Category: TV Features

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The Man In The High Castle

Early numbers indicate that last weekend’s Super Bowl matchup between the New England Patriots and the Seattle Seahawks drew 114 million viewers, making it, in terms of raw numbers of viewers, the most-watched TV show in history. Most of us viewed the game on NBC, either via their cable service or over-the-air broadcast. But for the first time, 1.4 million people watched the game streamed on the internet by YouTube. It was a move that the networks had been resisting for years, and an admission that the TV industry is in the early days of a profound revolution.

Another sign of change afoot could be seen at the Golden Globe awards, where Transparent won both Best Comedy or Musical Series and Best Performance for its lead actor Jeffrey Tambor. The unusual part is that Transparent was made by Amazon.com, and streamed exclusively on their Prime Instant Video service.

The Man in the High Castle

The show was a product of the second Amazon Pilot Season, a unique experiment in TV production that has so far been bearing fruit for the internet giant. Usually, a TV network will take pitches from producers and then order pilot episodes of several different shows each year. Then the network brass will pick what they think are the best two or three shows and pay for entire series. It is a notoriously wasteful process that yields questionable results.

But once Amazon got into the content-production business, they decided to show all of the pilots they order, and then ask the audience which ones should become series. It highlights a couple of important differences between the business models of traditional TV channels and the upstart internet producers. NBC, CBS, ABC, and FOX make money by using their programming to sell advertising, so that means their real customers are the ad buyers, not the viewers. Amazon, Netflix, and HBO are in the business of selling subscriptions, which means their primary customers are the viewers themselves. Without the fear of alienating advertisers and without the constraints of a schedule, they are freer to develop productions the networks would deem too risky.

This year’s crop of Amazon pilots includes The Man in the High Castle, an adaptation of a classic science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick produced by Ridley Scott. The premise of the 1962 Hugo Award winner is simple: What if the United States had lost World War II? In Dick’s alternate history version, the Greater Nazi Reich now rules the East Coast, while the Japanese Pacific States occupy the West Coast. Between them is a semi-lawless Neutral Zone, occupied by refugees deemed undesirable by the two Axis powers: Blacks, homosexuals, Jews, and other untermenschen.

The first of the series’ twin leads are Joe Blake (Luke Kleintank), a young New Yorker setting out cross country on his first mission for the beleaguered resistance. The second is Juliana Crain (Alexa Davalos), a San Franscisan first seen taking Aikido lessons and fending off the advances of her Japanese instructor. Crain’s boyfriend, Frank Frink (Rupert Evans), works in a factory making fake antiques to sell to the Japanese. His co-worker Ed McCarthy (Hustle and Flow‘s DJ Qualls), is a gossipy source with the latest news from inside the Reich. It seems the now elderly Hitler is at the end of his life, and when he dies, his successor will most likely declare war on the Japanese and claim the entire continent.

Dick’s strongest suit was always his elaborate world-building, and the show’s impeccable production design is rich with detail. Supersonic Nazi rocket planes land in San Francisco at Hirohito International Airport. Newsreels depict happy white Americans working in Volkswagen factories in Detroit underneath a flag whose 50 stars have been replaced with a single swastika. The taut pacing and slowly building tension is reminiscent of Battlestar Galactica at its best. The characters, which also include an I Ching-obsessed Japanese embassy official played by Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, all show promise, even if the acting was a bit stiff in this pilot episode.

Ambitious and brainy, The Man in the High Castle is unlike anything else on television, and a good argument in favor of the Amazon way of doing things.

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Inherent Vice

Like any good noir, Inherent Vice begins with a sexy woman showing up unexpectedly at a private eye’s door and asking for help. In this case, it’s Shasta (Katherine Waterston) asking her ex-boyfriend Doc Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix) for help thwarting a plot to commit her current boyfriend, wealthy real estate developer Mickey Wolfmann (Eric Roberts) to an insane asylum. Then things get weird.

