• Mr. Daniel Radcliffe hosted Saturday Night Live
• Smash, premiered to great fanfare (if NBC-level numbers)
• Mr. Matthew Broderick appeared in a heavily promoted ad during NBC’s highest rated program of 2012 (I don’t think it’s premature to make that pronouncement now)
• The NBC Promotions department put together a Superbowl spot in which the casts of many of its shows performed a slightly modified version of “Brotherhood of Man”.

Do you know what didn’t happen in the past three weeks?

• The Parks & Recreation character Tammy Two did not appear in said promo spot.

Look, I know we fans of musical theater are only a diminishingly small fraction of NBC’s diminishingly small audience. And I know that the Radcliffe and Broderick appearances are mere coincidence that probably didn’t even register on anyone’s radar. But if you’re going to do that damn number, maybe you ask Megan Mullally—one of the all-time best Rosemarys, who has been awfully good for your network for a really long time—to pop in for a second.

Of course, that would require NBC’s promo department to know something about musical theater and they have enough trouble trying to figure out how television works, so I should let it go.

Since I started out my little project with a spotlight review of How I Met Your Mother, I might as well stick with CBS.

I bet that a clever monkey (like a Nielsen statistician) with access to Nielsen’s numbers (like a Nielsen statistician) and some secondary studies about television viewing habits, traditional vs. alternative broadcast models, and a well oiled slide rule could easily demonstrate that the lower overall numbers for shows with younger skewing demos are artificially depressed because many of those shows’ viewers watch through alternative, unmetered avenues. This problem is similar to that where the ratings service under-reports for shows that are commonly watched in groups. Then again, no clever monkey working for Nielsen is ever going to point out to its clients that its product is only good at figuring out what your mom likes to watch.

Top of the Nielsens (even if their demo still skews old) and able to successfully promote new shows and their overall brand from just about any timeslot, CBS has been the king for quite a few years now. They do an excellent job of building on their successes and duplicating a few formulas over and over, which means there are only a small handful of genera to which most of their shows fit.

• Copus forensicus – CSI and all its offspring. Numb3rs also fit in this genus when it was on the schedule (though a case could be easily be made that it could have been classed as Copus giftus).
• Copus darkus - Here’s where you’d find your Criminal Minds, NCISes and Person of Interest. Given that CSI: NY tends to embrace the darkness  more than its kin from sunny climes, it could also fall into this classification.
• Copus giftus - That special someone with that special gift. Poppy’s idiot show¹ and the Unfunny Version of Psych slot in here.
• Chuckus lorre - You’d better believe if I were in Moonvest’s place I’d give Chuck Lorre free reign to give me at least one hour of programming for the 8-9 timeslot each weeknight. My only special request would be that he provide a family-friendlyish block of shows for Friday nights in the mode of ABC’s old TGIF.
• Survivus maximus.

That’s a whole lot of CBS shows. If you look at their schedule, there aren’t that many outliers. And that programming model has worked brilliantly for them. It’s not exactly niche programming, but they’ve found what works (and works well) and know how to stick with it.

But let’s not heap the praise too high here; as successful as they are from a numbers standpoint, their demo is getting older. And on a personal note, I just took a look at my DVR’s list of season passes…of the 44 current season passes, exactly three are for shows on CBS (and one of them, as you can imagine from yesterday’s post, is holding on by a thread).

So after the jump, let’s take a quick walk through the CBS week. I’ll try not to forget any shows that aren’t airing right now but make no promises.

 Monday

I won’t say any more about that show right now, but it’s “going strong” in season too goddamn many. Then we’ve got ethnic stereotypes and vagina jokes at 8:30,² Demi Moore’s future alimony at 9, and Mike & Molly rounding out the two-hour comedy block.

We watch M&M. I want to like it more, but the performances are all over the board. The sweet relationship at the heart of the show is played beautifully by two very talented and funny people…and everyone around them is parachuting in from other shows. Remember how Josh Malina was playing to the cheap seats in the Sports Night pilot before he became the Jeremy we all know and love in the second episode? Everyone of the supporting actors on M&M is still playing to the cheap seats³ and it hurts to watch.

Rounding out the night is another show I wish I liked better; I grew tired of H50 midway through the first season and just stopped watching. CBS finally found a good fit for Alex O’Loughlin (who hopefully finally burned whatever blackmail pics he was holding onto for the few years prior) and Scott Caan is freakin’ great in this show. And still I don’t care. There’s just something perfunctory about the whole affair that I couldn’t put my finger on and still can’t. It’s written adequately, shot adequately, acted quite well, and all adds up to “meh”.

Tuesday

Dark and quirky, dark and quirky, Poppy with red hair. That’s three hours of television built for someone who isn’t me. I know it’s built for someone—many someones, in fact—but I couldn’t guess whom.

