some thoughts on the various teevees I have put in my face recently
I'll try to mark spoilers, but nothing's really happened enough in the first few shows to justify having created what I would consider spoilable material, so.
Penny Dreadful 1-4
For starters, never put a synonym for 'awful' in the title of your show. Breaking Bad is excused, because it didn't mean it like that, and also it was good. Mostly good. I have a complicated relationship with what I thought of Breaking Bad. But we're not talking about that, we're talking about Penny Dreadful.
Okay, so I have aural processing issues, but I swear, I'm not understanding half of what they're saying. It's a combination of high-class dramatic British mumble and whatever Billie Piper thinks she's doing with her mouth. I find myself praying for scenes with the American, since I can make out what he's saying. Oh, and Monster II; his angry, tortured, emo enunciation is crystal-clear.
I suspect that the best way to watch this show is to notice when Timothy Dalton is onscreen, and then just to stop paying attention until he and whomever he's having the conversation with have stopped talking. Unless that person is Eva Green, in which case, she's worth watching. She's a gem, really. Best thing the show's got going for it. Why isn't the whole thing from her POV?
There remains, too, the question of: How bad does the show know it is? Because it seems like it's trying for over-the-top, but only gets there in terms of the occasional gore splatter or decadent orgy, so it just sort of lands in the realm of 'melodrama taking itself too seriously'. It's not remotely comic, and the fact that it has a real Grand Guignol show in the fourth episode indicates to me that they know with things like that, the audience should be laughing along with the production in-between the screams and gushes of blood. But no one and nothing here is funny. It's just all grim grim doom grim and then someone dies messily. There's a reason I don't read Frank Miller comics.
It gets high marks in the Dorian Grey Makes Out With Everybody category. In fact, I was going to stop watching after the pilot, but (little spoiler here) I heard that even the American gets a checkmark in that category, and I'm shallow enough that I figured I could watch on, see what was up with that. But one absinthe-fueled clipshow later and I'm more certain I could've seen a gifset on Tumblr and been happy.
I may keep watching? But I may bow out? Right now, I'm vaguely intrigued enough by it to keep going, but also vaguely bored enough by it that if I stopped now, I'd never stay up nights wondering how it ended.
My point is, I'd like to see a real adaptation of the Leage of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
Halt and Catch Fire 1
I tried to watch this streaming from AMC's website, but my computer halted and (metaphorically) caught fire every time. (This laptop is not good with ... things.) So I wound torrenting it to see the last fifteen minutes. Tech irony!
This show really captures the essence of the era where a dude could jack up a Speak 'n' Spell with a screwdriver and an empty beer can.
I know more about computers than the general population does, but less than pretty much all of my friends do, which puts me right into the correct technological zone to appreciate what's going on here. I can imagine anyone who doesn't know what a BIOS is will be hanging on by a thread and anyone who knows a lot about what a BIOS is will feel a bit talked-down to, but I'm here going, sure! You get the chips and you put the pokey against the gizmo and it makes the lights come on and that's hex, I'm right with you! I also did not know the term 'halt and catch fire', but the neat title and the addition of Lee Pace were enough to get my attention, and I think everything else about the 1983 Dallas setting will be enough to keep it.
Now here's the gross: the ladies. The wife is a Skyler White killjoy, except with our benefit of living 30 years ahead of when the show is set, we know she's killing her husband's joy, not his illegal meth trade -- and she's a computer nerd of her own, but she doesn't have COMPUTER DREAMS, she has a day job at Texas Instruments. And the punky sassy computer prodigy is fucking the main character within five minutes of her introduction because of course she is. They both seem like really cool characters, but they've had craptastic introductions. I live in the hope that the show will get its shit together on them.
If I can get the streaming to work, I'll let you know.
Leverage season 5, with spoilers
I sort of wish someone I trusted dearly had told me to stop watching Leverage after season 1, or at least had told me to stop watching and then given me a list of cannot-miss episodes, like the Rashomon Job. Season 1 was an amazing chunk of television, but every progressive season sort of sunk into a deeper slump as they tried to find newer and more exciting wacky wrongs to right!
Once the scope gets that big, the commentary gets uncomfortable. I compare it to the reason the West Wing really never recovered after 9/11 -- what was going on in the real West Wing was so horrifying that you could no longer make a friendly liberal parody version of Washington and have it be anything like the real world without getting really fucking depressing. So you have to kidnap the president's daughter and blow some SUVs, because you can't deal with a war in Iraq without going, uh, if Jed Bartlett were the president, there would be no war in Iraq.