Inherent Vice is the first official film adaptation of a novel by Thomas Pynchon, and the material meets the perfect director in Paul Thomas Anderson. Pynchon’s writing is as famously difficult as the writer is reclusive. His best-known work, 1973’s Gravity’s Rainbow, is a postmodern journey across post-war Europe — the mission to find a single German rocket that holds either highly advanced technology or the key to spiritual transcendence, depending on who you ask. But the plot is itself a red herring, a distraction from the real point of the book, which is Pynchon’s twisty wordplay and crazy quilt of interlocking ideas and associations. Pynchon is the master of leaving just vague enough of a trail of breadcrumbs to keep his readers moving forward, grasping for a solution that always seems just out of reach.

In his 2009 novel Inherent Vice, Pynchon uses the framework of the hard-boiled detective novel to create the expectation of story. But instead of the streetwise ladies man Phillip Marlowe, we’re investigating the mystery through the perpetually stoned eyes of Doc Sportello. And so, the story is hazy at best.

Joaquin Phoenix

There’s always a THEY in Pynchon’s narratives, the mysterious but powerful cabal pulling the strings of history. “If THEY can get you asking the wrong questions, THEY don’t have to worry about answers,” he wrote in Gravity’s Rainbow. In Inherent Vice, THEY take the form of the Golden Fang, which may be a wayward ship, or a tax shelter for dentists, or a murderous Vietnamese drug cartel, or perhaps all of those things at once. Shasta disappears soon after her meeting with Doc and is last seen boarding the Golden Fang, adding urgency to Doc’s search. Or at least as much energy as a guy who is frequently seen with a joint in each hand can muster.

Along the way, Doc encounters his frenemy in the LAPD, Detective “Bigfoot” Bjornsen (Josh Brolin), whose flattop haircut and comically strong jaw renders his head as square as his attitude. Then there is the matter of the missing master of the surf saxophone, Coy Harlingen (Owen Wilson), who may or may not have been murdered at some point. And it goes without saying that investigations into matters this complex will require a number of visits to Doc’s attorney, Sauncho Smilax (Benicio Del Toro), whose speciality is maritime law, but who dabbles in criminal defense. Doc first meets the conspiracy in the guise of Dr. Blatnoyd, the cocaine-crazed dentist played with great gusto by Martin Short. And he has time for dalliances with his girl on the side, Deputy District Attorney Penny Kimball, a perpetually disapproving Reese Witherspoon.

Hitchcock said that mediocre books make the best movies, because great books have great prose that gets lost when you translate it to the screen. Anderson works around this problem by putting the words of Pynchon’s narrator in the mouth of Joanna Newsom’s Sortilège, a psychic who may or may not be one of Doc’s frequent hallucinations. The director uses each increasingly surreal episode in Doc’s investigation as a framework to hang a series of indelible images, composed with the help of cinematographer Robert Elswit, who also shot Anderson’s Boogie Nights.

For Anderson, whose There Will Be Blood and The Master were both tightly focused character studies, this is a return to sprawling hangout movies like Boogie Nights and Magnolia. Phoenix is mesmerizing as Doc, wandering addled through the idyllic, 1970 Southern California landscape in one scene and coolly facing down the FBI in the next. And did I mention this is a comedy? Phoenix is funny as hell when he breaks out into occasional slapstick, as Pynchon’s characters are prone to do.

Inherent Vice is proving to be one of those love it or hate it kind of movies, and its cult is already forming like the Mansonite conspiracies that Bigfoot Bjornsen sees in every gathering of dirty hippies. I’m firmly on the side of loving it, but I know it’s not for everybody. It’s the kind of thing you’ll like if you like that kind of thing.

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Star Wars: Rebels

It’s been 15 years since George Lucas’ Star Wars: The Phantom Menace brought back the beloved franchise that changed the face of film, both for good and bad. The three prequels, including Attack of the Clones (2002) and Revenge of the Sith (2005) continued the Star Wars tradition of impeccable production design, layered references to classic films, and groundbreaking special effects. They also continued the traditions of wooden acting, and introduced twisty, incomprehensible plots to a franchise that even its detractors would admit had been models of clear storytelling. Lucas, the man with the golden touch in the 1970s and ’80s, had seemingly lost it, and was producing films only a slavering fanboy could love. They kept showing up, but they vented their increasing frustration and derision online.

