Phlogiston

A sad day—one of the great stars of our time has passed away: Frasier’s dog Eddie dies aged 16. “A consummate professional.”

Given my previous post, genre is suddenly at the forefront of my mind. And one genre I love is the caper movie/show. Two new caper shows just started in America: Heist and Thief. I’d originally thought to say something more in depth about the pros and cons of the two shows, especially given how similar they sound. But there isn’t any point as Heist seems to have been already cancelled, and two articles say better and at greater length than I was prepared to go into as to why Thief is very much worth watching and Heist is not. The Mercury News’ article gives the best side-by-side comparison, and the Jam! article reinforces it by roundly slamming Heist.

The short version is: if Thief comes to a television screen near you, watch it. It’s good. If Heist does, don’t bother.

Last month The Observer had a wonderful article on the new “Teen Noir”—specifically, Veronica Mars, one of my favourite new TV shows, and forthcoming movie Brick.

With its highly stylised dialogue, hardboiled talk of gats and hop, shamuses and reefer worms, Brick breathes new life into the teen movie. As depicted by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Brendan is an adolescent Marlowe, all world-weary attitude and well-placed punches—when asked by one character what he intends to do now his plan has been rumbled, his response is the deadpan: “Stand here and bleed at you.”

Similarly, a recent episode of Veronica Mars saw Veronica, who was manning a drinks stall, ask the show’s anti-hero: “What’s your poison?” The response, “emotionally unavailable women”, echoed Bogart/Bacall dialogue from Hollywood’s Golden Age.

It’s hard to describe Veronica Mars, and in previous posts I’d opted not to; I feared any description I gave would make it sound like Nancy Drew, when in reality it’s closer to something by Chandler or Hammett, just layered on to the world of American high school with its gangs and cliques, the stylised hard-boiled dialogue transcribed into teen slang. It’s genre-bending on a Buffy scale, and it’s surprising how well it works. (I admit I was very sceptical when I first heard about Veronica Mars last year, and it took me a couple of episodes to settle in to it, unlike Buffy and Firefly—another genre-bender, cowboys in space—which hooked me immediately.) The important thing is that the noir protagonist has to be an outsider who effortlessly outsmarts the socially and economically advantaged, mired in moral turpitude as they are, and who is constantly exposed and vulnerable to the violence of the bottom feeders vieing for a way out of their social ghetto, and those themes translate surprisingly easily into the world of high school. Perhaps the most brilliant twist of the genre-bending in Veronica Mars is its gender-bending—with the private dick now being dickless in the shape of Veronica (and what a nice shape), the femme fatale is converted into an homme fatale: Logan Echolls, one of the best characters to ever grace the small screen.

Last year Veronica Mars was named the best new show of the year by the New York Times and Entertainment Weekly and Brick won the Sundance Special Jury Prize for Originality of Vision. You can read more about Veronica Mars at fan site Mars Investigations. IGN also has an interview with Enrico Colantoni who plays Keith Mars—Veronica’s dad, erstwhile sheriff of Neptune, and now private investigator.

Just a quick post on two really nice interviews I came across. The first is Rolling Stone’s interview with Kiefer “Jack Bauer” Sutherland. I’d really like to go out for a drink with that guy. The second is Backstage’s interview with Seth Green, who sounds like he is one hell of a smart cookie despite moving to Hollywood at age sixteen and who has a work ethic I can only dream of.

The Daily Telegraph’s latest installment of their Film-makers on Film series features Joss Whedon, and in what may seem an initially unlikely candidate for discussion he chooses to discuss Brigadoon. The article features some lovely insights into Joss’s approach to film, TV, and genre.

Whedon has a theory that every movie aspires to the state of the musical. “You can take any genre and say these horror bits, these action bits, these are the musical numbers - these are the moments where we are uplifted. The shoot-out in The Wild Bunch, the Neo and Agent Smith fight in The Matrix - those are the big closing numbers. The way a musical can make us feel is unlike anything else, in song and particularly in dance. I think people fly through plate-glass windows when they get shot because movies don’t have dance scenes any more. This is what we do instead.”

My first post to this blog, just over a year ago now, was a round-up of the latest TV shows, especially the American ones, so it seems only appropriate that I mark my return from my long hiatus from the blogosphere with my thoughts on what I’m watching (and not watching) right now.