Wednesday

I’ve never watched Survivor. I’m sure it’s great or something. I don’t know. I tend to watch a lot less reality TV than most of y’all;⁴ that’s just my nature. Oh look: there’s some more police and their policing ways.

Thursday

I’ve watched a couple of episodes of BBT: Evil Wil Wheaton’s been on a couple of times, right? This show’s not really my cuppa. Let me expand that thought: Chuck Lorre’s not usually my cuppa. He’s a capable and competent show runner who has put shows on the air that I have enjoyed in the past (and produces Monday night’s M&M which I almost like) but my comedy sensibilities and his aren’t quite sympatico; his shows usually just don’t quite click for me.

And what can I say about ¡Rob! that isn’t going to make me wish I hadn’t wasted the time thinking of it?⁵

I guess some people like Person of Interest? Okay. I like liver and kale; who am I to judge.

Ah, Psych. You’re actually quite a fun little show with one of the best theme songs on the…oh fuck. It’s the other one. The not funny one with the dude with a woman’s name. Right.

Friday

This is just a night of I don’t give a fuck. A show whose premise I barely remember, but think it’s like Everwood without the good stuff, yet another paean to sexy forensic scientists who do sexy science in the sexy labs, and Tom Selleck in a show built for my father (but airing long past the old man’s bed time).

Sunday

Holy mother of—

It’s a goddamn brilliant show!

The Good Wife is good, solid storytelling that feels like a throwback to an earlier time but simultaneously doesn’t feel stale. I don’t know if Robert and Michelle King traded for magic beans, traded for magic mushrooms, got hit by a blast of gamma radiation, or were just always this good and hadn’t a chance to shine before, but whatever the source of these powers of theirs, I hope they keep using them for good. Why CBS hasn’t started the cloning machine working on this show is a mystery to me. 27 different flavors of CSI and 503 Chuck Lorre sitcoms still leaves room for at least one more King & King joint on the schedule.

and in conclusion…

CBS is doing great. Their audience is slowly aging and I’m not sure they’re doing the right things to attract a younger demo (although I hear vagina jokes are all the rage at Whitney’s house), but they’ve got a few more years before that’s going to be a real concern. A little species variety would be healthy—a limited ecosystem is a fragile ecosystem—but it’s hard to make that argument too forcefully when the few genera of shows they have are eating up the competition.

From a creative perspective, I would love to see CBS make some bold and risky choices. This is, after all, the network of All in the Family, M*A*S*H, and The Dukes of Hazzard. It would be an intriguing business decision to set aside one or two hours a week as high-risk slots on the schedule, times when the network could throw out the rules, put aside the brand, and reduce their ad rates so they could experiment with different tones, genres, and styles. It won’t happen, but as the behemoth they should be the ones taking those occasional risks.

1. I gather from the ads that criminals must spend a lot of time hanging around crime scenes when the police show up; else, how would her gift be of any damn use?
2. From the creative genius of Whitney Cummings.
3. Except Holly Robinson Peete in her recurring guest spot this season; she’s nicely modulated and would fit just fine in the show I wish this would become.
4. As long as we exclude cooking shows, home improvement shows, and the fucking unstoppable juggernaut that is House Hunters and HH:I from the equation
5. Actually, I have a good ¡Rob!-adjacent joke planned for a future network. It’s a throwaway, but I’m looking forward to it.

What? You didn’t think I was going to write about How I Met Your Mother just because the title of this piece clearly implied that, did you? No, no. Titles are contrivances, mere fluffery. They don’t constitute a contract between author and audience.

Just because the show seems to be framed as the first-person narrative of how its nominal protagonist met his children’s mother doesn’t belie the authors’ true intent. And since deconstruction is a passing fad, we’ve got to pay attention to all that stuff external to the text. If Carter Bays and Craig Thomas say HIMYM is a show about five friends on the cusp of delayed-onset adulthood that only tangentially concerns the romantic journey of one of them, then clearly that’s the way it is. You’re wrong. Each and every single one of you.

It’s hard to remember, but there was a time when Ted Evelyn Mosby was likable. He fucking made it rain because he was in love; he stole a Smurf penis; he acted the fool in the best possible ways. There were still kids then—a captive audience within the show—for Future Ted to regale and embarrass and annoy with his never-ending tale of meeting their mother.

Now, the kids are an after-thought, Bob Saget’s narration is perfunctory, and Ted’s a raging douche. He passes his days in the classroom next door to Ross Geller and they’re both going to be spending their declining years pursuing ever-more-inappropriate coeds like two Wild and Crazy Guys. Actually, if HIMYM hired Schwimmer and just let him and Josh Radnor go at it in weekly douche-offs, I might be able to muster up some enthusiasm for the show again. As it is…

HIMYM is a show that really needed a finite run. I understand why CBS wants to let it run until Jason Segal can finally get good enough at the fiddle so he can win back his soul and get the fuck outta Dodge,¹ but Bays and Thomas and the cast and Les Moonves and Fox should all have sat down at the end of the first season and laid out a plan: four seasons and just enough episodes to hit the syndication sweet-spot² and still finish strong.