The nadir of the franchise (not counting the 1978 Holiday Special) was the 2008 animated movie Star Wars: The Clone Wars, which was then spun off into a weekly TV series that appeared to be set up to be just as dismal. But a funny thing happened over the show’s six year run. As Lucas slowly lost interest and turned the show over to show runner Dave Filoni, it got better. Perhaps this should not have been a surprise, because Lucas has always been a better producer and world builder than director. The best film in the franchise, The Empire Strikes Back, was written by Leigh Brackett and Lawrence Kasdan and directed by Irvin Kershner, a journeyman director whom Lucas met in film school. Lucas’ original intent had been to turn over the universe he created for other directors and writers to play with, something he had forgotten when he was filming his first drafts at the turn of the century. Star Wars‘ DNA is rooted in Flash Gordon serials, 30-minute long cliffhangers that played to preteens in the movie theaters of the 1930s and 1940s. So the serialized format of The Clone Wars, complete with Tom Kane’s booming “In our last episode…” voiceover, turned out to be a perfect fit for Star Wars.

Star Wars Rebels

The voice work of Matt Lanter turned out to make for a more compelling characterization of Anakin Skywalker than either Jake Lloyd or Hayden Christensen had managed in the prequels. And most importantly, Anakin’s apprentice Ahsoka Tano (voiced by Ashley Eckstein), a character who had started as a badly written audience surrogate, evolved into Star Wars‘ best female character since Princess Leia. The prequel’s Padmé Amidala was just a damsel in distress, wasting Natalie Portman’s talent. But Ahsoka was a capable, intelligent, rounded character who became the only one to see through Palpatine’s deceptions and walk away from the corrupt Republic before the Jedi Purge.

But then, in 2012, Disney bought Lucasfilm for $4 billion, and the first thing they did was cancel The Clone Wars. Fans were torn. On the one hand, they had lost confidence in Lucas. On the other, it’s Disney. Boba Fett is not Bambi. But now, with the news filtering out of the ongoing,
J. J. Abrams-helmed Episode VII taking on a generally positive slant, we have the first concrete evidence of how the future of Star Wars‘ universe will unfold: The premiere of the new Star Wars animated series Rebels.

Set 15 years after the Jedi Purge, Rebels‘ pilot is centered around Ezra Bridger, a 14-year-old street urchin from the Outer Rim planet Lothol. Trying to rip off the Stormtroopers who are occupying his planet, he inadvertently ends up in the middle of another, bigger heist by a pirate named Kanan Jarrus and his crew of misfits. Eventually, Ezra realizes that the crew of the starship Ghost are not mere criminals, but nascent guerillas. In a climactic fight, Jarrus is revealed to be a surviving Jedi. He recognizes Ezra’s wild Force talents and offers him an opportunity to become something greater.

Rebels borrows heavily from Joss Whedon’s series Firefly, which is kind of fitting since it borrowed heavily from the Han Solo mythology. Under the direction of Filoni, the characters, who include two prominent female roles, are encouragingly Jar Jar free. The animation is evolved from The Clone Wars‘ 3D computer rendering, which is frequently gorgeous, even as it works to stay out of the uncanny valley. And best of all, future episodes promise a return of Billy Dee Williams as Lando Calrissian. Count me among the cautiously optimistic.

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Gotham

Gotham‘s story is bigger than Batman himself. Don’t get me wrong, I like the Caped Crusader as much as any middle-aged comic book nerd. But over time Gotham City has taken on its own life, especially since Alan Moore (The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen) penned the city’s rich backstory in a 1986 issue of Swamp Thing. Frank Miller’s Batman: Year One broke new ground by focusing as much on the hard choices made by Detective James Gordon as it did on the exploits of aspiring vigilante Bruce Wayne. Greg Rucka and Ed Brubaker’s merciless police procedural Gotham Central, which pushed the Dark Knight even further into the background by focusing tightly on a few good cops bucking a corrupt system. Gotham Central wasn’t just a good comic, it was great crime fiction, and a TV show inspired by any one or all of these ideas could go in many fun directions, from classic noir to supernatural horror. But Gotham‘s pilot just confirmed the new FOX series is just another vehicle for something we don’t need more of: predictable origin stories.

Did we need to see the usual horror in the eyes of young billionaire-to-be Bruce Wayne as his mother’s mandatory pearls are ripped from her neck, sending beads bouncing across the blood-slick streets just as they’ve bounced across the pages of countless comic books and film adaptations? From secret societies, to scary asylums, to Golden Age superheroes like Green Lantern Alan Scott, there are a million stories in the city of ultimate corruption. Why rush to tell the one we already know by heart?