So, it seems that last year Desperate Housewives was one of my fave new shows. Sadly, it didn’t hold my attention. What grabbed me about it to begin with was its Twin Peaks vibe, the dark surreal underbelly of American suburbia. Well, at least that’s what I thought I was getting. Instead, it’s descended into Sex and the City for older married chicks. I was already getting bored in season one, and after the first couple of episodes of season two I just gave up on it. Another show I raved about last year is currently teetering on the edge of my watch list: Lost. Lost started off incredibly well; I liked the ensemble cast, I liked their back-stories, and I liked the mysery of the island: are they insane, in purgatory, in some supernatural Bermuda triangle, or caught in some heinous conspiracy? Frankly, who knows and who cares by now? Last year I expressed surprise that J.J. Abrams, creator of Alias, could have written something like this. But now the similarities with Alias are becoming all too obvious. Alias was always a bit hokey, with its knowing Mission Impossible riffing, and its ridiculous (and seemingly endless) spy-family patriarchs and matriarchs. But the first season had panache and verve, and promised a payoff in terms of unravelling the Rimbaldi mystery and playing out the complicated romantic involvements of the leads. But none of it went anywhere. The Rimbaldi mystery was a huge McGuffin, and the romantic involvements slipped all too quickly into juvenile exercises in do they or don’t they love me more than them? Sounding familiar yet? That’s right, Lost is rushing headlong in the same direction. Originally, show runners J. J. Abrams and Damon Lindelof claimed that an entire five season story had been worked out in advance, and that they knew exactly what was happening and where the story was heading. Then David Fury left the writing team to join the 24 team and said in an interview that they were just flying by the seat of their pants, making it up as they went along. Recently I’ve heard (Hannu, leave a comment with the details) that in a recent interview Abrams and Lindelof have admitted that they intend to drag the mystery out for as long as the show is on air. So those of you hoping for some explanation of what is going on might as well give up now. Personally, I’m giving it to the end of this season, and if there isn’t enormous improvement I’m gone.

The new season in America saw three new shows, all sounding nearly the same (”They’re amonst us, but we can’t tell who they are”): Invasion, Threshold and Surface. Personally I had no real interest in any of them, but a lull over Christmas in anything to watch ended up with me catching up on all three. Threshold was simply dreadful. Brent Spiner was wonderful, but one good actor does not a show make. It’s no surprise it was cancelled after ten episodes. Surface, currently showing on ITV2, failed to hold my attention. I don’t have much more to say about it than that. Invasion, currently showing on Channel 4, is probably the best of the three, but honestly it’s nothing to write home about. It is at least more character driven, and contents itself to build slowly, and it does have a nice creepy “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” feel to it. But when all is said and done, the last few episodes have felt weaker than the openers, and it just doesn’t feel like it has the quality to keep it going.

One new show and one returning one that I do enjoy, despite thinking that they’re kinda daft, are Supernatural and Medium. Medium, currently showing on BBC1, bugs me slightly with its “hang-’em-high” conception of justice, but Patricia Arquette is simply wonderful in the title role, and I really enjoy the quotidian details of her home and family life. Supernatural, currently showing on ITV2, is totally daft, but enormous fun. A dark chiller, riffing on American urban legends, it has just enough hokem and creepiness to make a hit of a fairly obvious formula.

Three new sitcoms of note: How I Met Your Mother, Kitchen Confidential and My Name is Earl. The first two were of note to me because they starred Buffy the Vampire Slayer alumni: Alyson Hannigan in the former and Nicholas Brendan in the latter. How I Met Your Mother was aimed at people who were mentally deficient, and of course is a big hit; Kitchen Confidential was edgy, smart and cancelled after about four episodes. My Name is Earl is currently showing on Channel 4, and so far has been funny and enjoyable. How long that will last is anyone’s guess.

But now on to what I do think is good:

24, the crack cocaine of TV, has gotten off to a spectacular start in its fifth season, with the first four episodes so far rivalling what we saw in season one. Whether it can maintain that is another question, but so far so good. I’m reassured by the fact that David Fury and Manny Coto are on the writing staff this season.

Battlestar Galactica just goes from strength to strength. This season (two) has just been incredible. I blogged about this show before, but if you still don’t believe me, here’s another very positive review. This is the kind of show that people who don’t even like sci-fi love. There is more drama, politics, and human fallibility in one episode of this show then there is in most seasons of other drams.

Veronica Mars continues as the greatest undervalued, and in many cases unknown, show. As a great man said, “this show knows from pain”. My current fave alongside Battlestar Galactica. Why the hell isn’t this on UK TV? I don’t know how to begin even describing what this show is about; I do know that any description I try to give is almost certainly going to fail to do it justice.

One returning show I’ve only just gotten hip to is The Shield. The guys at RE5ULT rave about this, and I’d heard that it’s won more Emmies and Golden Globes than any other cable show, but when I saw the first two seasons going cheap on DVD in the January sales and picked them up I don’t think I was prepared for it to be just this damn good. Picture NYPD Blue meets The Sopranos; a cop show where the lead character is a corrupt policeman, a decent man who does horrendous things. That’s The Shield. I’ve also heard that I need to check out The Wire but I haven’t yet. Speaking of The Sopranos it’s due to return in, I believe, March of this year. What a wait it’s been. It has to be pretty much the gold standard in American TV drama.

