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From the Blog

Apr

I have large, moving shapes covered

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Real quick one:

Remember a year and a half ago, when I wrote this?

That’s what I’m aiming for. I want every new season of American television to have one comedy or drama depicting the savage hypocrisy of representative government. I want The Weft Wing, an Office-style mockumentary about a bunch of ambitious Harvard and Georgetown grads who figure out new euphemisms for “bombing civilians.” I want The Big Push Theory, a sitcom about four nerds who run a think tank that drafts leading opinion polls. I want Reno 911 but played straight-faced and set in Atlanta. I want Larry David’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. I want stories without heroes, filled with awkward laughs and abrupt fades to black.

Armando Iannucci heard my prayers and delivered. HBO subscribers, tune in every Tuesday to “Veep”:

If you weren’t sure whether or not to watch this show, ask yourself: do I find the Professor’s political cynicism tiresome? If so, avoid. If not, subscribe.

(P.S. You can catch the entire first episode on YouTube, uploaded by HBO themselves! Don’t take my word for it)

Apr

winter is coming

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

Game of Thrones: As good as anyone could have expected.

It betrays its TV roots by having most of the important plot developments narrated, rather than shown. We learn through exposition about Jon Arryn’s murder, about the bond between Ned Stark’s dead sister and King Robert, about the Targaryens’ need to raise an army to reclaim their throne. Such are the limits of shooting on a tight budget. It’s all skillfully done, but it suggests the limits of the “language” of television.

That said, the casting is phenomenal. Not just because the actors all look their parts – the offensively handsome Jaime, the cynical imp Tyrion, the jovial King Robert, the beautiful but proud Daenerys and her mad brother Viserys, and so forth. But because the actors all have amazing chemistry. Jaime and Tyrion have one scene together, yet it communicates perfectly how a handsome swordsman and a twisted dwarf could get along. We get a sense of Magister Illyrio’s unctuous scheming in just a few scenes. And even characters we haven’t properly been introduced to yet – the Hound, Theon Greyjoy – make their mark with one or two tossed-off lines.

I’m not thrilled with Sean Bean as Ned Stark. But Bean does grim well, and Ned Stark’s supposed to be honorable to a fault. Catelyn Stark hasn’t been given much to work with yet, but she’ll have more material in later episodes. And of course the best characters haven’t arrived yet – Petyr “Littlefinger” Baelish, Lysa Arryn, and all the colorful minor characters that turn this story into a world.

So now there’s this, plus The Borgias, plus The Killing to watch. Time to quit my day job.

Nov

for I’m drunk tonight and I’m rarely sober

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

When last I wrote about Boardwalk Empire, Ferrett cautioned me about expecting too much too soon. “At this point in its development, Mad Men was still relying heavily on “GOTCHA!” moments,” he noted. “It evolved; I’ll give this time too.”

Well, he was right to preach patience. Because now the threads have started to come together.

It hasn’t been perfect. The Jimmy Darmody storyline struggled for footing. If you define drama as two characters in a room, trying to get past each other, Jimmy’s story has been disturbingly absent of that. He takes up with a prostitute, who gets horrifically scarred while he’s out getting a suit. He tends to her while she recovers, but then she kills herself. In both cases, the pivotal developments – the injuries to Rose, either self- or thug-inflicted – happened while Jimmy was literally out of the room. Sure, there was some excellent characterization in the form of Jimmy’s story about the Fourth of July, but otherwise nothing.

Then, of course, the shootout.

Suddenly Jimmy’s making choices. In some cases they’re obvious, violent choices, like shooting Jim Sheridan and his goons in the cloakroom of a fancy club. In other cases they’re subtle, like spending a little social capital to show the mutilated Richard Harrow a good time. But he’s now a participant in his own story. And this is inherently more interesting to watch than baby-faced Michael Pitt moping.

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Margaret Schroeder has started making choices as well. First, she used what leverage she had on Nucky to get him to quit shipping beer to the garage behind her house. Then, when that failed, she sicced Agent van Alden on him. She grappled with the dilemma of whether or not to accept Nucky’s romance – and patronage – and has lived with some of the consequences. She chose to ignore her neighbor Annabel’s advice and allow Nucky to confide in her. And she chose to peer into Nucky’s secrets: his ledger of graft and bootlegging.