Gotham’s cast

Gotham‘s stylistic problems are probably best exemplified in an Episode 2 scene where two detectives are interviewing the Penguin’s mother, played by the ever-quirky Carol Kane. The cops look like they just walked out of an episode of Law & Order into a Tim Burton film. The trick of a show like Gotham is to make the more and less realistic aspects of the story make sense together. But Gotham can’t seem to decide if it’s an edgy crime drama or a campy romp through comic book history.

The overstuffed pilot episode introduced viewers to Fish Mooney (Jada Pinkett Smith), a sexy crime boss looking to wrestle control from Carmine Falcone (John Doman), the Gotham City Godfather. There’s a parade of characters destined to join Batman’s rogues gallery: 15-year-old Selina Kyle/Catwoman (Camren Bicondova) scampering across rooftops; Edward Nygma/The Riddler (Cory Michael Smith), a creepy forensics expert who likes to phrase his answers in the form of a question; a pre-teen Poison Ivy (Clare Foley) growing up in an abusive home with lots of plants. There’s also a cameo by comedian with a morbid sense of humor. He’s a real joker, and Fish Mooney loves him.

So far Oswald Cobblepot/Penguin (Robin Lord Taylor) is Gotham‘s best-developed character, and Taylor’s pitch-perfect characterization calls to mind performances by Crispin Glover and Peter Lorre. In Gotham he’s reimagined as a stool pigeon with a sadistic streak and delusions of grandeur.

Fish Mooney thinks Gordon assassinated Cobblepot to prove his loyalty. But Gordon faked it, and now has to share at least some responsibility for the psychotic killing and kidnapping the Penguin pulled off at the end of Episode 2. Although they may waddle, this storyline has legs.

Ben McKenzie and Donal Logue do their best to make the predictable good cop/bad cop relationship between Jim Gordon and his partner Harvey Bullock interesting. But there are other cops on this beat in Gotham with potentially interesting stories. Renee Montoya was created for Batman: The Animated Series and went on to become The Question, a conspiracy-obsessed super detective who was given her best life in the pages of Gotham Central. In “Half a Life” — one of the best story arcs the funny books have ever produced — Montoya’s life unravels after a photograph of her kissing another woman is posted on a bulletin board at the police precinct. Hopefully Gotham can eventually tell stories like these with the detail and delicacy they deserve.

For all of its tonal problems and self-inflicted wounds, Gotham is still probably the best effort so far to adapt the superhero universe to the small screen where serialized storytelling really belongs. Hopefully, like Bruce Wayne, it will eventually grow into something other than what it appears to be on the surface.

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TV Watch: Doctor Who

CREDIT: BBC.co.uk/doctorwho

Doctor Who is now entering its 51st year. The BBC sci-fi TV show is older than Harry Potter, Star Wars, and Star Trek. Its first episode, which was delayed because of BBC’s coverage of the Kennedy asassination, debuted in England the same year that Astro Boy, the first ever anime, debuted in Japan. Can a show that is as old as an entire genre still have something to say?

The first actor to play the Doctor was William Hartnell, who was 55 years old at the time of the 1963 debut. After three years galavanting through time and space in the TARDIS, Hartnell’s deteriorating health forced him to retire. So the writers came up with a way to keep the popular show going without its star. When Time Lords like the Doctor are near death, their bodies regenerate, changing appearance and giving them new life. The number of total regenerations a single Time Lord could get was set at 12, which, in 1966 probably seemed like a large enough number that the writers would never have to deal with what happened when the Doctor ran out.

BBC.co.uk/doctorwho

Peter Capaldi as Doctor Who

After being cancelled in 1989, Doctor Who regenerated in 2005. For the first 26 years of the show’s run, it was a series of half-hour cliffhangers that bound five or six episodes together under one long story arc. When it returned, it was as series of one-hour, stand-alone episodes with only the loosest of a season-long arc. The new Who was instantly popular, thanks in large part to the onscreen chemistry between the ninth Doctor (Christopher Eccleston) and Rose (Billie Piper), the Doctor’s human traveling companion. When Eccleston decided that one year as the most recognized man in nerddom was enough, he was replaced by the 10th Doctor (David Tennant), and Piper stuck around long enough to get the new guy established and set the new Who up for its best years. Long-form television was back in fashion, and Doctor Who‘s plot machinations became increasingly byzantine, as the Doctor’s troubled past in the Time War caught up with him. When Tennant left the TARDIS in 2010, he was replaced by the 11th Doctor (Matt Smith), who was initially well received but never achieved the same depth of fan love as Tennant. Smith stayed for three years until being killed off during the show’s emotional 50th anniversary special. And so, here we are, with Peter Capaldi premiering as the once-thought-impossible 12th Doctor.