We would have been saved from Douche Ted.³ We would have been saved from the ham-handed cock up that was Barney and Robin 1.⁴ We’d have been saved from what I can only imagine will be a smug Barney and Robin 2.⁵ We’d have been saved from what I fear is coming this sweeps month as the other leg in that infernal triangle goes hot again.⁶

Look: based on the ages of the kids and the fact that Future Ted is telling the story in 2030, the show’s got about one year for Ted to meet the mother and knock her up. And yet…we continue swirling down the drain with misguided stories and diminishing returns.

This week’s episode used Marshall and Lily’s housewarming party as a backdrop and it was stilted, tired, and uninspired. A perfunctory narrative device split the storytelling into three separate segments that were supposed to cleverly mesh together in the end. But I just didn’t care. I didn’t care how Ed Grimley ended up in the beekeeper’s suit, I didn’t care about Barney and his crazy cat castrator,⁷ and I certainly didn’t give a shit about the cheese. All this boring half-hour did was make me nostalgic for the sweet simplicity of “Works with Carlos Girl”.⁸

HIMYM was the first show I ever wrote a spec script for. I used to truly love it. I wish I could say that I love what it is now.

I want to meet the mother. I want to want to meet the mother. I’m just not sure how much more of this show I can put up with to do so.

1. Look, I’m still working out the kinks in these writing muscles. Give me another week and that joke’ll be tight as the E-string on Les Moonves’ gold fiddle.
2. And cake. I hear you get cake for 100.
3. Also Louche Ted and next Christmas’s must-have toy, Koosh Ted.
4. Not from their pairing; that was sublime thanks to the great chemistry between NPH and Cobie Smulders. I’m of course talking about the idiotic and inorganic way the writers tore them asunder because they didn’t know how to write them together.
5. Oh no, viewers. We didn’t re-couple them because that’s what you wanted; we always intended to put them together in the end.
6. I have no inside knowledge. I just have a bad feeling. Or good, I guess. That would free up 30 minutes a week for me.
7. How clever. The crazy cat lady lopped off some dude’s pecker because he missed her cat’s bris. They’ve put some sixth-graders on the writing staff, I see.
8. Fortunately, Beth is doing just great and Leverage hasn’t lost any of its mojo yet.

Television breaks my heart.¹

Whether it’s a once-brilliant show dragging itself along for years after it should have exited gracefully—like some revenant haunting the moors—or a challenging show that falters in its final moments with a clumsy deus ex Ron Moore’s ass,² or just the realization that Whitney Cummings has two shows on the air while there are seasoned show runners with actual talent who can’t get a pilot shot…

Where was I going with this? Oh yeah

…it’s getting harder for me to engage with TV anymore. I still watch a good assortment of shows (and keep telling myself that I need to catch up on some other highly regarded ones) but many of those are out of habit.

My fingers hover over the remote as each new episode of The Office or How I Met Your Mother airs. Is this going to be the week I finally pull the plug? Is this the week I cancel the Season Pass? It’s close. One of those shows is a bitter reminder of how bitter its nominal lead character has become. The other is just flailing, an unfunny chicken whose head cut itself off.³

But I do care, still. And I do recognize that even as I’m getting more crotchety, we’re still living in a golden age of television. Mad Men is returning in just over a month, for Farnsworth’s sake.

So, I’m going to do what any curmudgeon does best: I’m going to bitch.

I certainly don’t have the energy, nor the desire, to do weekly recaps of shows I’ve grown weary of; I don’t even have the energy to recap shows I still like. And hell, no one needs or wants to read my recaps. I don’t much want to preview or review new and returning shows as there are thousands of other people more enthusiastic and excited about doing that right now. What I can do is apply my highly critical (in all senses of the word) eye to the state of television. And I can do it in a systematic and annoyingly direct way.

I’m going to run through all the networks, weblets, and cable outlets I watch (and a few I don’t regularly watch) and critique their tone, their programming decisions, and any damn other thing that crosses my mind. And remember that I don’t watch all that much TV anymore, so it should be interesting⁴ at the very least that I would unhumbly offer a critique.

Some of the broadcasters will most definitely come off well. Some will come off NBC.

I’m going to try to do several of these a week, once a day if I can remain motivated, and while I have some ideas how they’ll be prioritized, they probably won’t end up in any sensible order when it’s all said and done. I’ll (hopefully) even throw in some deeper analysis as I go along, but there’s no telling when I’ll just get lazy again.

