Tag: TV

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Full Frontal With Samantha Bee

For many, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart was an island of television sanity in the W era. For others, it was just proof of how smug liberals are. But there’s no denying the show’s lasting impact on TV comedy. It’s most famous alumni are The Two Steves: Colbert and Carell. After batting cleanup for Stewart on Comedy Central for years, Colbert is currently killing it in David Letterman’s former slot on CBS. Carell, on the other hand, abandoned topical comedy for The Office and, later, movie stardom, most recently as a high strung financial analyst in The Big Short.

To replace Stewart, The Daily Show brought in outsider Trevor Noah, who so far has been holding the brand together, and little more. But two Daily Show alums are taking the old formula and running with it. John Oliver was the leading candidate for Stewart’s chair until HBO snapped him up in 2013. He’s tweaked the formula, dropping the fake news deadpan, with decent results. But both the Daily and Oliver are going to be hard pressed to keep up with Full Frontal With Samantha Bee.

I’ll admit, I’m pretty burned out on political TV comedy. But Bee’s opening monolog instantly won me over. Where Noah is a little bland, and Oliver channelling everyone’s favorite Addreall addled British exchange student roommate, Bee is relaxed, confident, and looks like she’s actually having fun in front of the audience. It seems the two primary skills of the liberal political comedian are effectively channeling exasperation and articulating a lot of words clearly and quickly, and Bee can do both through a smile that seems genuine.

On this week’s show, which aired last night, she held a focus group for Trump supporters, with a promise to “actually treat them nicely”—which included an after-focus group party complete with live entertainment and “Welcome Trump Supporters” sign. After two decades of increasingly hostile partisan warfare intensified by information bubbles that isolate audiences and feed them only the news they agree with, this little bit of cultural exchange borders on a revolutionary act. Bee defanged the rancor by being respectful of her opponents, while still wringing laughs from the distance between their opinions. In this season of political anxiety, Bee might be the comedy remedy you’ve been looking for, and the true heir to Stewart’s chair. 

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“Broad City” and “Girls” Vie For The Voice Of A Generation

Abbi Jacobson and Illana Glazer of Broad City

It is unfair that Broad City and Girls are so often mentioned in the same breath because the two shows’ differences are many, while their similarities are surface-level. Both are half-hour comedies about white, female friends in their mid-twenties as they navigate sex, jobs and friendship in New York City. Both are written, directed and acted by their female creators. And both are saddled, time and again, with defining Who Young Women Are for the dry sponge of baby-boomer-run media. With both series debuting new seasons this month (Girls on its 5th and Broad City on its 3rd), we should ready ourselves yet again for an endless puddling of comparative lit devoted to the shows, in the mediocre company of which we can count this blog.

Despite their skin-deep similarities, Broad City and Girls are different species. It’s easy to love Broad City and hate Girls. It’s fun to watch Broad City while, at times, it almost physically hurts to watch the self-defeating character machinations of the women and men on Girls. And while Lena Dunham’s sea-change of an HBO show tends to garner criticism for its white, middle class myopia, Broad City gets a critical pass, even a critical hi-five.

Broad City, a Comedy Central production, takes the classic plot approach pitting its odd couple leads against an episode-defining event. One of the show’s inaugural episodes follows Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer as they try to raise money to go to a Lil Wayne concert, navigating everything from Craigslist to the Q Train to make it happen. In its newest episode, Abbi and Ilana struggle to make it to a former roommate’s art opening, encountering rabid warehouse sales, a circus school graduation, and a moving porta potty along the way. The structure is predictable but the take is fresh — the show’s humor is expertly patched together from whatever was on Twitter last week and the fucked up story your friend from college told you about her crush. In this new episode as in the past two seasons, they pull it off.

Formally, Broad City is the “Frogger” episode of Seinfeld taken to its logical conclusion. Nothing ever happens. It doesn’t matter if George Costanza gets Frogger across the street or not. It doesn’t matter if circus school is in session. It is less about the characters, lovable as they are, than it is about the weird fabric of New York City. This bodes well for the series longevity, so long as the writing stays good.