Doctor Who fandom is the oldest and most fanatical of the nerd subtribes, and during the run up to the 50th anniversary, showrunner Steven Moffat seemed determined to serve up as much red meat to the fans as possible. The series immersed itself in its own mythology, becoming a show mostly about itself, a recursion that the character of the Doctor, who once famously described the universe as a “big ball of wibby wobbly timey-wimey stuff,” would appreciate.

Moffat surrounds the new Doctor with fan-favorite characters Madame Vastra, Jenny Flint, and Strax, their Sontaran comic relief. But Moffat doesn’t give the new guy much to do. When Capaldi is finally unleashed late in the show to confront the cyborg villain, he hints at a new iron hand under the Doctor’s jolly velvet glove. But overall, Capaldi’s first episode seems flat and uninspired. If he is to be the actor to regenerate a franchise crushed under the weight of its own history, Moffat is going to have to find new places for the TARDIS to go.

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Ancient Aliens

A short list of the most singularly enjoyable moments on TV, circa 2014: Raylan Givens and Boyd Crowder chew a scene together on Justified; the host’s epic-length one-topic rants on Last Week Tonight with John Oliver; Ron Swanson bedeviled by a Tammy on Parks and Recreation; and the sharp if-then logical leaps Ancient Aliens takes linking abstruse historical mysteries with the elegant, “According to ancient alien theorists … .” The prepositional phrase manages to both boldly explicate unusual ideas while also not overcommitting to their accuracy. The show seems to be saying, “This is a safe place for every crazy notion you’ve ever had; who knows, maybe some of them are true.”

Ancient Aliens is built around the concept first popularized by Erich von Daniken in his 1968 bestseller, Chariots of the Gods?: that extraterrestrials have been visiting earth for at least thousands of years and that their encounters with humans inspired our religions and were essential in the development of “our” technology. In other words: the Egyptian Pyramids couldn’t have been built without a little otherworldly help, and also some pharaohs, like Akhenaten, were aliens.

The genius of Ancient Aliens, and the thing that places it far, far above likeminded shows in the backwater of basic cable is the breadth and depth of its pseudoscientific and pseudohistorical geography and the earnest energy with which it cannonballs in. Because, Ancient Aliens argues rather correctly, this is a big and old world and there’s a lot of weirdness that’s hard to explain. Rather than being satisfied with hanging out in the Nile Valley for a whole episode, Ancient Aliens will glibly link a minor Sphinxian detail to some rock formation in South America, and then combine those together to get to the Bhagavad Gita, and then, before you know it, the Knights Templar have been introduced. And the episode is only half over.

Ancient Aliens is joyously assembled like a mystery in reverse being solved by an attention-deficit detective: There are clues to the enigma everywhere, and the relevant ones can be seized upon and arranged at will, because there’s only one whodunit: Aliens. The detective-in-chief on Ancient Aliens is Giorgio Tsoukalos, a Swiss-born, spray-tanned, wild-haired talking head who in real life is the director of von Daniken’s Ancient Alien Society, editor of Legendary Times Books, and — this can’t be made up — a former professional bodybuilding promoter. Tsoukalos is the perfect messenger for Ancient Aliens‘ theories: He’s a charming, intelligent, glint-eyed rogue who slyly tries to convince you to believe he’s right while also letting you know it’s okay if you don’t. Tsoukalos serves as an excellent counterbalance to the fully committed von Daniken, the serious and maybe borderline angry ancient astronaut theorist David Childress, or even the declarative narrator, Robert Clotworthy.

