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The Endless Summer

Posted in American TV (General), American TV Shows, hiatus, Reviews, TV channels, TV Criticism, TV Culture, TV History with tags , , , , , on September 6, 2015 by Tom Steward

I’m back after being away for the summer…just like TV! Or so I thought. Summer used to be a dumping ground for cancellation fodder, but something has changed. Many of the year’s most important programmes now air over the summer and momentous TV events are just as likely to play in the spring and summer as fall and winter. No doubt some of this is down to cable channels disrupting the old network seasonality, but it’s becoming increasingly apparent that TV critics can’t take summer off any more if they want to stay current. So what’s been happening?

Colin Farrell after reading the reviews of True Detective Season 2

Colin Farrell after reading the reviews of True Detective Season 2

True Detective Season Two

Another reason why TV critics can’t go away for summer is because they’d all miss doing their favourite thing – bashing the follow-up to a universally praised piece of television with no particular motivation other than convention. Season Two of HBO’s anthological police procedural was torn to pieces by most critics, with so-called fans and lovers of quality television just as vociferously negative. It really has nothing to do with the season itself, just a tired old game that critics like to play, one that immunised us against the self-evident pleasures of Treme simply because it followed The Wire and even made us question the quality of The Wire when it entered its second season. Worryingly, it suggests critics and viewers of the serial age have serious trouble evaluating television when it deviates from formula, and really aren’t ready for the anthology revolution happening in TV.

Jon Stewart leaves The Daily Show

After fifteen years as host of The Daily Show on Comedy Central, Jon Stewart could simply be remembered as the person that brought the art of fake news – cultivated in Britain by Armando Iannucci and Chris Morris – to the US. But he leaves behind him an even greater legacy. When TV news polarised into partisan platforms with MSNBC on the left and Fox News on the right, Stewart’s Daily Show was just about the only source of news that had any semblance of objectivity (as rocky a term as that is) left to give. He was trumped by his own protégés. First Stephen Colbert, who transformed himself into a living doll of satire, viscerally exposing the ugliness of the media conservative while manifesting the winning naivety that makes them attractive. Then John Oliver who – with the help of HBO’s unsegmented formats – brought satirically slanted news reporting into the realms of investigative journalism and political activism.

Cilla Black/Rowdy Roddy Piper (delete as nationally appropriate) died

It’s only accident that these deaths occurred in summer, but taken together they are tantamount to transatlantic television tragedy. The British light entertainment host and Canadian WWF star died within a week of each other, which means nothing until you put together that their stretches as reigning TV personalities from the 1980s to the early 2000s is virtually identical and that they generate the same fuzzy nostalgia (in warmth and confusion alike) from the generations that grew up watching them. For me, it was a sharp reminder of how separate American and British cultures can be. Nobody mentioned Cilla – a contemporary of America’s beloved Beatles – stateside. Roddy Piper remains unfamiliar to me…and to all 90s British kids who didn’t have Sky.

Netflix Summer

The charms of hyper-inflective prison comedy-drama Orange is the New Black continues to elude me, but it’s Netflix’s most valuable commodity and the June release of its third season was not an anomaly. The star-studded prequel series to cult comedy movie Wet Hot American Summer was made available in July as was season two of the critically acclaimed cartoon BoJack Horseman. Orange is the New Black was even streamed a few days early, just to remind Netflix subscribers that they can do shit like that. It’s pretty cocky behaviour, and somewhat backfired when fans who had booked time off work to binge-watch the season found themselves in a socially impossible situation. I don’t think this surge of summer activity at Netflix (nor the summer-theming of its releases) is at all a coincidence, more an attempt to dominate TV distribution in these months of the year. For all their talk of liberating viewers from the tyranny of scheduling, Netflix keeps subscribers under the yoke of its idiosyncratic calendar.

Fear The Walking Dead is set in LA...it's going to be a short show!

Fear The Walking Dead is set in LA…it’s going to be a short show!

