Scrubs

Scrubs is a light comedy about a guy with a face who works at a hospital and wants to be a doctor and dates women who have issues and has obnoxious friends and an inexplicable one-sided feud with the working class and has an Asshole to whom he looks up for fatherly guidance and recognition.

In other words, it’s a searing take on everything wrong with faltering masculinity in modern society. It’s natural, the show seems to posit (because naturalistic fallacies are how these shows posit), to want the admiration of a stone cold turd like Cox, because us goofy guys never got enough guidance from our own dads and are confused as to the subtleties that distinguish respect that don’t come easy from a patronizing bully. In a fashion that was wildly popular during the Dark Ages of the ironic kitsch (the mid 90’s), Scrubs bookends these grim declarations of the hopelessness of our lives with feel-good songs and palavering homily about everything more or less working because goshdarnit, that’s just the way this whole crazy cookie is shaped, and goshdarn if we don’t get right out there and eat that cookie. That Scrubs tries to sweeten this pale, psuedo-cynicism with yukky gags demonstrates only that its writers don’t get what’s so repellant about psuedo-cynicism in general. Well, it may be a rash, ill-considered, hysterical, incorrect, ugly, scurrilous and evil opinion, but people who don’t understand that don’t deserve airtime anymore.

Or am I being ironic? Duhhhhhhnnnn duhhhnnnn DUHNNNNNN!

Worst Broadcast Shows

Broadcast TV: once the national commons, now the dumpster of the national psyche. It’s where trends go to die. It’s where classics go to get killed by repetition. It’s where cheap lawyers advertise. Broadcast is like watching sick calves wobble toward the abattoir, and every year it serves up a new complement of the botched and bungled. Here are this year’s sickest (fiction only):

Cold Case. Like the Family Research Council doing a “black” voice, hand up the ass of a crude The Wire sockpuppet. Cold Case steals the formal points and hints at repackaging the message, but swaps naturalism for cliché and any attempt at fairness for one-sided hectoring. It’s like the TV equivalent of nervous cover-up chatter – only like most deplorable primetime rip-offs, it’s likely the product of very few intact motives. Extra credit for including not one, not two, but four U2 songs in an episode. Clearly, these writers are in touch with the street.

House, M.D. is far beyond self-parody. As in the last few sclerotic seasons, nary an onscreen conversation passes that isn’t mostly speculation as to House’s (now well-worn) motivations. Plus, Lisa Eddelstein is reduced to David Shore’s Magical Girlfriend, coerced out of her clothes again and again in fantasy and hallucination. Shore seems to be playing toward “and sex is the key to reforming irascibles”; Dr. Cuddy isn’t having it, but after the Heel Face Turn, she will be.

The Cleveland Show. Like Seth McFarlane doing a “black” voice, with a FOX focus group filling in the teleprompter. It’s noticably more anodyne than Family Guy, which raises unsettling questions. Does McFarlane think black people can’t bear a nihilistic show? Actually, let’s back up a step – does he think any anodynists are still watching his shit? Needs to read more internet; he’s been their public enemy for years going. Maybe he’s thinking “I can’t be myself writing about a black family.” Then don’t.

Sit Down, Shut Up. This profoundly unfunny cartoon proves the old adage that Mitch Hurwitz can’t adapt shit. For extra points, it’s the most visually unappealing animation I’ve ever seen, beating every contender I can think of by a long mile.

Legend of the Seeker is like Xena but self-serious. It follows the struggle of magical chosen ones in a land overrun with evil and, typically enough of “epic fantasy,” plays the whole thing for topical allegory. It’s hard for me to accept moralism from a show whose villains are so implausible, whose heroes are such imperious elites, and whose world view attributes Evil itself to the hubris of untalented artists. Priorities, please.

Glee. A more charitable writer might describe FOX’s newest darling as an alchemy of opposite aims, crossing the uber-anodyne high school musical with the more nihilistic asshole drama (practically the network’s own invention). Unfortunately, it gets the worst of both worlds, the valorization of conformity alongside the valorization of the Asshole, and plenty of cheap shots at “uglies and fatties.” In other words: a surprising articulation of the All American values for which the FOX network is known and loved.

