17 result(s) tagged “Television”

In the pilot episode of Fringe, one bit of dialogue struck me as so wrong that I backed up to transcribe it.

An FBI agent (Anna Torv) is speaking to the man who’s supervising a mysterious case in which everybody on an intercontinental flight arrived with only their bones intact. Earlier in the episode, we had seen Torv’s character in bed with another agent, whose life now hangs in the balance after being attacked with a similar flesh-eating agent.

Here’s what the supervisor says:

“It would be nice to think that your tenacity in this case is a byproduct of a remarkable and robust professionalism.”

That’s a good line, spoken with with precise sarcasm by Lance Reddick (who will always be Cedric Daniels to me but is probably vaguely familiar to the masses from a few guest appearances on Lost).

Unfortunately, he’s not finished:

“But I can’t help but wonder if there wasn’t something going on between you and Agent Scott.”

That’s not a good line, and it’s so unnecessary that I can’t imagine how it got through.

You can get away with dialogue like that on Lost, which skates by on conceptual brilliance even when the acting and scripts make you wince.

But Fringe is a blatant rip-off of The X-Files. The series’ opening scene is effective and horrifying, but it mimics Chris Carter’s episode template. The opening credits include a handprint. The first scene after that found the two agents post-coitus, and it wouldn’t have surprised me if their names were Sculder and Mully. (Thankfully, the male didn’t survive the first episode.) There’s a grand conspiracy suggested in the pilot. It’s on Fox.

When you’re treading such familiar territory, you need some sharper conversation, particularly with a pilot episode, with which you’re trying to hook executives (initially) and then audiences.

Frequent Drunken Commentary Track collaborator Mike Schulz tells me I’m making a big deal out of nothing, that network television is written to the lowest common denominator.

That might be true, but this little niggling detail knocked my enthusiasm for the show down a couple notches.

The 58th — and second-to-last — episode of The Wire, David Simon’s sociological HBO drama about Baltimore, is titled “Clarifications,” and one scene succinctly serves that purpose.

When McNulty takes his faked serial killer of homeless men to FBI profilers, they nail the detective’s character in a few sentences based on his “evidence”: The murderer, they say, is a high-functioning alcoholic who works in a bureaucracy and has a problem with authority. McNulty — in Dominic West’s performance, always lacking self-awareness — can barely cloak his petrified amusement. He seems to be thinking: Am I that easy?

The scene confirmed for me that the fifth season of the lauded show is a comedy. More crucially, it summarized The Wire’s outlook: It knows people, and believes that you can know them, too, with just a few clues. It has a storyteller’s belief in the telling detail, and the reporter’s faith that people are consistent, and reducible to a few key traits.

The grief in Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke is heartbreaking. Unfortunately, the anger in it is misinformed, facile, naïve, misplaced, unfair, inconsistent, unsupported, or some combination of the seven.

To be clear, I do not begrudge the people of New Orleans for being pissed off at their municipal, state, and federal governments for their preparations for and responses to Hurricane Katrina, levee breaches, and flooding. When you’ve been through what they’ve been through, you’re entitled to your ire.

I do begrudge Lee, who had an opportunity to create either a poetic expression of loss, sadness, and fury or the definitive popular political document on the hurricane and its aftermath. Instead, he made something in between, a scattershot, muddled, formless four-hour documentary that is rarely illuminating and too infrequently poignant. It’s not just disappointing; it’s maddening.

Have you calmed down yet?

Are you over the orgasmic delight you felt at the way David Chase defied all predictions about the end of his beloved series, The Sopranos? Have you recovered from your rage about ambiguity, a lack of closure, and Journey?

Good.

Now let’s clear a few things up. Tony Soprano did not die. That last scene was not at all a cinematic expression of Tony’s anxiety, and therefore David Chase did jab his middle fingers into your eyes. Yet there was nothing wrong with the way it ended, even if it was manipulative.

In this “Five Minutes” audio commentary, Culture Snob will explain all that and more, without abruptly cutting to silence mid-sentence.

In honor of the final episode of The Sopranos, Culture Snob takes a look at five minutes from The Wire — a show that probably wouldn’t exist were it not for that crime family from Jersey.

This brief audio commentary — part of the “Five Minutes” series — looks at one scene from The Wire’s first season. In these five minutes, the only dialogue that passes between Baltimore Police detectives Bunk and McNulty are variations on the word “fuck” and one utterance of “pow,” but the audience pieces together how this particular murder went down through visual storytelling and acting devoid of meaningful words.

This final “half-season” of The Sopranos — only five episodes remain — reminds me of the movie version of Clue, in the sense that series creator David Chase has set up any number of possible endings, none any better than another. Each week brings new foreshadowing — a new suspect if you’re inclined to think that Tony’s going to bite it — but no real sense of a final destination.

