(Some of The) Best Stuff on the 2022 Teevee Box

Some of you will hate parts of this list.  Probably many of you.  It'll make you mad.  It will drive you to the comment section with a fist full of "Hey dumbass, whatabouts?"  and "How could you have not watcheds?"

Do I care?

I do not.

I'm not a professional TV critic.  I can't get Sam Esmail or Rian Johnson or Tony Gilroy on the blower to get their thoughts on shows they created or just admired.  I am just a 'umble watcher of TV shows like yourself, who delights in being ensorcelled by great storytelling wherever I find it, but with a fairly limited amount of time to read/view/listen/appreciate during any given week (You see, I've got this blog.  And a couple of podcasts.  And a life.)  

I also know my own taste palette. For example, cilantro tastes like soap to me.  You might love it, and god bless you if you do, but to me, it's big bite of Ivory.  In the same spirit, let me confess that I don't much like horror.  There are exceptions, but you'll neve see me in line waiting for a Saw sequel.  I also have very little patience for wealth porn -- especially wealth porn featuring rich assholes doing right asshole things, which is why you won't find shows like White Lotus or Succession on my list:  you might love them, and god bless you if you do, but to me, they taste like big bites of Ivory soap.

You also won't find the billion dollar Dragon show or the billion dollar Ring show here.   The both seemed like mighty heavy lifting and I didn't care enough about them to make the effort.

Similarly, having worked a number of awful, soul-crushing office jobs in my life, I made no room in my schedule for Severance.

But enough about what isn't on my list.  Let's move on to Stuff  I Think You Would Really, Really Enjoy.

Tokyo Vice.  Crime thriller set in, well, it's in the title.  Protagonist tries to unwind a conspiracy that is deeply intertwined with a culture he doesn't' understand.  Which leads us to...

The English.  Welcome to mythic, lawless mid-American in the year of 1890, where the people who were there all along are being destroyed by the invaders from everywhere else who are fighting tooth and nail to exploit the abundance all around them. 

And speaking of people arriving in strange places with different rules...

The Peripheral.  You may not be able to send flesh-clad cyborgs into the past, but The Peripheral  posits the possibility of sending information back in time from a ruined far future to a still-recognizable near future.  

And speaking of time travel...

So far, Kindred exceeds my expectations.  It updates and expands Octavia Butler's 1979 novel, moving the home-base of its protagonist from 1976 Los Angeles to 2022 Los Angeles.  It also changes some of the relationships among the novel's characters, but not in any way that damages the plot.  

And speaking of science fiction...

For All Mankind continues to deliver on the promises it made during it's first season.  Elements of the imagined future of my childhood -- permanent bases on the Moon, ambitious expeditions to Mars -- set within a believable and recognizable alternate history of the 1960s, 70s and beyond.  No phasers or warp engines: just human nature banging around inside a familiar cultural and geopolitical universe, with cooler toys and admirable heroes.

But what if the exploration of space and other worlds didn't take place in public, on a global scale, with the threat of nuclear war hanging over it, but instead was the province of two senior citizens who found a door into another world in their root cellar?  

If that sounds like fun to you, you should definitely check out Night Sky.

Sometimes the aliens comes to us...with sinister plans for us all.  But their plans are undone by the goodhearted citizens of an idyllic Colorado town.  Hilarity ensues.  Welcome to Patience, Colorado and Resident Alien.

Or, if you'd rather step outside this reality altogether and travel from Dreams to Hell and back again, The Sandman might be just what you're looking for.  

Two sequels blew me away this year.  

Better Call Saul has been rolling, humming and soaring along under its own, completely unique and unexpected power since 2015, leading us down a long, downsloping path from Michael McKean and doc review to Carol Burnett and our protagonist fully fallen and finally trapped in a corner he can't weasel or bribe or lawyer his way out of.  