Fear the Walking Dead Series Premiere

The unwanted spin-off of AMC’s The Walking Dead debuted in the last days of summer. As True Detective also switched from a rural southern locale to the L.A. metropolitan sprawl, I wouldn’t expect any glowing reviews forthcoming…

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Hiatus

Posted in hiatus with tags , , on July 13, 2015 by Tom Steward

Hi everybody! (Hi Dr. Tom!),

Watching TV with Americans is on hiatus for a couple of weeks while I’m insanely busy with theatre in San Diego… which is eerie since my next post is going to be on John from Cincinnati set in Imperial Beach! If you live in or around San Diego, please come to my show Lone Star and Laundry & Bourbon at The Horton Grand Theatre downtown, playing Friday June 17th and Saturday June 18th at 8pm, Sunday June 19th at 2pm and 6pm. Click the link above for tickets and more info.

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Got Milch?: Part 1

Posted in Uncategorized on July 3, 2015 by Tom Steward

Thanks to the deal between Amazon and HBO – which is the best move the company will ever make until it stops treating its employees like they’re in a pyramid scheme – HBO Original Series are now starting to trickle down to the screens of people like me who are too cheap to pay for both postage and a cable subscription. Earlier seasons of currently airing shows have been made available recently, but for the most part the HBO series added to Amazon Prime are drawn from the ranks of the old or forgotten. An artist whose work consistently falls into both categories is David Milch. The next couple of posts look in turn at two David Milch dramas I’ve been able to watch in their entirety through my Prime membership, starting with the unintended miniseries Luck.

Lucking.

Lucking.

Luck is an ironic title, but it was never meant to be. Unlike most serious dramas (especially those made by HBO), the characters regularly experience success and fortune instead of their lives going badly wrong. We’re continually told that drama is based on conflict, and yet Milch has managed to create a drama that is completely devoid of it. For Milch and his writers, drama is what happens every day – hence the calendar-like structuring of his oeuvre. In Milch’s hands, the blandest of small talk becomes existential poetry. No-one in a David Milch drama merely says ‘hello’ and no word or thought is ever misplaced. What we do have in Luck is the suggestion of confrontation that never comes to fruition, a theme we’ve encountered before in Milch’s work, whether it’s the much-reviled finale of Deadwood or the chase scenes in NYPD Blue offset by a moment of comic bathos.

So why is Luck an ironic title? Well, it’s because behind-the-scenes the series didn’t have enough to get to a second season. The deaths of three horses during production of the first compelled Milch and the other producers to either find an alternative (presumably digital) solution or bow out completely. I don’t wish to antagonise those who fight animal cruelty, nor suggest that there wasn’t an element of shooting oneself in the foot, which is a suitably violent analogy. I’m glad the decision was taken to end production, both for the sake of the horses who would clearly have been in further danger should it have continued and because the aesthetic of video gambling would have undone the visceral power and suspense of the stunningly directed and edited race sequences. I abhor horse racing but there is a parallel between the call to forfeit a potentially game-changing piece of drama for the safety of animals and the cruelty-free reverence for horses expressed in the episodes.

Despite premature cancellation, the nine episodes of Luck hang together rather well. By the end of the first and only season, the characters have already revealed depths untold by their initial depictions and a tragic denouement is eschewed in favour of reconciliation. It is only foreknowledge of Milch as an auteur that makes Luck seem like such a loss. The three seasons of Deadwood are as unceasingly brilliant as any single piece of art has been. NYPD Blue went off the boil the second Milch left the series after eight years – and I mean that quite literally. Milch can not only create, he can sustain, but the artist has been denied his canvas. Luck was also the perfect middleman between Milch’s more obtuse work like the arcane John from Cincinnati and the modern-times Elizabethan theatre of NYPD Blue. Luck could have filled the vacuum in our culture left by Deadwood.

luck 2

Lucky actors!

It’s refreshing – even for Milch – that the race track is just a race track and not some loaded allegory. Luck is as profound as any Shakespeare about human vice and folly, and yet as bound to the flow of daily life as a soap opera. If you wish to see it metaphorically, and not simply as a centre of dramatic and thematic unity, then it functions as a retirement home for character actors, albeit an indiscriminate one that allows movie stars to mingle with TV movie stars. Even though the actors are veterans, the material compels them to learn about themselves as performers, and how to resist their worst urges towards melodrama and synthetic gesture. I’m sure they rarely find dialogue of the kind of purity that it can only be spoken aloud. It’s not naturalism as such, but an artifice that finds a rhythm of speech mirroring our own.