Nucky Thompson has grown into his role. I complained in the last post about how Steve Buscemi played Thompson as “history’s most neurotic capo.” That bothered me at the time because, in the first few episodes, he had nothing to be neurotic about. He ran Atlantic City with an iron hand in a suede glove. But now, with the d’Alessio Brothers rifling his collections, the Feds indicting his ward bosses, his paved roads flitting toward Jersey City and Lucky Luciano parked on his stoop, he’s feeling the pinch. Now, his agita is justified by dramatic circumstance. Now he’s a cornered terrier – and I want to see him bite.

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My continually evolving verdict on the minor characters:

* None of them can do an accent worth a damn. Madame Jeunet’s accent and delivery remind me of some of Hercule Poirot’s worst lines. Margaret Schroeder’s Irish accent has graduated from “appalling” to merely “distracting.” I’d lay into Eddie Kessler’s Hogan’s Heroes German with a little more weight, but he’s clearly comic relief anyway. And while Lucy Danziger’s thick Brooklyn gazpacho is annoying, it’s supposed to be.

* Aleksa Palladino is one of the finer actors on the show. She’s capable of the most genuine facial expressions I’ve seen on anyone in a long time. From the fatigued patience she has with Michael Pitt in bed in the second episode (“you want me to put my mouth down there”), to the disbelief she has at the dream of Greenwich Village, I get no sense that she’s delivering lines. She’s a real person living through these moments. It’s fascinating to watch and I hope she gets lots more work.

* Shea Wigham, as Eli, is similarly unaffected in his performance. It’s a shame that the two best actors are typically confined to bit parts.

* Michael Shannon is also lots of fun. I love the humorlessness with which he commands civilians. I love the weird thing his face does when he tries to smile. But some aspects of his character are a bit too much. The flagellation, for one thing. You can make a character a creepy Protestant without making him whip himself. That said, it was a well-shot scene. The ritual of laying out the towel and the belt; taking off his shirt and folding it. It’s an excellent thematic capstone to an episode where every moment of pleasure – Luciano balling Gillian Darmody; Nucky lazing in a cathouse while Mayor Hague gets his rocks off – is coupled with a moment of awkward shame.

And that, as much as anything, is a reason to keep watching. Theme, style and vision are unified in a way that you typically only see in movies. In the best episodes, like “Nights in Ballygran” and “Family Limitation,” every line and scene points like an arrow into the heart of the story. In other episodes, like “Anastasia” and “Hold Me in Paradise,” the gears rattle a bit. But it’s still TV that eats like a movie. To get that quality every week is a sign we live in a fortunate age.

Oct

that old Irish mother of mine

Posted by Perich at 7:00 am

In the comments section of the AV Club, particularly when discussing Mad Men, there’s an overused turn of phrase: “on the nose.” It’s used when the symbolism in a given episode is a little too obvious.^* Mad Men has earned reams of critical acclaim for the way its dialogue, cinematography and performances are all arranged to hint at a theme without hammering it in. In a given episode, the characters talk about, focus on and move toward everything but what they truly want. It forces the watcher to engage. That’s what makes Mad Men, at the moment, the best thing on television.

HBO’s Boardwalk Empire is on the nose.

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It started in the pilot, with Atlantic City treasurer Enoch Thompson (Steve Buscemi) crowing with his ward bosses over how corrupt he was. He didn’t quite rub his hands and cackle, but that may have been an acting choice. Buscemi delivers his lines with a stiff formality. I can’t tell whether it’s part of the character – Thompson, at the height of his power, tiring of his facade – or Buscemi’s fatigue with the material. In any case, Buscemi is the least satisfying part of the show for me. He hardly revels in his power the way we want our gangsters to: Michael Corleone ordering the death of his enemies, Joe Pesci threatening to bash someone’s head in. He’s history’s most neurotic capo.