The other sequel is Andor, which I did not see coming and fully expected to brush aside as another cash grab or another helping of fan-service cotton candy from history's most claustrophobic galaxy-spanning evil empire.  Instead we got an unflinching and bravura series about how the thuggish, ravenous machinery of rising fascism spreads and takes root.  How people who are struggling just to get by are stunted by their common belief that there is nothing they can do about it.  How the powerful are willing to accomodate it for the sake of their place in the pecking order.  And how all of these forces can be the bloody hammer and anvil that forges a rebellion out of ordinary men and woman.  

If that's a little grim for you, cleanse your palette with Hacks. The second season of this series has emotional weight, characters that are more deeply drawn and it's just really damn funny.  

It would be terribly unfair of me to pair Slow Horses and The Old Man in the same sentence -- or even the same paragraph -- but look! I just did!  

It also would be wholly unfair of me to summarize Slow Horses as "What if John le Carré's George Smiley were a genius slob who has been cast out of the inner circle and now (barely) supervises a small crew of the British intelligence's worst pariahs and misfits?  And then, one day, a real case falls into their laps?"  Unfair...but look! I just did!  

The Old Man is James Bond or Ethan Hunt, who has gone gray in the long, bloody service of his agency and was given a new life and identity and allowed (encouraged) to disappear.  Then, one day, his past shows back up on his doorstep,

What can a Man of Chicago say about The Bear except it gets everything right.  The people and their relationships.  The sandwich joint.  The lingo and rhythms of the kitchen.  The city.  The stakes.  Everything.  The perfect bite of cinematic thin sliced beef, great bun, great juice, giardiniera, and sweet peppers.  Yes Jeff!

Four of my last five suggestions are not TV series'.  They're movies, but they came into our home on the same TV box as all the rest, so there you go.  

Everything Everywhere All at Once is everything Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness wanted to be but wasn't.  You'll love it.

Prey, is the first Predator movie in a long time to crack the code.  It's stripped down and moves like the wind, but still manages to nicely balance character development with shots of adrenaline.

Glass Onion is all plot and twists and what kind of monster would spoil such a thing for you?  Instead let's just say that the exploits of Mr. Benoit Blanc are the Mr. Beef Italian Beef Sandwich of puzzle-box murder mysteries in that I could chow one down every week from now until the end of time and love every bite.

RRR has a three hour and seven minute runtime, so get your chores and pee-breaks out of the way because once you're strapped in this movie flies non-stop from start to finish.  It is gloriously overstuffed with enough romance, tragedy, humor, mythology, dance numbers, animal stampedes evil imperial scheming and battle set-pieces for any ten Marvel movies.  

And finally, a wild card.  Not from 2022, but from 62 years ago.  It's Danger Man (retitled Secret Agent in the United States.)   A lean, well-written BBC production starring Patrick McGoohan that's explained in its first season introductory voice-over:  "Every government has its secret service branch. America, CIA; France, Deuxième Bureau; England, MI5. NATO also has its own. A messy job? Well that's when they usually call on me or someone like me. Oh yes, my name is Drake, John Drake."  

Danger Man can also be seen as a low-key prequel to McGoohan's next television series, The Prisoner.

Be seeing you!

I Am The Liberal Media

The Business We've Chosen

It's not news.  It's just business.

From Politico, 12 hours ago:

Donald Trump and Fox strike a truce

After 72 hours on the brink, the CEO called the candidate, and peace was restored in TV land.

A truce has been struck between Donald Trump and Fox News, as both parties chose to avert a path that could have threatened the summer ratings blockbuster the real estate mogul’s presidential campaign has become. On Monday morning, after 72 hours on the brink, Fox News Chairman and CEO Roger Ailes called Trump to assure him that he would be treated fairly by the network. And Trump, who according to a source with knowledge of the situation had threatened to boycott Fox News altogether, agreed to appear on “Fox & Friends” and “Hannity.”