Ancient Aliens, now in its seventh season, spent a few seasons on the History channel before being shifted to the sister network H2. It’s a strange move, because even though the main theme of Ancient Aliens should not be confused with reality, it still features plenty of corroborated antiquity around the edges. An attentive viewer can still learn plenty about the world that was. And that’s a lot more history than you’ll glean from the shows the History channel prefers: docudramas about people in a workplace, and the monetization of old crap.

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TV Review: Veep

CREDIT: Paul Schiraldi

It seems as though not enough has been made about the greatness of Julia Louis-Dreyfus and her current show, Veep, which just completed its third season — if it’s possible that an actress who has won consecutive Emmys for Outstanding Lead Actress in a Comedy Series could be considered having gone “under the radar.” Louis-Dreyfus is best known for playing Elaine from Seinfeld, the kind of career stele so monumental it threatened to overshadow anything else she’d ever do.

Her performance in Veep as U.S. Vice President Selina Meyer, 14 years after Seinfeld ended, topples that possibility. Meyer may even be a better character than Elaine — though it should be caveated that I’m the kind of revisionist who prefers Futurama to The Simpsons and The Dark Knight Rises to The Dark Knight.

The premise of Veep is that the second-most powerful person in the free world, the American VP, a heartbeat away from the presidency, is so unimportant and ineffectual a figure that they are shut out of White House decision-making, assigned humiliating tasks, and roundly ignored except for the occasional political blunder.

Paul Schiraldi

Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Sam Richardson

Louis-Dreyfus is, at the risk of hyperbole, exquisite in the role. She has the right mix of intelligence, polish, and charisma to be believable as an electable politician and attractive running mate but adds to it enough inelegance, foolishness, and insensitivity to prove she doesn’t merit anything greater. Meyers’ political ambition is matched only by her ability to unwittingly thwart it. Parks and Recreation‘s Amy Poehler is the only one in the medium who matches Louis-Dreyfus’ timing, delivery, and chops for physical comedy.

Meyer belittles her staff, cursing to a degree worthy of a sailor’s swear jar — everybody on the show does, actually. But what makes Veep‘s crudeness so endlessly enjoyable is that the characters (i.e., the actors and writers) seem to be constantly searching for the single greatest putdown a scenario can have. Veep‘s style is to keep a scene going past the point of when the critical plot information is conveyed, just to watch characters interact. The dialog is either improvisational or wielded so that it appears organic to the situation. My all-time favorite: Meyer calls the tall, unctuous White House liaison, Jonah (Timothy Simons) a “jolly green jizz-face.”

In addition to Jonah (my favorite character on the show after Meyer), the Veep ensemble is stacked with greatness: chief of staff, Amy (Anna Chlumsky); personal assistant, Gary (Tony Hale); spokesperson, Mike (Matt Walsh); political operative, Dan (Reid Scott); office administrator, Sue (Sufe Bradshaw); prez chief of staff, Ben (Kevin Dunn); strategist, Kent (Gary Cole); and Selina’s daughter, Catherine (Sarah Sutherland). There’s no duplication in personality in the group, except that they are all beloved fools and jackasses.

Veep was created by Armando Iannucci, who directed and co-wrote the amazing political-diplomatic film satire In the Loop. Though Scottish, his ear for bureaucratic idiocy is so strong — or else the notion so universal — he evinces a firm grasp of the farcical machinations and absurd argot spoken inside the Beltway.

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TV Review: Louie

“TV was (and to a lesser extent still is) fractal, with each individual episode standing in for the show as a totality. To tinker with the basic concept — like letting two battling lovers marry and have a child in the fourth season — is to destroy the delicate balance that keeps viewers tuning in.” — Ty Burr, Gods Like Us: On Movie Stardom and Modern Fame

“I said, ‘I won’t show you anything. You have to just wait until I’m finished with the shows.’ That was a very reckless thing to do, and [FX] could have said no, but if they had I would have just gone back to the road. But they said yes, so here I am.” — Louis C.K., interview with FilmSchoolRejects.com, June 28, 2010

FX’s Louie, which wraps its fourth season Monday night, stubbornly reinvents television every week. Like his creator, writer-director-editor-star Louis C.K., the Louie in Louie is a comedian and father of two girls. He’s eloquent onstage, but that telltale hand on the wall of the Comedy Cellar hints at other insecurities. At times, his failure to communicate grows so profound that he forsakes Newhart- or drops the Letterman-style stammering and falls mute. He spends a chunk of every episode sitting or standing silently and awaiting judgment; half of this season has explored Louie’s relationship with a Hungarian woman (Eszter Balint) who barely speaks English.