Same here. Once the team is in Portland (and oh, could it ever just stop making jokes about, ha ha, we're in Portland, so wacky!), it gets a lot of targets that are pretty big fish to fry. The one that really sticks in my mind is the one about the fake Wal-Mart. They go on for a long time about how bad Wal-Mart stores are and how healthy it would be to unionize, and then ... they fail at unionizing and they just shut down the store, leaving tons of other stores around the country merrily exploiting their workers in the same way, except without talking about that because it'd mess with the single victory accomplished in this episode. Woo.
Don't get me wrong, there are a couple good episodes, like the one where Parker's leg is broken. But all the disbelief I can usually suspend has come crashing to the floor. Drug a guy and create a holographic dream world to reprogram his brain around his anxiety issues? Infiltrate the Senate and broker interpersonal deals better than career lobbyists do? Resolve the mystery of D.B. Cooper with a deeply implausible solution? Fake-fly the fucking Spruce Goose? Are you just shitting me now?
That's the problem, too, with showing power that big, and that's that if you can work miracles on this scale but don't, you're sort of implicitly an asshole for refusing to help. It's kind of like how I feel about all the people that get killed by cars and crushed by falling buildings when Superman is fucking around as Clark Kent. If you can con the House of Representatives to fund cheerleading, why don't you con it into, I don't know, increasing food stamp benefits? if you can shut down one Wal-Mart store, why isn't your next step to repeat the process until the whole structure collapses? If you can develop a technology for visualizing people's dreams in order to work out their mental health issues, why are you not sharing this with the millions of people who could benefit from it?
Also, ugh, Nate and Sophie. I liked them a lot when they were doing the weird will-they-or-won't-they dance and all the steps were accompanied by Sophie's going YOU ARE AN ALCOHOLIC AND BROKEN, GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER. They were even okay when they had hooked up but were trying to keep it a secret. But once they could be openly 'I wuv you too!!!' at one another, yack. What I liked about their relationship was that it was a sexy rivalry turned into a sexy alliance! What it turned into was just heteronormative garbage that brought out the worst of Sophie's high-maintenance female trope and Nate's clueless jealous man trope. If I'd been eating when I saw the marriage proposal at the end, I would have lost my appetite. Yes, go on and quit your jobs that make you both you, and go retire to traditional roles in boredom somewhere! Way to take a relationship that was everything cool about two competent, independent, troubled adults and shoehorn it into a generic all-problems-solved TV romance.
At least we'll always have the OT3.
Hannibal season 2, WITHOUT SPOILERS
Okay, see everything I said about Penny Dreadful? Hannibal does its Grand Guignol right. I spend most of my time watching that show cackling with wicked delight -- and that means I'm invested, so when something horrible happens, I'm transfixed and warmed-up enough that my gasps of shock are genuine. Hannibal's cannibal puns, Chilton's 'bitch please' expressions, Mason's absurd sadistic flights of fancy, the lab nerds' Mutt and Jeff routine -- these are how you make a show about brutal murder not feel like watching a Holocaust documentary.
I also watched the whole thing with raininariver last week, start to finish in a little over a day, and the pacing really does hold up better that way. I watched it as it was aired, and it really did feel like there was just this colossal shift in the middle, to the point where I sort of wondered if I'd missed an episode somehow. But no, the season really just is in two arcs, and when you see the end of the first right up against the second, it makes a lot more narrative sense.
And yes, it's ridiculous. Magical Murder Baltimore is a hilariously improbably hub of serial killers. Will Graham's magical girl powers are such that I'm surprised he doesn't get a costume change every time the Magical Murder Pendulum swings. This show goes so far over the top it hits the stratosphere. I mean (okay, slight spoiler), Hannibal is literally drawing gay fanart at one point. The show is covered in corn syrup and cackling with glee.
But it never loses sight of the fact that the blood is not the point; the blood is the medium through which a story about people is told. It's a good story about charming abusers, too. It makes you want to sympathize with Hannibal, even as he's doing all sorts of horrifying things, but it never lets you be happy about that. There are plenty of characters, in fact, who are obviously in love with Hannibal and horrified with themselves that that has been their response to him. And yet, they keep coming back and doing what he says! Forget the dismembered corpses; that's the real horror.
There's definitely some justified critique about how the show treats its ladies. But if you want to spoil yourself and look at Bryan Fuller's second-season 'murder wall', you can see a couple things: one, of the ten people with Xs on their faces, only one is a lady; two, there are a lot of women, major and minor, who are still definitively alive. I agree with concerns raised about that one lady's death, but I also agree with pretty much everything the actor herself said about it (obvious spoilers there).
It's also interesting, I find, that the ladies who get murdered/almost murdered don't get loving, eroticized, drawn-out deaths in the way a lot of horror delivers female snuffings. The show doesn't even really give them eroticized maimings; that's reserved for the boys, who sweat and seize and bleed so prettily. Lord, is the gay male gaze refreshing.
