because I'm unemployable, I watch cop shows
This is depressing reading: The Decline of the English Department. I don't agree with everything he says, by a long shot, but he's right on in a lot of ways, and, well, it's depressing. This bit hits particularly close to home:
Meanwhile, undergraduates have become aware of this turmoil surrounding them in classrooms, hallways, and coffee lounges. They see what is happening to students only a few years older than themselves-the graduate students they encounter as teaching assistants, freshman instructors, or “acting assistant professors.” These older students reveal to them a desolate scene of high career hopes soon withered, much study, little money, and heavy indebtedness. In English, the average number of years spent earning a doctoral degree is almost 11. After passing that milestone, only half of new Ph.D.’s find teaching jobs, the number of new positions having declined over the last year by more than 20 percent; many of those jobs are part-time or come with no possibility of tenure. News like that, moving through student networks, can be matched against, at least until recently, the reputed earning power of recent graduates of business schools, law schools, and medical schools. The comparison is akin to what young people growing up in Rust Belt cities are forced to see: the work isn’t here anymore; our technology is obsolete.
Yes. Well.
To move to a happier subject, let's talk television. I've long been a fan of television procedurals, but I believe this is the first year in which cop shows are the primary, if not in fact the exclusive, genre I'm watching. As a result, I'm becoming more aware of the particular rhythms of the episodic procedural, to which I'd never paid much attention before because I was concentrating most of my attention on shows that have different sorts of narrative arcs. And it's been particularly striking the extent to which the season premiere of a procedural is concerned with resetting the pattern and getting things back to business as usual after whatever crisis happened in the finale to upset the balance. We got it in House (which is totally a procedural, even though it's not a cop show), in Bones, in Castle, and then again in CSI:WTFNY.
The CSI:NY premiere really captured a strong alternate reality feel there at the beginning. If I didn't know that this was really not the sort of show that goes for this sort of thing, I would absolutely have expected some sort of dream reveal. Danny's in a wheelchair? Stella's sleeping with Adam? And in the half-scene that continues to baffle me, was that a grieving Flack hooking up with some other woman at a bar at the beginning of the ep? I'm...still a little confused about that one.
The wrinkles got ironed out a little bit as the ep went on, and Mac's obsession with the case, and then finally being able to put it away at the end of the ep, became the metaphor for things getting back to normal(ish). I liked all the Danny/Lindsay stuff, and I'm glad that it doesn't look like Danny will be leaping out of the wheelchair miraculously soon, but that he most likely will eventually--this will be the twist in the resetting of the pattern, I suppose.
In terms of the plot, did we ever find out who killed Angell? I didn't re-watch the finale, but I was pretty sure that bit hadn't really been resolved. And Mac's all "Danny's in a wheelchair! I must have justice!!!" yet nobody seems particularly concerned about justice for Angell? I assume this plot thread will come back at some point, with Craig T. Nelson's character and all that, but it still struck me as an odd omission.
Still completely WTF about Stella and Adam. I mean, I'm glad they dispensed with that quickly (Stella: "That should never happen again." Me: "OH THANK YOU, GOD!"), but I'm rather baffled why it happened in the first place. The only thing I can figure is that maybe they've got some sort of character arc planned for Adam. Might he be being written out, what with the annoying blonde chick after his job and such? Because even though he agreed with Stella, I'm not sure he was actually planning to do so--after all, he's the one who's had a crush on her for years, and just when it seemed to be reciprocated, that was the end of that. So maybe they're setting him up for some sort of...something? Otherwise, I cannot imagine who thought it was worth spending time on this interlude.
But by the end of the episode, it's Mac and Stella together cleaning up his office, and all is right with the world. Rinse and repeat. :)
Oh, mediocre cop shows! Very much my mental pace right now! And further on that subject, I have only this to say about this week's Bones: Hee!!! Reset button effective, continue on, beloved team! (And should we expect to count the wet!B/B post-ep fics by the dozens, or go straight to scores?)
Meanwhile, undergraduates have become aware of this turmoil surrounding them in classrooms, hallways, and coffee lounges. They see what is happening to students only a few years older than themselves-the graduate students they encounter as teaching assistants, freshman instructors, or “acting assistant professors.” These older students reveal to them a desolate scene of high career hopes soon withered, much study, little money, and heavy indebtedness. In English, the average number of years spent earning a doctoral degree is almost 11. After passing that milestone, only half of new Ph.D.’s find teaching jobs, the number of new positions having declined over the last year by more than 20 percent; many of those jobs are part-time or come with no possibility of tenure. News like that, moving through student networks, can be matched against, at least until recently, the reputed earning power of recent graduates of business schools, law schools, and medical schools. The comparison is akin to what young people growing up in Rust Belt cities are forced to see: the work isn’t here anymore; our technology is obsolete.
Yes. Well.
To move to a happier subject, let's talk television. I've long been a fan of television procedurals, but I believe this is the first year in which cop shows are the primary, if not in fact the exclusive, genre I'm watching. As a result, I'm becoming more aware of the particular rhythms of the episodic procedural, to which I'd never paid much attention before because I was concentrating most of my attention on shows that have different sorts of narrative arcs. And it's been particularly striking the extent to which the season premiere of a procedural is concerned with resetting the pattern and getting things back to business as usual after whatever crisis happened in the finale to upset the balance. We got it in House (which is totally a procedural, even though it's not a cop show), in Bones, in Castle, and then again in CSI:WTFNY.
The CSI:NY premiere really captured a strong alternate reality feel there at the beginning. If I didn't know that this was really not the sort of show that goes for this sort of thing, I would absolutely have expected some sort of dream reveal. Danny's in a wheelchair? Stella's sleeping with Adam? And in the half-scene that continues to baffle me, was that a grieving Flack hooking up with some other woman at a bar at the beginning of the ep? I'm...still a little confused about that one.
The wrinkles got ironed out a little bit as the ep went on, and Mac's obsession with the case, and then finally being able to put it away at the end of the ep, became the metaphor for things getting back to normal(ish). I liked all the Danny/Lindsay stuff, and I'm glad that it doesn't look like Danny will be leaping out of the wheelchair miraculously soon, but that he most likely will eventually--this will be the twist in the resetting of the pattern, I suppose.
In terms of the plot, did we ever find out who killed Angell? I didn't re-watch the finale, but I was pretty sure that bit hadn't really been resolved. And Mac's all "Danny's in a wheelchair! I must have justice!!!" yet nobody seems particularly concerned about justice for Angell? I assume this plot thread will come back at some point, with Craig T. Nelson's character and all that, but it still struck me as an odd omission.
Still completely WTF about Stella and Adam. I mean, I'm glad they dispensed with that quickly (Stella: "That should never happen again." Me: "OH THANK YOU, GOD!"), but I'm rather baffled why it happened in the first place. The only thing I can figure is that maybe they've got some sort of character arc planned for Adam. Might he be being written out, what with the annoying blonde chick after his job and such? Because even though he agreed with Stella, I'm not sure he was actually planning to do so--after all, he's the one who's had a crush on her for years, and just when it seemed to be reciprocated, that was the end of that. So maybe they're setting him up for some sort of...something? Otherwise, I cannot imagine who thought it was worth spending time on this interlude.
But by the end of the episode, it's Mac and Stella together cleaning up his office, and all is right with the world. Rinse and repeat. :)
Oh, mediocre cop shows! Very much my mental pace right now! And further on that subject, I have only this to say about this week's Bones: Hee!!! Reset button effective, continue on, beloved team! (And should we expect to count the wet!B/B post-ep fics by the dozens, or go straight to scores?)