But the by-the-book approach of Broad City also somewhat limits what I cringe at calling the “radical potential” of a show like Broad City, because, at the end of the day, this is a complex portrait of being young and loving weed and hating your job in New York City, but it’s a simple draft of what female friendship looks like.

Allison Williams, Jemina Kirke, Lena Dunham, and Zosia Mamet of Girls

Girls— frequently intolerable, unkind to its characters, caricatural, too white, set in New York City but never on the subway (this really annoys me) — nonetheless stakes a more difficult claim. It still seeks, and has always sought, to expand the category of what kinds of female relationships, bodies and emotions can be shown on mainstream television. In its 5th season, we meet Marnie (Allison Williams) on her wedding day, neurotically over-directing her doomed nuptials with chronically selfish boyfriend, Desi (Ebon Moss-Bachrach.) (If you don’t want spoilers, stop reading here.) Hannah is on hand, acting surly: “She has been so inappropriate and unsupportive of me all day,” Marnie complains to Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet), while Jessa (Jemima Kirke) flirts with danger in the form of Hannah’s ex, Adam (Adam Driver). The episode switches lithely between the women’s wedding preparations and the men’s. The writing is good: “This conversation sounds like a fucking E. E. Cummings poem,” rails the series current hero, Ray, when Adam and Hannah’s new boyfriend engage in a long-form, male emotion-grunting session. 

As far as episodes go, the newest is far from the most challenging. Girls cut its teeth on crack, nudity, awkward sex, alcoholism, BDSM and (perhaps most offensive) painfully unlikeable characters. None of that here. The biggest success of the first episode of the 5th season of Girls is that we have the same characters, improbably intact, that we started out with years ago. They have changed the way real people change — subtly. They have not been good friends to each other, but they have not been entirely bad friends to each other. Instead, the quartet of women proves something that is very true but too rarely portrayed, which is that sometimes your best friends are not the people you most like, but the ones you end up with. And that is okay.

Yes: With the start of these new seasons, I still feel some aversion to watching Girls and I like watching Broad City. Both are good shows. Neither offers a good five point summary of what is means to Be Female and In Your Twenties Today (take note, think-piece editors of the world.) They aren’t really even comparable, except that when both premiere new episodes next week, I have to say — despite how much fun Broad City is, I’ll probably watch Girls first. 

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Flashbacks: Vinyl and 11.22.63

Two new TV series obsess over the details of a certain moment in time, but with vastly different approaches.

Bobby Cannavale as hard living record executive Ritchie Finestra in Vinyl

As Martin Scorsese’s new series for HBO, Vinyl is focused on 1973, a time which, in retrospect, was the height of the recording industry. Co-produced with Mick Jagger and much of the same production team behind Boardwalk Empire, including writer Terence Winter, Vinyl is a tale of out of control excess on all fronts. Bobby Cannavale, veteran of that show as well as Will And Grace, plays record executive Ritchie Finestra, head of the fictional American Century records. Ritchie is trying to turn his company’s fortunes around by signing Led Zeppelin and selling out the the German company Polygram, and turn his life around by getting clean and moving to Connecticut with his wife Devon (Olivia Wilde). But with cocaine bumping all through his hard partying social circle, it’s clear from the beginning that sobriety was going to be an uphill battle.

With his cronies Zak (Ray Romano) and P.J. (Scott Levitt) at his side, he uses his “golden ear” to find acts to create hits for the label, cringing when he finds out his A&R people had a turned down ABBA as uncommercial. Ritchie’s big breakthrough, which forms the frame of the pilot episode, is finding the New York Dolls and opening up the American glam rock scene. We also flash back to the 1960s, when Ritchie got his start in the business promoting soul singers. Ritchie is another totally unlikeable protagonist in the Scorsese mold of Leonardo DiCaprio’s Jordan Belfort in Wolf of Wall Street. Record executives and Wall Street junk bond traders both live near the bottom of the list of careers that inspire sympathy, and Ritchie’s cavalier attitude towards paying his artists justifies reflexive hatred.