Speaking of FOX formulae, 24 is laboring at establishing its tone after the Bush era. What I mean is, its whole formula is weak and the writers plumb further flail each new episode. When it’s not firing blank fnords, it’s trying to justify its previous enthusiasm about torture and detention in a news environment that’s hostile to both ideas, along with the “terror war” rationales that were inseparable from them. In other words, it’s a lot like the contemporary Republican Party: nervous and abashed, grumbling equivocally to cover up plain lack of ideas.

The Simpsons. There’s simply no show less deserving of airtime in 2009 than The Simpsons. “Exhausted premise” doesn’t begin to describe it. It’s worn out its welcome to the point that even the (very) occasional funny joke is soured in context — by weak performances, preciousness, and the knowledge, now certain, that not one detail of its overwrought Springfield will ever change. “Irrelevant” isn’t a fair charge; the weakness of its comedy is horribly relevant. Unfortunately, thanks to its litany of catchphrases and rich merchandising legacy, it’s also a cash cow for FOX, and as long as there are mediocre comics out there, this dinosaur will continue to stink.

Irritating Ads

What the hell is up with food service companies making grandiose philosophical claims?

Wendy’s latest jingle is some lackadaisical folk twit asserting that “you know when it’s real” — glad to hear it, Mr. Russell, now impress me with your airtight analysis! Oh, you’re not? Oh, you’re just going to pitch a burger using sixth and seventh generation xerox clones of The Office characters? Yeah? Shit.

But it’s probably not worth adding that “you know when it’s real” reflects the biggest package of recidivist dubious in the entire philosophy of knowledge, when Church’s follows up by claiming to know “what good is.” Never mind the hemlock, the deans of “proper” philosophy can’t even figure out whether “to be” applies. It’s a good thing our chicken vendors are working overtime to make up for it.

The latest ad I compulsively mute is one for AT&T U-Verse, depicting a family so determined to watch their respective shows that they’re willing to hold one another at remote-control-point to ensure nobody records over them — a cutesy pastiche of shooter movies with abysmal, godawful acting (even by ad standards) that everyone involved should be ashamed of.

The Thick of It, II

People find politics horrible because it’s an inherently messy intersection. On the one hand, pundits at coffee shops and on op-ed pages discuss it in the language of ideas: the smart idea, the right idea, ideas whose times have come. Even soi-disant pragmatists can’t but. We’re confined, by training and by place in society, to thinking in terms of the ideal. Simultaneously, real politics seems worlds apart from smart, right thinking; the business of power is in lying, cheating, prejudice and abuse. Rational people, eloquent in the language of “we should,” end up wondering what use it all is when we don’t.

Critics are treating The Thick of It like it’s Peter Capaldi’s show, but I think they misread it. To me, the show has always been about its politician characters. Its most relatable thread is is the tension between mortal humans, who need things like convictions and bathtubs and sleep, who worry about careers and make wrong judgments, and the horror that Capaldi’s character represents, the horror intrinsic in the power business. Moreover, by focusing on crises of spin control, The Thick of It illustrates how political language itself — shaped, shared and fought over by bystanders — lampshades the real absurdities power brokers perpetrate.

80’s Conformity

For anyone who suspected the 80’s a particularly dire time to have been babysat by the box, here’s Phil Mendez, one of the creators of the Dungeons & Dragons cartoon:

Dungeons & Dragons was a series about six kids who were transported to a dimension filled with wizards and fire-snorting reptiles and cryptic clues and an extremely-evil despot named Venger.  The youngsters were trapped in this game-like environment but, fortunately, they were armed with magical skills and weaponry, the better to foil Venger’s insidious plans each week.

The kids were all heroic — all but a semi-heroic member of their troupe named Eric.  Eric was a whiner, a complainer, a guy who didn’t like to go along with whatever the others wanted to do.  Usually, he would grudgingly agree to participate, and it would always turn out well, and Eric would be glad he joined in.  He was the one thing I really didn’t like about the show.