1. Hyperbole is the currency of the Internet. Hypobole (spellcheck doesn’t appreciate that neologism) only works if your name is Bob Newhart or Steven Wright.
2. While there are some who feel the ending was such a misstep that it invalidates the hours that preceded it, I’m not one of them. I think the ending was a creative whiff, but at least they didn’t just take the strike.
3. That is one fucked up metaphor. It’s not evocative; it’s evidence that I’ve not been writing much. But I’m leaving it in. Warts and all, that’s what this is going to be.
4. For small values of “interesting”.

I’ve been resistant about this, but I do love Noah Wyle. Of course it means keeping fingers crossed that Good Blood Moon er, Blood MoonGood Moon Bloodgood doesn’t stink up the joint like she did in her Burn Notice arc. We’ll see.

Fighting Evil So You Don't Have To.

This past Saturday, I attended a reunion panel for The Middleman, a wonderful show that ran for twelve episodes on ABC Family.  TV critics passionately stumped for the show, but the audience never showed up, and the show was canceled before its first season was through.  (I blather on a bit about it here.)

Now it was two and a half years later, and C2E2 had brought some folks from the show in for an hourlong Q&A.I scampered into the Q&A a couple of minutes late.  My Chicago trip was marred every step of the way by insufficient planning; in this case, I hadn’t realized that C2E2 was far, far, far away from where I was staying in Evanston, so I finally reached the exposition hall with literally minutes to spare.

My heart sank when I saw a line snaking down the hallway and into a panel room, but rose again when I saw that it was for a different panel.  The Middleman room was maybe two-thirds full — good for me, but bad for humanity.  A comics convention should be packed with Middle-fans, right?

Ah well.

The crowd was heterogeneous:  some old, genial types (like me); some intense twenty-something guys — even the ones without costumes were clearly hard-core comic fans; a smattering of pleasant Renn Faire-ish types; and some tween girls who all thought Wendy Watson was awesome.

I got in just as they finished introducing the panel, which was the entire central cast of the show:  Natalie Morales (Wendy Watson); Matt Keeslar (The Middleman); Brit Morgan (Lacey Thornfield); Mary Pat Gleason (Ida); and Jake Smollet (Noser).  Mark Sheppard (Manservant Neville) was supposed to be moderating the panel, but he’d had some last-minute conflict.  The remaining panelists made a running joke of this, riffing off of the zillion other shows Mr. Sheppard gets cast in.  (“Oh, he’s chasing people down on Leverage.”  “He’s wheeling and dealing in some space western.”  And so on.)

So instead, Javier Grillo-Marxuach, AKA “Javi”, AKA the creator and showrunner of The Middleman, took over the moderating duties.  He kicked things off by asking the cast to complete the phrase “The Lost Pyramids of…”

“Itzilichlitlichlitzl!” shouted the cast.

Not surprisingly, this had been a vexing piece of pronunciation for the cast to learn.  Javi finally recorded an mp3 of himself pronouncing the name properly and sent it to the cast to have them memorize it.  The file still lurks on Natalie Morales’s iPod, jumping into its “Shuffle Songs” playlists and sporadically freaking her out.

Javi posed a few questions to the cast, and then went to the audience for questions.  He badly wanted to handle the questions “Donahue-style”, weaving through the crowd with a handheld mic to get questions, but there were unfortunately technical limitations, and he was stuck with the usual “line of people behind the microphone in the aisle”.

The audience questions were uniformly good.  I wish I could remember them, but I (foolishly) never took out my netbook so I could take notes.  Fortunately, at least three people were videoing the entire panel.  Surely *somebody* will put a recording online.  (Please?  Pleeeeease?!) What follows are my (very) vague recollections of the Q&A.

A lot of the questions were about the show-making process.  An example:  “How many people did you look at for each role, and which of them was hardest to cast?”

Apparently Keeslar was cast from before the beginning.  Javi had seen him in The Last Days of Disco, years before the ABC Family nibbles, and said, “Yep, that’s the guy for The Middleman.”  Later, he would repeatedly tell ABC Family executives that he wanted the lead to be “a Matt Keeslar type”.  They finally suggested back to Javi, “Why don’t we just make an offer to Matt Keeslar?”  Javi mused upon this simple wisdom and quickly agreed.

Sidebar:  Javi had nothing but the best things to say about ABC Family.  Any time an audience member posed a question that was even *faintly* redolent of blaming the network for cancelling a good show, Javi would catch them up short, correct that misapprehension, and then move on to answering the question.

As for the collaboration with the network, it turned out the network had strong, strong opinions about initial casting (for example, “make the heroine Latina” — see below) and the overall look of the show.  Javi was happy to cede that ground to the network.  They got on the same page with initial casting, and then later on, the show cleared stuff like costume choices and set designs with the network.