But drug-crazed macho preening is not Vinyl’s biggest problem. It’s characters seem to lack motivation (beyond “he’s drug crazed”) for almost anything they do, flying into fits of rage and falling in lust almost at random. And for a historical story made by people who were there, it plays fast and loose with anachronism. Punk and hip hop arrive three years too early, and the concert scenes, which should be the series strong suit, come off like Rock Band: The TV Show. There’s a long way yet to go in Vinyl’s first season, but Scorsese and company will be hard pressed to get themselves out of the corner that the pilot’s frankly ridiculous ending painted them into.

James Franco gets anachronistic in 11.22.63

Better with the historical details is Hulu’s 11.22.63. With 50 years of conspiracy theorists picking over the Warren Report and Zapruder film, few historical events have been obsessed over as thoroughly as the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Stephen King, who wrote the short novel that the series uses as a jumping off point, created the story out of seemingly the same impulse that drove Oliver Stone to make JFK: to wallow in the details and try to emerge with a coherent narrative. But there’s no Stone-esque psychedelia here. Director Kevin MacDonald’s pilot is a workmanlike table setting exercise, spelling out the rules of the time travel scenario that sees New England writing teacher Jake Epping (James Franco) going back to 11:58 AM on October 21, 1960 by merely stepping into the closet in the back of the neighborhood diner run by Al Templeton (Chris Cooper) Jake is convinced by Al to use the portal to try and stop the Kennedy assassination, and thus Vietnam and a host of other bad things from happening. He’s got a carefully researched dossier accumulated from his own time travel adventures, and advice like “If you do something that really fucks with the past, the past fucks with you.”

King has had a spotty record with adaptations of his work, but this 11.22.63 does a good job of capturing him at a moment of storytelling tightness. Franco is an appealing presence, and his experience in genre work, which often requires actors to convey information about plot and emotional states very quickly, shines through. The first of eight planned episodes finds Jake experimenting with all of the information advantages being a time traveller 50 years in the past brings, which, when done intelligently and with a sense of play, is the fun part about time travel stories. The trademark King supernatural creepiness comes into play in the person of the Yellow Card Man (Kevin J. O’Connor) who periodically appears to Franco to point out that he doesn’t belong in the past. With the expositional formalities out of the way, 11.22.63 looks ready to take off.

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Casting Call for Million Dollar Quartet

This Saturday, Febuary 13th, at 9 AM there will be an open casting call for Thinkfactory Media’s upcoming TV show Million Dollar Quartet. 

The series, with a reported budget somewhere north of $17 million, is still in search of its leads, who will include Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis at age 16, Johnny Cash at age 19, and Carl Perkins at age 20. Everyone who shows up at the audition will be considered for background extra work. The producers request that everyone show up in their best 1950’s period clothing. The auditions will be held at Humes Preparatory Academy Middle School at 649 N. Manassas St. 

More details can be found at the production’s website. (warning: autoplay audio)

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TV Review: Drunk History

Octavia Spencer as Harriet Tubman in Season 3 of Drunk History


Drunk History, Season Three (2015; various dirs., including Jeremy Konner and Derek Waters)—One of those rare, obvious, so-stupid-it’s-actually-brilliant comic conceits that’s both infinitely renewable and funny as hell, the third season of Derek Waters’ soused, civic-minded riffing on our great nation’s landmarks, legends and lore remains far better than it has any right to be.

Although it has moved from its earlier home at FunnyorDie.com to Comedy Central, Drunk History remains as pure and simple as a shot and a beer. Each week Waters, a gentle, short-armed, kind-eyed deadpan artist, visits a new city, sits down with some people he likes who either live there or were originally from there, has a bunch of drinks with them, and listens to them talk about a key or overlooked moment in American history. Meanwhile, Waters, his supporting cast, and a surprisingly varied lineup of game guest stars perform period-appropriate re-enactments while lip-synching the words of their increasingly loaded narrator.