It continued in the second episode, where we learned that Margaret Nicholson (Kelly MacDonald) was the world’s most precocious Irish housewife. Smart enough to quote George Sand from memory but not smart enough to avoid marrying an abusive Kraut, the writers have made her the Voice of the Socially Conscious Woman. Which is a role the show needs, to be sure, but not quite as blunt. We don’t need a character in 1920 judging 1920 with the voice of 2010. That’s the sort of shit I expect from a Heinlein novel. She’s Boardwalk Empire‘s stab at Peggy Olsen, but Peggy at least has boldness if not perfect foresight. MacDonald’s too retiring to cheer for. It doesn’t help that she has the worst Irish accent since Back to the Future III.

And it continued in the fourth episode, with the further exploration of Chalky White (Michael K. Williams). Being one of those legendarily rabid Wire fans, I made a conscious effort not to put too much weight on Williams’s shoulders. “He’s a different character in this show,” I said. “He’s not Time Travelin’ Omar.” But the speech he gave before interrogating the Klansman reeked of cheap melodrama. Other writers on Overthinking It (Fenzel in particular) have decried the recent need to give every protagonist a backstory, and this episode really hammered home why.^**

boardwalk-empire-michael-williams

Williams’s speech ground the pace of the interrogation scene to a halt. It had built to a beautiful thrum of suspense, with the Sheriff hooding the prisoner and walking off. Next scene, Williams enters. We saw how torn up he was over his man getting killed. We know this is an HBO show about gangsters, so we’re expecting some violence. And we get … a speech. A long one, too. Because we wouldn’t believe that a black man in 1920 would be murderously mad at the Klan unless he had some personal involvement with them, like his papa getting lynched.

The scene’s almost saved when Williams quietly unfolds the leather parcel he brought in: a vast array of metal tools. “These my daddy’s tools,” he says.

And then the Klansman asks, “W-what are you going to do with them?”

Oh, for fuck’s sake. You’ve been handcuffed to a chair for twenty-four hours by Atlantic City’s corrupt sheriff. You’re still wearing your Grand Cyclops costume. A scarred black man has just been telling you about the time his father got lynched. And he’s fondling a pair of bolt cutters with a gleam in his eye. The fuck you think is going to happen?

(deep breath)

Perhaps I’m being too harsh. I might have had high expectations going in, since I’d seen all of the above actors in exceptional pieces of art before (Reservoir Dogs; No Country for Old Men; The Wire, etc). Oddly enough, it’s the characters I had no real expectations of who’ve impressed me the most.

boardwalk-empire-michael-shannon

I love Michael Shannon’s unpredictable Prohibition agent. I can still make myself laugh recalling him struggling for breath as he hoists a dying witness into a dentist’s chair. “You got something to boost his system? Give him some pep?” I love Shea Wigham’s understated brutality as Enoch Thompson’s thuggish brother. I’m liking Paz de la Huerta more than I thought I might. She comes off as a vapid sexpot, but it’s a three-dimensional vapid sexpot; she’s not shallow for lack of characterization, if that makes any sense. I like Gretchen Mol, who not only showed some fire in the fourth episode but seemed to mean it, too. And I love the quietly suffering Eddie.

So of course I’ll continue watching it. It’s an HBO series, so it’s allowed to build slow. As a show about the games of power played with an ensemble cast of excellent actors, it’s better than 90% of what’s on TV today. I’m scraping the burned bits off my filet mignon here. It’s good TV; it’s better than I deserve.

But will someone tell the writers to shut up and let the actors do their job? There was a fantastic bit in the fourth episode where Buscemi’s character is getting dressed for the day. “Get my shoes,” he tells Eddie. “Which ones?” Eddie asks. Buscemi stares at his valet in frustrated disbelief and points at the suit he’s wearing. Eddie nods and hustles toward the closet. That wordless exchange said more about their characters than a paragraph of text could – and it was funny, too. More of that, please; less of the other thing.

________________________
^* Formally, “on the nose” means “I’m worried all my friends got it too, and I won’t need to explain it to them.”

^**In a good story, we discover a character through their actions and their words. In a mediocre story, we discover a character through exposition – what they or other people say about them. And backstory is exposition. “You didn’t hear about how his parents were killed in 9/11, by the terrorist he let escape when he was serving in Operation Desert Storm, which he only enlisted in to make his daddy proud?” If you want to show me a conflicted character, then tell the actor to act conflicted. Or, even better, script a conflict! Don’t talk at me.