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Deadliest Watch

Posted in American TV Shows, Behind-The-Scenes, Reality TV, TV Acting, TV channels, TV History with tags , , , , on June 26, 2015 by Tom Steward

Next time you’re wondering why broadcast television still matters, consider A Deadly Adoption. This perfectly pitched pastiche of Lifetime original movies would entertain if accessed from any platform, but aired on Lifetime during the Saturday evening timeslot reserved for premieres of genuine original movies it pushes the limits of hoax or even cultural terrorism. As a Brit with an interest in the history of television, A Deadly Adoption reminded me of Ghostwatch, a pre-recorded BBC TV horror drama from the early 90s styled as a live factual special of the kind that were popular on the BBC around those years.

Nothing funny about this.

Nothing funny about this.

Ghostwatch and A Deadly Adoption exploited their network and timeslot to convince audiences of their veracity, the former as a piece of primetime public service television and the latter as a legitimate original movie ‘inspired by a true story’. Both programmes used, at cross-purposes, a mixture of familiar faces from the genre they were approximating and those that you wouldn’t expect to see. In both cases, the anomalies were supposed to tip off the audience as to the subterfuge. But while widely-known comic actors Will Ferrell and Kristen Wiig nudge the viewers in the direction of parody, the same couldn’t be said for the jobbing BBC character actors that Ghostwatch’s producers naively assumed would lead a Saturday evening audience to conclude it was a drama. Ghostwatch recruited actual BBC presenters of the moment to play themselves while A Deadly Adoption called upon veterans of the casts of Lifetime movies. Again, this had mixed results. The agency of presenters affiliated with a broadcaster reputable for its trustworthiness contributed to viewers becoming disturbed, confused and angry while watching. Having Erik Palladino play the cop he always plays asking the questions he always asks increased the plausibility but was also a satirical detail.

Perhaps the most striking similarity between the two programmes lies in the execution of the deception. Neither seems to let the mask drop, and yet they seem to be pointing you to the inauthenticity all the time. Crucially there is no over-acting, at least none outside the conventions of infotainment or TV movies. In Ghostwatch, direct address to the camera is a two-way street. It’s part of the fraud and also tells viewers to their faces that what they’re doing is tantamount to a hoax. It even has the audacity (and foresight) to pre-emptively chide parents for letting their children stay up to watch. Like any skilled comic actor (I’m put in mind of Jerry Lewis in The King of Comedy here too), Wiig and Ferrell’s faces can simultaneously pay lip service to the earnest drama around them while sporting an inner smirk that lets the audience know they’re in on the joke. While they (wonderfully) break character in the final scene, the leads in A Deadly Adoption are generally content to merely stand near the entrenched clichés and overwrought conventions of the Lifetime movie canon and gesture to them discreetly. The comic agenda, like Ghostwatch’s dramatic one, is effaced.

Another lesson that A Deadly Adoption learnt from Ghostwatch is that the most effective spoof is the one that runs like the real thing. Ghostwatch should have been by rights shot on film but the choice was to make it as if it were at every stage a piece of factual television broadcast live from a studio. That meant both the audience and the ‘actors’ were reacting as they would to the very thing it was not. I think this is also why Police Squad! is such an exquisite send-up of Dragnet, largely because it wasn’t much different in production values. Apparently, some BBC executives didn’t get what the Ghostwatch directors were trying to do and rejected some of the shots as cheap and amateur. A Deadly Adoption is going for the clunky symbolism and magazine-plate portraiture of the Lifetime in-house style, not trying to improve on it. To expect A Deadly Adoption to live up to the cinematic comedy of Ferrell, Wiig and director Adam McKay’s previous work is to miss the point. It’s a clever move, and one that demonstrates confidence in the art, that the movie was poised to allow audiences to occasionally forget it was parody.