Penny Dreadful 1-4
For starters, never put a synonym for 'awful' in the title of your show. Breaking Bad is excused, because it didn't mean it like that, and also it was good. Mostly good. I have a complicated relationship with what I thought of Breaking Bad. But we're not talking about that, we're talking about Penny Dreadful.
Okay, so I have aural processing issues, but I swear, I'm not understanding half of what they're saying. It's a combination of high-class dramatic British mumble and whatever Billie Piper thinks she's doing with her mouth. I find myself praying for scenes with the American, since I can make out what he's saying. Oh, and Monster II; his angry, tortured, emo enunciation is crystal-clear.
I suspect that the best way to watch this show is to notice when Timothy Dalton is onscreen, and then just to stop paying attention until he and whomever he's having the conversation with have stopped talking. Unless that person is Eva Green, in which case, she's worth watching. She's a gem, really. Best thing the show's got going for it. Why isn't the whole thing from her POV?
There remains, too, the question of: How bad does the show know it is? Because it seems like it's trying for over-the-top, but only gets there in terms of the occasional gore splatter or decadent orgy, so it just sort of lands in the realm of 'melodrama taking itself too seriously'. It's not remotely comic, and the fact that it has a real Grand Guignol show in the fourth episode indicates to me that they know with things like that, the audience should be laughing along with the production in-between the screams and gushes of blood. But no one and nothing here is funny. It's just all grim grim doom grim and then someone dies messily. There's a reason I don't read Frank Miller comics.
It gets high marks in the Dorian Grey Makes Out With Everybody category. In fact, I was going to stop watching after the pilot, but (little spoiler here) I heard that even the American gets a checkmark in that category, and I'm shallow enough that I figured I could watch on, see what was up with that. But one absinthe-fueled clipshow later and I'm more certain I could've seen a gifset on Tumblr and been happy.
I may keep watching? But I may bow out? Right now, I'm vaguely intrigued enough by it to keep going, but also vaguely bored enough by it that if I stopped now, I'd never stay up nights wondering how it ended.
My point is, I'd like to see a real adaptation of the Leage of Extraordinary Gentlemen.
Halt and Catch Fire 1
I tried to watch this streaming from AMC's website, but my computer halted and (metaphorically) caught fire every time. (This laptop is not good with ... things.) So I wound torrenting it to see the last fifteen minutes. Tech irony!
This show really captures the essence of the era where a dude could jack up a Speak 'n' Spell with a screwdriver and an empty beer can.
I know more about computers than the general population does, but less than pretty much all of my friends do, which puts me right into the correct technological zone to appreciate what's going on here. I can imagine anyone who doesn't know what a BIOS is will be hanging on by a thread and anyone who knows a lot about what a BIOS is will feel a bit talked-down to, but I'm here going, sure! You get the chips and you put the pokey against the gizmo and it makes the lights come on and that's hex, I'm right with you! I also did not know the term 'halt and catch fire', but the neat title and the addition of Lee Pace were enough to get my attention, and I think everything else about the 1983 Dallas setting will be enough to keep it.
Now here's the gross: the ladies. The wife is a Skyler White killjoy, except with our benefit of living 30 years ahead of when the show is set, we know she's killing her husband's joy, not his illegal meth trade -- and she's a computer nerd of her own, but she doesn't have COMPUTER DREAMS, she has a day job at Texas Instruments. And the punky sassy computer prodigy is fucking the main character within five minutes of her introduction because of course she is. They both seem like really cool characters, but they've had craptastic introductions. I live in the hope that the show will get its shit together on them.
If I can get the streaming to work, I'll let you know.
Leverage season 5, with spoilers
I sort of wish someone I trusted dearly had told me to stop watching Leverage after season 1, or at least had told me to stop watching and then given me a list of cannot-miss episodes, like the Rashomon Job. Season 1 was an amazing chunk of television, but every progressive season sort of sunk into a deeper slump as they tried to find newer and more exciting wacky wrongs to right!
Once the scope gets that big, the commentary gets uncomfortable. I compare it to the reason the West Wing really never recovered after 9/11 -- what was going on in the real West Wing was so horrifying that you could no longer make a friendly liberal parody version of Washington and have it be anything like the real world without getting really fucking depressing. So you have to kidnap the president's daughter and blow some SUVs, because you can't deal with a war in Iraq without going, uh, if Jed Bartlett were the president, there would be no war in Iraq.