“Donald Trump and I spoke today,” Ailes said in a statement released by the network Monday night. “We discussed our concerns, and I again expressed my confidence in Megyn Kelly. She is a brilliant journalist and I support her 100 percent. I assured him that we will continue to cover this campaign with fairness & balance. We had a blunt but cordial conversation and the air has been cleared.”

Trump made up too, in a tweet: “Roger Ailes just called. He is a great guy & assures me that ‘Trump’ will be treated fairly on @FoxNews,” he wrote. “His word is always good!”

...

From the NYT in 2009:

Voices From Above Silence a Cable TV Feud

It was a media cage fight, televised every weeknight at 8 p.m. But the match was halted when the blood started to spray executives in the high-priced seats.

For years Keith Olbermann of MSNBC had savaged his prime-time nemesis Bill O’Reilly of the Fox News Channel and accused Fox of journalistic malpractice almost nightly. Mr. O’Reilly in turn criticized Mr. Olbermann’s bosses and led an exceptional campaign against General Electric, the parent company of MSNBC.

It was perhaps the fiercest media feud of the decade and by this year, their bosses had had enough. But it took a fellow television personality with a neutral perspective to help bring it to at least a temporary end.

At an off-the-record summit meeting for chief executives sponsored by Microsoft in mid-May, the PBS interviewer Charlie Rose asked Jeffrey Immelt, chairman of G.E., and his counterpart at the News Corporation, Rupert Murdoch, about the feud.

Both moguls expressed regret over the venomous culture between the networks and the increasingly personal nature of the barbs. Days later, even though the feud had increased the audience of both programs, their lieutenants arranged a cease-fire, according to four people who work at the companies and have direct knowledge of the deal.

...

It's not news.

It's hasn't been news for a very long time.

It's just business.

And from Fox and Friends to Meet the Press, what you see and do not see on the teevee machine is decided by a handful of media moguls and global corporations, who act solely in their own political and commercial interests.

#TrueDetective Drops By The Walter White Memorial Desert Hostage Park and Picnic Area

Huge chunks of flaming exposition continued to rain down randomly from the sky in the final episode of True Detective Season Two. By the time the final credits rolled. whatever was plot there might have been had been was buried under an final avalanche ludicrously impossible coincidences during what should have been the climax -- you know, that part of any story when the plot points and happenstances which any halfway competent author deploys during the first half of the narrative are satisfyingly resolved and not exponentially expanded.

And whatever suspense any individual scenes may have had in the hands of some other writer was successfully dissipated with dialogue so telescopic that they may as well have dressed up the soon-to-be dead characters in Ensign Deadmeat Red Star Trek uniforms and had them announce cheerfully that they only have two weeks left until retirement.

Two spoilers below to sum up the crash site where a decent television drama should have been:

Ray Velcoro returns to his parked car to find someone has strapped a transponder the size of a WWII shortwave radio to the underside of his vehicle, with a Giant Blinky Red Light on it just in case he missed seeing it.   Rather than remove it and tossing it into a ditch, or removing it and keeping it on the seat next to him until he hits the highway and then tossing it out of his window into traffic. he drives away, presumably to leading the Bad Guys in the opposite direction of where his future baby mama is hiding out.

Then he drive halfway across the state of California with a couple of million dollars in a duffel bag and several firearms at his disposal, he starts to notice with increasing alarm the the fuel gauge is nearing the Big "E".  He manfully refuses to stop for gas at any of the Golden State's 275,000

"gas stations" because stopping for gas would, I dunno, arouse, suspicion?

I guess?

Maybe?

Instead, he drive several hundred miles out of his way so he can arrive at the exact spot where Dream Dad had warned him five episodes ago (after unfortunately not dying from a shotgun blast delivered by a character whose completely improbably existence and motives are Central To The Whole Fucking Plot, but are kept carefully hidden from everyone until the end because I dunno, Nic Pizzolatto is a terrible writer?  I guess? Maybe?) in great detail that he would be would be gunned down by bad guys among the towering redwoods.  

