Cheat To Win

Sally Draper, “The Beautiful Girls” (season four, episode nine): Mad Men hit the jackpot when it cast a young Kiernan Shipka as Don’s oldest child, the strangely wise, always wounded Sally Draper, a young girl who seems to be drinking in everything around her and saving it up for the intense therapy she’ll need in 1985. In season three, the series tentatively started giving Sally actual storylines, and when Shipka proved up to the task, seasons four and five offered even more, to the point where it started to seem like Sally might be the series’ stealth protagonist. “The Beautiful Girls” is a great example of what makes Sally so fascinating, as she runs away from home to join her father at his office and finds herself passed between many women who could represent her future.

Our Kiernan, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.

Yet at the same time, those criticisms don’t particularly bother me. The show is too white and too upper-class, yes, but that’s a broad, systemic problem within the TV industry, and harping on this little-watched show as if it’s the standard-bearer in that department strikes me as a strange way to tackle that problem. (Even more bizarre are the still-lurking accusations of nepotism, as if HBO is throwing open its doors for every child of artist parents. If anything, the nepotism complaints are attempting to get at complaints about the skewing of the class system in America, but, again, that’s a problem that extends far beyond Girls.) And almost all of the other “flaws” I described above—except perhaps the show’s inability to know how to use its ensemble from time to time—are things that are so endemic to the series’ strengths that it seems impossible to separate them from what I love about it.

Todd VanDerWerff understands me and my views on television in a way that I will never be able to articulate.

BOSTON—Boston residents once again hustled and bustled their way into the nation’s hearts this week as they continued playing their adorable little game of “Big City,” a live-action role-playing adventure in which Bostonians buzz about their daily routines in a delightful hubbub of excitement as if they lived in a major American metropolis.

Inhabitants of real cities across the nation smiled in affectionate amusement as Bostonians put on their big-city clothes, swiped their Charlie cards for a ride on one of the MBTA’s trolley-like subway cars—charmingly called the “T”—and rushed downtown for “important” business meetings at the John Hancock Building, the South Boston Innovation District, and other pretend centers of global industry and commerce.

Source

Because in many ways, Enlightened is the necessary antidote to The Wire. This is not to say that the earlier show isn’t important or groundbreaking or fantastic, just that it looked up at the institutions we humans had built and offered a weary sigh of resignation. The most frequent question leveled about Enlightened by people only tangentially familiar with it is “How is that a comedy?” when it seems to have so few obvious laughs. And while that’s certainly the case, I would say Enlightened is a comedy in the traditional sense, a story where things don’t necessarily end well, but end with tiny glimmers of hope for the future. In the second season, a character tells Amy that she hopes so much that it can scare people, and that’s almost the show’s point. It is not worth it to lose yourself to despair. It is not worth it to give up hope entirely. It is not worth it to believe the system will defeat you forever. Things change. Systems are worn down. But people endure. If the characters on The Wire might offer up those weary sighs when asked how to effect change, Amy Jellicoe might pull you aside and say (in the most irritating way possible) to relax. To breathe. To let it go.

There is time. There is so much time.

Todd VanDerWerff from The AV Club encapsulated everything I want to say about Enlightened in one post.  Bravo, sir.

LONDON—Excited members of the British royal family released an ultrasound image Tuesday morning showing the unborn child of the former Kate Middleton, the Duchess of Cambridge, whose pregnancy was officially announced yesterday. “We are so thrilled to release this image of our future monarch, whose prophesied moment of ascension we await anxiously,” proud great-grandmother-to-be Queen Elizabeth II told reporters. “Soon it shall be with us. Soon all will be as foretold.” Representatives for the royal family claimed the child’s mother was “unable” to be interviewed, as she “needs much rest—the vessel requires strength.”

Brilliant.

I think what I liked best about this season is that the characters haven’t really changed. They’ve been through life-changing experiences, and they’ve done stuff that seems like they had been changed, but when you get right down to it, the characters in the finale are the characters from the pilot. Yet now we know so much more about them that we have a better read on the situations they get into. We can see how much Hannah defeats herself and keeps herself from accomplishing her goals. We can see how Jessa’s impulsiveness gets her into situations she can’t easily bluff her way out of. We can see how Shoshanna’s relative innocence and naïveté keep buoying her up, rather than dragging her down. Of the four, only Marnie seems willing to embrace anything like change, as she takes an impulsive chance on the overweight officiant at the wedding, and that might have as much to do with her drunken, continued despair over Charlie as anything else.

Some might read this lack of change as a bad thing. Long-form narrative is supposed to be about characters growing toward something else and becoming more self-aware, right? And, yes, there are some series where that’s very much the case. Yet I think many of the best TV shows are about people who fundamentally don’t change, who remain more or less the same, yet continue to reveal new sides of themselves to us. They don’t change so much as our viewpoint on them does. I’d say Girls more than meets this challenge in its first season. We know these people better than we did in episode one, even if they’ve remained basically the same people. If you go back and watch that pilot, knowing what you know about the characters now, it’s obvious that Lena Dunham and her collaborators knew who these people were and were just letting us get to know them slowly. Someone like Adam—who was seen by many of us (including me) as a “bad guy” back in the early days—now plays completely differently, since we better know who he is. It’s a really tricky feat to pull off, but when it’s done, there’s nothing quite like it.