As Season Three guest narrator Tess Lynch pointed out in a recent interview on Previously.tv, the show is far more structured and deliberate than it appears. Each narrator has to memorize a script; each narrator is encouraged to research their topic independently; the final story involves plenty of rehearsal and multiple takes; and a medical team is present at every taping in case the boozing gets out of hand. But the final product—loose, colloquial, surreal, often hilarious—somehow feels like it was made up on the spot by a perfectly bombed barfly savant who’s tapped into a level of historical knowledge and comic invention unimaginable in our increasingly timid and calumnious high school social studies textbooks.

The high point of the season so far is Crissle West’s version of the adventures of Harriet Tubman, the “regular-ass person” who, after freeing 750 slaves during the Civil War (allegedly) declared, “This shit is dope as hell!” Tubman is played by Academy Award-winning actress Octavia Spencer, which is hardly surprising in a fictional cosmos where 30 Rock’s Jack McBrayer appears as both Clarence Darrow and Andrew Jackson.

Grade: A-

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Wet Hot American Summer: First Day Of Camp

When I first watched the 2001 film Wet Hot American Summer, I only responded to the unexpected pang in Michael Showalter’s romantic plot and the non-sequitur trip-to-town sequence. But my 25 subsequent viewings had a Lebowski-ian effect. Everything bloomed with dry confidence. Mundane teen movie staples turned first from deadpan parody into casual emotional violence, then into reassuring absurdity. The charm was in how the movie knew when and when not to try. There were “rake gags,” where a bit went on so long it became hilariously absurd. There were moments where a key prop, stunt, or exit was left out or drastically undercut, which called attention to the ridiculousness of the actors’ histrionics. (In the update, for example, a toxic waste spill is represented by a Day-Glo green puddle.) There was also the comedic freedom of unrestrained expression without consequence. Horniness, despair, and aggression were deployed for comedic effect and then forgotten a minute later. In addition to playing with tropes, writer Showalter and director David Wain were arguing that human emotions are mechanical, that they come along regardless of whether or not there is a prop or plot to excuse their expression. Teens (and the adults playing them) flail and scream because their conditioning tells them to, then rationalize a grandiose reason later.

Postmodern prequel with an all-star cast

Fourteen years later, as a Netflix series, Wet Hot is very successful at mimicking the beats and rhythms of the original, from the bright grass greens to the absurdist, Brechtian schtick. It is a prequel, set on the first day of the camp, whereas the first one took place on the last day. Showalter, now conspicuously overweight, bewigged, and 45, is playing an even younger teenager, whose lovelorn crushes are even more about entitlement and possession. He is specifically labeled “a nice guy” who can’t deal with the fact his quasi-girlfriend (Lake Bell) wants to sleep with a visiting Israeli (Wain), who has wonderful patter: “The tongue in the mouth, it can mean so many things … This is the true meaning of community, of kibbutz.”

The scope widens to include spies and undercover reporters, but it’s basically the same as other work by Showalter and Wain, like Wainy Days and Stella. The huge cast (Amy Poehler, Bradley Cooper, H. Jon Benjamin) is supported by ringers (Michael Cera, Jon Hamm). The core players from comedy troupe The State are true to form, if less fresh-faced. They still make familiar Hollywood devices feel dumb and unnatural, while grounding them in feelings of longing, rejection, and the sense of otherness.

On first viewing, it’s a little too dry. Comedy that comes from character more than unbridled absurdity is better. I enjoyed another recent online show involving idiots yelling, Other Space, more for this reason. Wet Hot American Summer: First Day Of Camp is a fine example of a postmodern prequel, but it’s still a prequel, with all the expectations and emotional baggage that entails.