And thus was he gunned down by bad guys among the towering redwoods.

Meanwhile, in what may be the best metaphor for True Detectives Season Two to come out of the whole show, Jeremy from The Wedding Crashers -- 

-- is driven deep into the Walter White Memorial Desert Hostage Park and Picnic Area --

-- by a dozen Mexican cartel refugees from Breaking Bad, where -- very much like the True Detective viewer -- he is knifed in the gut for no particularly good reason and then bleeds slowly out while marching through an empty wasteland past a menagerie of characters we have never met before (including True Detective Season Two Asshole Dream Dad, who was apparently assembled from components left over from The Newsroom Asshole Dream Dad) until Imaginary Wife tells him to stop walking because, dude, you've already been dead for the last 50 paces.

Other stuff happened, but I cannot imagine why anyone would care.

I hope these fine actors fine better work, worthy of their talents.  And I hope HBO gives this format another try, this time with at least one person in the writer's room who swings enough cod to hit the fire alarm if things start to go sideways.  Like, say, me :-)

That #MrRobot Song You Were Wondering About

With tonight's episode, Mr. Robot is now the natural successor of Breaking Bad.

No kidding.  It's breathtaking.

Some Velvet Morning - Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazlewood:

Some velvet mornin' when I'm straight
I'm gonna open up your gate
And maybe tell you 'bout Phaedra
And how she gave me life
And how she made it end
Some velvet mornin' when I'm straight

Flowers growing on a hill, dragonflies and daffodils
Learn from us very much, look at us but do not touch
Phaedra is my name

Some velvet mornin' when I'm straight
I'm gonna open up your gate
And maybe tell you 'bout Phaedra
And how she gave me life
And how she made it end
Some velvet mornin' when I'm straight

Flowers are the things we know, secrets are the things we grow
Learn from us very much, look at us but do not touch
Phaedra is my name

Some velvet mornin' when I'm straight
Flowers growing on a hill
I'm gonna open up your gate
dragonflies and daffodils
And maybe tell you 'bout Phaedra
Learn from us very much
And how she gave me life
look at us but do not touch

And how she made it end

Well Eliot does get straight.
And does open up a gate.
And a buncha other things happen too.
Oh my, oh my, yes they do.

Halt and Catch Dragons

A lot of smart people who write and talk about teevee professionally have already noted the small miracle that is this season's Halt and Catch Fire.  Specifically, the fact that AMC underwrote some drastic protagonist gender reassignment, which transformed a show about underclocking male-centric dumbassery and knockoff hardware which, ultimately, no one really cared about...

...into a show about a struggling software company being run by two women out at the wild frontier of online gaming and social media.

From Grantland:

...
Thankfully, AMC did no such thing. Rather than blaming the show’s brain trust — creators Christopher Cantwell and Christopher Rogers plus showrunner Jonathan Lisco — for its stumbles, the network offered a rare chance to debug and get it right. Halt and Catch Fire’s lunky title — it refers to computer code that leads to a system crash — likely didn’t help its performance in Season 1, but it did offer inspiration for one of the most remarkable turnarounds in recent TV history. Season 2, beginning Sunday night at 10 p.m. ET, is a hard reboot. Gone is the protagonists’ misplaced desire to beat Apple in beating IBM at its own game, and gone, too, is the Giant, the clunky PC that was the result of all of their uninspiring efforts. Exiled along with all of that is Cardiff Electric, the drab corporate setting that constrained the plot, and Pace and McNairy’s alpha dog vs. beta male cockfighting that defined it. It’s not that Halt 2.0 is an entirely new show: The faces and floppy discs are the same, and outside the garage it’s still Texas Forever. It’s that Cantwell, Rogers, and Lisco have rewired the mainframe to showcase the stray lines of ancillary code that should have been the focus all along.
...