The hilarious Louis C.K.

Louie is a sad sack who trudges about his day like your uncle Marv. No belt can rescue his droopy jeans; no Beefy-T or XXL-sweater can hide his gut. He half-shuffles, half-lumbers into his scenes like a drunk or a grizzly bear that just got off the Tilt-A-Whirl. His gait is as expressive as Chaplin’s waddle, Tati’s tiptoe, or Keaton’s pit-bull charge.

In Louie‘s universe, things get weird fast. A tickle fight with an astronaut’s beautiful daughter winds up in the emergency room. A hurricane named after a Southern debutante kills LeBron James and demolishes Brooklyn in seconds. In flashbacks (or are they daydreams?) Louie’s black ex-wife suddenly turns white. His recalcitrant daughter suddenly cries out, “Why is there even an America?” A fat girl suddenly says “fuck” on network TV.

But things frequently slow to a crawl, too; the sense of time passing both quickly and slowly is reminiscent of those moments after an automobile accident. C.K.’s proclivity for long takes and shallow lenses prolong awkward moments, difficult conversations, and solipsistic reveries that explode in his face. In “So Did the Fat Lady” — one of the most extraordinary reckonings with female body-image issues I’ve ever seen — an awesome, overweight woman (Sarah Baker) takes Louie to task for his refusal to really see her. The camera circles them repeatedly but it won’t look away from her or from him when Louie tries to escape. That episode is the strongest example of Louie‘s bracingly surreal approach to storytelling, where the terrifying unpredictability of the next thing seen or the next thing said is the only constant.

I’ve never seen anything like it.

Louie
FX
Season 4 Finale, Monday, June 16th, 9 p.m.

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TV Review: Game of Thrones

Early in “The Watchers on the Wall,” the ninth episode of Game of Thrones’ fourth season on HBO, Night’s Watchman and round mound of rebound Samwell Tarly (John Bradley) accidentally blurts out the show’s central message: “We’re all gonna die a lot sooner than I planned.” More than anything else that body-count rubbernecking keeps people invested in David Benioff and D.B. Weiss’ adaptation of George R.R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire. Over and over again, we’re reminded that no matter how important they seem, no character is ever safe. This kind of cast fragility and character expendability is fairly common in huge, multi-volume fantasy epics, but it’s rare in big-budget, serialized television. Yet lots of folks — especially folks like me, who don’t plan on reading the five enormous novels that have provided most of the story so far — can’t get enough of it.

Although I tend to watch more movies than TV shows, what has intrigued me ever since Quentin Tarantino guest-directed an episode of ER in 1995 are the ways in which filmmakers adapt their technique and their sensibility to the small screen. It’s tough to do, but when it works, it works really well.

Ironically, director Neil Marshall’s handling of the battle between the Night’s Watchman and the Wildling hordes in “The Watchers on the Wall” reaffirms his status as an overlooked action-film auteur. Marshall’s specialty has been constricted, close-quarter combat; I’ve long admired his claustrophobic 2005 horror film The Descent, and I liked his apocalyptic action epic Doomsday — one of the few movies that properly deployed steely wonder woman Rhona Mitra. Plus, Marshall’s helmed the coveted ninth episode of a Game of Thrones season before; he directed season two’s justly celebrated “Blackwater,” which gave Tyrion Lannister (Peter Dinklage), aka “The Imp,” the briefest taste of glory.

Like “Blackwater,” the stripped-down, torch-lit “Wall” is as craftily structured as those Game of Thrones episodes that juggle multiple locations and subplots. “Wall” spends 15 minutes on idle chatter and worried stares before a cannibal Kevin
Greene-type mutters, “It’s time.” After 30 solid minutes of expanding and escalating carnage that includes a funky long take that reminds everyone of the bad blood between Watchman Jon Snow (Kit Harington) and his flaming redhead Wildling ex-lover Ygritte (Rose Leslie), it finishes with five minutes of necessary breath-catching.