So why, you may wonder, did I leave him in there?  Answer: I had to.

As you may know, there are those out there who attempt to influence the content of childrens’ television.  We call them “parents groups,” although many are not comprised of parents, or at least not of folks whose primary interest is as parents.  Study them and you’ll find a wide array of agendum at work…and I suspect that, in some cases, their stated goals are far from their real goals.

Nevertheless, they all seek to make kidvid more enriching and redeeming, at least by their definitions, and at the time, they had enough clout to cause the networks to yield.  Consultants were brought in and we, the folks who were writing cartoons, were ordered to include certain “pro-social” morals in our shows.  At the time, the dominant “pro-social” moral was as follows: The group is always right…the complainer is always wrong.

This was the message of way too many eighties’ cartoon shows.  If all your friends want to go get pizza and you want a burger, you should bow to the will of the majority and go get pizza with them.  There was even a show for one season on CBS called The Get-Along Gang, which was dedicated unabashedly to this principle.  Each week, whichever member of the gang didn’t get along with the gang learned the error of his or her ways.

We were forced to insert this “lesson” in D & D, which is why Eric was always saying, “I don’t want to do that” and paying for his social recalcitrance.  I thought it was forced and repetitive, but I especially objected to the lesson.  I don’t believe you should always go along with the group.  What about thinking for yourself?  What about developing your own personality and viewpoint?  What about doing things because you decide they’re the right thing to do, not because the majority ruled and you got outvoted?

We weren’t allowed to teach any of that.  We had to teach kids to join gangs.  And then to do whatever the rest of the gang wanted to do.

What a stupid thing to teach children.

Contemporary TV Modes

Asshole Drama

House, M.D. appeals to people who admire the attitudes of patriarchal authority; House is imperious, dictatorial, possessing an implicit conservatism effaced only by his distaste for organized belief. Temperance Brennan, protagonist of the knock-off drama Bones, is identical but female; Emily Deschanel’s performances bring less archness, swap instead for naive shock at the inadequacy of others’ logic. Tim Roth in Lie To Me plays a smug deception expert who makes unilateral decisions based on his superior knowledge of human nature (hence FOX’s decision to schedule him next to Hugh Laurie). Glee, too, features a hard-ass front and center; the idea is that even sincere, spirited “good kids,” like the kind mythologized in the “high school musical” genre, could use the teachings of a know-it-all jerk. On the further end of the spectrum, these are joined by Dexter, about a know-it-all serial killer cop, and 24, about a know-it-all serial killer cop. The M.O. of the “asshole drama” is that people are inadequate, and the reason assholes exist is to teach us to be better. It’s a low-key kind of emotional fascism, which borrows the attitudes of the nihilistic comedy but dispenses with nihilism; its covert message is the promotion of various forms of authority.

New Sincerity

Doctrine has it that postmodern excesses leave Millennials with a new mandate for sincerity in the arts (where that tends to mean optimism) and a new license to be grandiose. The West Wing, arguably the first TV show in this mould, turned the political genre on its head by presenting politics as a lot of basically decent people (!) doing the best they can. Since then, the same logic gave us everything from the frankly spiritual Lost to the frankly dispiriting Cold Case, whose producers signal their hope for the inner city by playing U2 all over it. The danger for this genre is that with hamfists like the authors of Cold Case making grandiose gestures everywhere, sincerity (and optimism) could acquire the stink of chauvinist, majority naiveté.

Neoclassicism

In my mind, this is the bellwether for the era’s defining Boomer conservatism. Neoclassicism is a movement currently gaining momentum in the pop arts that prioritizes such qualities as traditional content, formal elegance, restraint and “class.” This is the secret to the The Sopranos’ critical success. More than its story, its formal qualities appealed to critics’ inarticulate sense for canonicity; naturally, it was quick to canonize. Perhaps the most thoroughgoing neoclassicist show is AMC’s Mad Men, which extends the mandate for tradition to actual nostalgia, and makes formal elegance such a byword that its setpieces often resemble living paintings. The trouble, I suppose, is that formal elegance is intoxicating when it frames a story like The Sopranos, which is compelling and well-told, but is easily imitable and dulls in application to the half-assed and the ill-conceived.

