Show is hardly my only news source, but it is my only news source that also keeps my spirits up. Even when reports are dismal, when tragedy strikes, when politicians prove once again that I’m not yet cynical enough to anticipate all the outrages they’ve committed, The Daily Show makes me laugh. It might be just a bitter chuckle, but it’s enough to keep me from permanently withdrawing from the public square into the corners of my private life.