And finally, a plug for yet another cancelled before its time show: The Inside. Created by Tim Minear, co-executive producer of Angel, Firefly and Wonderfalls, it’s no normal police procedural (in fact, Tim Minear admitted in an interview that he wouldn’t have a clue how to write a police procedural as he hasn’t a clue about police procedure). Instead, it’s a very dark, gothic, psychological drama, featuring normally outlandish serial crimes, a la The Silence of the Lambs, in which the crimes often reflect unflatteringly on those investigating them, illuminating and sometimes reflecting their dark and troubled psychologies. It’s really worth checking out, especially if you give it a few episodes, although be prepared to get hooked on a show cut off in its prime. The Inside is currently showing on ITV4 on Fridays at 9pm.

The CulturePulp has a very good, long interview with Joss Whedon.

It was with a mixture of incredulity and derision that, over two years ago now, I heard that Battlestar Galactica was to be remade. For those of you who don’t remember the risible movie, followed by the embarassing and short-lived TV series, followed by an even worse and shorter-lived spin-off/sequel series, then you should count yourselves lucky. Hint: think Buck Rogers in the 25th Century and you’ll be in the right ball-park. Who would want to remake this steaming pile? Well, Ronald D. Moore would.

Then word spread that it wouldn’t be a remake, but a re-imagining; that it would be much darker, and very post-911; that Starbuck would be a woman. “Who cares?” I thought, it’s still going to suck. In 2003 a mini-series was produced, I guess to test the waters, and it was both a popular and critical success, and on the heals of that the first season of the new TV series aired last year. Word started to spread that it wasn’t just good, it was amazing. I started seeing talk of it not only in the blogosphere, but in much weightier journals, and critics and social commentators who wouldn’t normally touch science-fiction with a barge poll were singing its praises. My certainty that it must be rubbish started to weaken, and eventually I gave in and watched the mini series. It was really good! I instantly went on to watch the whole of the first season, and my opinion of it went up still further. Last Friday the first episode of the second season aired, and frankly it just gets better and better.

The New York Times’ whopping six-page article, Ron Moore’s Deep Space Journey (requires free registration), bears testament to the positive response the show has received from the mainstream media, calling it “one of the most original and provocative programs on television”. The show’s power consists in its dumping almost all of the tired worn-out cliches of science fiction, as expressed in Moore’s manifesto for “naturalistic science fiction”:

After numerous meetings and a full script treatment, he wrote a two-page memo that laid out the basic tenets of what the new “Battlestar Galactica” would eventually become. “We take as a given the idea that the traditional space opera, with its stock characters, techno-double-talk, bumpy-headed aliens, thespian histrionics and empty heroics has run its course, and a new approach is required,” it began. “Call it ‘naturalistic science fiction.’” There would be no time travel or parallel universes or cute robot dogs. There would not be “photon torpedoes” but instead nuclear missiles, because nukes are real and thus are frightening.

The naturalism is enhanced by the fact that the story, even of the original, so closely follows recent events:

“When I watched the original pilot,” Moore says, “I knew that if you did ‘Battlestar Galactica’ again, the audience is going to feel a resonance with what happened on 9/11. That’s going to touch a chord whether we want it to or not. And it felt like there was an obligation to that. To tell it truthfully as best we can through this prism.” In the miniseries Moore wrote to introduce the new “Battlestar,” the echoes of the war on terror were unapologetic and frequently harrowing: what happens when an advanced, comfortable, secular democracy endures a devastating attack by an old enemy that it literally created (which enemy, in Moore’s version, also happens to be religious fanaticism)?

The intended naturalism is also captured perfectly by the special effects, which are done by Zoic, the same company that did the effects for Firefly and Serenity, with their trademark CGI which looks like it is shot on handheld camera, complete with objects going in and out of focus, rarely remaing in the centre of the frame as if the camera is struggling to follow them, and frequently obscured by glare from lightsources such as an engine or a star. Indeed most of the (actual) camera work is handheld as well, following characters through dark cramped corridors. In this respect, the new re-imagined Galactica owes a considerable debt to Firefly, and the kudos for popularising naturalistic science fiction led by characters, and devoid of aliens, plot-saving marvels of technology never before mentioned, and incomprehensible technobabble, should be shared equally between the two. (And to be really fair, the idea is not exactly new, as anyone who has watched Alien or Blade Runner will know. It has, however, been on one hell of a long holiday.)