Outside of that, their freedom was rather astonishing.  The writers were free to write the show they wanted to write.  And that’s really what mattered to Javi; on-set, he told the cast, “Do whatever you like, but don’t change a word of the dialog.”  And if you’ve watched the show at all, you probably have a notion of how machine-tooled the dialog is, and how unchangeable it is.  Beyond that, the actors were free.

So everyone had the creative freedom they wanted:  the network got a shiny-looking, diverse show; the writers got to write their crazy screwball sci-fi comedy; the actors got to do anything they wanted, just so long as they said the right words in the right order.  Everybody wins!

One person asked, “If the show had been on a larger network — FOX or something — could the show have found a larger audience? or was it always destined to be a niche thing?”  Nobody really addressed that question, just because they couldn’t conceive of the show being on another network.  Ms. Morales pointed out that FOX would have cancelled them in two episodes.  They all said they wouldn’t have had nearly the same creative freedom on a larger broadcast network.  Javi summed it up:  “If the show hadn’t been on ABC Family, it wouldn’t be the show that you love.”

And yes, ABC Family did cancel The Middleman.  Javi addressed this with (of all things) a line from The Commitments:

"Sure, we could have been famous and made albums and stuff, but that would have been predictable -- this way it's poetry."

That nearly made me cry.

This is partly because I am a great big wuss, partly because I’m such a fan of the show, but mainly because there really is something poetic about making something beautiful and then moving on.  It’s heartbreaking that we got no more than we got, but how wonderful that we got it at all.

Returning to the topic at hand:  Matt Keeslar was pretty much their one and only choice for the title character.

For the lead, Wendy Watson, ABC Family wanted a Latina heroine.  Every time I’m reminded of this fact, I do a mental double-take.  One expects networks to go the other way with their notes:  “Ah… we’re not really targetting an ‘urban’ demographic with this property.  Could you maybe re-cast this role to be more… ‘conventionally-upscale’?”  Television — especially broadcast and basic cable — is consistently, blindingly, eerily Caucasian.  The friends on Friends were all white people, and they largely encountered other white people, and they lived in New York City.  (For those of you unfamiliar with NYC, that last clause was the punch line.)  It’s laudable that a network — even a tiny little network like ABC Family — tried to correct for that in some small way.

In the original comic, Wendy Watson was a “corn-fed Iowa redhead”.  Javi at first rebelled against the network note to make her anything but that.  (“But why?  You’re Latino yourself!  Shouldn’t this make you happy?”)  Most Latino characters on TV reinforced stereotypes that Javi personally detested.  He referenced a list of stereotypes that Natalie Morales had mentioned earlier in the panel (when she talked about roles she typically went out for):  “I don’t say ‘Papi’, I hate *HATE* salsa music….”  Then he digressed, talking about waking up every morning in Puerto Rico to the oh-so-cheery salsa radio station.  (He did a couple of quick salsa steps.  I had never seen salsa danced with such bitter irony.)

“I like synth music written by Germans,” he concluded irritably.

Back to the topic at hand:  Javi and the network came to an agreement that Wendy would be LINO, or “Latina in Name Only”.  (Javi has used this term on the Minuteman commentaries.)  No “Papi”, no salsa, lots of comic-book fannishness.  And this was okay by ABC family — they got to strike a blow for diversity in TV casting (and hooray for that, by god), and Javi got to avoid perpetuating irritating racial stereotypes.

(Interestingly, the show would go on to lean a bit on Natalie’s Latina-ness as it went on.  “I’m Cuban!” might be my favorite throwaway line in the whole series.)

In any case, the initial casting calls for Wendy Watson included (seemingly) every Latina actress in L. A., but it was quickly whittled down to two actresses.  Apparently Ms. Morales now feels a bit awkward when she runs into the woman she beat out for the role.

Noser had the biggest “cattle call” casting efforts, as ABC Family had no idea at first what kind of Noser they were looking for.  “But in the end, Jake Smollet would not be denied.”  I don’t remember much about what they said w/r/t casting for Lacey and Ida, though the second choice for Lacey wound up cast as the first fish victim in “The Flying Fish Zombification”.

There was another good question about what initially drew the cast to the roles.  Ms. Morales got the “It was paying work!” answer out of the way first.  Ms. Morgan mentioned that it had been absolutely wonderful *finally* to read for a part that wasn’t either (1) the dumb blonde or (2) the first hapless victim in a horror movie.

After the first couple of questions, there were only one or two people in the question line.  At that point, a question actually occurred to me, so I squeezed out of my seat, got in line, and stood around nervously for several minutes.

The question I babbled out (so, so nervous) was pretty much the same one I asked about LOST for Mo Ryan’s podcast:  “This is for anybody who wants to weigh in:  say in the near future, a showrunner picks up the DVDs for The Middleman and watches all the episodes.  What do you want them to take away from that experience?  What influence do you want the show to have?”