Hyperrealism

Hyperreal shows blur the boundary between fiction and reality, generally by fitting wholly fictional elements into a milieu that’s deliberately as realistic as possible. The realism is achieved either by meticulously low-key storytelling, or (more commonly) by the insertion of recognizably real elements (like real landmarks or celebrities) into a more fictionalized narrative. Hyperrealism has a long working history with nihilistic comedy (Curb Your Enthusiasm, Head Case, etc.) but is now being appropriated by dramedy too (Entourage), to occasionally striking effect. Baudrilliard would argue that the hyperreal is aimed at supplanting reality, but to my feeling, the true silliness of this genre is in the way it makes reality a mere product placement; the fiction is often no more believable for the inclusion of realities than it would be without them. In other words, the tools of postmodernism do wear out: the mind becomes habituated to these anomalies and it no longer seems disorienting. Then what? I’m guessing the cheeky celebrity guest spots start to look pretty stupid.

New Naturalism

Not to be confused with hyperrealism, this is a cousin of both neoclassicism and New Sincerity; like those, its rise is intimately connected with the decline of postmodern dogma. The degree of naturalism varies. The Wire and The Thick of It are as naturalistic as possible, going to elaborate lengths to “rough up” the speech with dialect and found idiom, and whenever possible depict stories taken from the news. Others shoot for impressionistic naturalism; Deadwood uses deliberately anachronistic profanity to convey the gritty, underclass feeling of the American frontier. Strict diegetic sound is popular in this genre. Naturalism is a strange thing on US television, which has tended to skew toward the imaginary; for an example of the weaknesses of this dogma, look toward British TV, where naturalism reigns and even so, actual insight can be elusive.

Irritating Ad Trends

1) Seemingly everyone, from Visa to Cricket, now has an ad full of gangly, tone-deaf people singing pop songs in public, with jump cuts to connect their snatches of awkward mewl together. Actually, this is probably meant to signify “togetherness” and “spontaneity” and other things GenY consumers supposedly shell out to feel associated with. Thing is, most of these “singers” are excruciatingly bad, the sort of people who’d cause actual pain if they sang in actual public. Cricket claims you’ll get respect online.

2) Next up: auto insurers and their mascots, whether they be Progressive’s simpering, uncanny Cusack byblow, Geico’s triptych of uninspired corporate symbols, or SafeAuto’s remarkably graceless references to The Office. The idea may be that auto insurance is a faceless industry that consumers need personified; true or not, these are living spambots.

3) “My life is unique.” Preferred pitch for free checking accounts and Axe products. Usually features a series of rapid-fire beats depicting quirky, unique activities like partying with teenagers, flirting with girls, riding a truck, eating a sandwich, dancing with a sweatband, having sex with people in rabbit suits, taking pictures with friends, taking pictures with eccentric strangers, playing on a giant metal dinosaur, climbing stairs, having sleepovers, high-fiving, and so forth, in order to establish that the protagonist needs special accommodation or products with unusual resilience just for being so goddamn on all the time.

Cold Case

Cold Case is The Wire with maudlin in place of brains.  In other words, it’s nothing like The Wire.

Sympathy

In Characters & Viewpoint, Orson Scott Card’s how-to for fiction, he writes extensively about the subjective dimension of characterization, what he calls “sympathy.” Writers use tools to make characters more or less likable to the reader, and these don’t necessarily have a lot to do with what makes a person good. For example, we tend to sympathise more with a character who suffers, even an evil jerk — which is why in fiction, evil jerks we’re supposed to tolerate are generally put through a lot of suffering. Pain and fear are hooks for empathy.

Does it make good moral sense? Not really. That Rudolf Hess suffered in Spandau prison doesn’t make him any more likable as a Nazi fuckhead. Nor does it make sense to assume an intellectual is a bad guy, though as Card points out, that’s the rule as often as not. The crux of sympathy is perceived likeness. People being people, they generally like a character if the character is like them. But where do we get our ideas about what we’re like?