What no one seems to have noticed is that, to make their product sing, AMC appears to have ported over several components from the operating system from Game of Thrones.  Not an exact match.  Not Windows ripoff of the Apple interface .  HaCF is definitely its own thing, but it's enough to make me go "huh".

Allow me to demonstrate...

To begin with, our major character is now a blond queen slogging her way through the wilderness.

For the moment, she lacks the means to fight her way to her rightful throne, but her unique gifts mark her as it's true heir.  The "Mother of Logons" (sorry/not-sorry) promises her followers freedom, but is finding that governing wisely is much harder than coding or conquering brilliantly.

For advise, she leans heavily on a loyal female confidante and subordinate --

-- and an older, battle-scarred man who lives deep within the friend-zone.  He comes with a checkered past, but is also wise in the ways of intrigue and combat and is willing to risk what life he has left to serve her vision.

She has a daring young suitor who is up from nothing, but he understands her, and damn can he handle a sword.

While she is leading an army of virginal young men --

-- she is also negotiating with a tricksie envoy from the enemy camp.  She has no reason to trust him, but perhaps this time...

There is also a bearded, acquisitive patriarch who is highly focused on his family fortune and legacy.

And a dowager queen who is kind of a bitch.

And out there beyond the squabbling and personal drama of the main characters, barely on anyone's radar, the true, existential threat moves inexorably towards our cast of characters.

Watching The Detectives

The very capable Chris Ryan at Grantland (a publication which should definitely hire me) gets it almost right:

...

True Detective needs the signifiers of our world, but not the rules. It needs the corruption, the graft, the institutions, the laws, and the crime, but that’s it. Characters on this show don’t talk like us, and they don’t act like us. They are of this world but not in this world. This is “Los Angeles,” not Los Angeles.

Once you accept this, True Detective becomes a different kind of show, and it makes a certain kind of sense...

The first part, yes; the second part, no.  So almost, but not quite.

Because right now, HBO's True Detective does not make sense.  Not yet, anyway.  Right now, it is failing on its own terms.  Which doesn't mean it will, in the end, be a failure, but at this moment it is not delivering on what it promised.

And here's why.

This is not a heist story, so there are no plans to draw or teams of expert misfits to recruit.  It isn't a crime-gone-wrong story either, or a buddy flick, or a road picture.  It isn't Elmore Leonard mesmerizing us with the folkways and conversations of C-list criminals.  It isn't Ian Fleming or John Le Carre or Graham Greene navigating the world of James Bond or George Smiley or Alden Pyle.  It isn't a Mario Puzo parade across three bloody generations of America's most infamous fictional crime family, and it isn't Arthur Conan Doyle letting us peer at the world through the cool, logical mind of the world's only consulting detective.

So if the list of all the things which True Detective is not could go on for days, then what is it exactly?

Ah.  Glad you asked.

It is a dream.  A very intense dream.  And stories which aspire to take you up into a dream -- which don't merely ask you to suspend disbelief in the way all fiction does, but which requires that you to take up the local language and rules of a dream world -- take on a very special and delicate burden.

My future colleague at Grantland points quite correctly to the work of David Lynch as the scaffolding on which Nic Pizzolatto is hanging these eight hours of television --

In the absence of the singular vision of Fukanaga and the interview gimmick, the show’s directors (so far, Justin Lin for the first two episodes and Danish filmmaker Janus Metz Pedersen for Episode 3) have turned, consciously or not, to David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive as a central text. Lynch’s 2001 film looked at Los Angeles — from the Hollywood Hills mansions to the sun-baked parking lots outside of doughnut shops — and saw a city that could contain infinite possibilities, horrors, timelines, and realities.

Nic Pizzolatto’s story is following suit. Those overhead shots of freeway interchanges are overused and serve mostly to transition from one scene to another, but when viewed as part of the dizzying narrative that is being assembled, they make sense. These roads are Carrie Mathison’s or Lester Freamon’s cork boards — they indicate the interconnectedness of the evil that lurks in the light.