He ain't 'fraid of no disgruntled viewers.

He ain’t ‘fraid of no disgruntled viewers.

Ferrell and Wiig’s IFC mock-miniseries The Spoils of Babylon played a similar game, invoking a phony industry backstory through trailers and faking-of documentaries, and playing on a network that revives obscure cult media. However, I stick with my Ghostwatch comparison. The aim is never truer when you become your target.

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Controvers-TV

Posted in American TV (General), American TV Shows, Reviews, TV History with tags , , , , on June 19, 2015 by Tom Steward

One of the historic functions of American sitcoms has been to deal with taboo issues in the society of the time. This purpose has been all but forgotten as network television becomes increasingly more conservative, both on the production and audience side. Although, it’s not as if cable TV is stepping into the breach. Cable channels tend to use their license to push boundaries on representation for infantile laughs rather than a progressive cause. I suspect that increased conglomerate ownership of TV stations has something to do with this too. If you’re appealing to the same judges, you’re bound to get the same verdict. I bring this up because I just happened to come across episodes of two 1980s sitcoms based around controversial topics on TV recently, although the rate of re-run on some channels does rather push the odds in favour of that happening. I was first struck by how committed each sitcom was to serious treatment of the issue in question, as opposed to today when it would need to be discussed by proxy. Then what stayed with me was the contrast between the ways the sitcoms handled delicate subjects, though neither seemed to proceed with much delicacy.

Yes, this really happened...

Yes, this really happened…

The first was a two-part episode of Different Strokes called ‘The Bicycle Man’. It’s a notorious episode of an already pretty notorious sitcom. You may think there’s nothing creepier than a grown man with an ageing disorder being made to play a child but there is, and it’s a grown man with an ageing disorder being made to play a child being pursued by a paedophile. It’s a classic case of wanting to have your cake and eat it, appropriately enough as that’s what the child molester uses to try and get into Arnold’s pants. The sitcom is earnest about educating the audience (especially children) on the dangers of paedophilia, and the final scene, which seems to go on forever, is basically a PSA. But the producers are also clearly reluctant to disturb the conventions of the studio sitcom, and so we still have a laughter track and one-liners about paedophilia. Some of this works in regards to the molester himself, who uses comedy to cosy up to children, but most of the time it feels like the episode is pulling in different directions. That said, the pathological profiling of the paedophile is the most sophisticated I’ve seen in television.

The second was an episode of The Golden Girls called ’72 Hours’ in which Rose is informed she may have contracted HIV from a blood transfusion and has a three-day wait to find out. Unlike Different Strokes which doubled its length and set aside screen time to outline the issue, Rose’s predicament is a subplot of a normal episode rather than an issue-based special. This underlines the fact that the sitcom dealt with taboo topics like racism, sexism and homophobia all the time but was also indicative of how the writers wanted the audience to calm down about HIV rather than obsessing over it. This was 1990, so it’s not exactly typical at this point to portray HIV as an everyday part of contemporary society that affects straight as well as gay people, yet that’s exactly the jumping-off point of this episode. Not that the writers are in any way idealistic about how people of an older generation respond to the threat of HIV. Rose is understandably scared and turns to scapegoating promiscuous gay men while Sophia starts labelling her cups and using different bathrooms. No-one is condemned for acting irrationally here but no-one is let off the hook either.

HIV and The Golden Girls

HIV and The Golden Girls

It’s a shame these episodes stand out in today’s TV. Look at Modern Family. We have a gay couple at the heart of the show yet the Christian ownership of ABC by Disney means that we’ve never had a storyline which draws attention to their struggles in society. We only got a kiss between them after gay marriage became culturally acceptable, five seasons in. You might argue that the permanent presence of previously marginalised characters in a sitcom is a bigger step forward than a devoted storyline to issues in their community, but, again, take Modern Family. Have any of the clichés or misconceptions about gay men disappeared by having Mitch and Cam as protagonists? When it comes to taboo issues in sitcoms, I think concept and execution are polarising. Many sitcoms like The Middle address agonising social problems because of what they are and not what they talk about.

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