To me, it feels like a narrative cheat. The best stories are those whose outcomes are both surprising and inevitable, whose authors from the start build toward a terminus without sacrificing suspense. At this point, Chase could pull any of a dozen equally fitting endings out of a hat.

We aspire to erudition here at Culture Snob. Not today.

Our task: Re-cast The A-Team for a feature film and a new audience.

We’ll go the Miami Vice playing-it-straight route. No cheeky humor. No cameos.

Our dream cast is a little unhinged, and a lot dangerous. Being enlightened, our team is more racially balanced, and we’ve even added a girl. Sort of. He’s got the cheekbones, delicate features, sensuous mouth, and penetrating eyes of a beautiful woman, at least. Inevitably, he will play charmer Templeton “Faceman” Peck.

My attempt, with no attention paid to cost or feasibility, but with an eye toward each performer’s history, follows.

I just started watching Deadwood this week — late adopter and all — but found this essay compelling. It’s part of “Deadweek” at the always wonderful The House Next Door. Comparing the show to both Shakespeare and the first two parts of The Godfather, Andrew Dignan offers trenchant insights not only about HBO’s western series but about the Bard and Coppola’s movies.

And I think Deadwood is going to rock.

And I’m genuinely happy that creator David Milch is wrapping the series up after three seasons and (possibly) a couple movies. It’s a relief to know that in 2012, we shan’t be watching the sixth season of Deadwood and bitching: “Remember when that fuckin’ cocksucker was good?”

“Not with a bang ... not even a whimper ... it was more like a wet fart.”

Throughout the show’s 12-episode run this spring, the House Next Door has generously given series creator David Chase credit for knowing where he’s taking his Sopranos ship. The commentary on Sunday’s episode, however, marks a re-evaluation — a shortening of the critical leash. The premise of the analysis has been that Chase would brilliantly bring his gangster and family saga to a close. But after 12 episodes, we’re pretty much back where we started.

Back in November, I fretted that Lost would suffer from what I dubbed the “endless hit-TV-series death march”:

“Great shows envisioned with tidy, finite story arcs often become unwieldy and bloated once they become profit centers.”

Matt Zoller Seitz continues to clearly and insightfully break down the new season of The Sopranos. In his post on “Join the Club,” he makes a connection that seems obvious now, but it eluded me when I watched the episode: With Tony’s brain playing out an alternative existence, The Sopranos is paying its respects to Dennis Potter’s The Singing Detective.

The March 19 episode, Seitz writes,

“felt like a muscular American response to Potter’s masterpiece, from the hospital location to the expressive, knowingly nostalgic use of pop music. ... The tone of this extended sequence is very Dennis Potter, but the unexplained identity swap has a touch of David Lynch’s Lost Highway about it.”

Odds and ends before we head off to New Orleans for a wedding. (Congratulations Theo and Jenny! Please do not spawn; the world has enough journalists.)

• For those who like articulate, incisive writing about inarticulate, blind characters, check out this treasure trove at The House Next Door, along with this insightful review of the season premiere of The Sopranos.
• Roger Ebert offers a fascinating, thoughtful review of Unknown White Male.
• And Slate, prompted by the World Baseball Classic, asks: Why is baseball season so fucking long? I was surprised at how compelling I found the argument that baseball could indeed operate much like the NFL — 16-game seasons over four months — and still have meaningful results. The author essentially claims that baseball’s pace, timbre, and casual attitude toward losing are functions of a long season, rather than a necessity because of the need for a large sample size.

The ever-divisive Lars von Trier is not known as a storyteller, and that’s the main reason his miniseries The Kingdom — which was released on DVD in November — is so surprising.

For a series whose mystery and suspense are central to its allure, Lost’s ploy of eating up airtime minutes with background that is seemingly irrelevant to the central plot is positively brilliant. When you don’t need to move the story forward for a couple handfuls of your weekly forty-odd minutes, it makes it a lot easier to sustain the series over a longer period of time. And here’s the shocking thing: The backstory structure is an artistic triumph, a skeleton that gives the series its distinctive shape, depth, and resonance.

In toto, Errol Morris’ First Person doesn’t feel scattershot; it comes together at the end in mysterious, alchemic, and near-miraculous ways. The television series is a composition of disparate moods, tones, and colors, touching on myriad extremities of the human condition and containing multitudes, but it also has an elusive quality of oneness.

If you want a perfect example of how great material can transcend its treatment, watch HBO’s recent two-part mini-series of Angels in America.

You’re in your apartment. Your husband has gone to work. There’s a knock at the door. A genial man says he’s the plumber. You explain that you haven’t called for a plumber. He replies that he’s checking the pipes of all the apartments because of a pressure problem. You let him in; his story seems reasonable, and he’s got the right tools. It’s an act of trust. He says his name is Max.

You’re watching The Plumber. This setup is awfully familiar. You know the plumber’s a violent man, capable of unspeakable deeds. You know the wife, Jill, is in trouble. It’s an act of trust.