-- but I'd like to push a little deeper for today's lesson in How To Watch Teevee Like A Snob and suggest the proper template is Franz Kafka or, better yet, Edgar Allen Poe.

Poe's, The Fall of the House of Usher, for example, is ridiculous from the point of view of a linear, plot-driven story.  No one in it is a normal human who gets up and goes to work on Wall Street or at Arby's.  Around these surreal characters, apparitions come and go, maybe.  Someone dies, maybe.  Their body is going to be kept in the house for weeks, stored for mysterious reasons in a screwed-shut coffin, in a locked copper-lined crypt below the house.  The sun never shines. A wild storm whips up out of nowhere,  The dead rise, maybe, and tear doors off their hinges, And our narrator escapes just in time to see the the House of Usher split in two by a bolt from Heaven and collapse into a dead black lake.

As a conventional work of fiction, it makes No. Damn. Sense. at all,  But as a dream it works amazingly well, because Poe was a poet who cared much more about navigating his readers from one emotion to another by carefully crafting the atmospherics to move them implacably towards a specific psychological outcome.  And so from the very start, Poe piles the adjectives relentlessly on to let you know that you are not only are in a dream, but exactly what sort of dream you are having.

In Usher, you are immediately told through imagery and interior emotional states you are headed into a very bad dream, where horrible things are likely to happen:

DURING the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was -- but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me -- upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain -- upon the bleak walls -- upon the vacant eye-like windows -- upon a few rank sedges -- and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees -- with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium -- the bitter lapse into everyday life -- the hideous dropping off of the veil.

And if the specific vintage of nightmare on the menu wasn't clear enough, Poe makes sure to drive the point home:

Noticing these things, I rode over a short causeway to the house. A servant in waiting took my horse, and I entered the Gothic archway of the hall.

And for all of his long sentences, Poe moves his readers along through all of his horror stories at an incredibly brisk pace.   Usher is a hair over 7,000 words.  Sixteen pages.  And that's long by Poe horror standards. The Tell-Tale Heart is 2,200 words and The Masque of the Red Death just over 2,400 -- figure five pages each, give or take.  Poe could and did plot with great care when he was pioneering the consulting detective genre, for example, but his horror fiction was a different beast entirely.  Those were constructed to draw you in and move you along fast, fast, fast.  No time to slow down and admire the carpet or go through the drawers, because while his detective fiction were clever puzzles that invited readers to poke and scrutinize and solve, his horror fiction was designed as intense, immersive dreams.  And dreams unravel when you give your readers time to stop and handle the fiddle faddle on the knick-knack shelf.

(As an aside, let me underscore that the magic of this is in the words.  Which, by themselves are just...words.  Same stuff you and I use every day.  But in his stories Poe the poet selects and fits each one into place with enormous care so that, together, they drag you along towards your inexorable fate like a team of Percherons.)

The first season of True Detective got this balance between pacing and carefully deployed weirdness just right: using a few words and pictures they constructed a dream which swallows you up and bears you away towards something terrible; something which you could almost-but-never-quite feel rushing towards you because it was made out of the vocabulary of human nightmares.  

And those are the two element at which this season of True Detective is failing so far.  The pacing is arrhythmic, leaving us lingering in the wrong places (like the Sylvia Plath Bar & Grill) for too long.  And the visual and verbal cues are off:  with more than 1/3 of the story told, I still can't tell if we are observing the melancholy House of Usher from across the fields, or if we are on the causeway to the house or if we have passed through the Gothic archway and into the heart of the nightmare.  

There are still five chapters of story to tell, and I have not given up on it yet.  But we are three chapters in, and so far our storytellers have failed to create that delicate alchemy of real and surreal, inevitability and surprise. weird and mundane, out of which captivating dreams are made.  

And time is running out.