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The Story Of Film

The Story of Film: An Odyssey (2011; dir. Mark Cousins)—Beat the heat this week by staying indoors and soaking up Mark Cousins’ 15-part history of cinematic innovation. Running 15 ½ hours and featuring nearly 1000 clips, Cousins’ massive monument to fair use and great movies from around the world is highly recommended to smart people like you who’ve figured out that the American cinema isn’t the only game in town but have no idea where to begin. Can you dig it? More importantly, can you set aside the free time to dig it?

Cousins is quietly enthusiastic without sounding pretentious or crazy, and his hard-earned, nicely skewed point of view only increases the charm of his soothing, hyperbolic voiceover. He hates The Lord of The Rings, loves Baz Luhrmann (“Not since interviewing Bernardo Bertolucci have I met a director who so understands their own work and, moreover, has a convincing theory of art” he writes in The Story of Film’s accompanying booklet) and says that the one movie you should see if you haven’t already is Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammel’s 1970 freakout Performance, which contains Mick Jagger’s greatest role, one of the earliest music videos, and a point-of-view shot of a bullet travelling through a person’s brain.

Cousins is a curious and generous interviewer as well. Early on, we discover that Norman Lloyd, a.k.a. Colin Quinn’s buddy at the assisted-living facility in Trainwreck, is a human Rosetta stone who can tell first-hand stories about nearly all of the major American filmmakers from the first half of the 20th century. We also get Charles Burnett stammering about the “propaganda” of Hollywood characterization, Terence Davies professing his love for Vermeer, Stanley Donen angrily dismissing the idea of the “camera-stylo”, Youssef Chahine predicting the Arab Spring five years early, and Indian star Amitabh Bachchan (star of Sholay, ran for five years in Mumbai, how could you forget) dismissing his own charisma by insisting that appearing on camera is just a job.

Cousins’ informal numerology is also something to behold. He lists the eight challenges to the romantic cinema of the 1920s and ‘30s; the seven reasons Alfred Hitchcock is “the pre-eminent image-maker of the 20th century”; the six major US film genres emerging in the 1930s; the five kinds of identity crises in European film of the 1970s; the four European directors of the 1950s worth knowing well; the three kinds of films in the New American cinema of the 1960s and ‘70s, and the three key transgressive works of the New Korean Cinema of the ‘00s. Although his own images can’t compete with the ones he’s selected from film history—and really, how could they?—his most affecting footage juxtaposes clips and photos of key locations from old movies with the parking lots, apartment complexes and abandoned buildings they inevitably become.

The Story of Film is an excellent road map and, like the films of Yasujiro Ozu, it’s great to have on in the background if you plan on taking a snooze. If anything, it isn’t long enough.
Grade: A-

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Orange Is The New Black Season 3

In place of a social conscience, we have pop culture. It is a conversationally unobjectionable comfort, unsuited to anything but filling Hollywood coffers. Season 3 of Orange Is the New Black is very comfortable. The social ills it engages include racism, transphobia, rape, homophobia, and, most of all, the prison-industrial complex. This makes our binge-watching feel more honest.

Looming over it all is Lost, a show whose redundant flashback structure has been imported here and grown longer in the tooth. All character traits must be foregrounded with strange actions in the past. All plots must be delayed to tell us what we already know. The flashbacks help continue series creator Jenji Kohan’s greatest success: her campaign to humanize all the characters in Litchfield prison, from the villains to the comic relief. It is part of the novelistic project of modern television. But in practice, it often delays the story, and tells predictable tales with an excess of melodrama.

Orange Is The New Black cast

Characters act evil because a villain is needed to drive the plot. Humorous situations don’t build into serious ones; they switch on and off the way real world physics does in action movies. A scheme to sell soiled panties online results in bitter betrayal, but it’s hard to take seriously because the situation feels like a joke. A silent character grows a cult around her saintly quietude, but when the group banishes a member, her resulting suicidal depression seems strangely hollow. It’s the shadow of another show, Kohan’s Weeds, whose narrative also suffered from unearned swerves.