Honestly, I only vaguely recall their replies.  I was sort of a deer in headlights.  Partly it was “OMG OMG JAVI AND ALL THE ACTORS ARE LOOKING AT ME BE COOL MAN BE COOL.”  Mainly I felt nervous because I’d heard so, so many stories about idiotic fans asking boneheaded, insulting, or incomprehensible questions at comic-convention Q&As.  Even after I was done talking, I had residual anxiety:  “Okay.  Didn’t go off on a fifteen-minute personal anecdote about chronic-pain issues.”  N.B.:  some guy really did that while asking a ‘question’ at SDCC.  “Didn’t try and fail to be funny.  Didn’t say anything creepily sexual.  Asked a question that isn’t answered on the DVD commentary.  Okay.  I think we did alright.”

Meanwhile, the panel had a pretty good discussion going.  I vaguely recall Matt Keeslar talked about how The Middleman had smart characters.  I think Brit Morgan alluded to how nice it was to have have two female characters who were friends:  not ‘frenemies’, not cruel acquaintances who did bitchy soap-opera machinations to each other, but friends.

Mainly I remember that Javi initially held out the mic for me, and I didn’t realize I was supposed to take it from him, and he told me verbally I could take the mic, and I was all, “PETER DON’T PANIC MAN JUST TAKE THE MIC BE COOL”.

There was a question about the characters’ favorite moments from the show.  Mr. Keeslar said it was the movie-theater scenes between the Middleman and Lacey.  The entire audience “d’aww”ed as one — which is not surprising, as those scenes were the core of the Middeman/Lacey relationship.  Like the relationship, they are tentatively hopeful but at the same time melancholy.

There were questions about the actors’ favorite catchphrases (Mr. Keeslar:  “‘Flaming pork buns’.  Or anything off of a Chinese menu, really.”) and their least-favorite tongue-twisting lines (for Ms. Morales, a short line about [I think] pimp-slapping; for Ms. Morgan, a fairly long speech about female empowerment).

There was a question about what sort of things they might have done in future seasons of The Middleman, had they been renewed.  Javi talked about his pet notion of starting season two as if it were season *seven*, with a major jump ahead in time and plot, and never a word of explanation.  He also alluded to killing off the Middleman so that the alternative-world Middleman could come and take his place.

SPOILERS FOR THE COMIC SERIES:
Apparently, when the TV show was just about to premiere, the comic series killed off Matt Keeslar’s character.  Javi felt compelled to make assurances to Mr. Keeslar:  “This isn’t like that Dick Wolf thing where he writes death scenes for all his characters and keeps them in a vault to use as a bargaining chip in contract negotiations.  It’s really just a coincidence.”

A few other random observations:

• Brit Morgan talked at Amy-Sherman-Palladino-esque speeds^[1]; eventually Javi took away her Red Bull and drank the rest of it himself.
• A tween Latina girl dressed like Wendy Watson came up to ask a question in the Q&A, which was a nice moment of ‘yes, this show was good for humanity’.^[2]
• There may be a “Jolly Fats Wehawkin Employment Agency” T-shirt available on cafepress.  The woman who designed the shirt may have been sitting next to me at the Q&A.  Javi may have ensured that the original key art for the faux temp agency somehow found its way to her.  I can neither confirm nor deny any of these things.
• Apparently I am not the only viewer who loves Ida’s groundless and insistent conviction that Wendy is a pothead.  (At one table read, Mary Pat had to ask a staffer why everyone laughed at Ida’s reference to “4:20″.)

Eventually, the panel finished up.  I think it actually ran twenty minutes longer than scheduled.  Javi and the cast booked it to the autograph booths.  I pondered going by there, but I figured the interaction would just feel weird.  Plus I hadn’t packed my DVDs of the show.

So, off I went to the next panel, that quote about bands and poetry still rattling around in my head.

The Middleman Panel.

_______
[1] “I love Gilmore Girls — they talk like Puerto Ricans!” — Javi.  The fact that Javi was evidently raised by people who talk like Rory and Lorelei might explain a lot about how The Middleman sounds.
[2] It’s kind of bizarre that this is a show whose panel audience included both tween girls and old men as die-hard fans, and yet not in the creepy way you might fear.

Looks like Syfy has one or two fewer wrestling shows or infomercials available to air. They’re going to be rebroadcasting Charlie Jade starting tonight/tomorrow morning at 5am EDT and (apparently) weekly in that prime spot.

Friday mornings at 5am. Boy do they know how to show the love for science fiction over there.

One of those seeds blossomed into the brilliant and criminally under-appreciated Middleman. Another produced the short-lived Huge. And then there was Greek.

I don’t want to write a paean to the show; I did mention it was slight, right?