Todd VanDerWerff continues to knock it out of the park in his recaps for GIRLS.

Girls takes a similar tack. Its characters are distinctly feminine, longing to have voices in a male-dominated society and not taking for granted that they’ll have to squeeze those voices around the edges of the discourse, but they go about it in ways that are often antiheroic. One of the earliest debates about the series was whether viewers were meant to “root” for Hannah when she so often did bad things, like stealing a tip her parents left for a hotel maid or not seeming to care about anybody but herself. Part of this is just a general lack of comfort with comedic antiheroes, who are usually presented with a level of detachment that allows us to realize they’re not meant to be characters we emulate, but rather characters we recognize the darkest parts of ourselves in. (See also: David Brent, Larry David, Kenny Powers, etc.) Dunham presents Hannah without these filters. The show isn’t doing any judging for its viewers, instead asking them to judge the characters’ behavior for themselves. Girls’ world is essentially realistic, which makes it tempting to assume we’re supposed to root for the characters to tumble even further into self-absorption—particularly in the early going, before the series’ central figures got called on a lot of their bullshit. Hannah’s an unreliable narrator, and we’re constantly forced to re-evaluate the way we see things through her point of view. But this also means we’re sometimes wrong about our conclusions, and that’s never fun to realize.

Believe me, there are so many great points that Todd VanDerWerff makes in this post; the excerpt above is really just the tip of the iceberg. In short, this post from The AV Club blows most of the critical pieces I’ve seen on this show out of the water.

• The show is fond of juxtaposition, of smashing stories up next to each other and seeing what parallels seep out. Sometimes, that works. Other times, it doesn’t. But every once in a great while, we get an episode like this, an episode so wrong-headed that it becomes amazing just how thoroughly the show’s producers don’t understand basic tenets of TV drama. You can have a straightforward, dramatic story with huge emotional stakes. You can have a comedic story with small stakes. You just can’t equate them. Indiana Jones can outrun the boulder. The Millennium Falcon can outrun the explosion of the Death Star. Indiana Jones can’t outrun the explosion of the Death Star. (I really like this metaphor; sue me.)
• This wants to be an episode about failure. Rachel chokes in her audition. Puck fails the test and will have to repeat his senior year, instead of getting his pool cleaning business off the ground. Beiste leaves her abusive husband, then takes him back at the end after he asks her for a second chance.One of these things is so the fuck not like the other.
• The episode ends up addressing domestic abuse with less emotional depth than an NBC “The More You Know” 15-second spot.
• The problem is that Glee has bought into the myth of its own importance so thoroughly that it thinks raising an issue, then explaining what you should do in that situation, then going off to have Puck draw awesome rocker demons on his history final, is an adequate way to discuss serious topics.
• The series sees itself as a force for good in the world—and, yeah, if this episode helps one woman get out of an abusive relationship, that’s a good thing. But that doesn’t make the show good art or even good crappy television. It makes it painfully, woefully obvious art and crappy television.
• The show thinks it’s a sweet, satirical comedy, but it also thinks it’s the most important TV series to ever have aired. There’s not a lot of room to move between those two poles, and the more the show attempts to, the more its tone problems arise.

The Onion’s AV Club provided a take down of last night’s Glee with so much vitriol, even I was pleased.  Todd VanDerWerff’s words were some of the most brutal I’ve ever seen written in relation to the show - and they deserved every single one.

hammerito:

NEW YORK—Confusion, disgust, and terror were among the emotions new Jets quarterback Tim Tebow reported feeling after a 20-minute phone call with New York coach Rex Ryan. “Coach Ryan is a very…expressive person. Really descriptive. He can be a little vulgar, though,” the visibly distraught Tebow told reporters while attempting to hold a glass of ice water steady enough to drink from it. “He told me what he wants the Jets to do next year. Then he told me I’d like New York, and why. Then he told me about, about the ‘fun’ we are all going to have together. That was most of the call. I have to go now. I have to call my parents. I have to be alone for a while.” Coach Ryan said he enjoyed talking with Tebow, whom he described as “a nice, quiet kid with a good head for football who gasps a lot when you talk about poontang.”

This is perfection.

Calling the death a “tragic loss” and saying he was “truly devastated by the news,” self-described Apple product loyalist Eric Cavanaugh is treating the passing of the company’s former CEO Steve Jobs as if his fucking dad just died, sources confirmed Thursday. “I can’t believe it,” said Cavanaugh, 28, wearing a saddened expression that would make you think he was mourning the loss of his 61-year-old father, Jack, and not a complete goddamn stranger. “He meant a lot to me, and I’ll miss him. I think I might send an e-mail to rememberingsteve@apple.com [instead of contacting the man he hasn’t talked to in a month who helped him with his homework, paid his college tuition, and has supported him throughout his entire life, loving him unconditionally despite his myriad fuckups].” At press time, Cavanaugh reportedly needs to get his fucking priorities straight.

New game, friends - drink every time someone calls Jobs a visionary.

Source: The Onion