But what is most impressive is the honesty and seriousness with which genuine political and moral problems are treated. The comparison between the Cylons and either Al Quaeda or the evangelical right may sound hackneyed, but it is treated in a nuanced and subtle way: the humans are flawed and imperfect, and fail to own up to their responsibility for creating the Cylons or to recognise their own genocidal impulse towards them. The liberal democracy of the humans is beset with tensions between the military leadership and the civil leadership, and their freedoms often seem most imperilled by their own response to their near holocaust.

It seems ironic that a show which began life as a hackneyed attempt to ride the shirt tails of Star Wars and Star Trek should finally come into its own as those two franchises have come to a close, eclipsing them not only by reinventing itself, but by reinventing the whole genre of science fiction.

Global Frequency by Warren Ellis was first introduced to me by Hannu, and I loved it immediately.

When I heard that it was going to be turned into a TV series I was really excited. Then I heard that the pilot hadn’t been picked up, and I guess I just resigned myself to the fact. But this weekend the unaired pilot was leaked on BitTorrent, and now the fact that I’m not going to see anymore is just depressing and annoying. It was really, really good. So much better than 99% of what does get picked up. My only complaint was with Jenni Baird as Katrina Finch; I think the character was about as believable a scientist as Dr. Christmas Jones in The World Is Not Enough, and Baird was about as believable an actress in the part as Denise Richards was as Jones. But that didn’t detract from the show, which was dark, dark, dark. As show runner John Rogers wrote in his blog:

It’s a show about how the institutions around us have failed us, and we live in a world of chaos and death, held back only by borderline sociopaths. The HAPPY ending is our hero shoots an innocent man in the face. Oh yeah, slot us right in after Gilmore Girls.

Everyone watch (or set their videos for)The Secret Of Eel Island, every Sunday at 9:30am on Five starting tomorrow (April 10th), starring my niece Elysia Lukoszevieze!

Elysia as Sapphire

So, as I blogged earlier, I missed the first episode of Desperate Housewives when it first aired, so I downloaded it instead. Little did I know that the episode I downloaded was in fact the unaired pilot. (I discovered when it turned out there was a repeat of the first episode on Channel 4 the night before the second episode.) The unaired and aired episode were almost identical, except for the fact that Gabrielle’s lover (the much younger gardener John) was now played by a different actor. In the original pilot he was a blond haired surfer type (Gabrielle is Hispanic), whilst in the aired pilot he’d been swapped for a young Hispanic boy. How creepy is that? Why do Americans have such hangups about interracial relationships?

So, Desperate Housewives finally started last week in the UK. Unfortunately, I missed it as I was having dinner with my friend Philippa. I downloaded the first episode this weekend and I’ll definitely be watching from now on. But as much as I enjoyed it, I was also shocked by my sense of deja vu whilst watching it: it’s such a rip-off of Twin Peaks. Apparently, I’m not the only one to have noticed this; but even so, having it narrated by a seemingly unlikely candidate for suicide, as opposed to starting with a seemingly unsuitable canditate for murder, in order to reveal the dark underbelly of suburban America behind the white picket fences; and to have a character who appears at the most prescient or inconvenient moments like the “Log Lady” constantly crop up like Mrs. Martha Huber (who in her first appearance was carrying a blender just like the log lady carries her log) strikes me as pushing the limit of the difference between reference and plagiarism.

Still, it’s exciting that there are new shows worth talking about. Of the returning shows, tonight and tomorrow 24 makes a comeback. I hope to God it’s better than the last season. The first season was genius, but primarily because of its originality, and its taut script — even the occasional idiocy like Mrs. Bauer’s amnesia were forgiveable. I personally found the second and third seasons to be trading on the originallity of the first, and to be slightly lacklustre in comparison. Of course, the sad truth is that I watched, was hooked from episode to episode, and was in thrall to the cliffhangers each week nonetheless. So I guess it worked in some sense of working, but whereas I honestly think I will one day re-watch the first season of 24 I very much doubt that I will bother re-watching seasons two or three. Here’s hoping for season four.

Of the other new shows, Veronica Mars and Lost strike me as the best. Veronica Mars has irritated me in the past: the detective theme borders on Murder She Wrote from time to time, and some of the emotional content is juvenile and thin, but on the whole I enjoy it, and lately the episodes have been wonderful. Lost is, let’s face it, incredible. It’s one of the best TV shows I’ve ever seen. I honestly wasn’t expecting somethng that good from the creator of Alias.

And so, to Alias. It’s a stoooopid show. But it’s first season was hugely enjoyable, and just, well, cool. But season two got worse, and season three was so bad that I vowed never to watch it ever again. But some of the Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel wtiters apparently moved to Alias, and it suddenly became a possibility again for me. The double-bill that was the season four premiere turned out to be more like season one than season three: still sttupid, but fun, and not annoying. So maybe there’s hope for Alias after all.