A multilevel assault staged with Marshall’s economy and visual verve is effective enough, but it’s more tense in Game of Thrones-land because the principals involved, like Snow, Tarly, and Gilly (Hannah Murray), are just the sort of bland goody-two-shoes most likely to catch an arrow in the neck. And, as the fight rages on, the risks increase as each side busts out its heavy artillery. The first arrow shot by a Wildling giant shatters a wooden lookout post on the Wall; the second one recalls a good gag from the Warner Brothers cartoon “Bully for Bugs.” Not to be outdone, Tarly, in one of the episode’s few optimistic moments, remembers a secret weapon of the Night’s Watchman: an enormous white direwolf in a wooden pen.

Yet, despite all the heroism and boldness on display here, “Blackwater” is probably the stronger episode of the two. The most remarkable aspect of “The Watchers on the Wall” might be its refusal to acknowledge the potentially grim fate of another major character, unseen for the entire episode: I’m all for the sight of archers hanging off the side of two vertical miles of ice, but the producers aren’t going to kill off the Imp, are they?

Game of Thrones

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Mad Men, Matthew Weiner, and Edward Hopper

Spoiler alert: If you aren’t current on Mad Men, be aware of thematic and plot revelations in this review. And, if you don’t know what Mad Men is, Google it and get busy catching up. Also: Consider where you may have gone wrong in your life.

“Previously on” the Flyer‘s TV review page: Contemporary scripted TV is our equivalent of masterpieces of fine art. Our museums and galleries are HBO, AMC, Showtime, the basic networks, FX, Netflix, and Hulu. The Sopranos is a Caravaggio; Parks and Recreation is a Keith Haring. Breaking Bad is Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s The Triumph of Death.

Mad Men is an Edward Hopper. It’s Nighthawks and Chop Suey and Office in a Small City and Intermission and a dozen more, all rolled into one: gorgeous, perfectly designed, lonely, contemplative, sexy, and gender-inclusive. Creator Matthew Weiner paints Mad Men with pure confident brilliance. Mad Men is social commentary with the benefit of decades of perspective.

The big knock commonly advanced about Mad Men is that nothing much ever happens in the show. The times that the show has truly shocked viewers can probably be counted on one hand: A lawnmower comes to mind, as does a man’s severed nipple. But, taking place during the tumultuous history of the 1960s, Mad Men usually prefers to let the big moments happen in the public consciousness and take the personal histories at a more glacial pace. Pacing is actually Mad Men at its most honest: The world may change overnight, but people don’t.

Weiner ramped up for Mad Men as a writer on The Sopranos. His episodes, including “Chasing It,” “Soprano Home Movies,” and “Luxury Lounge,” are more sociological, observational, and digressive than most other Sopranos episodes. Weiner never seemed as interested in the big plot points of the New Jersey crime family as he was with what effect this was having on individuals. In Mad Men, he doesn’t recreate the scenes of those seismic national events but instead focuses on what they mean for the characters — similar to how author James Ellroy explores “the private nightmare of public policy” in his Underworld USA trilogy.

Last Sunday, Mad Men‘s Season 7 signed off until 2015 with “Waterloo,” a half-season finale in the middle of a bifurcated final round of episodes. (Don’t get me started about how annoying a network ploy this is.) But, at this point, I’m ready to stop debating if Mad Men is the best show of all time: It almost doesn’t matter what happens in the show’s final seven episodes, Mad Men has surpassed other great hour-long shows like The Sopranos, The Wire, M*A*S*H, Breaking Bad, and whatever else is presumptively the title-holder. (And comparing the relative value of dramas versus comedies is too difficult and too dependent on preferences. Apples to apples, I’ll take Parks and Recreation over any other comedy and Mad Men over any other drama.)

Until late in Season 7, Mad Men hadn’t yet tipped its hand about ultimate intentions: Is it a show about things falling apart or coming together? As “Waterloo” ends, things are hopeful. Don finally has the inclination and means to simply do and enjoy his work. Sally picked the earnest nerd over the cynical football player. Peggy found her voice. Things may change again in the second half of the season. Mad Men might do its thematic version of the Altamont Free Concert. Either way, it’s a cultural alchemy that is a joy to behold.

Watching Mad Men isn’t like watching paint dry, it’s like watching a great painting dry: Hopper’s Morning Sun oxidizing into immortality.