However, as slight as it may have been it was consistently funny and charming and witty and clever. Creator Patrick Sean Smith and his writing team never aspired to greatness, but they took no shortcuts either. They wrote interesting and believable college kids in a setting many of us can recognize, though for some of us it’s a bit further in the rear-view mirror. The show was peppered with pop culture references ranging from Jaws to the films of John Hughes but never felt weighed down by them. Mostly, the show was about its cast of well-drawn characters, with dual focuses drawn on popular, pretty Casey Cartwright (Spencer Grammar) and her younger, geeky brother Rusty (Jacob Zachar).

As an indication of the care the creators took with the show, Casey’s four-year love triangle with slacker-king Cappie (Scott Michael Foster) and Evan Chambers (Jake McDorman – my choice for this generation’s Billy Zabka, and that’s a compliment of the highest order from me) never felt like a crutch or a worn out storyline. The shifting love and enmity between these three was believable and never wearying, although Casey herself could occasionally be trying.

Did I mention this show is *funny*? That Aaron Hill’s Beaver is a lovable manchild? That Geoffrey Arend guested as alumni burnout Egyptian Joe and temporarily lived inside a giant model volcano in the basement of Kappa Tau? That Rusty turned that same volcano into a beer-spewing monster by stealing a weather machine? That the inimitable Clark Duke¹ is a regular? This show is funny.

But on a netlet that’s settling for melodrama and teen soaps, there’s little space left for unassuming funny.

Greek has no murders, no Molly², but plenty of moxie. Catch it on DVD or streaming and see if you don’t agree. Me, I’ll be watching the series finale tonight and laughing at the hijinks that ensue.

1. Seriously. He can do no wrong.
2. Ringwald, suffering for some past wrong by reading Brenda Hampton’s pablum.

I finally got around to reading Daniel Mendelsohn’s piece on Mad Men in The New York Review of Books and…well…wow. What a piece of garbage.

My first thought was that Mendelsohn was just trying to be contrary to earn style and courage points. Then I read further. Turns out he’s just an idiot.

Example:

The writers like to trigger “issue”-related subplots by parachuting some new character or event into the action, often an element that has no relation to anything that’s come before. Although much has been made of the show’s treatment of race, the “treatment” is usually little more than a lazy allusion—race never really makes anything happen in the show. There’s a brief subplot at one point about one of the young associates, Paul Kinsey, a Princeton graduate who turns out—how or why, we never learn—to be living with a black supermarket checkout girl in Montclair, New Jersey. A few colleagues express surprise when they meet her at a party, we briefly see the couple heading to a protest march in Mississippi, and that’s pretty much it—we never hear from or about her again.

Actually, Paul’s dalliance “on the dark side” said a lot about race relations in the early ’60s. Here was an ivory tower liberal out to prove his bona fides at any cost, in this case using a young girl to prove to everyone (himself included) how progressive he was. That pretty clearly sums up the “how” and the “why”. As for why we never heard about her again after the trip to Mississippi, that’s because Paul, when confronted with the brutal reality on the ground, came home with his tail between his legs. Of course he didn’t brag about running from the fight: that didn’t fit his personal narrative.

Or…

…Lane Pryce, the buttoned-up British partner who’s been foisted on Sterling Cooper by its newly acquired parent company in London—you know he’s English because he wears waistcoats all the time and uses polysyllabic words a lot…

Actually, I know he’s British from his OxBridge accent and the fact that he’s Richard Harris’s kid. I’m sure Mendelsohn is most familiar with Harris pater as Dumbledore; perhaps when he grows up he can watch some of the movies from before he was able to speak.

Or…

But then, why not have captions when so many scenes feel like cartoon panels? The show’s directorial style is static, airless. Scenes tend to be boxed: actors will be arranged within a frame—sitting in a car, at a desk, on a bed—and then they recite their lines, and that’s that. Characters seldom enter (or leave) the frame while already engaged in some activity, already talking about something—a useful technique (much used in shows like the old Law & Order) which strongly gives the textured sense of the characters’ reality, that they exist outside of the script.

*sigh* Do I really need to explain how the static blocking echoes the rigidity of the culture? How people rarely move in or out of scenes because they are locked in place?

The way that the scene about Lane and his black girlfriend somehow morphs into a scene about an unnatural emotional current between him and his father is typical of another common vice in Mad Men: you often feel that the writers are so pleased with this or that notion that they’ve forgotten the point they’re trying to make. During its first few seasons the show featured a closeted gay character—Sal Romano, the firm’s art director (he also wears vests). At the beginning of the show I thought there was going to be some story line that shed some interesting light on the repressive sexual mores of the time, but apart from a few semicomic suggestions that Sal’s wife is frustrated and that he’s attracted to one of his younger colleagues—and a moment when Don catches him making out with a bellhop when they’re both on a business trip, a revelation that, weirdly, had no repercussions—the little story line that Sal is finally given isn’t really about the closet at all. In the end, he is fired after rebuffing the advances of the firm’s most important client, a tobacco heir who consequently insists to the partners that Sal be fired. (Naturally he gives them a phony reason.) The partners, caving in to their big client, do as he says. But that’s not a story about gayness in the 1960s, about the closet; it’s a story about caving in to power, a story about business ethics.