This is all offset by the scatology of a comedian hiding the deeply felt in offensive jokes. Jolly Rancher shivs, vaginal discharge viscosity discussions, bifurcated penises in erotic sci-fi literature all undercut any self-seriousness. Orange is full of details expertly delivered by its murderer’s row of actors. The only false spot is newcomer Ruby Rose, an Australian model introduced to pay lip service to the concept of gender fluidity. But mostly, she’s just there to beat the show’s dead horse of a romance. Her love triangle with Piper (Taylor Schilling) and Alex (Laura Prepon) has all the dynamism of a plane stuck on the tarmac.

Lea DeLaria as Big Boo

The best actress is Lea DeLaria as Big Boo, who is even better than Natasha Lyonne at personifying the show’s combination of Borscht Belt jokes and real-life hurt. She and Pennsatucky (Taryn Manning), a one-note villain from earlier seasons turned into a squeaky-voiced stalwart, are the season’s true stars. There’s a moment where Pennsatucky declines to sodomize someone with a broomstick that works as both low comedy and character drama. A wordless sequence devoted to the daily routine of Chang (Lori Tan Chinn), an older woman ignored by the other inmates, is also a highlight. We see her mash Fritos in secret, with her feet. Unlike the flashbacks, there’s joy in not knowing where it’s going.

The other most successful subplot is the acquisition of the prison by a private company that sets the prisoners to work and cuts the guards’ hours in half. Their attempt to unionize is pitiful (their union song is from Les Miz), but the show effectively stresses how corporate structures prevent real reform, because financial pressure privileges short-term gains over things like mental health care, of which prisons are our largest provider.

Against real world problems, the only hope the show offers is a swerve towards transcendence. Laverne Cox and Piper Kerman have both used it as a springboard to discuss transgender rights and prison reform. Does it matter if we can see the strings? John Oliver and Jon Stewart’s soapboxes are modern examples of comedy as a method by which actual political discussion can leak in through corporate media. Orange Is the New Black is another unsung example.

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Craig Brewer Creating Urban Cowboy TV Series

CREDIT: Craig Brewer on the set of Footloose

Memphis director Craig Brewer has been tapped by Fox TV to create a series based on Urban Cowboy.

  Craig Brewer on the set of Footloose

Brewer, who has had a TV development contract with Paramount since last year, will write and direct a pilot based on the studio’s hit 1980 film, which starred John Travolta and Debra Winger. Legendary producer Robert Evans, who produced the original film, along with such classics as Chinatown and The Godfather, will be executive producing the project, according to Variety.  

Debra Winger and John Travolta in Urban Cowboy

Fox has had the biggest TV hit in recent memory with Empire, which stars Taraji P. Henson and Terrence Howard, both of whom headlined Brewer’s Academy Award-winning 2005 film Hustle & Flow. Many have pointed out Brewer’s film’s heavy influence on Empire, and Fox is developing the Urban Cowboy series as a possible tie-in with the network’s mega-hit. 

LIke the movie, Urban Cowboy will be set in Texas and follow the tumultuous relationship between Bud and Sissy. Travolta and Winger are not expected to reprise their roles. 

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2014: The Year Television Kicked The Movies’ Ass

Television continues to be the narrative televisual storytelling medium par excellence. It allows you to identify traits with human faces over a longer period of time, instead of for two hours, and thereby more easily dupes you into believing fictional people exist.

Game Of Thrones

This year Game of Thrones continued to get better and better at being subtly modern, showing us a world in which major problems are ignored for short-term politics. It was nowhere near The Wire, but still unique in using the medium to create a complex, multilayered world, more than any large scale cinematic shared universe. The show’s problems continue to be its backwards treatment of women and women’s bodies. Women are naked in traditional male gaze fashion, while penises are mostly off limits. Elsewhere, the show added a sexual assault to the adapted storyline and seemed to be confused about whether there actually was one and why it was there. The director and showrunners gave different answers in interviews, and the character in question blithely pursued his heroic arc.