I remember, when I was a child, watching cheesy box-office adventure movies and feeling desperately alienated from the heroes. By convention, these were mostly square-jawed football types whose distinguishing feature was a sort of moral “clarity” (i.e. simplicity). My sort of people – science-freaks, skeptics, liberals – were invariably sidekicks and jokes, misguided fools or finks for evil. I often suspect that this kind of cognitive dissonance, with its origin in normatizing fictions, is as much responsible for the appeal of the “gothic” subculture (and other deliberate affronts to popular morality) as anything else.

One of the purposes of The Sender, when I began writing, was to study television’s sympathy ploys and infer something of America’s emotional landscape. So what, then? Well, if we momentarily accept Card’s hypothesis about sympathy, we can guess that Americans still feel stupid; broad popular support for Homer Simpson attests to that. Moral simplicity also remains much-prized; cf. Marge Simpson, sure, but also Michael Bluth, Jack Bauer, John Locke, Buffy Summers, etc., all protagonists who face moral challenges by being conscientious and inflexible.

Card didn’t write about nihilistic irony; perhaps he never recognized it. I’d argue that comedies making heavy use of it tend to employ an inverted value structure. Curb Your Enthusiasm consists almost entirely of unsympathetic, unlikable people — we follow Larry David not because he’s particularly likable (though who can’t relate to faux pas?) but because his flaws are so much more spectacular than the others’.

The Office makes such an explicit hierarchy out of its sympathy claims that it’s often embarrasing. Young, white and clever are the top of the heap, privileged not only to viewers’ presumed sympathy but also their interest (we follow their personal lives without any humorous hook). Black and gay follow, privileged to viewers’ respect and called upon to add moral weight, but from a distance. Viewers are not asked to respect the elderly, the misfit or unattractive women — they’re mostly used for one-note jokes. For the boss and his sycophants, the show asks our occasional pity. Toward the conservative Christian, we are invited to feel mostly contempt.

Card makes a few questionable posits — for one, the tenor of his writing suggests that he believes these claims to be universal, a tedious and predictable assumption. He also seems to believe that the relationship between consumers’ attitudes and fiction is, for all intents and purposes, one-way. Kate Wright offers a more nuanced, if a thousandfold more disturbing, view in her Hollywood how-to Screenwriting Is Storytelling — but I’ll cover that another time.

Lost

The new season of Lost will also be the last, unless (God, I hope not) they follow with a movie. This means that we’re rapidly approaching the point where Lindelof and Cuse can no longer defer answers about their knotty plot. Fortunately, season 5 ends strong, suggesting at least that explanations do exist. Interestingly, what “The Incident” supplies in the way of confidence isn’t clues to the direction of the story as much as answers about the theme – and that’s a strange way to pivot on television.

The opening scene gives us a new flashback — the furthest back to date — and two new characters: Jacob, a hidden actor about whom we’ve heard plenty, and a black-clad mystery man. Jacob (Mark Pellegrino, better known as that goofy hit-man from Mulholland Drive) munches on red herring and reveals that he’s bringing people to the island to prove a point about human nature — namely, that people can change. His nemesis complains bitterly that “it always ends the same,” to which Jacob replies coolly that it only ends once, everything up until then “is just progress.” Cue ominous music. His nemesis says, “Do you have any idea how badly I want to kill you?”

So, this is the dualism of Lost: one person sees the ends and determines to get there, unconcerned with how; the other sees the means meaninglessly repeat themselves, and suspects there’s nothing more to it. Lost is Catholic where Twin Peaks was Protestant – less concerned with the nature of evil, than with the limits of humanity’s capacity for good. It’s also suitably ambivalent from the perspective of mortals, something it shares with the best Catholic apologia. Jacob, ostensibly the good guy, is aloof and assured throughout, explaining not one iota to the people he manipulates — whereas not only does his nemesis get great lines, but (to appearances) comes down on the side of empathy for sufferers. It also seems as though the time contrivance — recollect and prediction, time travel, time loops — goes past storytelling and enmeshes with the show’s theology, though to what extent we’re yet to find out.