(Emphasis mine.) Jesus. Fucking. Christ. This ridiculously shallow criticism from someone who a) was paid to write for a real live magazine and b) claimed to have watched the first four seasons in a marathon session.

It was because Don saw Sal making out with the bellhop that he knew he was gay. And, as it was believed of homosexuals at the time that they were perverts with no control over any of their sexual impulses, he fully expected Sal to service Lee Garner, Jr., just like he’d have expected one of the secretaries to do so. Thinking Sal was an independent agent free to choose whom he would and would not engage with never crossed Don’s mind. That is absolutely a story about gayness in the ’60s.

There really should be an intelligence test given before someone can post their opinions.

I have very little and very much to say about this beautiful season four premiere. Let’s see whether my talky or taciturn side wins, shall we?

When we left Dillon, Coach had been screwed out of his position by Joe McCoy’s machinations,¹ banished to the newly reopened East Dillon High as both consolation and punishment. Despite promises of large state grants to both schools, the best talent and lion’s share of the money have been diverted to Dillon.

With reduced income, reduced status, inadequate facilities, and a dearth of assistants, Eric finds himself in a position he hasn’t faced in a very long time. Remember: he was the JV coach at Dillon before he was elevated to the head coaching job. He isn’t accustomed to fighting with and for scraps. And they are scraps.

His team, such as it is, consists of those unskilled and unidentified athletes Dillon was willing to draw district lines around. Of course there’s a strong racial and economic split between the two squads as well. With the East Dillon players coming from the poor side of town, black and Latino students make up a large percentage of its population which is reflected in the composition of the team. Hearkening back to season one’s “Blinders”, there’s a strong but so far unmentioned problem with race on the team. Following Eric’s rant, only black players walk out and Eric specifically checks with Vince Howard² to see if he’s going to stay.

In fact, race is a thread through much of the episode despite never being mentioned. In the scene with the bloc of angry parents shouting at Tami about their children being moved, the first two parents to speak are black. Then a white woman whose “parents went to this school before Tami ever heard of Dillon High” wants to know why her daughter is being “sent to that hellhole with that element.” In the context of the scene, her rant is overlooked but we can’t ignore it. Especially not given the question asked of Tami numerous times about whether she thinks the two schools are equal. It would be impolitic of Tami to say, “separate but equal is inherently unequal,” but that is the clear implication.

Give all this context, Eric’s emotional explosion against his new team and the subsequent racial divide is far more worrisome.

On other fronts:

• JD has gone full Vader, embracing daddy and daddy’s ways even if he’s letting himself be a bit wild on the side. I remember last season how excited I was to see what Jeremy Sumpter would bring to the table but now I fear he’s been turned into a caricature. I realize he was dejected at State but the mustache twirling is a bit much.
• Matt is back in town – we don’t know why yet – and finding that Dillon Tech isn’t quite the same as the Art Institute of Chicago. Then again, perhaps he’s finally come across a truly insightful teacher (his sketches do have a bit of that “art student” feel to them and I can’t disagree with her sentiments) who will help him find his own unique vision.
• Julie is going to run to East Dillon to be with her few friends who’ve not graduated yet, further challenging Tami’s public proclamations that the two schools are equal.
• Tami and the coaching staff at Dillon are dancing to two vastly different pieces of music. Whether she can keep from being stomped by them will be one of the key story lines this season.
• Related, Buddy realizes he’s not only been marginalized but has in fact thrown his lot in with bad folk. With so little power thanks to Joe’s money, I expected him to stand by Coach Taylor at East Dillon this season. After seeing him tonight, I’m further convinced he’ll make that jump, as difficult as it may be.
• And Tim. Ah, Tim Riggins. Thank you for one great scene after another. The books flying, the young girl’s shredding of a former star, and every moment with Billy and Mindy. That first scene at dinner with Billy and Mindy, where Billy says nothing, that was gold. I’ve said it before and I’ll keep repeating it until the end of time: Derek Phillips is a remarkable actor whose talents made Billy Riggins so much more than the joke he was intended to be.

I’m thrilled to see FNL back at full power. I would stack this season premiere next to most of the episodes in that first, perfect season. Last year was good; this year promises to be great.

What did everyone else think?

1. I’m sure in his eyes, Coach hoisted himself on his own petard by ignoring precious, perfect JD.
2. Welcome to Dillon, Wallace.