Same here. Once the team is in Portland (and oh, could it ever just stop making jokes about, ha ha, we're in Portland, so wacky!), it gets a lot of targets that are pretty big fish to fry. The one that really sticks in my mind is the one about the fake Wal-Mart. They go on for a long time about how bad Wal-Mart stores are and how healthy it would be to unionize, and then ... they fail at unionizing and they just shut down the store, leaving tons of other stores around the country merrily exploiting their workers in the same way, except without talking about that because it'd mess with the single victory accomplished in this episode. Woo.
Don't get me wrong, there are a couple good episodes, like the one where Parker's leg is broken. But all the disbelief I can usually suspend has come crashing to the floor. Drug a guy and create a holographic dream world to reprogram his brain around his anxiety issues? Infiltrate the Senate and broker interpersonal deals better than career lobbyists do? Resolve the mystery of D.B. Cooper with a deeply implausible solution? Fake-fly the fucking Spruce Goose? Are you just shitting me now?
That's the problem, too, with showing power that big, and that's that if you can work miracles on this scale but don't, you're sort of implicitly an asshole for refusing to help. It's kind of like how I feel about all the people that get killed by cars and crushed by falling buildings when Superman is fucking around as Clark Kent. If you can con the House of Representatives to fund cheerleading, why don't you con it into, I don't know, increasing food stamp benefits? if you can shut down one Wal-Mart store, why isn't your next step to repeat the process until the whole structure collapses? If you can develop a technology for visualizing people's dreams in order to work out their mental health issues, why are you not sharing this with the millions of people who could benefit from it?
Also, ugh, Nate and Sophie. I liked them a lot when they were doing the weird will-they-or-won't-they dance and all the steps were accompanied by Sophie's going YOU ARE AN ALCOHOLIC AND BROKEN, GET YOUR SHIT TOGETHER. They were even okay when they had hooked up but were trying to keep it a secret. But once they could be openly 'I wuv you too!!!' at one another, yack. What I liked about their relationship was that it was a sexy rivalry turned into a sexy alliance! What it turned into was just heteronormative garbage that brought out the worst of Sophie's high-maintenance female trope and Nate's clueless jealous man trope. If I'd been eating when I saw the marriage proposal at the end, I would have lost my appetite. Yes, go on and quit your jobs that make you both you, and go retire to traditional roles in boredom somewhere! Way to take a relationship that was everything cool about two competent, independent, troubled adults and shoehorn it into a generic all-problems-solved TV romance.
At least we'll always have the OT3.
Hannibal season 2, WITHOUT SPOILERS
Okay, see everything I said about Penny Dreadful? Hannibal does its Grand Guignol right. I spend most of my time watching that show cackling with wicked delight -- and that means I'm invested, so when something horrible happens, I'm transfixed and warmed-up enough that my gasps of shock are genuine. Hannibal's cannibal puns, Chilton's 'bitch please' expressions, Mason's absurd sadistic flights of fancy, the lab nerds' Mutt and Jeff routine -- these are how you make a show about brutal murder not feel like watching a Holocaust documentary.
I also watched the whole thing with raininariver last week, start to finish in a little over a day, and the pacing really does hold up better that way. I watched it as it was aired, and it really did feel like there was just this colossal shift in the middle, to the point where I sort of wondered if I'd missed an episode somehow. But no, the season really just is in two arcs, and when you see the end of the first right up against the second, it makes a lot more narrative sense.
And yes, it's ridiculous. Magical Murder Baltimore is a hilariously improbably hub of serial killers. Will Graham's magical girl powers are such that I'm surprised he doesn't get a costume change every time the Magical Murder Pendulum swings. This show goes so far over the top it hits the stratosphere. I mean (okay, slight spoiler), Hannibal is literally drawing gay fanart at one point. The show is covered in corn syrup and cackling with glee.
But it never loses sight of the fact that the blood is not the point; the blood is the medium through which a story about people is told. It's a good story about charming abusers, too. It makes you want to sympathize with Hannibal, even as he's doing all sorts of horrifying things, but it never lets you be happy about that. There are plenty of characters, in fact, who are obviously in love with Hannibal and horrified with themselves that that has been their response to him. And yet, they keep coming back and doing what he says! Forget the dismembered corpses; that's the real horror.
There's definitely some justified critique about how the show treats its ladies. But if you want to spoil yourself and look at Bryan Fuller's second-season 'murder wall', you can see a couple things: one, of the ten people with Xs on their faces, only one is a lady; two, there are a lot of women, major and minor, who are still definitively alive. I agree with concerns raised about that one lady's death, but I also agree with pretty much everything the actor herself said about it (obvious spoilers there).
It's also interesting, I find, that the ladies who get murdered/almost murdered don't get loving, eroticized, drawn-out deaths in the way a lot of horror delivers female snuffings. The show doesn't even really give them eroticized maimings; that's reserved for the boys, who sweat and seize and bleed so prettily. Lord, is the gay male gaze refreshing.