True Detective

True Detective also had problems writing its female characters, but was distinguished by a beautiful opening credits sequence and fun Matthew McConaughey monologues set in a generically miserable Louisiana. McConaughey’s philosophy wasn’t anything you couldn’t find on the atheist section of Reddit, but it was operatic, poetic and accurate. Almost everyone else around him was cardboard. The series undercut this exciting pessimism by ending with action scenes and hope, not horror, with all the resounding tonal shift of a wet fart.

Orange Is The New Black

The show that was best at humanizing even its most minor characters was Orange Is The New Black. Although it may not be the most accurate depiction of the prison industrial complex, wherein we throw everyone possible in prison and make money off it, it certainly stressed the dehumanization of our system and treated the prison population with empathy. Despite all the stand-up routine style jokes, that made it a political show. Those politics were a rarity even as mainstream attention to the way police and prisons can treat civilians (murderously or corruptly) came to the forefront of newscycles this year. Television is a landscape of cops eternally breaking rules to throw criminals away. As public discourse changes, media companies sometimes allow politics that actually concern us to appear on our screens, and this is an example.

Probably my favorite cringeworthy horrible show of our modern era, 24, a show that actively and aggressively tried to act as an apologia for torture and once cast Janeane Garofalo so that its main character could yell at her, returned this year, as stupid as ever. The few episodes I watched seemed slightly more tasteful and less likely to suggest that torturing the hell out of someone is a superheroic act, but it had also lost its campy, 80’s action movie vibe.

Agents Of Shield

A lot of shows are mostly concerned with cross promotion —for example, Gotham which was mainly meaningless call-forwards to Batman characters. Marvel’s Agents of SHIELD had the 24 aspect of praising rule-breaking government agents with no oversight, but when it tried to be morally gray it just came off creepy. It got better this year, but was still most clear about its goals when advertising other products or films.

A procedural I did like was Happy Valley, a Netflix British import, because of the strength of its acting and writing, with only a little War on Drugs paranoia thrown in.

Attack On Titan

Other standouts included the anime Attack on Titan, widely available in the U.S. this year. The actual writing was horrible but whenever its overtly psychological monsters appeared it was wonderful. Hannibal’s Grand Guignol improved its procedural, and Transparent took Jeffery Tambor’s crossdressing from Arrested Development and remixed it humanely into the story of a transgender woman coming out to her family.

Black Mirror

Another import, Black Mirror, was accessible previously in the U.S., but just became available to most U.S. consumers via Netflix less than a month ago. Its scant six episodes are nice modern Twilight Zone parables, none better than the science fiction worldbuilding in “Fifteen Million Merits,” which dramatizes how the emptiness in working towards buying meaningless things does not go away when consumers recognize it. A consumerist system persists because it is easy to co-opt rebellion against it as a critique. Here, that means a dystopian society composed of people looking at computer screens from elliptical bikes get no catharsis when they watch an America’s Got Talent show. Their attempts to disrupt it only upgrade its edginess.
In terms of direct politics, one half of Comedy Central’s continuous critique of mainstream news, Stephen Colbert, abdicated for CBS. Given how David Letterman lost most of his verve upon decamping there, it is not a good sign. Meanwhile Aaron Sorkin’s humorless but passionate retelling of news from a few years ago, The Newsroom, finally died. From what I’ve seen of the show it seemed to be so mired in Sorkin’s voice that its political opponents were strawmen.

Finally, one of America’s most beloved television dads was revealed to be a serial rapist. This was a fact long ago: we’re just learning it. It is better to know, and for a corrupt, powerful person to be shamed if they cannot be prosecuted. His downfall was brought about in part because his handlers did not understand how new media works. For as long as it takes them to learn it, the world will change.